If you’re getting weary of the endless but necessary attacks on Nicholas Kristof for his misleading and almost antisemitic column about Israel’s “policy” of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners, Roy K. Altman has written in the Free Press the definitive critique of Kristof’s column—that is, until investigations by Israel reveal more information. Wikipedia identifies Altman as…
Shayne Currie reports: One of New Zealand’s biggest news organisations is appealing a precedent-setting court decision, in which a man convicted of assaulting his partner convinced a judge that an online news article about him and the attack should be removed. The district court judge agreed the man, who did not receive name suppression at…
In 1633, the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo for heresy. His offence was to argue that the Earth moves around the Sun. The Church was not acting out of malice. It was protecting a politically approved consensus against what was considered to be dangerous nonsense. The theologians and philosophers who condemned Galileo were not fools. They […]
Jonathan Rosen writes: Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdieto death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel. It is hard to write that sentence without feeling it is a parody of the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have slandered Josef K.,…
My friend the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry is writing about what he calls, correctly, “the most dangerous idea in academia”—an idea that can get you banned or even fired if you even suggest it. It is, of course, the notion that different “races” differ on average in IQ or intelligence. It’s such a hot potato…
An Area Standards Committee of the Law Society fined Stephen Franks and Franks Ogilvy for, well being lawyers. They sent a letter on behalf of their client to health professionals involved in “gender affirming care”. The ASC found that they had “used a legal process for an improper purpose”, censured them and fined them. I…
The Telegraph reports: A short video went viral last weekend that briefly restored my faith in British policing. It showed a female Metropolitan Police officer standing alone in Whitechapel, surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men, calmly defending the right of a Christian street preacher to preach. “In this country, we have freedom of speech,” she…
In the classic movie comedy, A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese lamented, “do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing.” Now 86, Cleese has a more pressing concern about being English: whether his exercise of […]
Every day, it seems, another group gets ideologically captured, valorizing Palestine (or Hamas) and demonizing Israel. This is dispiriting for Jews, but the latest such capture—of the free-expression literary group PEN America—is especially depressing. The decline of PEN American was first evidenced to me when, in 2015, it decided to give a “freedom of expression”…
In this Free Press article, Steve Pinker and Marian Tupy (the latter identified as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance”) once again recount the undoubtable progress that humanity has made over the past six or seven centuries. The progress described here will be familiar…
For centuries, atheists, Christians, and Jews have regarded one another as intellectual and cultural adversaries. Their disagreements are real and often profound. They disagree about the existence of God, the authority of scripture, the nature of morality, the meaning of history, and the destiny of humanity. These disputes have generated entire libraries of argument and […]
Juliet Moses writes at Quillette: The furore surrounding the storied Adelaide Writers Festival, the longest-running and largest literary festival in Australia and one that receives significant taxpayer funding, has made international headlines. Our drama ostensibly begins when the Festival’s board disinvites Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian writer with Palestinian heritage. Its climax sees a cultural…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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