Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Entries Tagged as 'Politics'
ONN might be America’s leading news network
July 5th, 2008 · 1 Comment
The Neural Buddhists
May 18th, 2008 · 1 Comment
A friend of mine sent me a link to an opinion article in the New York Times by David Brooks on the effect of the cognitive revolution on discussions about religion. He argues that the materialist-religious debates about the existence of God will be replaced by debates in which scientists whose spiritual beliefs overlap somewhat with Buddhism who challenge […]
Tags: Global Culture · Politics
Media Truthfulness in the US
May 10th, 2008 · 4 Comments
When I was a college freshman (first-year university student in the US), I wrote a paper arguing that CNN delivers objective news, because their market niche is just that. The professor gave us an assignment to write about bias in the media, or something like that. The only thesis I could come up with was […]
Tags: Outsider · Politics · US
How the impact of stereotypes about gender and technology depend on where you are
February 6th, 2008 · 1 Comment
The two classes I’m auditing intersected in an interesting way recently. In Judy Wajcman’s book Feminism Confronts Technology, there is a chapter on technology as masculine culture. One of the subsections is on engineering. Wajcman argues that
“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the […]
Tags: Feminism · Global Culture · Politics
The New American Century and Fascism
June 13th, 2007 · 1 Comment
Listening to Pandora at work, a song called New American Century by KMFDM came on. The lyrics caught my attention. In context of what I’ve been reading (and re-reading) this seems right on the money. There are strong directions in American politics that could endanger not only democracy and freedom in America, but given America’s […]
June 4th Massacre Ad
June 8th, 2007 · No Comments
Reuters reports that an ad saluting the mothers of the June 4 天安门广场 (Tian1an1men2 Guang3chang3, Tiananmen Square) massacre got published in the Chengdu Evening News! The person who placed it also tried other newspapers, and the clerks who handled the requests didn’t know what June 4 referred to. The other clerks called a supervisor. This […]
The Face of Modern Hatred in the US
May 17th, 2007 · 2 Comments
While waiting at O’Hare recently, I made the mistake of walking into a bookstore to spend some time. (I don’t have gold status with any frequent flyer program, since I fly so little, so I can’t wait in a lounge.) I call it a mistake, because I’m almost incapable of walking into a bookstore without […]
Soviet legacy
April 5th, 2007 · No Comments
Today’s scary piece of news: The horrible Soviet legacy of pollution is alive and well. I once read one of the environmentally scariest articles I’ve ever read in National Geographic about pollution in the former Soviet Union. At the time it was written, the Soviet Union had collapsed, of course. Openness and transparency were hardly […]
Tags: Politics
The End of Faith
February 17th, 2006 · 1 Comment
I finished Sam Harris’s The End of Faith yesterday. His central thesis is that faith itself - the practice of believing something without proof - is extremely dangerous and ought to end. It was piecewise an extremely scary book. The book emphasizes that it is only by reason and evaluation and discussion of facts that […]
Tags: Politics
Irshad Manji’s take
February 13th, 2006 · No Comments
As always, pretty funny and to the point. I especially appreciate this:
“To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone - anyone - to illustrate her children’s book […]
Tags: Europe · Fragmegation · Politics