Past movements have fought oppression and injustice without randomly slaughtering people.… Read the rest
Real Time
May 17th, 2006 8:09 pm | By Ophelia BensonSo I suppose right now somewhere in the middle of London (where is the ICA, anyway? I forget. Piccadilly? Bedford Square? next to Hatchard’s? I have no idea) some people (how many, I wonder? fifty? a hundred? two?) are listening to three or four guys talking about truth. I wonder what they’re saying about it. That it can be hard to get at, perhaps. That it’s in a well. That Bacon named an essay after it. That it’s not a bad thing to aim at, on the whole. That people who play certain public roles have a particular obligation to aim at it, and to avoid aiming at the other thing. That it’s just a matter of common sense, when … Read the rest
More From Rebecca Clarren on the Marianas
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWomen work up to 20 hours a day to pay recruitment fee and for housing and food.… Read the rest
Misery in the Mariana Islands
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAnd what Abramoff and DeLay did to block legislation that would have changed things.… Read the rest
Free Ramin Jahanbegloo
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonEurozine joins the list of signers.… Read the rest
Rasool Nafisi: the Meaning of Jahanbegloo’s Arrest
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAhmadinejad and his ideological cohorts see Ramin as a symbol of ‘westoxication’. … Read the rest
Voltaire and Erasmus Are Pissed
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHirsi Ali stripped of citizenship overnight, to the fury of many.… Read the rest
Religious Militias Murder Gays in Baghdad
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe fanatics’ list of enemies is growing: girls who refuse hijab, longhaired boys, liberal professors.… Read the rest
Summary of Churchill Report [pdf]
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe misconduct was deliberate and not a
matter of an occasional careless error.… Read the rest
Ward Churchill Verdict
May 17th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonCommittee found Churchill had committed falsification, fabrication, plagiarism.… Read the rest
Ward Churchill
May 17th, 2006 2:23 am | By Ophelia BensonInteresting. The University of Colorado has released a report on its investigation of Ward Churchill. And?
Among the violations that the committee found Churchill had committed were falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, failure to comply with established standard regarding author names on publications, and a “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”
Uh – that’s bad. That’s what you don’t do. You know like when you go to the dentist? The dentist isn’t supposed to take the sharp things and jam them into the roof of your mouth on purpose. That’s contraindicated. Same thing with this. Academics aren’t supposed to falsify, fabricate, or plagiarize. It doesn’t matter whether they’re controversial or offensive or rowdy or longhaired; they don’t … Read the rest
Why Bother To Read Books Before Reviewing Them?
May 16th, 2006 7:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonHere’s some, shall we say, flexible thinking in action. Someone (the name sounds male so I’ll decide it is male, in order not to have to say s/he, which I do not like to say) admitting in the first words of a ‘review’ that he has not read the book he is reviewing, then blithely and absent-mindedly proceeding to discuss said book quite as if he had indeed read it and taken detailed notes. I can tell you he hadn’t and hasn’t and didn’t, though, because everything he says about it is flat wrong, and I know that on account of I co-wrote the book.
Behold his artless frankness at the beginning –
… Read the restI can imagine, and i’ve heard
Identity and Violence
May 16th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSen takes aim at ‘solitarist’ approach to identity: seeing humans as members of exactly one group.… Read the rest
History is not Relevant
May 16th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTeachers and academics protest as some Scottish schools drop history from the timetable.… Read the rest
Kevin Phillips on God’s Own Party
May 16th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIt is the stuff of nightmares.… Read the rest
Sistani Removes Website’s ‘Death to Gays’ Fatwa
May 16th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBut anti-lesbian fatwa remains.… Read the rest
Rebecca Goldstein on Spinoza
May 16th, 2006 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Spinoza’s God is the sum of all the reasons for everything. But it’s not a God whom one can pray to.’… Read the rest
Foundational Commitments
May 16th, 2006 2:03 am | By Ophelia BensonSo, where were we. Here’s one thing JS said in the discussion.
The other general point is that I think people make the best cases for
scientific method when there are genuine threats to the scientific process.
I don’t think having imaginary arguments does the job nearly as well. So,
for example, Dawkins, Dennett, Jones, etc., are all doing what they’re doing
at least in part because they think that evolution is under threat as an
accepted truth. So there’s an instrumental reason for wanting dissent.
That did make sense to me, and since that made sense to me, I was better able to see what he was getting at in the interview. (The interview, being so brief, was a … Read the rest
Oh That Kind of ‘Adopt’
May 15th, 2006 9:02 pm | By Ophelia BensonSo, about those puzzling issues to do with what B&W’s basic commitments are and how one goes about figuring stuff out – I’ve had a chance to discuss them with JS now and it turns out we don’t disagree all that much and that he wasn’t saying quite what I thought he was. It all turns – as I said in a comment but didn’t make enough of – on the word ‘adopt’. I thought he meant adopt as in ‘decide to believe’, but he meant not ‘believe’ but ‘act as if I believe’ – which is a whole different thing, as we said in those comments. So that clears that up!
There are some interesting issues involved, which I … Read the rest