Category Errors

So, the irresponsible Terry Eagleton has taken out his droll pen to criticize Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. Botton's essay, if there's anything to be said for it, is a rather entertaining and pointless book, but Eagleton makes a tragic category error early in his evicerations look less responsible than he promises with his chosen tone:

The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised.

Free speech and civil rights are categorically different from belief in the supernatural, so much so that it's hard to see how Eagleton leaps from one to the other with any responsibility. The first two are civil issues, the latter personal. Debates about whether people should have free speech (which are real, and ongoing; see SOPA, PIPA, and PCIPA) continue to this day, and one is not "patronized" when the question is engaged: passionate about either granting that right, or restricting it for ideological reasons, but hardly "patronized."

I trashed my headphones, man

This afternoon, after driving home from the train station, I saw that my headphones had fallen out of my coat pocket, onto the floor of the car, and dangled out onto the road. For about ten minutes, they'd been dragged along the macadam at freeway speeds.

Those were my best headphones, too, an old-school pair of Sony Fontopia Plus. The speakers were ripped off; only the shells remain, pitted scars of plastic that will never again play either Mozart or Katy Perry. While the sound quality probably never matched something high-end like Skullcandy, Sony had this rubber coating on the wires that prevented them from ever getting tangled, no matter how bady I mistreated them.

Bummer.