by Ed Winfield
Tuesday 31st January 2012, 11:07 BST
You may have gathered that this Wednesday was the anniversary of the protests leading to the downfall of President Mubarak, and that the Egyptian parliament opened on Monday after an election a British broadsheet called "the freest in Egypt's modern history". So far so good, then.
Yet the most striking element of Ahdaf Soueif's Cairo is not those eighteen heady days in Tahrir Square last Spring, but the "interruption" that skips on to th...
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by Gregory Lewis
Wednesday 18th January 2012, 20:41 BST
(A tagent to this)
I'm sceptical whether any social commentator gets it right more often than chance. Worse, I don't think social commentary (as played out across op-eds, talks, and - alack - our very own comment blog) offers any insight into the matters it comments upon.
True to form, let's take one example and generalize. Brendan O'Neill likes being lefty and contrarian ("radical-humanist Libertarian-Marxist", according to this paper's pu...
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by Hugo Schmidt
Wednesday 18th January 2012, 20:40 BST
Christopher Hitchens died today, after his esophageal cancer finally reached “stage five”. I first encountered his particularly lucid mind on the wonders of youtube – something I am hardly alone in. Indeed, the Hitch’s virtual presence and following is so large that he once remarked “I don’t see what’s you about it. It’s a metube. It’s for me.” It’s justified – the amount of material produced by the man that is availa...
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by Ed Winfield
Monday 28th November 2011, 14:36 BST
I recently read this piece by Douglas Murray in this week's Spectator, which sets out how the hopes for the sprouting of democracy in the Middle East created by the Arab Spring are dying, and the movement has turned into an Arab Winter. The two causes for Murray's pessimism are the rise of violence and support for Islamist parties throughout the region. I disagree on both points, and would like to put forward an alternative, more optimistic v...
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by Gregory Lewis
Monday 28th November 2011, 14:36 BST
Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) prevented David Willetts from speaking at Lady Mitchell Hall last Tuesday, as you're probably all aware.
There's a variety of issues around this: about whether this behaviour 'harms the cause' against the governments plan by giving a wrong message or risking schism, etc. Bracket that. I'm more interested in talking about whether CDE's actions in stopping Willetts from speaking violated some liberal norms ar...
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by Hugo Schmidt
Monday 28th November 2011, 14:35 BST
Christopher Hitchens once remarked that in his adopted homeland it was always possible to get a row going about ‘racism’ when it was guaranteed to be bogus but never when it’s real. To which I’d add: not just in America. Neatly coinciding with the new Tintin film, a row has broken out over the old Tintin in the Congo issue, a row where everyone involved seems to be bidding for the role of the most fatuous.
The facts are simple: d...
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by Ed Winfield
Tuesday 22nd November 2011, 15:39 BST
Tony Blair once famously quipped that the New Labour project would be complete when the Labour Party learned to love Peter Mandelson. Perhaps the same could be said for the European project and Britain learning to love the EU. This blog isn't going to provide the answer to how this can be achieved - instead it will raise a question about the cause of this dislike.
I want to ask about the extent to which British public opinion is affected b...
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by Hugo Schmidt
Monday 21st November 2011, 09:11 BST
The recent spat between between the historians Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra, serves as a useful illustration of the rot that tribalism does to the mind.
The case of the argument can be summarized quite succinctly. Ferguson has written a number of books in which he effectively argues that the first part of the phrase “western Civilization” is redundant. That there are six ‘killer aps’ required for human progress - property rights,...
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by Emma Greensmith
Tuesday 15th November 2011, 20:13 BST
Life is full of complicated issues, as these blogs serve to demonstrate. Here's one that has got me thinking this week. The dust has now begun to settle on the chaotic and bloody denouement of the Gadhafi manhunt; the papers have started to move on, and instead of the Colonel, Silvio and James Murdoch stare out at us from the front pages. The news inevitably marches on, but we would do well to pause for thought.
Gadhafi has been killed - i...
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by Gregory Lewis
Tuesday 15th November 2011, 11:42 BST
I run a discussion group called 'Doctors of Philosophy'. We chat about various stuff, and occasionally I inflict upon them Prezis mapping out reasons and arguments and things like that. This is one example, about vegetarianism, which I think is pretty damn cool. See what you think.
Why vegetarianism is obligatory on Prezi
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