Some rather disheartening boilerplate on the merits of multiculturalism and identity and groups and communities from – surprise surprise – a university chancellor.

At the end of the day, the hope of these two kinds of projects – internal multicultural dialogue and external multicultural collaboration – is that we all come to value diverse groups, not just diverse individuals.

Well, as always, that depends on which groups we’re talking about, and what we mean by ‘value’, and what aspects of those diverse groups we are expected and hoped to value. It also depends on what happens when valuing groups is in tension with valuing individuals. What about individuals who want to leave or dissent from or change their groups, for … Read the rest

Ohhhhhhh lordy. Look at this. It’s called ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.’ Isn’t that just the best title? But the content is even better.

Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.

Microfascism! Yelp! What will happen when those evidence-based movement bastards turn to macrofascism? Will they get even more outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative on our asses? … Read the rest

I like William Empson. Don’t try to talk me out of it.

As a poet who had written anti-Fascist propaganda for the BBC during the war and had taught ‘English literature’ in China both before and afterwards, he didn’t want writers or readers to trade in emotive, ineffable or overly abstract (i.e. religiose) language. Literature was there to alert us, to make us think rather than assent; close reading was the preferred antidote to indoctrination. The consequences of listening or reading inattentively, and of not seeing how language can be used to sustain inattention and sponsor cruelty, were Empson’s abiding preoccupations.

Well, you probably won’t bother trying to talk me out of it, because you can see right there … Read the rest