The Moralities of Socialism
Recently, my good friend Jess sent me the link to an excellent essay from the New York Times magazine about evolutionary psychology and its possible link to the origins of human morality. Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that humans may have a biologically-determined compass that underpins all of our moral and ethical impulses. Drawing on...
Why I’m For Obama
If hypocrisy, as one writer claims, is an unavoidable — even integral — part of democratic politics, then the two remaining Democratic nominees for president are locked in a dead heat. Both stridently oppose a war that they once supported as members of Congress, and both employ a high-minded liberal rhetoric littered with non-partisan clichés...
The Pakistani Spectator
It seems that my humble blog has acquired some new fans in Pakistan. Against all expectations, I was recently interviewed by Ghazala Khan of The Pakistani Spectator, an online magazine covering ‘views, news and opinions on Pakistani Politics in specific and world politics in general with respect to Pakistan’. I fielded questions about my blog,...
Trying the Khmer Rouge
In between lounging in the backyard and assaulting Robert Fisk’s brick-like The Great War For Civilisation, I’ve been immersing myself in readings about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal — scheduled, after nearly two decades of diplomatic evasion and acrimonious negotiations, to begin operation sometime in 2008. But after again reading about the tribunal’s tortuous gestation, I’m...
Tom Cruise: The 'Goebbels of Scientology'?
Poor Tom Cruise — all he wants to do is make movies. Yet his latest film has many Germans in a frenzy, with some now branding him as the Scientologist equivalent of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Valkyrie, due for release in October, tells the story of the ill-fated July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf...
Bhutto's Assassination
I was shocked yesterday to hear of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, news of which stared up at me from the morning paper with 9/11-like gravitas. I haven’t followed Pakistani politics closely since I was studying in Edinburgh, but my suspicion — and that of most major news organisations, if not the rampaging Sindhi mobs — is...
The Whitehouse Effect
There’s an interesting article about climate change up now at the New Statesman that should set some environmentalist pulses racing. In the face of apparently ‘overwhelming’ evidence, British astrophysicist David Whitehouse claims that that global warming no longer exists — not as a matter of opinion, but as a statement of ‘observational fact’. Apparently it...
New Radiohead Tracks!
Radiohead’s In Rainbows discbox was finally released on Monday, and the new tracks from the bonus CD have now filtered through to teh internets, where they are available for download. The tracklist is as follows: 01 Mk 1 02 Down Is The New Up 03 Go Slowly 04 Mk 2 05 Last Flowers 06 Up...
Hare-Brained Utopianism
Karen Murphy may well be a talented journalist, but you wouldn’t know it from her screed on the ‘death’ of feminism in Tuesday’s Age. Her op-ed (you can read it here) is an embarrassing mish-mash of recycled platitudes, undergraduate sermonizing and hare-brained naiveté. According to Murphy, feminism is ‘dead’, and women are to blame: The...
A Step Backwards?
Looks like ALP campaign manager Tim Gartrell is out for more Liberal blood. He didn’t waste any time getting this website up, skewering newly-elected opposition leader Brendan Nelson’s positions on education, workplace reform and climate change. After Saturday’s rout, the new Liberal skipper is in for a rough ride. Here is Nelson on nuclear power:...
REVIEW: ‘The Collapse Of Globalism’, by John Ralston Saul
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the tenets of the anti-globalisation movement. Books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo deftly document serious socio-economic concerns, but then, when it comes to proposing solutions of their own, ride roughshod over their own arguments with an unsubtle blend of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and New Left sermonizing. Canadian philosopher John...
