Dusting off the "nice one fella" award

Always worth remembering that although Aaro's politics can be a little bit on the dangerous side if you happen to be physically located in one of the countries he takes against, he is unusual among the Decent Left in that he doesn't actually fear or hate the Muslims. And so it is that he writes something rather good about the Reverend Rowan. Including a dig at Melanie Phillips which appears to have drawn a bit of blood; I am pretty sure that if Mel had remembered that Dave isn't Jewish she'd have called him an anti-Semite. (I have left a remark in her comments to the effect that she has misunderstood - Aaro means to say that Melanie P is entirely entitled to have an opinion on the Archbishop of Canterbury and even to publish it, but as with the Vicar of Dibley's views on matters rabbinical, she shouldn't expect anyone else to care).

Toward the end, however, Aaro appears to take on the general question of liberalism versus communitarianism, and gets bogged down in it roughly as quickly as every other bugger, inside and outside political philosophy, who has written about it in the last thirty years. The central question being that if you have "communities" they are always going to end up putting social pressures on people within those communities (usually women and gays) which have the practical effect of denying them their civil rights, but if you don't have "communities", the world's an awfully cold place. I vaguely wish that this concern for the practical ability of people oppressed by minority communities to make use of their formal rights could be extended more often into a general program of assisting all sorts of people to make use of the rights that liberal society in general doesn't give them much practical hope of enjoying, but there you go. The question is a basically intractable one, so one can hardly blame Aaro for getting caught in it and he was much less annoying than Johann Hari's version of the same thing. Personally in re: liberalism versus communitarianism, I endorse the view of Professor John N Gray, which can be summarised as "fuck this for a lark, I'm off to read JG Ballard".

Update: compare and contrast "Clothes for Chaps".

Update Wednesday 13 February 5:15 pm by Chardonnay Chap If we're doing the Rowan Williams thing here, I may as well throw in some fun links I've found. Eugene Volokh on American courts' interpretation of Sharia law pertaining to contracts. Via Frog on Christopher Hitchens' arguments against Rowan Williams (yet again, Hitchens proves a better polemicist than logician) via IOZ who thinks it's all pretty trivial.