Tag Archives: controversy

Climate Science, Science and Humility

John Quiggin has just posted on the thoroughgoing mess the Australian conservative opposition is getting itself into over climate change in Delusionist disaster down under, which set me thinking about what is going on with the climate change thing. Anyone following this blog will know that I am not only aware of science getting some [...]
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Roman Polanski

It saddened me when I saw the news of Roman Polanki’s arrest for skipping bail 30 years ago. It didn’t know a great deal about the case but there seemed to be something a little arbitrary about waiting so long and then choosing this moment to bring him to justice. I don’t wish Polanski any ill [...]
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Bad Ethics and Bad Art

I have been trying to avoid the brouhaha over the Terence Kealey’s piece on lust as part of a ‘light-hearted’ and ‘wry’ look at the “the seven deadly sins of academe” for the Times Higher Education Suplement. My automatic response was distaste.  But reading Belle Waring’s robust response at Crooked Timber to Steve Fuller’s intervention [...]
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Reductionism in Economics

Having collected some of the thinking in the economic civil-war debates in my last post I would like to now throw out a few general observations. John Quiggin in a recent post at Crooked Timber notes some of the causes of the schism, he thinks partly due to the recent increase in polarization in the political [...]
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Economics Roundup

Krugman on Skidelsky Krugman has a review of Keynes: The Return of the Master (h/t Krugman).  Krugman continues to bait the fresh water economists but provides a neat summary of the Chicago school’s essential innovation, or, depending upon your perspective, regression to neo-classical economics. In addition Krugman looks at the evolution of the master’s thought between 1936 [...]
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Curiosity and Free Speech

Stanley Fish has an posted an article on curiosity on his NY Times blog and Ursula Owen has one on Free Speech up at the Guardian Cif.  They both seem to fall into a confusion familiar to readers of this blog.  First Stanley Fish, who starts by quoting the new Chairman of the National Endowment [...]
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Natural Selection, Faith and Reason

John Quiggan Quiggin has posted an article at CT, Sunstein Becked, wondering whether the GOP base are so irrational and beyond reason that Glen Beck’s plans to take out Cass Sunstein mightn’t be so bad an idea, Sunstein being ‘the most influential advocates of the view that the polarization of US politics is the result [...]
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More Strange Madness

OK, this is the final post (I hope) on this. Robert Wright has posted a diavlog with George Johnson where he gives the complete background to the Behe-McWhorter controversy. For me there was a delightful irony of them moving on to discuss Intelligent Design as a crackpot conspiracy theory, and them trying to [...]
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Our Strange Madness

In A strange madness Paul Krugman further reflects on the ‘craziness sweeping America’. Paul think the situation is if anything deteriorating, his 2004 criticism of the Bush administration being in some sense worthy of the passionate response they provoked, certainly relative to the current invective he (and Obama) are receiving for their reasoned and [...]
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Caroll and Zimmer leave bloggingheads.tv

Via Paul Nelson, The aftershocks of the McWhorter/Behe discussion rumble on with Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer leaving bloggingheads.tv.
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McWhorter and Behe Restored

Via Denyse O’Leary, John McWhorter and Michael Behe have been restored to life. Update from Robert Wright, editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv, Aug. 30: This diavlog has now been re-posted. The decision to remove it from the site was made by BhTV staff while I was away and unavailable for consultation. (Yes, even in a wired world it’s [...]
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The Land of the Brave and the Free

Michael Behe has just put up a post on his Uncommon Descent blog (his first post on the blog) on the bloggingheads.tv fiasco. Let me emphasize this, dear readers. Here we are living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And yet a web site puts up an interview with an [...]
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