Dissent is part of all cultures, Asian decidedly included.
Category: Flashback
Fashionable nonsense has been with us since the time that prehistoric man first transcribed Of Grammatology on to the walls of the Lascaux caves. Here we cast an eye back at some historical highlights.
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Fifteen Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Some antievolutionists admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a “wedge” for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
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Eagleton on Fish
‘A superficially historicist, materialist case – our beliefs and assumptions are embedded in our practical forms of life – leads not only to a kind of epistemological idealism, but to the deeply convenient doctrine that our way of life cannot be criticised as a whole.’
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NAGPRA and the Demon-haunted World
NAGPRA proceeds from an antievolutionary perspective grounded in fundamentalist religious belief.
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A Duty to Annoy
Is feminism about being a fragile flower needing protection and consolation at every hint of conflict? Or is it about being a cactus and fighting back. Wendy Kaminer disavows florality.
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Ethnomathematics
‘Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world.’
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So Sylvia Plath was a Poet?
‘Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.’
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An ex-Muslim woman speaks out – and has to flee for her life.
Most government-funded Islamic clubs ‘are run by deeply conservative men and perpetuate the segregation of women.’
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Richard Dawkins considers Fashionable Nonsense
It’s so uncool to think there is a real world.
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Separation of Mosque and State
‘Among intellectuals and in the academic world, any attempt to blame Islam for women’s oppression is stamped as Orientalism.’
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Norman Geras on Minimum Utopia
The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.
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Bias, as in Confirmation Bias
Being on the side of the rich and powerful ought to make it hard to play victim, but the right in the US manages it by seeing ‘liberal’ bias in the media even when it’s…not there.
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The margins are getting so crowded!
Centrality is so uncool that the margins are as full of people as Bangkok or the Aran Islands.
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Frank Furedi on Paranoid Parents
The world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.
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When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf
Richard Dawkins on the cowardly flabbiness of the intellect that afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions.
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Therapeutic Touch
The Skeptical Dictionary looks at energy medicine, the flow of chi or prana, auras, chakras…
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Monolithic Thought Unfair to Astrology
‘The Epistemological Situation of Astrology in Relation to the Ambivalent Fascination/Rejection of Postmodern Societies’
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Thomas Nagel on the Sleep of Reason
Eerily patient explanations from Sokal and Bricmont of why gibberish is gibberish.
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Tom Frank on ‘Market Populism’
Extreme diets and extreme investing, diversity all around, along with a consensus as ironclad as any in the ’50s.
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The Great Convergence
Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.