A rare insight by way of a blog by Paul, a ‘right-of-center, gun-owning, gay Texan’, here quoting Keith Burgess-Jackson (BJ), who calls himself the Anal Philosopher:

‘Conservatism is committed to a presumption in favor of tradition. Presumptions by their nature are rebuttable. Law is filled with presumptions… There is a legal presumption that people accused of crimes are innocent. To a conservative, traditions are innocent until proved guilty.’

This idea ties in nicely with a US government funded study of the psychology of conservatism, published last year by some of Stanford, California and Maryland Universities’ finest minds. Amongst other things, they discovered rightwing thinkers to be rather dogmatic and averse to ambiguity. So BJ calls on us to follow tradition dogmatically, without proving its value first and he talks of black and white concepts like innocence and guilt.

Yet BJ talks in the abstract, neither defining his traditions nor the crimes of which they’re accused. And he talks as if a tradition accused is on a par with a person accused of crime, which is just silly. Of course, leftwing thinkers – and US liberals – do care less for tradition. They tend to concern themselves with issues like prejudice, poverty and inequality; aberrations they regard as criminal. And all too often they find dogmatic, traditional values – a woman’s place in the home, say – at the root of these crimes.

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Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey’s assertion that, amongst other things, ‘no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries’ was always going to whip up Muslim anger, accusations of racism and almost tiresome listing of Muslim achievements.

Carey may have a point, but he finds himself hurling stones from inside a glasshouse. Christianity is certainly not a religion of science or invention, but has a long history of suppressing discovery. Pope John Paul II may have admitted the mistake – after a special commission – in 1992, but some still hold that the church was right and Galileo was wrong when he pushed the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun (buy their book).

Meanwhile, Christians across America are getting so good at promoting creationism, that briefing documents like this have to be issued to teachers. For these people, a lack of empirical evidence is no barrier to teaching creationism as if it were a verifiable scientific discovery – biologists, geologists and palaeontologists are part of some great conspiracy.

Today, no religion enables a culture of innovation; we owe that to secularism and tolerance.

Mad Mullah Murder.

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Marketing has been prompted to compare easyGroup’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou with Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, following the announcement that cheap flights, cheap car rental, cheap cinema, cheap buses, cheap credit cards and other cheap stuff are to be joined by… easy4men, a cheap toiletries range.

Now I might boast about getting a cheap flight to Barcelona… but will anyone brag about how cheap their aftershave is?
Naïve Marketing Strategies#1: High-Low……Naïve Marketing Strategies#3: McDonald’s Salads Plus

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According to some survey (I’ve lost the reference) sex, free and chocolate are the three words most likely to catch the eye, so advertisers everywhere should be working them into their copy. Of course, sex-free chocolate is somehow off putting, so you need to cheat and switch the order a little to create that perfect headline: free sex and chocolate.

And it works. I took two series of 100,000 text ads. The first references recent blogs like this…

Sex & the City meets…

Mad Mullah Murders… Britney’s Onyx Hotel… Barcelona’s 11-M…

The second’s like this…

Free Sex and Chocolate!

Mad Mullah Murders… Britney’s Onyx Hotel… Barcelona’s 11-M…

Thirty-six in every thousand people click ‘Free Sex and Chocolate’, while ‘Sex & the city meets…’ manages just fourteen per thousand (even though the s-word is still in there). Ultimately though, this has to be a naïve piece of marketing because as soon as people realise there are no free pics of naked people smeared with chocolate, they go elsewhere.

It seems obvious that these three words should come out top, but maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye. Maybe sex, free and chocolate are so potent because they point to both heaven and hell – symbols of guilty indulgence and corrupted morals as well as pleasure, something for nothing and luxury.