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France and European intellectuals have finally shown their deep hypocrisy. On the one hand Macron is declaring that the right to free speech to be aabsolute. Yet in the next breath he imposes a draconian attack on Islamism with significant focus on social media. Opinions and expressions on social media are used as evidence of dangerous tendencies. Some words are dangerous but others are immune? There is a traditional  argument that free speech has to be protected  and the…

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It is a strange matter with the alt right racism: it rejuvenates. It is a hydra like.  One geneticist had his work rejected for publication in 1940’s on the grounds that it was too similar to Nazism only for the same book almost entirely without any revision or updates (I  reviewed it at the time1 and checked almost every reference and almost all dated before 1945 ) to be published in 1970’s to rave reviews. J R Baker sought…

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In an earlier piece on defining racism I wrote: ‘Contemporary western philosophers are so committed to identifying racism with mental aberration that they loose any sense of reality.  Unless there is a guilty mind or a guilty thought there can be no racism in their opinion. This absurdity is cover for their wish to exculpate themselves. “I did not intend a racist result or have a racist thought in mind so I cannot be racist.”  1 Some might feel…

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Avram Alpert of Princeton has written an interesting piece, ‚Philosophy’s systemic racism‚ exposing the absurd defence of establishment philosophy that the racism of major European philosophers had no impact on their philosophy.   I have been studying this issue for many decades and in 1974 I described this nexus as ‘western philosophy’s self misunderstanding’.  However Alpert makes a couple of wrong turns. He claims  dialectic was born in Greece and is infected with racism and needs saving. Dialectic does not…

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We are witnessing a sanctification. However, there are many unanswered questions about RBG. It is uncivil to speak ill of the recently departed so this will await a later period. After the movie about her was released I attended a private view for artists and writers in London. I asked some of the makers of the film who were present some hard questions about her only to be told by them and the audience that they were in no…

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I am not speaking of ALL democrats but of some powerful cabal within the Democratic Party. Why should they want to loose? That is the wrong question. We have to ask: under which circumstances do they want to win?  Here the question arises whether if they could only win by changing their agenda would they rather loose? We have had a similar play in the UK where it is alleged that a strong party group in the Labour Party…

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Much discussion of history, particularly the history of the development of Europe and its impact on the rest of the world takes as its starting point that Europe is Christian. This is an assumption that needs to be openly challenged. Claims of a Christianity vs Islam conflict and  mosts claims about the underlying valuea of the West start from the assumption that the West is Christian. The concept of apostolic succession allows the Catholic church to say ‘we are…

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There appears to be  a lot of commentators who are asleep at  the wheel lately. What is happening in the US is a dangerous rerun of the past. In Chicago & Detroit many years ago during a  severe crash the  corporations laid off  their black workers under cruel and severe conditions. The White workers showed no solidarity. Clearly they thought that it was better for them to keep their jobs and for the black workers to take the hit….

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On 9 July, in a piece entitled: ‘Segregation still blights the lives of African-Americans’ The Economist wrote: “If something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the coloured peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed,” Martin Luther King Jr told striking workers the day before he was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1968 black Americans had only just realised formal…

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