The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by praisegod barebones:

Wait, you mean that lemon juice doesn't make you invisible to security cameras?

'A state religion, be it Islam, Jewish, christian or atheist, is too effective a tool for government manipulation of the population, through indoctrination, fear (of one's own neighbors) and direct intimidation by law.'

I'm with you in principle, but...let's just say that if I wanted to manipulate the British population, I wouldn't choose the Church of England as the medium to do it through.

Worth mentioning that in some places, state control of religion has been seen as a way of keeping a lid on religious extremism. I think that's true of the early days of the Churcvh of England, and its also, I think, true of Turkey in the present day. So that's one reason for atheists to be in favour of it.

Alex at 52: Muggletonian Morris? No proselytizing.

Pratchett's Ankh Morporkers speak a kind of cockney, not Northern, I reckon. Certainly that's true for C.M.O.T. Dibbler. The CMOT is very much part of the argot of a cockney market trader.

Abi 76, Scott 82

Here's a line you might want to borrow, though perhaps not if you're Joe Biden...

'If (John McCain) is elected,I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.'

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/neil_kinnock/

ombudspersons (now there is a word too awkward to live)

Ombudsfolk?

Avram: 'CS Lewis’s take on it was that it’s a nonsense question, which I suppose is what you get when you ask a technical question of a non-technical person. I mean, it’s not obviously nonsense. If you swap a person in for God — Can a person make a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it? — the answer becomes obvious: Yes, of course. Sedimentary rock would probably be the easiest. Blackboard chalk is made of artificially compressed gypsum powder; it shouldn’t be impossible for a person of typical strength to make a huge chunk of it, too big for a person of typical strength to lift. The question is well-formed, except for the word “Godâ€, which isn’t well defined.'

I've not got much sympathy for Lewis over most things but isn't this a bit like saying: 'It makes pefect sense to say 'What's the time in Brooklyn?' so how can the question 'What's the time on the sun?' be nonsense?

"Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."

Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man ?

One common definition of a profession is that it has a body with total control over who practices and who doesn't. See: chartered accountants, actuaries, etc

Is that a common definition? It seems to rule out both academia and school-teaching as professions.

'He claimed to be familiar with Islam from his time in Turkey.'

Then he's a fool, on top of everything else.

Turkey's really a very atypical place, in all sorts of ways, and Turkish Islam isn't all that representative of anything except...well, Turkish Islam. (The bars in Istanbul do very well in Ramadan, for example...I doubt that's true in Riyadh)

I don't know whether Erwin James still writes about prison related issues for the UK's Guardian newspaper, but if so, he's probably have an interesting perspective on this, having started covering that beat while still in prison...

Earl Cooley @58

This always seemed like a civilised place to hang out. It's disappointing to find that there are people here that think it's ok to advocate ripping another country to shreds as a way of 'salvaging' something from an American fuck-up.

The fact that the country you're advocating doing this to is the one that's been my home for eight years makes this of more than merely academic interest to me.

You do realise that if you think Turkey needs to be punished for the Armenian genocide, you probably ought to be thinking about ways in which the American people should be made to pay for actions of the pre-revolutionary British?

In other words - Turkey stopped being an imperial province of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and had a revolution, a new constitution etc. I'd like to suggest that historical discontinuities of that sort make some kind of difference to whether they should be punished for events that happened before then.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether there's any possibility that unions would help with issues like this.

Is it worth pointing out that Tula Connell who wrote the fdl posts appears`to work for the AFL/CIO

IOW, they seem to be interested in getting the word out about this sort of thing...

fidelio 78

How did you know about that? He had some trouble filling out some of the forms - not enough space to write his name, I think, but got it all together in the nick of time.

Terry at 48

Not intended as spam, but as a response to 41, which fell flat because a) I left my comment in preview for about half an hour and b)it looks as though I messed up on embedding the link - though I can't be sure, as it looks as though the govt in Turkey is blocking YouTube.

All things considered I probably deserve a kick up the Rump for general ineptitude, though....

Is there life in Peckham ?

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