From Geoffrey Nunberg’s new book Talking Right page 134.

In the 1920s, the [Wall Street] Journal warned against the threats to freedom that were implicit in minimum wage laws [and] the child-labor amendment to the Constitution (“an assault upon the economic independence of the family…”)

I’ll get to my point, but first I’ll clear up a detail. I frowned in puzzlement when I read that, thinking ‘The – ? I didn’t know there was a child-labor amendment to the Constitution. Ignorant me.’ So I looked it up, and there isn’t; Nunberg apparently meant attempts to pass a child-labor amendment, which (no doubt with the help of the WSJ) failed.

But my point is that that is another example … Read the rest

Alan Boyle posted Allen Esterson’s reply to Troemel-Ploetz on ‘Cosmic Log’ today. I meant to say something else about the November 20 post (the one with Troemel-Ploetz’s reply) yesterday but I forgot. (I know, I know. But I can only hold one thought in my head at a time. Be patient with me.) But it’s interesting, and it’s always coming up. It’s something Boyle said this time:

We’ve gone back and forth over the role that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, may have played in the development of the special theory of relativity…and now I’ve gotten the other side of the story from Senta Troemel-Ploetz…

The other side. Of the story. But it isn’t a story, and there isn’t … Read the rest

Democracy isn’t always and necessarily aligned with justice, progress, equality, women’s rights, freedom – it’s not always and necessarily aligned with anything except majority will. Majority will can be even more tyrannical than a military dictator.

Pervez Hoodbhoy’s critique of General Pervez Musharraf as a leader and as an author, in last month’s Prospect, is depressingly familiar. Of course we wish that Pakistan was a more liberal and democratic society…But simply repeating the same liberal pieties about instituting democracy and strengthening civil society won’t change the situation…There are certainly massive problems for women in Pakistan. Human rights activists suggest that a woman is raped in Pakistan every two hours. As Hoodbhoy points out, Musharraf’s government recently failed to enact

So maybe women really do think logic is ‘a pestiferous male invention’ (The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense). It would seem so by this, anyway – Senta Troemel-Ploetz replying on Alan Boyle’s blog to Allen Esterson’s article on Troemel-Ploetz’s paper claiming that Mileva Marić ‘did Einstein’s mathematics.’ It’s a cringe-making performance, frankly. She offers no real evidence, she simply cites ‘a tradition that always attributes achievement to men even if the men themselves claim their wives were the authors’ and then gives three quotations from Einstein to Mileva Marić:

“How happy I am to have found an equal in you (eine ebenbuertige Kreatur) who is as strong and independent as I am.” “Until you are my dear little wife,

Giles Fraser is getting bored.

Perhaps it’s time for a new sort of conversation about religion. The old one is getting really very tired, as in some overblown boxing match between two bruisers who just won’t topple. They slug it out. Land huge blows. Declare victory. Only for the opponent to rise again (no resurrection reference intended) and for the whole sorry circus to wind itself up for a rematch.

Well could that be because one side refuses to admit that it’s making it up as it goes along? It does tend to keep futile brawls going when people refuse to admit that. I know it’s what I always do when I don’t have any evidence or argument – … Read the rest