Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter's former head of content design, was one of the people who specialised in introducing features designed to protect users from hate. Twitter was a hotbed for trolling long before Mr Musk took over, but she says her team had made good headway at limiting this. Internal Twitter research, seen by the BBC, appears to back this up.

"It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better all the time," she says. It is the first time she's publicly spoken of her experience since she left after Mr Musk's takeover.

Ms Jennings Young's team worked on several new features including safety mode, which can automatically block abusive accounts. They also designed labels applied to misleading tweets, and something called the "harmful reply nudge". The "nudge" alerts users before they send a tweet in which AI technology has detected trigger words or harmful language.

Twitter's own research, seen by the BBC, appears to show the "nudge" and other safety tools being effective.

"Content design"

"...because tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world." 

Two simple and obvious points: 

Social media companies make their money by creating mobs; liberals want to censor the mob and leave the instigator untouched.

In France, and Twitter, you can mock Muslims and and Turks but not Jews or trannies.

A prominent advocate for women’s rights in France is being taken to criminal court over accusations of “misgendering” two transgender public figures. Dora Moutot, a best-selling author and social media influencer, is facing a legal complaint alleging insults on the basis of gender identity, and public incitement to hatred or violence towards a group of people on the basis of their gender identity. 

"Didn't even need to send tanks!" If the reference had been Israel, Hebdo would be in court.

Milanovic: "The end of the end of history"  The last paragraph.

The current war displays to us that the complexity of the world, its cultural and historical “baggage”, is great and that the idea that one type of system will eventually be embraced by all is a delusion. It is a delusion whose consequences are bloody. To have peace, we need to learn to live while accepting differences. These differences are not trivial differences that go under the current title of being open to variety, in the way we dress, in our sexual preferences or the food we eat. The differences we need to accept, and to live with, are much more fundamental and they relate to the way societies function, what they believe in, and what they think is the source of legitimacy of their governments. That of course can change in the course of time for any one given society, as it did many times in the past. But at a given point, it will differ from country to country, from region to region, from religion to religion. To assume that everyone  who is not “like us” is somehow deficient, or not aware that they would be better off being “like us” will –if we maintain this flawed belief—remain the source of endless wars.

Offensive on a thousand levels, and just stupid. "The weak suffer what they must", say the strong.

Milanovic again, with Jäger and Dominik Leusder, at Eurotrashpod. w. John Fucking Rawls.

The arguments are as absurd as the march for Charlie Hebdo. If the world is nowhere near being fully post-colonial in 2022 it sure as shit wasn't in 1989.  "[T]he idea that one type of system will eventually be embraced by all" may be "a delusion", but all communities should have the opportunity to decide that for themselves, and the comforts of the west are predicated on the fact that the majority of the planet hasn't been allowed the choice.

updated

Guardian: BLM protesters cleared over toppling of Edward Colston statue 

...In closing statements following the nine-day trial, the defence had urged jurors to “be on the right side of history”, saying the statue, which stood over the city for 125 years, was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime.

After just under three hours’ deliberation, a jury of six men and six women found the so-called “Colston Four” not guilty by an 11 to one majority decision at Bristol crown court on Wednesday afternoon.

“This verdict is a milestone in the journey that Bristol and Britain are on to come to terms with the totality of our history,” said David Olusoga, the broadcaster and historian of the slave trade, who gave evidence in the trial.

Olusoga said: “For 300 years Edward Colston was remembered as a philanthropist, his role in the slave trade and his many thousands of victims were airbrushed out of the story. The toppling of the statue and the passionate defence made in court by the Colston Four makes that deliberate policy of historical myopia now an impossibility.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP, said: “A British jury has confirmed the toppling of Edwards Colston’s statue was not a criminal act. The real crime was the fact the statue was still there when protestors pulled it down....

But some critics reacted with fury. Scott Benton, a Conservative MP, denounced the verdict as an “absolutely appalling decision”, tweeting: “Are we now a nation which ignores violent acts of criminal damage? This sends out completely the wrong message.”

The former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie said he could not help “questioning the sanity of the jury”. He added: “The verdict was a shocking signal to every lefty protester in the country that they can damage with impunity as long as they chant the phrase hate crime.”

The UK: Hate crime laws, hate speech laws, and what in the US would be "jury nullification", as law.

I prefer the first amendment to this shit. If the state is allowed to judge it will become self-serving.

Toppling the Colton stature was a criminal act. I might have joined in.  My parents broke federal law. They risked their future on principle. Saying they didn't break the law, is an argument against law itself.

---

I was thinking of amending what I wrote above, bur I realized I don't need to.

The “Colston Four” were charged with criminal damage. Under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, defendants charged with destroying or harming property can argue they had a “lawful excuse” for their actions. This is because safeguarding property – whether it is a house, a car or the statue of a slave trader – is less important than protecting public safety or preventing a more serious crime. To demonstrate “lawful excuse”, defendants must show that they acted reasonably and they honestly believed they were acting for these reasons.

...One of the key arguments was that the group was acting to prevent the more serious crime of public indecency.

...The judge, HHJ Peter Blair QC, didn’t allow jurors to decide on the grounds of misconduct because there was insufficient evidence on the matter. But he did allow them to consider whether the statue was offensive. One defendant said in court that the statue was “offensive to the true character of Bristol...”

"public indecency." "the true character of Scotland" 

* - links to this page.

Taibbi worries about liberal fascism*; he tells stories to "progressive journalists" about the good old days, eliding his history as a “white god”*. He defends Charlie Hebdo.* None of his fans are rude enough ask him what he thinks of nigger jokes. Greenwald says Tucker Carlson, Bannon* and Trump are socialists; he agrees with Taibbi about liberal fascism, and is on great terms with writers from libertarian organizations that call for the end of child labor laws. Jilani continues to side with Zionists against identity politics and defenders of race science* against racism. Ryan Cooper wants to nationalize Spotify.

update. Why not?

Conformément aux instructions du Président de la République, le #CCIF a été dissous en Conseil des ministres.
Depuis plusieurs années, le CCIF conduit avec constance une action de propagande islamiste, comme le détaille le décret que j’ai présenté en conseil des ministres. 👇 pic.twitter.com/W0SiDzORs4

— Gérald DARMANIN (@GDarmanin) December 2, 2020

HRW 

On December 2, 2020, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin tweeted that the Council of Ministers had notified the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) that it was being dissolved by decree.

“Whatever its intention, this measure risks further stigmatizing Muslims in France,” said Kartik Raj, Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Shutting down an organization that raises legitimate concerns about anti-Muslim prejudice is blaming the messenger rather than addressing existing discrimination.” 

On November 19, Darmanin announced on social media that he had notified CCIF of the government’s intention to shut it down, giving it eight days to challenge the action in an administrative court. In the days that followed, the organization responded to some allegations in the minister’s letter in writing and over social media channels and announced on November 30 that it had already dissolved itself voluntarily and pre-emptively at the end of October. The government said in the December 2 notification that it did not accept the organization’s claim that it has dissolved voluntarily. 

A representative of CCIF has confirmed to Human Rights Watch that it intends to challenge the decree in French courts. The organization, she confirmed, had ceased operations and was no longer able to take forward the more than 500 cases on which it had been working.

I've spent too much time recently reading Americans. 

Link via @humanprovince

Tagged Charlie Hebdo because there is no free speech in France, or anywhere in Europe.

Egypt's military dictator receiving France's highest honour, the legion d'honneur, in Paris in the presence of Macron who also threw Sisi a gala dinner. Images all courtesy of Egyptian regime as they were not provided by the Élysée to French press https://t.co/U24EhtjIS1 pic.twitter.com/p9Nj3ch0hk

— Mehreen (@MehreenKhn) December 9, 2020

je suis Ahmed

Buppies vs the fratboy left [et al.]

Light skinned b'guppie, "avid birder", (Harvard, Marvel Comics) in the habit of carrying dog treats to entice dogs away from their owners for the "intransigent" act of letting them them off the leash, and recording them on his phone if they complain, meets yuppie woman who thinks all black men are scary.
Fang's "self-appointed guardians of idpol" confused the names of two journalists, Fang and Fong, who make similar arguments. Beaman and Seijo equate the right to plastic surgery with the right to education. Rad queer theory and vanguardist contempt for the working class, oblivious to the history of the demimonde. American optimism turns everything into a Disney fantasy, including Marx and de Sade.
Fang's an idiot. It can't simply be cowardice. But at least he doesn't write for Quillette.
I'm sure Christian Cooper, creator of the first gay Star Trek character, and the first named for a fascist,  would be happy to create a black gay Captain America or GI Joe.

All my sympathies to the families of George Floyd and Ahmed Merabet, who never went to Harvard or the École normale.

Uncle Tom, Oreo, Kapo. "He Toms from the heart"

White "progressives" now seeing the contradictions of black chip-on-my-shoulder assimilationism. Condescending pedants who always complained are crowing in vindication.

If Biden is "racist" for saying that racial authenticity is defined by political affiliation or ideology, then bad news for a lot of identitarian leftists and liberals.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) May 22, 2020

There have been a few times in my life when I was told, by black men, that I was black, or "not white". The 21 year old who used those words said them almost as a question, because he was surprised that he could say it. The last time it was a warning from a man about my age at the end of a long day. Before he left he punched me in the chest, hard, and pointed his finger in my face. "Stay black!" I smiled, and may have laughed. Compliments can be rescinded. It didn't give me the right self-identify as black. Even if I don't quite identify as white.

Israel was founded by European Jews who identified with Europe but claimed a right to "return" to Palestine. Decades after the acceptance of Liberal Zionism we now have Liberal Garveyism. But when I ask a Zionist Ashkenazi if he's Jewish or white more often than not the response is surprise. An immediate answer is rare.

The obvious, and forgotten, parallel to Israel is Liberia, also founded in conquest. The Christian descendants of immigrant ex-slaves ruled under a system founded in Jim Crow; African-Liberians didn't get the right to vote until the 1960s. And then we can talk about skin tone.

If racism is a fact then race is a fact. Self-hatred is a fact. Political facts are facts.

I'll say it again and again: language in use does not follow the law of non-contradiction. Pedantry is anti-political.

These idiots can't even realize they're making the old argument against affirmative action. It's all just another marker of slow change.


Whiteboy would never go after one of his Jewish identitarian friends like this. Meanwhile @sadvil goes for the easy layup.

Jones deleted the tweet. She realized the trap she'd set herself.

Fang retweets a liberal Zionist political scientist and libertarian-lite think-tanker linking a paper by a light-skinned Princeton professor and neoliberal think-tanker who claims like Deleuze to have created a concept, "agenda seeding", whereby minorities influence the behavior of majorities. Needless to say they seed with their own blood but they get better results if they act like saints. Once again social science discovers the obvious. And of course Fang and Grossman mock the "wokeness" that's the desired result among majorities to minorities' complaints. Grossman links to an article in the Jewish identitarian Tablet on white savior liberalism that ends with a quote from a Jewish defender of white identity politics. And Fang is a fan of Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Yes, Blame Hip-Hop, Hegel at Georgetown, and Unlearning Race.

[T]his cheerful manifesto of the light-skinned and well placed, carries an atmosphere of gratitude for the acceptance France has promised Williams’s children. He has assured himself that in these times of tattoos, manipulations of the body, gender subversion, transition, transformations of the self, class fantasies, and cultural smugness, not much essentialism remains in definitions of blackness. We are saved already if we but knew it; we are already well, sound, and clear; we have only to recognize it.

And yet Williams was capable once of putting it as a question. Equal in Paris?

The satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo is one such thoroughly French institution. That is what you hear again and again if you criticize the content this paper trafficked in. “But you cannot understand Charlie Hebdo if you are not French”; “Charlie Hebdo has been a pillar of the French popular culture that shaped us; It is our tradition!” dozens of friends have insisted, as if somehow all traditions are noble and worthy of upholding. One of my oldest and kindest friends from Paris, a man with a beautifully aristocratic last name, made a point the other day that seems to have become one of the default rationales: “But Charlie Hebdo offended everyone the same. My grandmother, who is a practicing Catholic, will tell you they are harsher with the Pope than with anyone else.” While this may even be true, Anatole France had the right of it when he said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

...In the five years that I have lived in France, I have more than once been welcomed into well-furnished rooms where I have been left to silently puzzle over colonial detritus—Sambo-like dolls and figurines, thick-lipped, bug-eyed, disembodied brown porcelain heads—cavalierly displayed on illuminated shelves and marble tabletops. The first few times I saw these mementos I was jarred, though it is also possible for me to talk and laugh and drink in such spaces, because I am with friends, and I am comfortable in my status as an American who has made his home in Paris but is always free to leave. And yet, I would be lying if I denied that there is some small part of my consciousness still tender with ancestral ache, which cannot ever allow me to lose sight of these outlandish trophies and souvenirs. They seem to somehow comfort or amuse my hosts, reminding them of nothing at all or of some far less complicated and stressful past, and fit smartly in the décor alongside equestrian prints, layered “oriental” rugs, and grandfather’s antelope heads from Africa mounted on the wall.

Between Coates and Williams I'll take Coates. I'll always prefer honest contradiction, confusion and anger, to blithe superiority, snobbery and condescension.

"The greatest obstacle to success for middle-class blacks is not white racism but the allure of hip-hop culture."
N+1 has a thing for self-hating minorities/reactionaries:  Andrea Long Chu Wesley Yang writes for Tablet, attacking identity politics. Even his critics, in this country, can't see the absurdity. Jews are white now. They don't have an identity politics. Amazing.

The first piece in The Souls of Yellow Folk, the collection of Wesley Yang’s journalism, goes in with a bang. “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang’s 2008 essay on the mass shooter of Virginia Tech, is a remarkable attempt to trace the author’s kinship with a young man who, one year earlier, had killed thirty-two people and then killed himself. Outlining Cho’s abysmal, toxified, embittered half-life, Yang describes his own as well.

And we're back to Scott Aaronson and Aaron Swartz, who now finally has a tag.

Iowa, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Chicago.

1

"Justifying Academic Freedom: Mill and Marcuse Revisited," revised version now on-line...

...here. The last version benefitted from talks and workshops at Iowa, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Chicago. The abstract:

I argue that the core of genuinely academic freedom ought to be freedom in research and teaching, subject to disciplinary standards of expertise. I discuss the law in the United States, Germany, and England, and express doubts about the American view that distinctively academic freedom ought to encompass "extramural" speech on matters of public importance (speakers should be protected from employment repercussions for such speech, but not because of their freedom qua academics).

I treat freedom of academic expression as a subset of general freedom of expression, focusing on the Millian argument that freedom of expression maximizes discovery of the truth, one regularly invoked by defenders of academic freedom. Marcuse argued against Mill (in 1965) that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression would not maximize discovery of the truth. I show that Marcuse agreed with Mill that free expression is only truth- and utility-maximizing if certain background conditions obtain: thus Mill argues that the British colony in India would be better off with "benevolent despotism" than Millian liberty of expression, given that its inhabitants purportedly lacked the maturity and education requisite for expression to be utility-maximizing. Marcuse agrees with Mill that the background conditions are essential, but has an empirical disagreement with him about what those are and when they obtain: Mill finds them wanting in colonial India, Marcuse finds them wanting in capitalist America.

Perhaps surprisingly, Marcuse believes that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression should be the norm governing academic discussions, despite his doubts about the utility-maximizing value of free expression in capitalist America. Why think that? Here is a reason: where disciplinary standards of expertise govern debate, the discovery of truth really is more likely, but only under conditions of "indiscriminate" freedom of argument, i.e., academic freedom. This freedom is not truly "indiscriminate": its boundaries are set by disciplinary competence, which raises an additional question I try to address.

The last sentence, not quoted on the blog

In sum, the libertarians (Mill and Popper) and the Marxists (Marcuse) can agree that academic freedom is justified, at least when universities are genuine sites of scientific expertise and open debate.

Freedom for me but not for thee; the anti-humanist, fallacious, scholastic unity of the humanities and science.

2

Brian Leiter once touted David Enoch as a "leading legal philosopher"...

3

I'll be totally honest with you: this has been extremely upsetting. There's an awful lot of people who don't agree with the BDS movement.

The third may not quite fit except that Thom Yorke is seen as an intellectual, while Roger Waters, for all the history of Pink Floyd, is still a rock star.

I'll add this to the Charlie Hebdo tag. Seems appropriate.

re: defenses of Charlie Hebdo and bans on Palestinian protests, freedom of speech vs freedom of "acceptable" speech. etc.

A weather report on the France 2 television channel broke broadcasting records last week. Some 5.3 million viewers tuned in to watch Mélanie Ségard, a 21-year-old woman with Down syndrome, take a turn as guest meteorologist on the network. Wearing TV makeup and an irrepressible smile, she forecast clouds and rain for most of the country and lots of sunshine for Marseilles.

Ms. Ségard fulfilled a lifelong dream to show that “I can do a lot of things,” as she put it on Facebook. But for French society, this was a fraught moment. It clashed with a strand of cultural liberalism that treats the existence of people like Ms. Ségard as an affront to reason and good taste.

Her appearance was facilitated by a disability-rights group ahead of World Down Syndrome Day on March 21. It was all the more heartening because previous efforts to bring visibility to people with disabilities in France have run afoul of broadcast regulations that restrict images of happy people with Down syndrome. Such images are undesirable, regulators argue, since they could give second thoughts to women who have sought abortions.

At its best, liberalism revels in the hubbub of a crowded marketplace of ideas. But a dour, self-righteous and conformist model has now come to define the liberal idea across much of Europe, one that brooks no dissent from the latest progressive precepts.

Those of us who worry about the fragility of the liberal order and growing populist sentiment would be well-advised to pay more attention to how people on the sharp end of such “liberalism” experience it.

Take the Down syndrome debate in France. The Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, upheld a ban last year on a World Down Syndrome Day TV ad that showed DS young adults, like Ms. Ségard, addressing a pregnant woman considering whether to terminate a DS fetus: “Your child will be able to do many things.” “He’ll be able to hug you.” “He’ll be able to run toward you.” “He’ll be able to speak and tell you he loves you.”

The “Dear Future Mum” ad risked “disturbing the conscience” of women who had aborted DS pregnancies, the Council of State held in a November ruling. As it is, nine of 10 fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome in France are aborted. Set aside the abortion and disability politics: It is hard to see how any ads about contentious issues would survive the ruling’s purely subjective standard. That is, if it’s applied consistently.

Yes, the author's an ass.

"If you're explaining, you're losing."

updated

"DONALD TRUMP'S INAUGURATION MARKS THE BEGINNING OF THE ERA OF FEAR"

"DONALD TRUMP’S CHILLING LANGUAGE, AND THE FEARSOME POWER OF WORDS"

"This is how it begins."

"There are different ways to approach Trump's lies: morally, psychologically, etc. But as tools of dominance is crucial."

So we are already talking about a presidential "reboot" and it's not even a week of the new Administration?

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) January 24, 2017

This is just...the most perfect video of everything wrong with college activists. pic.twitter.com/duCzblUwGh

— Lo-Ping (@GamingAndPandas) January 21, 2017

The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican party. The other problem is liberals and the press.

"If you're explaining, you're losing." I've always described the ideal of objectivity as passive. I never thought it was an original point. I always thought it was obvious. I hated making it. But I'd never thought to use that old cliché until yesterday. It's a maxim from the culture of argument, not conversation.

Also reminds me I want to connect this to Didion on the Central Park jogger case, to the behavior of the kids and teachers at Yale and Mizzou, (now a tag) and Charlie Hebdo: the misunderstanding of democracy and freedom of speech.

Free speech means there are no government restrictions on fascist speech. It means also that people don't have "the right" to shut down an assembly of fascists, that people in Harlem don't have "the right" to chase a man walking down the street in a KKK robe, and that Jews in Skokie don't have "the right" to threaten a man in a Nazi uniform. The same rules apply to black men who wander into the "white part of town" at three in the morning and women who jog alone at night in Central Park. All of the people above are "within their rights" in wanting to be left alone. 

The calculations of real politics, as function and not ideal, practice and not theory (and of participants not philosophers), includes accounting for prudence.

Freedom of speech is not based on idealism. That's the mistake Christakis and Friedersdorf, and libertarians make. It's why they defend speech that they call inflammatory or provocative, without admitting to defending racism.  "Other people have rights too!" as Christakis says. The underlying logic is optimistic. Academic liberals make the same mistake. But democracy and freedom of speech are not based on optimism; they're based on realism. [the only new term I've used] They're based on fostering reasoned argument, only after setting limits to when and how you can respond to people you hate. There's no optimistic reason for allowing people to defend the extermination of the Jews, yet we allow it. And this allows for the possibility of change, not perhaps that we decide the Holocaust or slavery were justified, but maybe that the conquest of Palestine was not. But freedom of speech means we do not prejudge the good and the evil. Each generation is left to judge for themselves, in the present.

"A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." We don't want policemen standing on every street corner on every hour of the day, so we accept that street smarts are a requirement of city life. I'm not going to stumble drunk into a cop bar wearing a tshirt with "fuck the police" printed across the chest.
It's within my rights, just as it's within the rights of a girl in miniskirt and 5 inch heels to stumble drunk through empty streets at 3 AM, but it would be a mistake.

The unreasoning fear of Trump, like the fear expressed by some that laughing or cheering Spencer getting popped is weakening our democracy, is based on a misunderstanding of democracy. The people explaining why we shouldn't laugh at the minor violence against an open fascist are the same people explaining why it's not fair for Trump to be so unfair. They're explaining, and they're losing.

"A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Pedantry is lousy politics. The most famous definition of kitsch is "more Catholic than the Pope".  I don't want all citizens to behave like on-duty cops. They need to respect the law, but they also have to accept and learn to face the ambiguities of their own moral responsibility. I can laugh at the video of Spencer being punched without denying that the person who hit him committed a criminal act. I can enjoy watching it without justifying the assault as a matter of law. But it's amusing that one punch did more to deflate Spencer's image than all the coverage he'd received before. In a stronger democracy the man who punched him wouldn't have been an idiot anarchist who finally picked the right target. And he might have turned himself in.

This is all repeats, repurposed, expanded.

I asked a Marine if he was a soldier first or citizen. He said "Semper Fi".
The first sentence of political scientists' statement on Trump was: "Political scientists seek to understand politics, not engage in politics."

It's the same problem, the same evasion, the same passivity as the press.

A soldier in an army in service to a democracy is a free man who has to follow orders. That's a contradiction each soldier has to face. Is Manning a soldier or a citizen? There is no right answer, but we have to choose. That's what it means to live in a democracy.

Citizens have to face contradictions every day. Freedom means we have to be left to make our own decisions. So we laugh at a Nazi being punched. That's not the same thing as saying the person who did it should go free if caught. The law is a blunt instrument for times of crisis. The rest of the time we have to learn to be on our own.

Soldiers and social scientists who don't face the responsibilities of citizenship -because they're somehow above the mess of politics- are more dangerous to democracy than rude laughter.

Trump says he's hounded by the press; the press reports that Trump says he's being hounded by the press. They should tell him that if the heat's too hot he should get out of the kitchen. That's not reporting, but reporters should be willing to respond.

File under #EuropeanFootball: Qatar vs Abu Dhabi at Parc des Princes, in a Paris frenzied with fresh-seeming modes of anti-Arab bigotry.

— ⚽️ is a Country (@FutbolsaCountry) April 6, 2016

Call it insider football: Manchester City is owned by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan
Paris Saint-Germain is owned by The Qatar Investment Authority

First games of The Champions League Quarter-Finals
Today
PSG  2-2  Man City
Wolfsburg  2-0  Real Madrid
Game 2, Tues. April 12

Yesterday
Bayern  2-0  Benfica
Barcelona  2-1  Atlético
Game 2, Wed. April 13

continuing
Outrage as Muslim pupils exempt from shaking female teachers' hands in Swiss district

(AFP) - Male Muslim students at a school in northern Switzerland will no longer have to shake hands with their female teachers, following a ruling that was on Monday causing an uproar in the country.

A school in the northern municipality of Therwil, in the canton of Basel, reached the controversial decision after two male students, aged 14 and 15, complained that the Swiss custom of shaking hands with the teacher is counter to their religious beliefs if the teacher is a woman.

They argued that Islam does not permit physical contact with a person of the opposite sex, with the exception of certain immediate family members.

The local Therwil council did not support the school's decision, "but will not intervene as (it) is the responsibility of the school to set the rules," spokeswoman Monika Wyss told AFP in a statement.

The decision triggered an outcry across Switzerland with Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga insisting on Swiss public television Monday that "shaking hands is part of our culture."

She Was Asked to Switch Seats. Now She’s Charging El Al With Sexism.

...Ms. Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”

The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. Soon, Ms. Rabinowitz said, a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat, up front, closer to first class.

Adam Shatz on the Hebdo editorial, in the LRB

It isn’t clear whether France’s values are being upheld or perverted by such a far-reaching defence. As Arun Kapil put it to me, ‘the laïcards are the new fundamentalists.’ The 1905 law on the separation of churches and the state, which established laïcité, was based on the neutrality of the state towards religious institutions; it not only stripped the Catholic Church of its powers, it also freed Jews and Protestants to practise their faith more freely. Today’s defenders of laïcité, on both the right and the centre left, have abandoned any pretence of neutrality. It’s no wonder that, for many Muslims in France, including the silent majority who seldom if ever set foot in a mosque – Charlie’s ‘very large iceberg’ – it seems like a code word for keeping them in their place.

A few of the comments are good too.
Nov 2015, an article in the IBT, Why Do American Muslims Fare Better Than Their French Counterparts?

“Our data found that Muslims in the U.S. are employed and educated at very similar levels to the general population,” says Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at Pew. “In Western Europe, Muslims tend to lag the overall population in socioeconomic status.”

Part of that lag can be attributed to the types of Muslim immigrants that have settled in the U.S. versus those who've settled in Europe. Many Muslims came to the United States after the Imigration Act of 1965, and included highly skilled and educated workers. The Muslims migrating to Europe, however, have tended to be economic migrants who labored in factories or came as guest workers.

But even the working class Muslim immigrants in the United States have hope for the future and a belief in upward mobility -- a sense that doesn’t exist among French Muslims.

A new book from Harvard, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies, comparing Muslim and Christian immigrant communities in France.
The research is discussed in two posts at The Monkey Cage, in 2014 and 2015, before and after publication. The authors seem to think the position of Muslim immigrants as similar in the US and Europe.

The authors of the Harvard book also see a similar reaction to Muslims and Jews in France

Between September 2013 and September 2014, Marie-Anne Valfort partnered with the Institut Montaigne to conduct the largest résumé experiment ever fielded, with over 6,000 résumés submitted to actual job openings in the French labor market. This experiment involved male and female candidates of Lebanese origin and still found significant anti-Muslim (as well as anti-Jewish) discrimination in France. While a Christian male applicant must on average submit 5 résumés to receive a call-back for an interview, an identical Jewish male applicant must submit 7, and an identical Muslim male applicant must submit 20.

America is more anarchic than Europe. Religious conservatives are welcome but the main public concern is money, and conservative social morality dissolves with success, since business requires to you work with people from other communities. Cultural conservatism hardens only with failure as a group. But we have a weak civic culture. The European civic culture that American liberals appreciate is precisely what locks out socially conservative immigrants, socially and economically.

The Guardian

The editorial was published in English as well as French, suggesting it was intended for an audience beyond the magazine’s largely French readership. It has generated little response in France. 

There is no free speech in France. People defending Hebdo were defending Hebdo's speech, not a principle.

The full text.

For a week now, experts of all kinds have been trying to understand the reasons for the attacks in Brussels. An incompetent police force? Unbridled multiculturalism? Youth unemployment? Uninhibited Islamism? The causes are numerous beyond counting and everyone will naturally choose the one that suits best their own convictions. Law and Order fans will denounce the haplessness of the police. Xenophobes will blame immigration. Sociologists will rehash the evils of colonialism. Urban-planners will point to the evils of ghettoisation. Take your pick.

In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale. Our noses are endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in the flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All the while, no one notices what's going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He's a teacher, so it's not inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion. Rather like lecture by a Professor of Pies who is also a pie-maker. Thus judge and contestant both.

No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan's task.

Take this veiled woman. She is an admirable woman. She is courageous and dignified, devoted to her family and her children. Why bother her? She harms no one. Even those women who wear the total, all-encompassing veil do not generally use their clothing to hide bombs (as certain people were claiming when the law to ban the burqa was being discussed). They too will do nothing wrong. So why go on whining about the wearing of the veil and pointing the finger of blame at these women? We should shut up, look elsewhere and move past all the street-insults and rumpus. The role of these women, even if they are unaware of it, does not go beyond this.

The visible part of a very big iceberg.

Take the local baker, who has just bought the nearby bakery and replaced the old, recently-retired guy, he makes good croissants. He's likeable and always has a ready smile for all his customers. He's completely integrated into the neighbourhood already. Neither his long beard nor the little prayer-bruise on his forehead (indicative of his great piety) bother his clientele. They are too busy lapping up his lunchtime sandwiches. Those he sells are fabulous, though from now on there's no more ham nor bacon. Which is no big deal because there are plenty of other options on offer - tuna, chicken and all the trimmings. So, it would be silly to grumble or kick up a fuss in that much-loved boulangerie. We'll get used to it easily enough. As Tariq Ramadan helpfully instructs us, we'll adapt. And thus the baker's role is done.

Take this young delinquent. H has never looked at the Quran in his life, he knows little of the history of religion, of colonialism, nor a great deal about the proud country of his Maghreb forefathers. This lad and a couple of his buddies order a taxi. They are not erudite like Tariq Ramadan, they don't pray as often as the local baker and are not as observant as the redoubtable veiled mothers on the street. The taxi heads for Brussels airport. And still, in this precise moment, no one has done anything wrong. Not Tariq Ramadan, nor the ladies in burqas, not the baker and not even these idle young scamps.

And yet, none of what is about to happen in the airport or metro of Brussels can really happen without everyone's contribution. Because the incidence of all of it is informed by some version of the same dread or fear. The fear of contradiction or objection. The aversion to causing controversy. The dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist. Really, a kind of terror. And that thing which is just about to happen when the taxi-ride ends is but a last step in a journey of rising anxiety. It's not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension.

These young terrorists have no need to amass the talents of others, to be erudite, dignified or hard-working. Their role is simply to provide the end of a philosophical line already begun. A line which tells us "Hold your tongues, living or dead. Give up discussing, debating, contradicting or contesting".

This is not to victimise Islam particularly. For it has no opponent. It is not Christianity, Hinduism nor Judaism that is balked by the imposition of this silence. It is the opponent (and protector) of them all. It is the very notion of the secular. It is secularism which is being forced into retreat.

Above all, in a sense, this stops us asking perhaps the world's oldest and most important question - "How the hell did I end up here?". "How the hell did I end up having to wander the streets all day with a big veil on my head?" "How the hell did I end up having to say prayers five times a day?" " How the hell did I end up in the back of a taxi with three rucksacks packed with explosives?" Perhaps, very sadly, the only people who are still asking themselves that most important of questions are the unlucky victims. "How the hell did I end up here, six yards away from that big bomb?"

The first task of the guilty is to blame the innocent. It's an almost perfect inversion of culpability. From the bakery that forbids you to eat what you like, to the woman who forbids you to admit that you are troubled by her veil, we are submerged in guilt for permitting ourselves such thoughts. And that is where and when fear has started its sapping, undermining work. And the way is marked for all that will follow.

Tariq Ramadan is a slippery fuck, a religious conservative who claims to be something else. And I have some sympathy for people who having gotten rid of a church now have to put up with an influx of supporters of another one. Unfortunately the history of European empires fogs the issue; that and massive European support for Islamist governments opposed both to secularism and democracy.
See also Todd's Zombie Catholics

Islam is modernizing and secularizing. Western powers have done their best to delay that.

continuing above

"we were hoping the poor would be forced out"

Updated: more comedy

WaPo: Crying Tintin becomes symbol of grief after Brussels attacks
more at Mashable


"Brussels attacks: How Saudi Arabia's influence and a deal to get oil contracts sowed seeds of radicalism in Belgium"

There are many reasons why Belgium has become a hotbed of radical Islamism. Some of the answers may lie in the implanting of Saudi Salafist preachers in the country from the 1960s. 

Keen to secure oil contracts, Belgium’s King Baudouin made an offer to Saudi King Faisal, who had visited Brussels in 1967: Belgium would set up a mosque in the capital, and hire Gulf-trained clerics.

At the time, Belgium was encouraging Moroccan and Turkish workers to come into the country as cheap labour. The deal between the two Kings would make the mosque their main place of worship.

---
http://www.politico.eu/article/molenbeek-broke-my-heart-radicalization-suburb-brussels-gentrification/

Nov/2015 Molenbeek broke my heart

I was part of a new wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated — what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) — who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions. Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for a multicultural society.

Code as commentary. The word gentrification doesn't appear in the article itself.
"We had good intentions." And the idiot's an anthropologist.

Wapo: Why is Brussels under attack?

The area, just across the Canal not far from some of Brussels's more fashionable areas, first began to fill up with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants around 50 years ago. But while the area has undergone some levels of gentrification in recent years, it remains a sharp contrast with more affluent areas of the city nearby: Unemployment has been estimated at as much as 40 percent, and there are many seedy and rundown shops in the area.

Often those from immigrant backgrounds find themselves at a competitive disadvantage on the job market, as they speak only French and Arabic when many jobs in the city require a knowledge of French, Flemish or Dutch, and sometimes English. A growing right-wing political movement in Belgium has led to feelings of division in the country: Some Muslims say that a 2012 ban on Islamic veils such as burqas and niqabs in public spaces is a sign of their community's alienation from the Catholic mainstream.

If westerners want to stop extremism they should stop supporting extremists, and stop lying about it, to themselves.

Varieties of anti-politics
3/4

Nobody Gives A Shit Who You're Voting For
2000 wasn't pre-internet, but it was proto-internet, and one genre it gave birth to was the long essay about WHY I AM VOTING FOR X (usually Nader). These weren't persuasion pieces, these were ME pieces. I question the effectiveness of most persuasion pieces at this point, but they're still a different genre. The ME pieces are just navel-gazers. Nobody cares. They're boring. Vote for who you want.

related/repeats

2/28

I suppose it's weird to be a political blogger and not have all that much to say about the Democratic primary. I just don't have any deep analysis that people who read this blog can't figure out by themselves. I don't like discussions of "momentum" or how candidate X needs to be up 5 points (or whatever) in Colorado (or wherever) in order to "remain viable." It all starts to sound like sports commentary (they really need to get some points on the board! he's got a hot hand!).

I don't really find any electability arguments to be particularly persuasive. That doesn't mean they're wrong, and you might find them persuasive, but I don't have much interest in engaging them. Clinton will likely win, Sanders will likely lose, and while anything is still possible, that's always been the case, though that is not an argument to stop working for either candidate if you are doing that.

God this blog sucks.

"pathologically opposed to ambiguity" "throw/s up his hands" "pathologically anti-intellectual" "know-nothing" Do a site search if you want.

I like Hillary Clinton. I worried a bit about some of the idiots she has surrounded herself with. But happy for her to run.

If he imagines it as cut and dried, he's happy to show contempt; if he imagines it isn't, he'll hedge. And then if he likes someone it all goes out the window.

DeLong on Jeane Kirkpatrick

her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world.

Todd

The powerful negative effect of the variable 'proportion of workers' on the number of demonstrators indicates, on the other hand, that the lower classes have now completely escaped from the ideological control of the culturally dominant classes. The geographical organization of society largely explains this negative liberty. With great realism, Christophe Guilluy has centred his depiction of French society on the way the lower classes have been relegated to the periphery. Forced out into the geographical margins of urban areas, the workers no longer turn out to demonstrate in the hearts of town and cities. They can no longer be mobilized on an ad hoc basis, just as they can no longer be controlled ideologically: witness the way large numbers of them vote for the National Front. It is true that Francois Hollande and the Socialist Party had, by refusing the National Front any place in the 'great republican demonstrations', implicitly designated NF voters as non-desirables in the heart of our cities. At a time when the neo-republican pact is being sealed, the perfectly real category of `workers' is no more welcome than the imaginary category of 'Muslims'.

Who is Charlie?

We can now say, with the benefit of hindsight, that in January 2015 France succumbed to an attack of hysteria. The massacre of the editorial board of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as of several police officers and the customers of a Jewish shop, triggered a collective reaction unprecedented in our country's history. It would have been impossible to discuss it in the heat of the moment. The media joined hands to denounce terrorism, to celebrate the admirable character of the French people, and to sacralize liberty and the French Republic. Charlie Hebdo and its caricatures of Muhammad were enshrined. The government announced that it was giving a grant to the weekly so that it could get back on its feet. Crowds of people followed the government's appeal to march in protest throughout the land: they held pencils to symbolize press freedom and applauded the state security police and the marksmen posted on the rooftops. The logo `Je suis Charlie' ('I am Charlie'), written in white letters against a black background, could be seen everywhere: on our screens, in the streets, on restaurant menus. Children came home from school with a letter C written on their hands. Kids aged seven and eight were interviewed at the school gates and asked for their thoughts on the horror of the events and the importance of one's freedom to draw caricatures. The government decreed that anyone who failed to toe the line would be punished. Any secondary school pupil who refused to observe the minute's silence imposed by the government was seen as implicitly supporting terrorism and refusing to stand in solidarity with the national community. At the end of January, we learned that some adults had started to behave in the most incredibly repressive ways: children of eight or nine years of age were being questioned by the police. It was a sudden glimpse of totalitarianism. 

Todd is good, but his references to Weber and to science are defensive puffery. Sociology is not a science in the way he wants it to be. He's an intelligent, disinterested observer. Statistics is a tool. Disinterest is not objectivity.

"A religion is a form of utopia: when it disappears, alternative utopias appear" Emmanuel Todd

"Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values." Arthur Goldhammer

Goldhammer The first paragraphs and last.

There is, of course, no justification for the murder of political cartoonists. Nothing I say should be construed as in any way mitigating the horror of the Jan. 7 attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine by two gunmen affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Yemen. In no way do I excuse the crime or accuse the victims of somehow bringing it on themselves. This should go without saying, but as I have learned from the reactions to what I previously published on this matter, it bears repeating, and even then there are some for whom it will not be enough. I should stipulate at the outset that I believe the editors and cartoonists at the satirical magazine exemplified all the courage with which they are credited by PEN America, whose decision to honor the magazine with its Freedom of Expression Courage Award has sparked controversy and led 145 writers to support a boycott of its annual gala. Charlie’s staffers knew that, by taking the course they did, they might be subject to physical harm.

I do not in any way contest the magazine’s right to blaspheme, offend or denounce. I regard some restrictions on free speech under French law (e.g., lese majesty — a protester was arrested a few years ago for wearing a “Fuck Sarkozy” T-shirt — and prohibiting Holocaust denial and apology for terrorism) as undue limitations on political expression. In this respect, I am more of a free-speech absolutist than many in France today.

The possession of a right does not, however, make it imperative to exercise that right. The confrontation between cartoonists and jihadists began when a Danish editor raised the question whether editorial cartoonists might be exercising self-censorship with respect to Islam. He regarded such self-censorship, if it existed, as a potential threat to free speech rights. I do not deny that such a potential threat might exist, but I question whether it was or is a clear and present danger to free speech rights in the West today. Calling self-restraint self-censorship seems to me to foreclose thoughtful response by applying a pejorative label. When communities with very different sensibilities regarding religion must live together, there is potential virtue to self-restraint, which may connote many things, including respect for the other, a desire to avoid conflict on matters where rational discourse will be difficult to achieve and a commitment to avoid inflaming tensions. Discretion is a social virtue, and frankly speaking one’s mind on all occasions can be a form of misanthropy or aggression, as Molière reminds us. ...

Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values. However laudable the magazine’s intentions, I believe that such confusion has proved politically unavailing. I would therefore advocate a change of tactics. Honor the dead, by all means, and defend what is defensible. But there is nothing dishonorable about asking whether other forms of engagement might not offer a greater likelihood of success. 

"All lives matter"

"HANDS OFF OUR WELFARE CHECKS!"

"All lives matter"
"Some of my best friends are Jews"
The problems of Charlie Hebdo in two stock phrases, one new, one old.

Writing and rewriting...
I've been sloppy with Hebdo, not always and not so much here, but often enough.

Max Fisher, on the attack in Texas.

But this was not principally a free speech event; it was an anti-Muslim hate event. Pamela Geller is not principally a free speech advocate; her activism has rather focused on curbing the rights, including the speech rights, of Muslims in the United States. The Garland event's most famous attendee and keynote speaker, the Dutch far-right political leader Geert Wilders, has taken similar positions, for example calling for banning the Koran. 

There is of course zero — zero — justification for the two attackers, who shot a security guard in the ankle (read more on the attackers here) before they were killed. No amount of hate speech justifies a violent retaliation, nor does it explain why these two men turned to violence. 

But before we elevate Geller and the event's attendees to free speech heroes akin to the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, we should understand what the event was really intended to support: hatred and marginalization of Muslims. 

The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo are not heroes. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons were anti-Muslim as much as cartoons of the Pope are anti-Catholic, but only a fool sees European Muslims as the equivalent of European Catholics. No Jew would accept claims of the equivalence in Europe of Christians and Jews, and anyone else who would is suspect. Siné admitted being anti-Semitic once and then apologized. The second time he refused. He'd never said he changed his mind.

Pedants argue that double standards shouldn't exist, or absurdly that they don't. After the Holocaust and the founding of Israel European Jews and their descendants live fantasies no other minorities enjoy. They identify as white* and their ethnic nationalism is described by whites and by themselves as liberal.  No one in polite society questions if, "Jewish lives matter", is lacking in universalism. The question now in Europe is whether the double standard extended out of guilt to Jews and assumed by Jews regarding Europeans should cover Muslims and other non-whites as well.

The invention of an oxymoron.

French rationalism and political idiocy.
TPM (my highlighting)

One of the writers for satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the target of a deadly attack in January, said that the magazine's cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad are different from the contest to draw Muhammed in Texas over the weekend.

Jean-Baptiste Thoret, a Charlie Hebdo film critic, told PBS' Charle Rose that there's "absolutely no comparison possible" between the Charlie Hebdo attack and the shooting outside of the Muhammed cartoon contest held near Dallas by anti-Islam group American Freedom Defense Initiative.

"To be honest, I can’t imagine the kind of comparison you can make between the Charlie Hebdo attack January 7 and this event," Thoret told Rose when asked for his reaction to the Texas attack.

Thoret said the contest in Texas was part of a "very harsh movement against Islamization of the U.S."

He said that at Charlie Hebdo, the writers and cartoonists were "criticizing" religion, "not Muslim people in particular."

We're back to Aquinas and the doctrine of double effect. But it doesn't matter what Thoret thinks; it matters what Muslims think.
---

*See also Jason Stanley, and again in the previous post. In the introduction to his new book he refers as he has in the past to Judaism almost exclusively as a faith. It's as if he's never looked in the mirror.
---

Credit where credit is due: Arthur Goldhammer in AJA

Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values.

repeat from October, with additions, and a new tag for Charlie Hebdo, for reasons that will become clear.
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Andrew Koppelman defends religious speech as high-value speech, but is happy to learn that an obvious corollary is based on false history.

Here’s a familiar rule of First Amendment law: free speech protection does not apply, or applies only weakly, to what are often referred to as “low-value” categories of speech. 

...In an important new paper, Genevieve Lakier shows that this story is false.

Genevieve Lakier, "The Invention of Low-Value Speech"

Abstract:
It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment does not apply, or applies only weakly, to what are often referred to as “low-value” categories of speech. It is also widely accepted that the existence of these categories extends back to the ratification of the First Amendment: that low-value speech is speech the punishment of which has, since 1791, never been thought to raise any constitutional concern.

This Article challenges this second assumption. It argues that early American courts and legislators did not in fact tie constitutional protection for speech to a categorical judgment of its value, nor did the punishment of low-value speech raise no constitutional concern. Instead, all speech — even low-value speech — was protected against prior restraint, and almost all speech — even high-value speech — was subject to criminal punishment when it appeared to pose a threat to the public order of society, broadly defined. It was only after the New Deal Court embraced the modern, libertarian conception of freedom of speech that courts began to treat high and low-value speech qualitatively differently. By limiting the protection extended to low-value speech, the New Deal Court attempted to reconcile the democratic values that the new conception of freedom of speech was intended to further with the other values (order, civility, public morality) that the regulation of speech had traditionally advanced. Nevertheless, in doing so, the Court found itself in the difficult position of having to judge the value of speech even though this was something that was in principle anathema to the modern jurisprudence. It was to resolve this tension that the Court asserted — on the basis of almost no evidence — that the low-value categories had always existed beyond the scope of constitutional concern.

I grew up around legal discussions of the constitution. I never once heard the phrase "low-value" speech. It's fucking absurd.

I was born in 1963:

Fuck Tushnet, again
---

1/15 Koppelman continues to defend religious speech as high-value speech.

The American legal tradition of giving religion special treatment is justified, I have argued, because when interpreted at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, religion serves as an indispensable legal proxy for a plurality of important goods. Micah Schwartzman argues, in response, that using religion as a legal proxy remains vulnerable to charges of unfairness toward those with secular ethical and moral convictions. I respond here to Schwartzman’s critique.

Schwartzman

The idea that religion warrants special treatment has been criticized as violating norms of equality and fairness. In response, Andrew Koppelman has argued recently that the American legal tradition of treating religion as a “good thing” is justified on the grounds that when interpreted at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, religion serves as an indispensable legal proxy for a plurality of important goods. In this essay, I argue that using religion as a legal proxy remains vulnerable to charges of unfairness toward those with secular ethical and moral convictions. The case for adopting religion as a proxy turns on arguments against potential substitutes. Even if no category can serve as a complete substitute for religion, however, its use as a proxy can be complemented by protections for the freedom of conscience. The law need not choose between protecting religious and secular convictions. It can and should provide significant protections for both.

There's no line dividing religious from secular belief and neither Koppelman nor Schwartzman try to draw one, taking its existence on faith. Dualism is transubstantiation. The Bible is a book, just like Macbeth and The Story of O. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

The delusions of liberalism and the "enlightened" liberal state, the model of which is France.