One occasionally hears it said, generally by intelligent people who have turned their brains off for a moment, that science and politics don’t mix, and shouldn’t. This is of course nonsense, as they would realize if they thought about it for more than five seconds (which is, admittedly, a very lengthy period of time). Science […]
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I’ve often heard people argue a moral case for the inclusion of gender theory, “critical race” theory and other forms of theory influenced by postmodern streams of thought on college syllabuses for the humanities. If you are skeptical about such theories, I am sometimes told, you must be sexist, racist or transphobic. Or perhaps you […]
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I have been stalking members of the terrorist group Tawheed Network (formerly al-Muhajiroun). I have spied on them over the Internet, and heard much gossip about them in my neighborhood of Bury Park, Luton. Unfortunately, I have uncovered something disturbing. The local jihadis have been cautious since December 2015, when their leader Istiak Alamgir was arrested. They […]
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Earlier this year, Kenan Malik wrote an essay in the New York Times critical of the now-fashionable concept of “cultural appropriation.” The article caused some controversy. Briahna Joy Gray wrote a critique of Malik’s argument in the magazine Current Affairs. Malik’s response to that critique provides a useful way of thinking about the problems of […]
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Leslie Green, professor of philosophy at Oxford, recently published a post on his blog called “Why it is hard to be a campus conservative.” I said elsewhere that I have rarely come across anything that was both condescending and stupid to the extent this post is, but that’s not exactly true, because I have already heard the kind […]
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In its recent decision, the High Court of Australia cleared the way for a voluntary survey of the electorate to gauge community support for same-sex marriage. I don’t defend this idea: a voluntary survey is an unreliable instrument at best, and in any event providing for same-sex marriage is an issue that could be settled […]
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Fittingly, Hillary Clinton tells us two contradictory things about the purpose of her confusing, tedious new tome What Happened?. First page: it’s “the story of what [she] saw, felt, and thought” during the 2016 presidential campaign. Second page: “We can’t understand what happened in 2016 without confronting… the Kremlin,… the FBI, [the] political press… and deep […]
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Few have reigned as steady and strong a champion of free speech as well as an opponent of political correctness as University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson. Over the years he has attracted a host of followers in his crusade against identity politics, postmodernism, and campus orthodoxy. Additionally he has been able to earn an impressively high honorarium through […]
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There is no historical figure — with the exception, perhaps, of Jesus Christ — whose legacy ideologues are keener to appropriate than that of Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. The author of Animal Farm and 1984 is claimed by propagandists of the left and right as an ideological predecessor. “Orwell’s legacy,” writes Lee Wengraf of the Socialist Worker, “Is our […]
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