Category: Flashback

Extreme diets and extreme investing, diversity all around, along with a consensus as ironclad as any in the ’50s.

Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.

The new chauvinism receives official sanction from government and academic institutions.

If you number your paragraphs, will people mistake you for Adorno?

Attempts to reshape science classes delegitimize science as an especially trustworthy form of knowledge and promote “other ways of knowing” instead.

Confusing religion and race is a clever trap the religious have laid for a worried government rightly anxious about race.

‘Scientists and their works are everywhere described in an arctic language of despair.’

In the 1992 article that he expanded into an excellent book, Barber examines the ways Identity and Shopping are dividing the world between them.

‘…all but a fraction of his own writing molders unattended in America’s used bookstores. Like the New York Intellectuals with whom he was associated…he is referenced more often than read, a sad fate for a critic who wrote so much, so well and with such wit and insight.’

What if you want to talk about an authentic self instead of an ‘authentic self’?

‘Indian history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the past.’

He has his view and you have yours and they have theirs. So it goes.

‘To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it’s true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.’

‘Ramadan is a cold-blooded Islamist who believes that Islam is the cure for the malaise wrought by liberal values.’

‘We no longer defer to bishops or politicians; scientists are simply facing the same fate.’ Yes but bishops are one thing and scientists are another. We can demand that scientists produce evidence, but what evidence can a bishop offer?

‘…many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.’

It’s important to distinguish between necessary, useful technicality, and jargon or pseudo-mathematics substituting for genuine rigor.

‘Developments take place in a world linked by ideas rather than by race.’

What a coincidence that we’re here and not on that nasty Pluto.

‘The protection built into Theory…is composed of layer on layer of ignorance.’