An Elephant of One's Own

"How do I reveal to my Muslim daughter that women who look and dress like her mother have had their hijabs torn from their heads (...)?" The article makes a few valid points about the threat of anti-Muslim hysteria, though it's hard to pick them out in the fog of exaggeration and partisan bias. It's a long time since I tuned out of Pat Condell, one of YouTube's currently most famous self-parodies, due to his apparent inability to distinguish between two quite different animals, viz. the religion of Islam, on the one hand, with its scriptures and strictures, and on the other, the notional collective of people who claim to subscribe to one or another form of that religion. For me, the simple recognition that a person is not and cannot be a religion, or a book (or a Book) is enough: I don't feel the need to play with taxonomies, and I have a certain visceral dislike for the term "moderate Muslims" (is there such a thing as a "moderate Jehovah...

I have a son, now eight years old, who was diagnosed at the age of two and a half as Autistic Spectrum (Not Otherwise Specified). He is sitting in front of me as I write, watching a YouTube gameplay video (he is currently into Spore, but occasionally still backslides into Plants Versus Zombies and Cat Simulator). Needless to say, he is almost exactly like me. I have little doubt that if I were shrunk down to eight years old today I would be diagnosed as something . Disturbingly, schools today have psychologists-in-residence, so being diagnosed is an occupational hazard of being a kid, especially for boys . As already described, I escaped all this by growing up in the 60s, and being Catholic. The only diagnosis I recall clearly (apart from that of being made from puppy-dogs' tails, as already mentioned) was Original Sin: i.e., like all Catholic kids, I was routinely diagnosed as evil and thus deserving of eternal torture in a Lake of Fire. That was quite enough to b...