The government is asking us to trust them; I am generally inclined to do so on issues related to terrorism, but this isn’t acceptable. Not only is this a slippery slope, but we may have already slid down it: there may very well be an innocent man rotting away in prison.
The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all
Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
While I fault him for looking the other way whilst fighting for the other side, at least George Monbiot has the guts to admit he was wrong.
Social immobility is built into the way Britain lives and learns
Class is nowadays basically a function of income. It can’t respond to some quick-fix Cameron initiative or Clegg internship. Divisiveness will get worse because the political economy of Britain is structurally inept at generating and redistributing wealth across the human landscape. The only real aid to upward mobility is income and growth. That is why the last thing Cameron should have done was put up VAT.
AC Grayling on Militant Atheism
“Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we’re doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don’t like it.”
While you can say this is merely because civilisation has progressed, “believe in what I say or we’ll kill you” has a different ring to it than “we think you’re being a little foolish and causing harm in the process”. This view also begs the question of why civilisation has progressed.
I was just thinking about the Fairtrade movement. It occurred to me that “fairtrade” is effectively a euphemism for “I’ll not use my position in a member of a rich, developed country that bulk-buys produce on a huge scale in order to screw over farmers”.
Reading the side of a bag of sugar, telling me that buying fair trade helps to provide “education to farmer’s children”, you’ve got to wonder what else the purpose of buying sugar is, in addition to gaining some sugar, than to pass a portion of my generated value along a chain—rather than merely to get something as cheaply as possible. The selfish satisfaction in securing the cheapest deal is very shallow and short-lived.