As for the Burqa, Hijab, Jilbab or BinLiner? Hmmm, let’s ask some relevant questions. My sister who wears the veil, what are her choices now; why is s/he saying s/he wants to wear it; who taught her to put on that shroud; what were their motives? Sure, the principle of liberty means one is free to wear the veil. But that is only one-third of the equation.

The next third is the ideological meanings radiating from this shroud. That we, half of humanity, should be ashamed of our gender identity and role? Our XX-SNC physiological type? Our rich affectional orientation? Our capacity to share ourselves and create new life? That the sensuous and erotic is satanic and to be disowned, rather than integrated into a world of grown-up love, respect, desire and creativity?

That the other half of humanity is excused if it assaults someone because of uncontrolled “sexual impulses”? That I or another XX-SNC person’s affectional and erotic life is always managed by someone else – her “father”, her “brother”, her “uncle”, her “husband”? All patriarchal tyrants.

Which brings us to the final third. Don’t expect such obnoxious fallacies to go unchallenged, whether or not they are given the colour of a religious creed. The challenge may be coolly reasonable. It may be outrageous. What I say is “F*ck that demeaning shit!” Top marks to Anne Elizabeth-Moutet.

BTW…..Islamophobia is clearly a b*llshit concept, invented by persons who have no dedication to freedom of expression, and who wish to short-circuit robust public debate.

(i) It is an attempt to insulate ridiculous or obnoxious political or ethical beliefs from analysis and deserved mockery. Religion especially is very fair game for completely unbridled criticism.

(ii) No self-respecting individual would allow themselves to be compartmentalised and categorised purely in terms of their ideological precepts. I do not criticise the core of your identity even if I you thoroughly ridicule your most treasured beliefs, albeit that I should confine such ridicule to the public square. I have no entitlement to demand entry to expound my views to private associations where religious neurotics congregate – churches, mosques, synagogues, whatever

(iii) Except in the minds of clerical fascists, there is no respectable notion of a unified homogenous group of persons, called Islamists. Rather, there are revolting ideas, and the Islamic Ideology is full of them. I criticise the ideas, and anyone ill-motivated enough to claim that such ideas can justify wrongdoing.

Regards, andrea

Second, despite political flannel, it is obvious that even excellent intelligence work, which after all would no doubt require extraordinarily invasive access to private data, cannot prevent unpredictable killers from presenting themselves at check-in. Grooming of otherwise unremarkable agents is a terrorist method.

Third, I struggle to see the difficulty in allowing intimate but non-tactile searches, given that tactile and quite intimate searches are already commonplace.

Forth, in any balancing exercise, obviously a sacrifice of “modesty” (so called) on the part of some people is an appropriate, rationally connected and proportionate method, when the nature of the threat is destruction of the plane and the murder of the passengers.

Speaking for myself, being unabashed like those admirable German Young Pirates, I would walk naked, no bra no knickers, in public through a scanner if that was the proportionate price of safer travel, for myself and my co-passengers. I would subject myself to such scanning, and reasonably expect my co-passengers to likewise consent.

In particular, so called “religious beliefs”, but to my mind utterly irrational reactionary dogma, should carry zero weight, in considering the proportionality of the scanning. So-called “religious concerns” about modesty are code for hatred of the public and political visibility of persons of my physiological type. “Religious modesty” is at root a pretext for enforcement of religiously inspired gender apartheid. Ha, I would make it a buying factor that the airline employed intimate scanners

It is also relevant that this hatred of the feminine, and the consequent revolting hyper-masculinity and erotic frustration, are part of the psychosexual imbalance generating the violence within the Islamic Ideology, the inspiration for most contemporary terrorists. Public security policy could quite properly have as one of its purposes the undoing of this psychosexual imbalance.

As a general doctrine, we need to carefully distinguish slightly neurotic conceptions of privacy meaning invisibility, from privacy meaning the right to control my person and property and interests. We live in a very high-speed, technologically driven culture, where the swiftness of our transactions is highly beneficial. But that implies a preparedness to consent to the sharing of well-defined but often very detailed data about oneself with persons who otherwise know nothing about you.

Remember that travel is a choice, and primarily a matter of private contract. Although freedom of contract has its limitations, the starting point of contractual consent to intimate scan, as a precondition of travel, is hardly obnoxious.

Furthermore, if I choose to travel, I have an extra-contractual duty to assist my co-passengers to travel safely. This derives from my innate humanity, my common-sisterhood.

I observe, with a smile, that if I happily get undressed voluntarily to make love with someone I care for, then it is difficult for me to argue that I should not be highly visible when my mortal interests and those of my co-passengers are significantly engaged.

Obviously the technology is open to mischievous use. So, non-retention of scanning data that reveals no realistic threat, beyond say the duration of the flight, sounds like a sensible data protection principle.

Regards, andrea

Now I realise s/he is programmed by the Islamic Ideology. Instead of debating the argument that freedom of expression trumps your right not to be offended, s/he switches to the usual Islamic Apologist rant about not enough exposé of the “evils” of the Jewish Conspiracy. Of course, s/he says s/he discusses the problems of Islam all the time. Obviously not its paranoia and virulent hatred of free speech.

♥ andrea

The error, indeed the contradiction in the argument, is to suppose there is a valid definition of “external world”, but then to suffer torments of metaphysical anguish because it seems impossible ever to justify the existence of such a world.

As Gilbert Ryle and Co. were forever pointing out, this definition of an unobtainable “external world” is an empty tease. What is my “internal mental world” being contrasted with? Nothing. So, all of reality has been pointlessly relabelled as mental. Big achievement

We don’t “see” the electrical impulses in the primary visual cortex, or the dorsal and ventral streams, or any other area of the brain. We “see”, by default, those parts of the world that emit electromagnetic waves to which our eyes are sensitive.

All this fascinating neural activity is a correlate of the content of our visual domain, but it is not what we are seeing. It may well be a necessary precondition of seeing things, but it is not the subject of our sense of vision. Cooking is a precondition of my eating the tasty grilled aubergines. But I am not eating the cooker or the act of cooking when I east the aubergines, except in some amusing poetical sense.

No wonder natural scientists think philosophers love to invent non-problems, due to over indulgence in arbitrary redefinitions.

There is a real problem masquerading as the problem of the external world. That is how to validly infer such things as quasi-permanent objects, from the vast array of snapshots. How we logically categorise and order the world – now that is a real issue. The use of nested hierarchies as a measure of information content is one place to start.

Regards, andrea

I have no problem asserting that large elements of my “cultural inheritance” contain repellent strains of Clerical and Secular Fascism.

A follower of the Paedo Prophet must show enough independence of thought to be self-critical about her history.

Can’t do it? Well that’s suggestive of a fascistic “group-think” mentality.

Of course, clerics love to benefit from propaganda about group identity.

♥ andrea

This is priceless musical and visual comedy.

Anyhow, brilliant musicians. I went to this concert, sitting on the rail, up in in the balcony. Excellent.

Regards and ♥, andrea

these lyrics are brutal.  sentimental stories
Words only spoken seemingly
That I’m warming your heart that way.

its “sentimental sorries, words only spoken seem lame and I won’t win your heart that way.”

andreaandrewmilne

Dear ramrodstest,

May I suggest there is a killer ironic switch of perspective in the lyric.

S/he is saying to her lover:

“These lyrics I sing to you are brutal. The sentimental stories that you tell me, are words only seemingly spoken. You are only saying to me that I am warming your heart that way.”

That’s why Tracyanne sings:

“You said I made you feel warm, said I made you feel warm inside. Oh, it feels like none of this is real…”

Regards and merry Xmas and ♥, andrea

Noop, what’s daft is this initial schizoid splitting of reality into two realms, judged by some existential or phenomenological or epistemological demarcation. Typical of “masculine” styles of thinking, I observe.

There are no “philosophical” problems in our having deep emotional and attitudinal lives. We all know fairly well what it is to feel “such and such”, or to believe “this or that”, about ourselves and other people. Nor do most people doubt that their claims about other peoples and their own mental lives are more or less equally well founded. Unless you go on a philosophy course, the sense that one has an epistemologically privileged access to oneself isn’t commonplace.

The real puzzles are the patterns we have in our feelings and interpersonal lives, especially our half-conscious, half-unconscious models of each other’s feelings, beliefs and intentions. That’s why the art of conversation and romantic literature, and psychology, especially social psychology, all have great significance …. and why the philosophy of mind is a silly common-room hobby.

Things we can know in advance to be “a-priori” inexplicable by natural science? What is the “intrinsic” nature of something apart from its behaviour? A mixture of Kantianism and pure b*llshit mysticism.

My advice to CM? Go get a real job helping people in Tesco’s, to quote a better philosopher Or more campaigning for better treatment of other species, which CM was quite interested in, in the early 90s.

Regards and ♥, andrea

Way to go!

Just as my jaw was dropping and my anger thermometer going way over boiling point at KJ’s tosh (dressed up as ages-old Buddhist wisdom, of course), so your vid nails her nonsense.

You get my instant sub and friend invite, for Public Service to affection, sanity, hard-work, careful analysis, and the ability to share friendship and love and pleasure. Etc, etc, etc. The classical, life-enhancing virtues of Feminism.

This, of course, being a feminist politics and ethics available to everyone, not outmoded concepts of natural or essential sex-and-gender types. I always have to add that bit, in case someone calls me an essentialist backslider, who just pretends to believe in freedom from compulsory and constricting dimorphic identities.

Probably, I’m going to be told off for not wishing KJ happiness and a quick recovery. Phah, I’m not a bloody saint…. s/he just needs to drop that uptight, head in her arse, rigid, “I’m so transcendentally enlightened”, smug, veneration of “masculine” power and emotional isolation and autism.

Says KJ in watch?v=GyH6nU6eb2I

“Those who understand ultimate reality don’t experience emotion”.

You mean like sympathy, or outrage at injustice, or uncontainable love for ones friends and ones children? This dualistic disconnection between thought and feeling is one of the sickest twists in patriarchy. We need to replace it by a sensuous comprehension, in which to know and to feel run in deep tandem. Integration of the psyche, not schizoid disassociation.

What is strange about KJ is that s/he hovers between the wisdom of seeing the interconnectedness of all of us, but uses this as a pretext for denying the value of individuality (s/he likes to muck around with ideas like ego, self, consciousness, blah, blah), and by implication the significance of the suffering of others. Then s/he turns that into an excuse for veneration of proud, vain, isolated “masculinity”. I suppose that is what’s called paradoxical enlightenment

Maybe what’s going on (speculates Andrea the Wise) is s/he’s trying to trash some highly unpleasant element of her experience, by trashing the claim that her personal identity really exists? Sinister, very sinister ……

One of my “no-nos” is arguers who pretend not to take a moralised position, but claim to derive it almost against their will by clear thinking from facts. Eg KJ at watch?v=CuHrl0lnN4U 5:25-6:45

“Just as non-attachment in not about an emotional dissatisfaction, or psychological disassociation, so wise misogyny is not about hatred of women, it’s not an emotional satisfaction or revulsion, it’s not distaste. It’s basically just a rational conclusion and rejection of what makes up the feminine mind.”

Grrrr….. Pure contradiction; pure projection of self-hatred on to a realm of abstract rationality; insouciant attempt to pre-empt and dismiss valid criticism just by mentioning it; crap failure to grapple with the is-ought problem. 0 out of 10. What would dear Siggy have said, twirling her cigar, about this case, in “On Negation“?

Rarely have I come across someone who so admires what I regard as anathema to a womanly, beautiful, playful, social existence.

OK, diatribe over.

♥, andrea

Freedom of expression is the lifeblood of democracy. No, I’m not being sarcastic. The emphasis in my comment is on the term democracy. Or better still, a realm of individual liberty and security of person and property.

Anyone fool enough to think that The Islamic Ideology does not have as its primary aim the overthrow of democracy and the subjugation of all persons to Clerical Fascism…well, such a person had better study “The Book of Hate”, aka Quran, esp sura 9:029.

Being barred from a particular architectural design for your Political Office for the Promotion of Clerical Fascism, ha, that doesn’t seem to me to be too wrongful a balancing act between your freedom of expression and my entitlement to live in a society where there is not a surfeit of bearded nut jobs who want to see me in a bin liner or to rape me.

Religiously programmed patriarchal Zombies of Hate (almost always XY-SNC) who regard my physiological type as moral, political and existential trash … well, as far as I’m concerned, their ideology can be shredded into the f*cking dustbin. They are free to shout their hatred in the public square, but I won’t lift a finger to facilitate it, and that includes not acquiescing in planning laws that permit construction of their broadcast towers.

My ears are pricked, aching to hear from a progressive crew of these monotheists, who have rejected the patriarchal elements of their moral-political brew, joined the world of physical evidence and reasoning by logic (PEaRL), and who now express their love of all things womanly. Who shout out that their hearts are as warm as sacks of golden honey in the sun for feminine ideals. Forgive me if I fall asleep waiting….

Regards, andrea