Several people have asked me for my opinion of where we are with regard to the coronavirus pandemic, and what the future might hold. Obviously I'm not an expert in epidemiology or, in fact, any relevant science. I do, however, have a good basic grounding in science generally, and I have a circle of friends and contacts who are experts in a variety of scientific and medical fields.
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Over the years - particularly the last 3 or 4 - I've become disenchanted with most of the mainstream media. Wokeness infests the media almost as much as it does my own profession, but facts are now coming back to bite...hard.
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I've been asked (by my sister - Hi Paula), to review a documentary called What the Health. The subject is diet and the film presents a case against meat-eating and for veganism. I've just watched the film on Netflix, and here is my considered view.
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Frequently in debate an opponent will raise the issue of capitalism - usually to do with perceived inequity/unfairness/brutality. When I was young I thought in similar ways. It seems obvious that any system which relies on greed to motivate must be morally dubious, whereas a system designed at more equitable distribution of resources must be morally superior.
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At last. For someone with an internet name of Bikerman, I've been without a bike for far too long. For personal and work reasons I had to sell my beloved Yamaha several years ago. Now, being finally in a position to get a new bike, I've bought myself another Yamaha.
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Matthew Goodwin gave an interview on YouTube in which he gives his analysis of the failures of Labour and the left in general. To me he seems to talk with sincerity and sense. His shares many of my own conclusions about the issues - although there are a few points of difference between us. On the main political and socio-economic analysis, however, I think he has it just about spot on.
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In debates involving social justice there is one term which is frequently used and which I think is widely misunderstood. That term is Equity. Most people, I believe, think that this is simply another word for equality - it is not.
Equity, in the sense used here, means equality of OUTCOME, not equal opportunities. That apparently minor difference is actually huge. It separates the left-liberal (equal ops) from the identitarian/SJW (equity) on the left, and the liberal right from the authoritarian right on the other wing of politics.
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There has been much buzz about a young girl from Sweden who has become the darling of climate activists. Greta admits to having several mental issues and deciding to abandon school to concentrate on climate activism. Supporters have lionised the young girl whilst critics have attacked her as a damaged young girl who knows next to nothing about the issue.
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I have written in the past about my concerns over the concentration of power within the tech sector. Google, for example, has tremendous power with no real accountability. Most people know that the ubiquitous search engine deals with user searches in a 'less than straightforward' manner. It is fairly common knowledge that companies willing to pay can have their listings advanced up the list of search results. This, however, is the tip of the iceberg.
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Feminism is not about men-hating, we are frequently told. This is often the patronising response to the fact that most people (men AND women) do not wish to call themselves feminists. The implication, of course, is that they are just ignorant.
I tend to think otherwise. I think that the reason most people don't want to be called feminists is because feminism is indeed about man-hating and I call, as witnesses, some of the leading feminists of the 20th and 21st century.
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The media is currently full of this 'story' - ie that the top earners at the BBC are men. The narrative is that this is a clear example of the gender pay gap and shows that women are being discriminated against - being paid less money for the same work. This narrative has not, to my knowledge, been challenged or even questioned in public.....so I will have to do it myself.
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In these articles I intend to examine and roundly mock some of the funnier and more ignorant attempts to appear scientifically literate I know of. These are the Post-structuralist French bunch of poseurs responsible for much of the ills of higher education, inter-sectional feminism and post-modern idiocy in general.In this article I will concentrate on one of the founders and leading lights - Luce Irigaray.
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I am hearing much talk around rape and the necessity to 'do something' about the 'terrible conviction rates'. This article, more than any other, is likely to draw condemnation and abuse from the feminist loonies because it takes an honest and frank look at something which feminists lie about more than anything else - rape1.
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In this posting I will look at some of the claims and assertions coming from feminists and see how much such claims can be trusted.
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Some time ago I promised to post something on this issue - the claimed gap in pay between women and men. So, here is the promised article. The image heading the article is typical of the general claim made. Obviously most of the fuss is coming from the US - hence the currency - but a similar story of woe is articulated by UK feminists. Is it correct?
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I was sat contemplating yesterday. I'd been working on an article for this site and I was getting stale - trying to spot an error that would have been obvious a couple of hours before - a sure sign that it is time to stop what you are doing and do something else for a while.
For some reason my mind dove back into a philosophical question I've been pondering - is there such a thing as objective morality?
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At this time of year the issue of cultural appropriation rears it's asinine head, as children select fancy dress costumes for Halloween and Guy-Fawkes night. It is wrong, we are told, to dress in the manner of a minority group, since this appropriates their culture for a trivial and demeaning purpose. Dressing as a Mexican, African, Polynesian, or pretty much any other non-European/US national is frowned upon by the social justice mob, and the usual shaming tactics are applied to the max.
Magdalen College, Oxford has just introduced a mandatory course for all undergraduates, on which students will be taught that it was wrong and shameful to hold a Ball (last year) themed around the 1920s, since that era was extremely racist, and colonial attitudes prevailed.
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We are currently in the middle of a moral panic based on historic wrongdoing (or perceived wrong doing) of some famous men. Events began with allegations against a famous Hollywood mogul - Harvey Weinstein dating back a couple of decades or so. There is little question that Weinstein is a wretched character. Whether he broke any laws is still open to question and will not be answered until we see a proper trial. There is little doubt, however, that his behaviour was unacceptable - then as now - and few people, me included, would take issue with that. Pretty soon, however, scores of women came forward (to the press in most cases) with their stories of historic sexual abuse, and a campaign to encourage others, called Me Too, was started. Here is where the problems began.
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This issue simply refuses to die, and the amount of misinformation, distortion and plain lying seems to increase over time. Rather than return to the issue every time feminists need a boost and raise it up the agenda again (seems to happen every 2 years or so) I am going to post a fairly comprehensive look at the issue which I can refer to as needed.
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Professor Jordan Peterson is something of a bête noire to the regressive left. He is the most public intellectual opponent to the entire philosophical underpinning of the regressive left. He is also an extremely compelling speaker who is able to support his arguments. He was recently in the UK and was interviewed by Cathy Newman on C4 News. To call Newman's performance unprofessional would be kind. She was appalling.
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The amount of misinformation originating from feminist sources that has now become part of 'common knowledge' is scary. A credulous media seems all to willing to print or repeat the most outrageous nonsense as long as it comes from a 'genuine feminist source'.
As I have demonstrated in previous articles, the idea of a credible feminist source is problematic. Modern feminism relies heavily on the Gallic Postmodernist philosophy which essentially holds that feelings are more valid than statistics or other empirical measures. What might be 'evidence' to a feminist is unlikely to be so to anyone who is not indoctrinated into feminist dogma. The aim of this posting is to correct some of the more egregious and persistent of the lies that are routinely trotted out by those either unwilling or incapable of doing even the most elementary fact checking.
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If you are contemplating spending a great deal of money on a University course for yourself, or for your child(ren), then I think you should check whether the University of choice is one which supports and encourages free speech. If not it is probably following the trend first seen on US campuses, but now spreading through UK universities - namely, the idea that it is the role of the University to train activists in social justice.
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In the UK the Labour party is currently a shambles. In the US the democrats managed to loose an election to a reality-show host. Clearly there are some serious issues with left wing politics in general. In this article I try to explain what the problem is and how it arose.
Before I go on I will define what I mean here by 'left wing'. In broad terms there are two viewpoints regarding society and politics. One view is that we should strive to arrange society according to a historical blueprint or a past ideal. The other view is that society is better than it has ever been but needs to progress further by looking to the future, not the past. We can call the first conservatism and the second progressivism.
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Recap
In the first article, I looked at how the regressive left arose from the remnants of the revolutionary radical left, after most decided that they could no longer openly cling to classical Marxist theory. I explained that having abandoned Marxism, with the promised utopian communist state that it predicted, the regressives no longer had a specific utopian end-point to talk about, but most still remain committed to the overthrow of the state in a Marxist-style revolution, even though they cannot say what, exactly, they would put in its place. Finally, we saw that the modified version of identity politics adopted by the regressives is toxic and actually undoes all the progress made by the liberal left in addressing equality of minorities and reducing both the importance and the awareness of identity differences such as gender, race and sexuality. I finished by explaining that it is for this reason in particular that many people, including me, label this destructive mutation of left-progressive politics the regressive left.
In this article, I want to explain the dangers that I think regressives pose to society, and offer some thoughts on how we might address these dangers.
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Original interview by Liz ConnorEmma Watson is the latest in a growing line of celebrities who suddenly feel qualified to lecture on the meaning and goals of feminism.
How she suddenly discovered this expertise is left to our imagination but presumably it involved some weird and wonderful arcane mysticism and waving a magic twig around. It certainly didn't involve reading the relevant studies and papers.
Emma has broken her instructions into a handy seven bullet points so that the audience can take the bit-sized message without getting hopelessly lost or confused. I'll take each point individually and respond. This is NOT a rant and I will not be seeking to fire off cutting put-downs or to 'destroy' her. It is a reasoned explanation of why I think she is misguided, misinformed and misdirected.
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This is a guide to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity aimed at the non scientist. No prior knowledge is assumed, but I will need to assume that you are familiar with basic arithmetic, and that you know something, even if only a very little, about algebra.{tab Introduction}Please do not be put off if maths frightens you - I hope to show you that maths is nothing to be feared and what have you got to lose? If you know that algebra uses letters to represent values then that should be enough to get us going. If you are more proficient then so much the better. If you know Pythagoras' theorem about right angled triangles then you already know the most difficult maths in the whole guide.
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As I have noted in other writing, humans, as a species, stink at statistics. I don't mean maths in general - though plenty of us stink at that. I mean statistics, and particularly probabilities and risk calculation.
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You may remember doing quadratic equations at school - or some of you may be engineers or scientists and use quadratics regularly. The problem with them was always that a very large number cannot be solved - or they can be solved, but they give 'complex' answers. {tab Chaos|green} With the advent of cheap computing it became possible to crunch more of these types of equations (known as polynomial equations) very quickly. One person who was doing this early doing this was a meteorologist called Edward Lorentz. He was playing with an early computer in 1963, trying to produce weather forecasts.
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Anyone who has debated creationists will be aware that, whatever their character away from debate, they often have no problem breaking their 9th commandment when talking to atheists.Specifically and explicitly, I am saying that creationist apologists can be expected to lie. That is a general rule with (perhaps) some exceptions, not the other way around. I know it might appear an offensive over-generalisation, but I do not think it is - in fact I have never met a SINGLE creationist who was not noticeably dishonest in debate, but I avoided the temptation to go that far in this assertion.1
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At one time eye-witness testimony was the gold standard in criminal trials. Certainly I can remember that being the case. Over time, however, we began to get an appreciation of just how BAD we are at seeing, remembering and recalling. If you think squares A and B are different colours then your eyes are not so reliable either :-)
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I thought this had been killed-off when the creationists lost in an American court at the Dover trial. Unfortunately I still see and hear from people who insist that ID is a legitimate scientific theory, and that it should be taught alongside evolution.
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