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Showing posts from March, 2010

New Labour Report Card (1997-2010)

Let us reorder this world around us. - Tony Blair, 2001 A regime review. When attaching responsibility for a social situation to an administration, the question is: how do we distinguish policy effects from bland luck? One can't really place the recession (2007-9) against New Labour; why should they claim credit for. Ecclestone thorny crown. Furthermore, economies are such wildly complex things that one should resist giving anyone much credit for good times - which is not to say that crashes and mismanagement are not the fault of their core financialization. MERITS 1. Credible drive towards cultural equality Acknowledgement of institutional racism post-Stephen Lawrence inquiry (1999) Age of homosexual consent equalized (2000) & introduced one for lesbians. LGBT adoption (2005; Scotland 2009) Civil partnerships (2005) Equality Bill (2009); public breastfeeding, magistrates to take up pay discrimination cases Various maligned positive discrimination processes.

On The Julian Lethbridge Guestlectures

"Biology rightly protests when alien concepts are imported from other disciplines, such as occurred with the Intelligent Design hoo-hah. But this embargo cuts both ways; God's existence is not a scientific question, and scientific inquiry therein is simply a category error. Do not dismiss from outside without examination from inside. Truth cannot be traced across the borders here; they are exogenous species." Aberdeen Uni recently ran a series of incredibly poorly-publicised lectures one Dr Julian Lethbridge, (a Spenserian-Wittgensteinian theologian-curmudgeon from the University of Tuebingen). The umbrella was a Defending the Humanities gig, and the weight of his understanding was properly novel, a little intoxicating. I was in rout for much of the time, trying to sense together his system, the shape of his world. Here's my attempt to formalise a holist, then. I'll try not to just copy out the notes, though I'm utterly sure I'll miss something critical an