Adam Curtis has made some brilliant documentaries. Watch this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3NIXAxt2MQ
Category Politics
The present conservative leader of Australia is an utter fruit-loop. Julia Gillard, the Labour ex-PM of the country, a few…
The general election is only just over, and I am sorry for being off my usual topics. I will return to them shortly. I would like to provoke thought on what motivates voters to vote for particular parties, briefly and rather anecdotally and theoretically.
Pun intended.
My depressed sadness has turned into anger.
Today is a bad day for fairness. It is a bad day for democracy (think AV/PR). It is a bad day for the electorate who seem far less politically educated than I realised (and if my school has anything to go by, very very ill-equipped to be responsibly voting)
In the first part, I looked philosophically at the debate. I will now continue by considering my own country, the UK, in terms of the EU and economics, amongst other things. This takes off from the last post which looked at how borders are arbitrary and the luck of birth place is not enough to warrant privilege.
Britain and the EU and Economics
With the rise and rise of UKIP, even despite their consistent foot-in-mouth propensity (and perhaps because of it), I have written a piece looking at UKIP in a skeptical light and am now due to write about the subject which concerns them the most. Immigration. This is quite a useful thing to do because in some respects I am not fundamentally sure where I stand on the minutiae of this core election Pandora’s Box.
The British Humanist Association has produced this gem of a useful chart in the context of the UK elections coming…
I was trying to work out what is going on in Syria, and what the implications of rebel victory were, as well as who, exactly, the rebels were in light of media bias.
I came across this article from an interesting source called EA WorldView (based in the University of Birmingham, UK).
WTF? BBC (video available from there): Utah will resume the use of firing squads to carry out the death penalty when…
EARLSBORO, Okla. – Rafael Cruz, father of Texas Senator and Tea-Party favorite Ted Cruz, spoke recently against atheism and secular humanism at a gathering of an Oklahoma Second Amendment advocacy group. He claimed that the belief systems are two of the main ills facing our society, that they lead to sexual perversion, sexual abuse, and the complete loss of hope, and that people following these two views should be rounded up and placed in special ‘camps’ to keep them separated from the rest of America.
This will be part of a short series looking at UKIP in the context of the upcoming election, including expressing my views on immigration since that appears to be UKIP’s main serious concern. This is a long piece, so get yourself a nice cuppa and settle into it.
So to the uninitiated (and to those foreign readers) who are UKIP?
Brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP3HJVp3n9c
Geoff Barton, headteacher of King Edward VI School in Suffolk, writes:
I drove in to work this morning listening to Radio 4’s Today programme. I wasn’t quick enough to avoid its regular Thought for the Day segment. But in a way I’m glad. Because straight afterwards education secretary Nicky Morgan came on, trying to defend the proposed expansion of the government’s “free schools” initiative.
From Thought for the Day to Platitude of the Day. Truly, the education secretary left no cliché unturned.
The BHA has released this: During a speech detailing Conservative plans to open 500 new free schools by 2020, David…
I can’t believe I had forgotten this, or perhaps it never passed my radar. Apparently UKIP aren’t a racist party, even though theor supporters and members are empirically more racist and intolerant than all other main parties, even though it seems that a councillor activist puts their foot in their mouth on a daily basis, and even though their leader was labelled as a “racist”, “fascist” and “neo-fascist” when he was at school. He sang Hitler youth songs, for crying out loud! Here is a Channel 4 News article from September 2013. You MUST read the letter sent by one of the teachers to request Farage not be considered for prefect. It is amazing:
The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years.
But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.
A new piece of research has come out which looks to take the landmark Milgram experiments to the next level…
This chap (to whom the series was directed), Scotty M, has replied to some of my points in the series on Free Market Economics. Unfortunately, he would rather rabidly bash away at You Tube than bring a civil discussion here.
The most common issue that Scotty faces is his predilection for straw manning positions by either misunderstanding them or wilfully employing some kind of bait and switch or intended mischaracterisation to fight against an imaginary foe.
Buckle up, this is another sizeable piece…
In this series looking skeptically at libertarian claims of free market capitalism being the holy grail of all of reality, I have come to the section where I cast a skeptical eye over some of the more common claims of libertarians. The claim appears to be that free market economics is responsible for the success of certain countries. I would like to set out here that, whilst this is true to some extent, it is not so obviously the case. Remember from previous posts, I am not advocating some kind of communist collectivism.
The Young Turks do a pretty good and obvious job: