Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Tag: controversy

  • Is a Carbon Tax Justified Purely on Health Grounds?

    Today it was 26C in Tokyo, and we had our first taste of this year’s yellow dust, the strange and nasty pollution that tends to drift over Japan from China during spring and summer. Today’s was the worst I have ever seen in 5 years in Japan – the above photograph, taken from my ground…

  • Did it Have to be Stalin?

    Today’s Guardian is running an article about the controversy of renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad for the annual celebrations of that particularly brutal period in World War 2. If anyone hasn’t read Anthony Beevor’s book on this topic, I strongly recommend it – I don’t know how factual it is but it’s an excellent read anyway.…

  • Towards a Neo-liberal Explanation of Japanese Equality?

    I want to start this rant with a quote from the British chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander. In discussing a review of the alternatives to the UK’s trident missile program, he announced We are in a position where the costs of the Successor have to be paid for from within the MoD budget.…

  • Can we Prove that the Australian Gun Buyback Prevented Mass Shootings?

    With the sad events recently in America, and president Obama’s newfound (apparent) determination to do something about assault weapons, a lot of attention has focused on Australia’s National Firearms Agreement (NFA), which outlawed certain categories of guns and included a program to buy back guns already in circulation (commonly called the “gun buyback program”). Several…

  • Rushdie vs. le Carre: the Battle from the Land Before Time

    Today’s Guardian reports on an exchange of letters between Salman Rushdie and John le Carre, from 1997, in which they disagree vehemently about the limits of free speech. At this point in his career Rushdie was in hiding from Islamic fundamentalists, and le Carre was in trouble for criticizing Israel – which of course put…

  • Are Climate Change “Skeptics” More Likely to be Conspiracy Theorists?

    Introduction In this post I will examine the data on beliefs about climate change, conspiracy theories and free market ideology collected by Stephan Lewandowsky. Lewandowsky conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) on the assumption that established theories of conspiracy theory ideation obtained from prior research could be applied to…

  • In Which Faustusnotes Enters the Great Breast Debate

    This week sees the simultaneous release of pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge’s breasts, and the release of a Counterpunch article on how a feminist Assistant Professor should be allowed  to breastfeed in class. I think everyone is roughly aware of how the debate is proceeding vis a vis the Duchess’s breasts – they’re a…

  • Drug Cheat or Sour Grapes?

    I’ve been enjoying the Olympics from the vantage point of my air-conditioned couch, and because I’m in Japan I’m getting to see only the sports that interest Japanese viewers, so at the moment it’s wall-to-wall Judo and swimming. Of course, having something of a soft spot for China I’m quite happy to see them coming…

  • The Moral Quagmire that is Paladinism

    In briefly surfing through the Paizo messageboards I stumbled upon this highly contentious doozy of a thread: Is torturing intelligent undead an evil action? The resulting thread is a microcosm of the murky debates that surround good and evil in a game that recreates a moral universe radically different from our own, but my position…

  • Your Inequality Challenge

    I’m doing some research work at the moment on a certain country, and have identified a negative relationship between inequality (measured using the Gini index) and all-cause mortality. I’m not at liberty to identify the country, or the details, of course. This negative relationship means, in essence, that the more unequal a small area becomes,…