Category: Flashback

Ad hominem denigration doesn’t make the case.

Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.

‘The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.’

‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’

Prose as a window-pane opens onto a reality that is solidly and visibly ‘out there.’

‘the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works’

Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.

Education has been portrayed as ‘white’ – what use is it when strutting the streets?

Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?

What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.

‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’

‘psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.’

‘What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?’