The telescope is needed for ultraviolet astronomy.… Read the rest
Honour Killings Averted
Mar 31st, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPair from enemy tribes in Pakistan marry under police protection.… Read the rest
Martin Seligman on Eudaimonia
Mar 30th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIt’s now possible to measure fuzzy states like sadness and schizophrenia.… Read the rest
How Do You Apologize for Mass Murder?
Mar 30th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIn Rwanda people have to live next door to the people who murdered all their relatives.… Read the rest
Theory is Too So Still Relevant!
Mar 29th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIt has to figure out who will be famous twenty years from now, obviously.… Read the rest
Odds and Sods
Mar 28th, 2004 11:48 pm | By Ophelia BensonI trust you saw this review of Alain de Botton’s latest scholarly work via News. If not, do have a look; it’s very funny. Very enraged, very impolite, and very funny. It starts well –
Alain de Botton is the kind of public intellectual our debased culture deserves. This prince of précis, this queen of quotation, pastes together entire books by citing and then restating in inferior prose the ideas of great writers from centuries gone by. Aping the forms of philosophical thought in tones of complacent condescension, he provides for his readers the comforting sensation of reading something profound at little cost of mental effort.
And it goes on well, too.
… Read the restthe second half of the book offers “Solutions”
Taboo, Unclean, Yuk, Pollution
Mar 28th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonRestoration of statue of boar abandoned for fear of ‘offending’ Muslims in Derby.… Read the rest
Atheists Need Protection From the Majority
Mar 28th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAtheists are one group it’s okie doke to despise.… Read the rest
BBC on Laine Case
Mar 28th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonUS scholar says case was brought for political reasons.… Read the rest
Hitchens Reviews Buruma and Margalit
Mar 28th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonParanoid, reactionary, death-loving ideas underlie Occidentalism as well as Orientalism.… Read the rest
Potential for False Abuse Claims
Mar 28th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonNew child protection law could lead to problems being misinterpreted. Or not.… Read the rest
Miscellany 3
Mar 27th, 2004 11:21 pm | By Ophelia BensonAnd more. Another item from Normblog, that made me laugh a good deal. About people who pontificate in a repetitive repetitive manner about clichés and the end of civilization as we know it. I know people like that, I’ve been trapped at dinner tables and in cars with them on more than one occasion. (Some people even think I do that! Would you believe it!) Drone drone drone they go, droning about droning bores. Rather the way I am now. I’ll let Norm tell it:
… Read the restNot only that, there are ‘more dangerous’ clichés, says Mortimer, like ‘”the war against terrorism” when we aren’t at war with any country’. One reads this sort of thing so often now, I’m thinking
Miscellany 2
Mar 27th, 2004 8:11 pm | By Ophelia BensonMore of the miscellany. I want to look at a sentence or two from a comment on the hijab issue – a comment prompted by this article. I’m not bothering to link to the comment, because it’s quite typical and not all that interesting, in my view. It’s the typicality that makes the sentence worth looking at. It’s the kind of Everyone Says It sort of thing that – well, that everyone says, without really thinking about it much, or perhaps at all. So people go on saying it, and they hear it, and no one ever (or hardly anyone hardly ever) stops to take a closer look at it, and it infects public rhetoric more and more. A … Read the rest
Steven Poole Shreds Alain de Botton
Mar 27th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe weasel words, the pretending to discover what everyone already knows, the whimsy.… Read the rest
Miscellany
Mar 26th, 2004 7:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonDang, I’ve been having a hard time keeping up lately. Not very surprisingly. This writing a book caper does tend to take more than a few minutes a day, after all, and the time has to come from somewhere. And there are other odds and ends, and so – items I want to comment on have been piling up. I do what I can, I wake up nice and early, a good deal earlier than I would like to in fact, but still the piling up goes on. So I’m just going to do a miscellany, a grab-bag, an everything all at once comment, and whittle the pile down a little.
There’s this from Normblog on something George Monbiot said … Read the rest
Tagore’s Nobel Medal is Missing
Mar 26th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSome people oppose his ‘largely secular legacy.’ … Read the rest
Shaken Baby Diagnosis Shaky?
Mar 26th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTo admit uncertainty is sometimes appropriate.… Read the rest
Scott McLemee Reviews Richard Evans
Mar 26th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Evans is not awed by the Nazis themselves. He defies their efforts to defy reason.’… Read the rest
The French Hijab Ban is not Anti-Muslim
Mar 25th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonOne of the ban’s architects explains the thinking behind it.… Read the rest
Historians on Zinn
Mar 25th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHow does Zinn compare to Hofstadter and Foner?… Read the rest