Utopia, you are standing in it!

Those following the BBC’s commemoration of the World War One centenary may have noticed this Tweet on September 20^th.

The link leads to a feature on the BBC’s iWonder webpage titled “Does the peace that ended WW1 haunt us today?” which is presented by the BBC News diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall.  Launched in January 2014, the iWonder brand was described by the BBC as a project intended to “educate and inform”.

“To coincide with the start of the BBC’s World War One season the BBC today launches a range of exciting digital content under a new brand called BBC iWonder.

iWonder is the new brand from the BBC designed to unlock the learning potential of all BBC content. Interactive guides – curated by experts and BBC talent including Dan Snow, Kate Adie, Ian McMillan and Neil Oliver – are the first phase of this initiative.[…]

Tim…

During 2012, BBC‘s program The Big Question hosted a lively, intersting debate on the issue of animal testing (aka vivisection). The program started off civil but then the animal rights, anti-testing side (not surprisingly) hurled accusations and half-truths toward the middle of the exchange. The opponents of animal testing knew they could not win the debate so they made slanderous charges against their opponents.

by Tim Harding

At first sight, the concepts of economic efficiency and social justice might seem unrelated or even counterposed.  Some people intuitively feel that in the economic sense, efficiency works against fairness and therefore equality. Economic inequality just seems unfair and wrong.

In this essay, I propose to argue that the concept of economic efficiency can be used as part of a case that social justice does not require economic equality.  My case is primarily based on the works of Frankfurt; but Rawls’ Difference Principle is also of assistance.  I also intend to consider some objections to this case, and to either provide counter-arguments against them, or to suggest that the objections are not sufficiently important to outweigh the case I am putting forward.

Economic efficiency is typically defined as a Pareto optimum – a state of affairs in which it is impossible to make anybody better-off without…

Fascinating research by Dr Susan Flavin:

You spend years “burrowing away on dusty documents”, then a line in your research – admittedly attention-grabbing – about workers in Ireland in the 16th century quaffing rations of 14 pints of beer a day, gets noticed, and suddenly historian Dr Susan Flavin is getting calls from all over the place. Images of burly stone masons lurching around drunkenly wielding medieval hammers and chisels come to mind.

Flavin, a lecturer in early modern history at Anglia Ruskin University, has been researching 16th century social and economic history for years, and says today that people have “jumped on” the beer angle. She’s had an offer from someone who wants to recreate a 16th century oat brew and send her bottles, and a well-known craft brewery has also offered help in recreating the methods, for which she’s hoping for research funding.

So, if people routinely quaffed…

One-and-a-half-year-old, 440 pound tigress, Mevy, escaped from her Cirque Bormann-Moreno circus cage in Paris on Sunday. Upon discovering this and after the tiger wandered through city streets, Mevy’s owner, Eric Bormann, located the tiger in an alley near the Eiffel Tower and shot her dead.

Soon after the shooting, the animal rights group Bridgette Bardot Foundation naturally expressed outraged. They used the occasion to call for banning the use of live animals in circuses.

Eric Bormann explained that a tranquiler gun was not used since the drugs would have taken too much time to take effect. What is of note isn’t just the outrage expressed by animal rights activists over the shooting, nor the killing of Mevy herself after she left her cage, but that Bormann suspects foul play in terms of how the tiger got out.

The tiger trainer says that Mevy’s cage was secured with a…