Dave's Archives

Category: Society

  • Think of the landlords

    Some people honestly just don’t care. This from the website of TICA – the Tenancy Information Centre Australasia. Tenants do not deserve the right to impose their habits on innocent landlords by claiming that housing is a human right. The framers of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights might have a point to make…

  • Uniculturalism

    I don’t pretend to know what goes on in the minds of people who despise multiculturalism. Do they hold to a fantasy in which multiculturalism is some sort of government construct that prevents people from adopting the same culture? Presumably they must start from the premise that the different cultural practices of other people are…

  • False security, false feminism and false secularism

    There seems to be a growing school of thought in Western countries that the burqa (or other forms of Islamic headdress) should be banned, with several European countries (including Belgium, France and Spain) debating or already having passed laws against it. There are murmurings here too, by the Liberals’ Cory Bernardi and the Christian Democrats’…

  • One belief does not a religion make

    There’s nothing like a righteous religious leader for a good dose of stagnant inanity. Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen doesn’t let us down (SBS, ABC, News Ltd): As we can see by the sheer passion and virulence of the atheist – they seem to hate the Christian God – we are not dealing here with…

  • Climate reporting – compare and contrast

    There’s a subtle difference here that I can’t quite put my finger on. An article in The Register (by Lewis Page): Agricultural brainboxes at Stanford University say that global warming isn’t likely to seriously affect poor people in developing nations, who make up so much of the human race. Under some scenarios, poor farmers “could…

  • Come in

    Here’s a sign I noticed while cycling: Perhaps there’s hope for us yet.

  • Peer review

    I’ve stumbled across yet another “ClimateGate” article (by way of James Delingpole), this one going right for the jugular of science: peer review. The author is journalist Patrick Courrielche, who I hadn’t come across until now. Courrielche argues that peer review is kaput and is being replaced by what he calls “peer-to-peer review”, an idea…

  • Climate: ‘mission accomplished’

    I read with ever growing fascination the comments that continue to flood into climate-related blogs. Deltoid has collected a few truly astounding ones. I’ve also discovered the UK’s very own James Delingpole, who’s a riot. As mentioned in my [intlink id=”949″ type=”post”]previous post[/intlink], there seem to be a veritable army of those convinced that the…

  • Climate conspiratology

    Climate denialism has taken a turn for the worse. I say this with great trepidation, of course, because it was never an especially pretty sight to begin with. A substantial number of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been retrieved and published online without permission*. One…

  • The Liberal war

    Costello is quitting politics, Wilson Tuckey isn’t quitting politics, Peter Dutton (the shadow health minister) has had politics quit on him. Turnbull is the voice of (relative) sanity in the Liberal Party, but not many – either in the Party or in the wider population – seem inclined to listen to it. Some seem to…