Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: controversy
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Will Self has declared war on George Orwell, anointing him the “Supreme Mediocrity” in a mediocre essay distinguished only by its needless use of the word “lucubrations.” For those of you Americans out there who know of Orwell but have never heard of Will Self (I wonder how that came about?), Self is a novelist…
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The most well-respected methods for reducing carbon emissions seem to be carbon taxes and carbon price mechanisms. I have written before about how I think they will not work to achieve a zero carbon state, based on lessons from the field of public health. Here I want to explore in a little more detail just…
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I have previously written about the difficulty of accurately understanding the issue of sex trafficking, and attempted to point out the conflicted political goals and deceptive tactics of some of the key activists and organizations in the movement against sex trafficking. I wrote these posts in connection with my argument that radical feminist critiques of…
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Today’s Guardian has a classic piece of click-bait by the opinionated and ignorant AIDS-denialist Simon Jenkins, in which he claims that maths is a waste of time for school students, and government obssession with maths will make schools intolerable and authoritarian. His article is leavened in equal measure with sneering at any politician who tries…
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I have got involved in a Saturday-morning stoush about genetically modified (GM) crops at Professor Quiggin’s blog[1]. For those who don’t know him, John Quiggin is a left-wing economist and blogger who wrote the book Zombie Economics, and I think is generally well-respected for his sensible policy views, though he can be spectacularly wrong. I…
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Nelson Mandela’s passing was only a few days ago and already the left-wing press and counter-press have managed to come up with a wide range of criticisms of someone who should, ostensibly, be their hero. Slavoj Zizek, that staunch opponent of anything modern in the left, is recycling the old claim that Mandela simply changed…
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I follow God on Facebook[1]. Not the real God, obviously, but this one has almost as many followers: just over a million people follow God. God does a couple of weekly regular updates that get a lot of attention: he does a weekly smite where he finds someone really annoying in public life and threatens…
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Last weekend the Guardian had an interesting article about the New College for the Humanities, some dodgy knock-off rich-kids proto-university in the UK, land of inequality. Apparently it’s being run by someone left-wing, so we have to take it seriously even though it charges 18,000 pounds a year (twice the cost of Oxford) for a…
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A few weeks ago Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was replaced in a leadership challenge by her arch nemesis, Kevin Rudd. She had previously overthrown him in 2010. Gillard and Rudd are leaders of Australia’s “left wing” party, the Australian Labor Party (ALP), and since her replacement there has been a bit of…
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Friday’s Guardian editorial featured a spit-flecked rant against internet pornography, starting and finishing with a demand to ban all of it. At the same time, the Daily Mail was putting up a strident demand for more efforts to police child porn. These articles are both profoundly wrong on facts and science, and breath-takingly hypocritical, not…
Compromise and Conceit 