A protest against the perceived obsession, dogmatism and influence of post-Iraq left politics.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Women Must Not Look at Men in Shorts
Apr 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAyatollahs and MPs in Iran want ban on women in football stadiums to remain.… Read the rest
Daniel Finkelstein on Euston Manifesto
Apr 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPrinciples may draw on the great history of the Left, but they are not its present or its future.… Read the rest
Christian Discovery to Manifest Destiny
Apr 26th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonJim Cornehls gives a brief history of US violence.… Read the rest
A Dialectic
Apr 25th, 2006 7:11 pm | By Ophelia BensonOne good Radio 4 idea-discusser reviews another. (I like Laurie Taylor. For one thing, he reviewed the Dictionary of FN in the Times Higher. He didn’t think much of it, but he did think some of the jokes were funny – that’s good enough.)
… Read the restI’m also put off by the assumption that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly join Bragg in his latest popularising endeavour is something of a spoilsport or a dangerous elitist…No one can doubt Bragg’s populist spirit. One of the chief pleasures of In Our Time on Radio 4 is the sound of him trying to persuade the assembled academics to speak more plainly about their specialist subject. Whether the topic of the day is quantum mechanics, Goethe,
Alan Ryan on Jane Addams
Apr 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonShe presents us with almost too much to think about.… Read the rest
On de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness
Apr 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Nobody could claim these are great revelations. But they have the virtue of being true.’… Read the rest
Claire Harman on Bragg’s Twelve
Apr 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonArkwright’s patent served to restrict knowledge rather than spread it.… Read the rest
John Sutherland on Bragg’s Twelve
Apr 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBragg has established himself over the past decades as a fearlessly dedicated popular educator.… Read the rest
Laurie Taylor on Bragg’s Twelve
Apr 25th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAcademics never nearby enough to moderate some of his less fortunate populist urges.… Read the rest
Vatican Considers Condom Rules
Apr 24th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMight allow married people with HIV to use condoms.… Read the rest
Review of Sen’s Identity and Violence
Apr 24th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTunku Varadarajan finds it pretty but unrealistic.… Read the rest
No Shortcut
Apr 23rd, 2006 5:25 pm | By Ophelia BensonThis is good bracing stuff.
At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.
And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem … Read the rest
The Disturbing World of Implicit Bias
Apr 23rd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWe may not always think what we think we think.… Read the rest
Is a Happy Human the Same as a Good Human?
Apr 23rd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhat would Herbert Spencer think?… Read the rest
Richard Schoch Skeptical of Positive Psychology
Apr 23rd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonLasting and profound happiness isn’t about feeling good, it’s about being good.… Read the rest
Women’s Autonomy Under Threat
Apr 23rd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonReligious enclaves encouraging women to go back to when they were men’s property, not their own.… Read the rest
Self-awareness Switched Off During Concentration
Apr 23rd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBrain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate on a difficult, timed task.… Read the rest
The Myth of Productivity and the Function of Consumerism: An Institutional Perspective
Apr 23rd, 2006 | By Jim CornehlsProductivity is an economic term that, like others, has more than one meaning. First, there is overall productivity, meaning the collective ability of a society to produce goods and services. Second, productivity is used to explain the distribution of incomes within a society, where productivity is taken to mean the relative contribution of each of the so-called factors of production, land, labor and capital, to the production process. These two aspects of productivity are inextricably linked in the U.S. mixed economic system.
Efforts to measure productivity in the second sense are chimeras. Productivity is the result of mixing machinery, human effort, and community knowledge. Productivity does not exist independently of any or all of these. If a woman uses a … Read the rest
Creationism Conference in Derbyshire
Apr 22nd, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTo hear academics defend the view that God made the Earth in six days about 6,000 years ago.… Read the rest