to which I am proud to say I contributed (admittedly only about 1% of it).
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Friday, September 23, 2005
The luddite left
Hilarious correspondence over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, as one liberal rages at Larry Summers, accusing him of "offering this nonsensical theory of standard deviations".
What shocks me is that my maths teachers were in on this absurd theory too, and spent hours hammering it into the whole class. Likely many of my readers have fallen prey to the same. What were those monsters who decided that knowing how distant, on average, values in a data set were from the mean would be advance knowledge and mathematics, and just what were their motives?
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, September 19, 2005
The Liberal Democrats at prayer?
Over at Harry's Place, Marcus issues the following call to arms:
The Church of England used to be known as the Tory party at prayer. Suggestions for a more up to date description in the comments box please.
Go there and see what you can suggest. As far as I'm concerned, TimmyHawk is clearly in the lead at this moment.
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, September 01, 2005
The future of the Right
The Young Britons Foundation has relaunched its web site, and it looks really beautiful. With the launch of a campus newspaper also imminent, the organisation is going from strength to strength, and is succeeding at doing so many of the things Conservative Future has perhaps neglected. The YBF will also have an evening reception at the Conservative Party Conference on Monday 3rd October.
From the anti-Darwinism of the radical left to the anti-Darwinism of the religious right, I will fiercely recommend a piece in today's Guardian by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne (who?) on the subject of Intelligent Design. Refreshingly free - especially for Dawkins - of the nasty bashing of religious people so common to columns on this issue, it explains precisely why the science classroom is not the place for the theories the creationist movement proposes, and why, scientifically, intelligent design falls so far short.
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Sunday, August 28, 2005
Science is above politics - but it isn't the other way around
Sorry I haven't posted much recently. I shall remedy that soon. In the meantime, I will recommend this debate I had lately over at Pootergeek, the weblog of Damien Counsell, a professional biologist inclined to evaluate his radical politics in separation from what science tells us about human goals and social realities. As I conclude:
You can, if you like, take a radical feminist view that all our sexual attitudes prior to 1963 were a religious male conspiracy that have left all sorts of cultural demons that exist today and continue to blight the lives of young girls who would otherwise be as sex-hungry and uninterested in romance as young boys. Or you can accept what modern biology tells us about sexual attitudes, and why they exist - and that they would exist, did exist and will go on existing without any effort from repressed Rabbis or patriarchal Priests. But what you cannot do is be a scientist by day, but switch off the science when it starts to interfere with your ideology. Science is above politics, but politics certainly isn't above science. Where the scientific facts lead, sane political discourse must follow.
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Friday, August 19, 2005
Blair on Cameron, Brown on Davis
I have spent quite some time recently, on PoliticalBetting.com, arguing against those card-carrying members of the Guardian and Independent-reading tendency there, which seems to believe the only route to power for the Conservatives is to please voters just like them. As I am wont to remind them, there are a lot more floating voters out there than there are hard-core left-liberals, and working to persuade the former is likely to be a more productive use of time.
That is not to say, however, that the views of professional politicians who do have to win votes and elections, and so to understand the mind of the floating voter, is to be ignored. In that light, Matthew D'Ancona's Telegraph piece - on how Blair, Brown, their camps, and other Labour MPs are viewing the Tory leadership contest - is extremely interesting and illuminating.
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, August 18, 2005
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Quote of the Day
"I don't think either Britain or the US can claim superiority in integration and race relations. Insofar as mass immigration has passed off peacefully, it has been in the face of silent opposition from the great majority in both societies (check any opinion poll). In that sense, this whole debate is about how well food agrees with the stomachs of two men who had no appetite anyway. The question of whether it's wise to go on force-feeding either of them matters far more than which one has coped better." - In the Samizdata comments
Wow - just wow. The personals section of the London Review of Books is about as aesthetically pleasing and appropriate as catching one's grandparents 'at it'. Horrifying.
The Young Britons Foundation has relaunched its 
From the anti-Darwinism of the radical left to the anti-Darwinism of the religious right, I will fiercely recommend a 
Sorry I haven't posted much recently. I shall remedy that soon. In the meantime, I will recommend 
I have spent quite some time recently, on 
