Skip to main content

Posts

Holocaust Memorial Day: A Reading List Gabriel Ash : The most honest way people can celebrate Holocaust memorial day is by kicking down a Syrian refugee and stealing their wallet.
Post a Comment
Read more
The long hisory of Muslims and Christians killing people together How "little use terms such as 'Muslim' and 'Christian' are to describe the almost hopelessly complex web of shifting power-relations, feudal alliances, ethnic sympathies and historical grudges" that shaped much of European history.
Post a Comment
Read more
Britain is at war with Yemen . A joke by Owen Jones:   "If the British people were fully aware of what was happening, Britain’s involvement would surely be unsustainable."
Post a Comment
Read more
" The organizers of the #ausnahmslos campaign don’t deny that the scale and coordination of the assaults in Cologne were alarming. But they point out that sexual harassment is a far more common occurrence in Germany than is typically acknowledged, especially at traditional German events like Munich’s Oktoberfest and Cologne’s Karneval, where large crowds tend to gather under the influence of massive amounts of alcohol. A  2014 study  from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that one in three women in Germany has been the victim of physical or sexual violence (or both) since the age of 15. “If there’s anything we can gain from what happened in Cologne, it’s that we start openly talking about the issue of sexual violence against women, regardless of who the perpetrators are,” said Elke Ferner, the parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth, who signed the #ausnahmslos campaign’s open letter . ...
Post a Comment
Read more
I read The Richness of Life by Stephen J Gould about a year ago... It was a fascinating discovery. Now the late Richard Levins is enticing me to read his work. Is human behavior controlled by our genes? Richard Levins reviews ‘The Social Conquest of Earth ’
Post a Comment
Read more
Immigration Scandals From April, any non-EU citizen earning below £35,000 after five years of work will be denied indefinite leave to remain. (A hint of how that might be enforced came on 17 January, when  Dr Paul Hamilton , an American Shakespeare scholar, discovered that his application for further leave to remain had been rejected when immigration officials arrested him at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon and sent him to Morton Hall immigration removal centre, where he remains today.)
Post a Comment
Read more
“Social media are a trap” The Polish-born sociologist  Zygmunt Bauman: " The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is ...
Post a Comment
Read more
One of the many stories my British and American professors never told me at university The British Colonialists in "Australia"
Post a Comment
Read more