Tilting at the liberty windmill

8:42pm

Much is being made in some quarters of the apparent gulf between the view taken of David Davis’s resignation by the political and media village (he’s lost the plot/is a one-man plot/is a monstrous narcissist) and the public (he’s a hero fighting for Britain’s ancient liberties). I can’t help but see all this as yet another example of the replacement of reason by emotion. I can certainly see that Davis has touched a popular chord among people who feel passionately – and I have much sympathy with this – that MPs no longer act in the public interest and no longer speak for them but instead are machine politicians whipped by their party leadership into a systematic denial of reality. I also sympathise with the general view that the state is encroaching more and more oppressively into people’s lives –...

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Princess Obama Derangement Syndrome

12:20am

 

My oh my, what a firestorm I appear to have started with my remarks two days ago on Obama’s background! It was wholly expected, of course, but nevertheless the posters’ comments are so revealing. They graphically illustrate the way in which Obamania has quite obviously destroyed the capacity for reason.

First, it is quite clear that any questioning at all of Obama’s background is entirely off-limits. Next, the posters fail totally to grasp that the real point isn’t what faith he professed or was brought up in as a child – it is the fact that he has not told the truth about his early background. Then, some even compare such questioning with the ‘truthers’ who allege that 9/11 was perpetrated by a conspiracy between America and Israel. They thus demonstrate that they cannot tell the difference between rationality...

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Huxley-Wilberforce, round two

11:58pm

 

Last night’s BBC Radio Four show The Moral Maze, on which I am a panellist, was recorded at the Cheltenham Science Festival and consisted of a particularly fascinating debate about the relationship between science and religion. One of the witnesses was Dr John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician and author of the remarkable book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? His answer is not only no, but he totally demolishes the Richard Dawkins position from the perspective of science. He shows not only that there is no inherent conflict between science and faith but that the argument for faith is now being bolstered enormously by the remarkable developments in science.

John Lennox took this argument to Dawkins himself at an equally remarkable debate in Alabama last year. You can watch...

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The death of Magna Carta has been much exaggerated

5:32pm

 

 

Meanwhile, on the 42 days’ detention limit issue itself the vote was won but the argument goes on. The government’s hair’s breadth victory last night, achieved through some epic and unsavoury horse-trading, may have staved off immediate political disaster for Gordon Brown’s premiership, but there is a widespread belief that the House of Lords will vote the measure down. The argument this morning on the Today programme (0810) between Lords Carlile (for) and Goldsmith (against) illustrated what is to come. Goldsmith said in effect that destroying our fundamental values, which he thinks the 42-day limit does, undermines our fight against the Islamists who are attacking those values and that we can only achieve victory against them if we show them that our values are better. Carlile said that the ultimate civil liberty was national security, and that the...

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Huh??

2:55pm

 

David Davis’s bizarre decision to resign and fight a by-election on the issue of 42 days’ detention is causing widespread astonishment. His statement – surely one of the most egotistical, self-regarding examples of the genre – grandly states that as a result of his gesture

at least my electorate and the nation as a whole would have had the opportunity to debate and consider one of the most fundamental issues of the day.

But the issue is being debated in Parliament. That’s what his constituents sent Davis to Parliament to do. Ok, the pork-barrel nature of last night’s vote was appalling. But the party Davis represents did actually oppose the measure in vigorous terms – largely thanks to Davis’s own efforts – and will continue to do so in the Lords, where it is expected...

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Obama and the giant blogosphere conspiracy

11:32pm

 

Today’s Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat ‘virulent rumours’ about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama’s own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has no moderators. Yeah, right.

The Guardian quotes the director of some monitoring outfit as saying that the blogosphere’s smears about Obama are particularly vicious.

He added that one of the most persistent is that Obama, a

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