Monthly Archives: 2019-11

5 published posts from 2019-11.

Why we should fear a world Empire

Universalists dream of a world empire in which a world government works to solve global problems, enforcing the same law all over the world. There are many different ideologies that envision a world government, ranging from international socialism, to the brotherhood of Islam,...

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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, History, Society, Cultural Critique, Democracy

Is it the duty of the state to police a positive national history story?

Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though...

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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, History, Society, Religion, Geeky Musings, Cultural Critique, Democracy

Academia: from inefficient effectiveness to efficient ineffectiveness

If, as I think, academia has gone from being inefficient but effective to being efficient but ineffective (a proposition I won't defend here), the mechanism for making the switch was going from embodied cognition to abstract Cartesian cognition, or to be more precise from a ri...

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Posted in Education, Economics and public policy

Pedantry is not its own reward – and it's certainly not ours!

Pedantry is alluring. Especially if one gets some aesthetic satisfaction from the way words are used. Take "begs the question" for instance. I love this term because it is such a simple, chummy way of naming something that's maddening in is subtlety. To beg the question in its...

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Posted in Cultural Critique

The British Film Festival

Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Military Wives (Opening Night) The life of a military wife can be thankless. Separated from loved ones, their suffering and sacrifice go unnoticed while they live with the dread of a fateful knock on the door. But Kate finds freedo...

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Posted in Films and TV