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...

In the old Spanish blog, one of my most popular posts was an interview I did with an unusually articulate grey-cheeked parakeet, in which the bird in question patiently explained what he saw as the flaws in human social organization, and recommended a social outlook more like his own, on the basis that widespread adoption, by humans, of this alternative system and philosophy (in which communal nest-building played a prominent part) would dramatically reduce intraspecific conflict, as well as freeing up valuable time and energy for more productive and interesting pursuits, such as chirping, or looking sleek and dapper. For this blog I no longer have a parakeet, so I will instead go for a Pre-Columbian Granite-faced Person (PCGFP). We have them here in Ecuador, you see, so it's convenient. ME: Making big stone faces on Easter Island wasn't a great idea, was it? PCGFP: On reflection, no. I think we got a bit carried away there. It was like one day someone said "Hey, ...