In which I hold forth on the virtues of armchair philosophizing and other such distractions...

What would be gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine.When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable...

Moritz Goldstein on why it was pointless to fight German anti-Semitism with reason

Just something that came to mind upon being shown videos of Mr Thackeray trying to whip up a loyal fan-base by returning to the basics, listing grievances I do not know about, and so cannot comment on. And yet, the muffled rumble of the assembled crowd was scary...

Which leads me to this post by an extremely smart lady, who questions the right of this other guy to decide the lyrics of some song is not offensive enough to be banned; on the grounds he has probably not had enough first-hand experience of casteism to comment on it. The merits of the guy's argument are beside the point, but does he require experience to have an opinion? If so, how much experience, and who decides? I know, the old 'who decides' donkey that has been so ruthlessly flogged over the last couple of centuries it can barely lift an eyebrow to defend itself.

But the danger implicit in this kind of thinking is far less obvious; the more one learns, and the smarter and more sophisticated one's outlook towards life becomes, it becomes easier to simply reject other opinions as less informed, less intelligent or as simply plain dumb. Conversations and arguments tend get concentrated to between rarefied realms of almost equals who harbor roughly similar beliefs and convictions on perhaps the extent of the role of the state in their anarchosyndicalist societies (or something else equally incomprehensible to most of us)...

Back to preacher-man mode: Revelation in a barber-shop in Kerala a month ago when I failed miserably to convince a group there of the alethic and epistemic modalities implicit in the ambivalent statement in a newsletter, 'Research suggests it is possible that prayer promotes physical well-being' - Every opinion has value, hovewer misinformed or silly; and has to be argued on its merits, for this constant act of re-affirmation make us re-examine the foundations and assumptions upon which all our convictions are based on...