Category: Social Science

Blending and framing by paradox

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee) There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To…

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Unintended consequences of political correctness

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." I am a big supporter (including in…

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Are US copyright laws unconstitutional: Default states semantics

by Dominik Lukeš ·

LII: Constitution To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; I had no idea that copyright was part of the US Constitution until I read about this in an LA Times Op-Ed . The article was…

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Individual perspicacity, collective naïveté

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions: The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself…

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Two models of governance: Foundations of policy negotiation

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Lakoff in 'Moral Politics' talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you…

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Primogeniture: Negotiating the internal 'logic' of social change

by Dominik Lukeš ·

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley. BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Primogeniture: Should the…

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The perception problem and the question of rationality in life

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex. What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as…

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Collective cognition, culture, mind share and patterns of action

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions ...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share , at least amongst the tech community . Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something . It can also refer to…

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More meaningful than what? Populations and truth in social science

by Dominik Lukeš ·

WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap…

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From culture-specific to the universal in the US counter-insurgency manual

by Dominik Lukeš ·

"Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show ) This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific…

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Paradox of the evolutionary metaphor in language death

by Dominik Lukeš ·

When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment : In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for…

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Folk theories of conceptual causality and collective autonomy

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Film examines Daily Mail 'diet' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail. For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources…

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Girl Wars, Boy Wars

by Dominik Lukeš ·

The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…

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Networks of trust and the newspaper business

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed ...newspapers' core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it's expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn't really matter. There's plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true. The problem with many…

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Bi-furcated narrative frames in public policy debates

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…

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Anecdotes, metaphors and the negotiated truth

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Media Matters - "Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser "I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote -- the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject," Carney wrote. And who can blame him? For the reader, an anecdote -- a "short account of an interesting or…

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Metaphoric inferencing in action and the negotiation of interpretive privilege

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t…

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Media and scenarios of public opinion formation

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…

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Conservatism as part fo language competence

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Language Log: Keeping "wrong grammar" off the air A program will be assigned a "PG" rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects)." The article doesn't say who gets to be the "grammar cop" -- some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem…

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Havel on intertextuality

by Dominik Lukeš ·

CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…

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Science vs. social science of the environment

by Dominik Lukeš ·

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to…

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The analogical instinct

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Comparison To Clinton Is Dismissed - washingtonpost.com Tom Ingram, who was an adviser to Fred D. Thompson 's 1994 Senate campaign and has talked to him about a potential 2008 presidential run, said that he thought the Royal race might be good for Republicans, but not because of gender or any similarity Royal had to…

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McJobs, the Dictionary Wars and Folk Theories of Meaning

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…

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Frame negotiation through popular culture frame hypostasis

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…

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Cummulative identity and failed assumptions on multiculturalism

by Dominik Lukeš ·

BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…

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Cognitive foundations of civilizations

by Dominik Lukeš ·

iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…

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Death by analogy

by Dominik Lukeš ·

'Hold Your Wee for a Wii' Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. .... 28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner's report indicated the…

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New Atheism and old religions or the other way around?

by Dominik Lukeš ·

On The Media: Transcript of "God No!" (December 15, 2006) In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. "The New Atheists", as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in…

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Limits of social cognition research as a basis of policy

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…

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Logic and conceptual frames

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82 The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition : "If a relationship between a mistress…

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New societies and old societies

by Dominik Lukeš ·

TIME.com: Time's Person of the Year: You -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working…

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Free Market Doctrines: From analogy to ritual

by Dominik Lukeš ·

A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding…

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Framing the Civil War

by Dominik Lukeš ·

On The Media: Transcript of "Paper Wait" (December 1, 2006) BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why not then stick to “sectarian violenceâ€?? What changed? BILL KELLER: You know, it’s kind of emerged as an issue, and then last Sunday we ran a story about one of our reporters in Baghdad, Ed Wong, who surveyed a number of…

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Images of cummulative causation and a theory of education

by Dominik Lukeš ·

November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn't Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn't exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius…

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On making sense of

by Dominik Lukeš ·

On The Media: Transcript of "The Power of Myth" (November 24, 2006) ANA MARIE COX: Well, I think that Joe is a provocative thinker and a great reporter. He was really early out of the gate t rying to put a narrative around this election . There was a very unusual mid-term. There were races…

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Education reform, memory, skill and secondary socialization

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Malaysian National News Agency :: BERNAMA PEKAN, Nov 4 Bernama -- Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has called for the countrys memory-based education system to be replaced with one that promotes mind development so that the students become more creative and critical. The Deputy Prime Minister said the education system was currently directed towards memorisation…

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Wikipedia - the Original Encyclopedia

by Dominik Lukeš ·

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Home Page the mammoth undertaking that was the Encyclopédie – one of its editors, D’Alembert, described its mission as giving an overview of knowledge, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human knowledge, observing where they separate or unite and even…

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YouTube of the 1890s

by Dominik Lukeš ·

BBC - Radio 4 - Archive Hour - 21 October 2006 Matthew Parris uncovers the remarkable story of the Electrophone, the first sound broadcasting service to operate in Britain. Electrophone (information system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The name Electrophone was used for a telephone-distributed audio system which operated in the United Kingdom between 1895…

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Scenarios behind education

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Bearing witness to a teacher's task - The Boston Globe Many people believe they know what makes effective schools because they have attended school. This is akin to saying I am a physician because I've been in a hospital. I challenge any of this group to spend a week teaching in a public school classroom…

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Jazz in America/Classical in Europe: Functional equivalence

by Dominik Lukeš ·

NPR : Roundtable: The Future of Jazz Radio News & Notes with Ed Gordon, August 10, 2006 · Some experts say the jazz radio format is in crisis. Some of the few stations devoted to jazz may soon change format. Guests: Suzan Jenkins, president of Jazz Alliance International, an industry group; Tom Thomas, president of…

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Language awareness as part of linguistic competence

by Dominik Lukeš ·

'Google' becomes an official verb - ZDNet UK News Though you may have been "googling" people for years, the verb you were using was technically slang, until recently. In fact, many regularly used tech words are just now getting the official stamp of approval from English-language dictionaries. On Thursday, Merriam-Webster announced its latest update, and…

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Rationality and immigration

by Dominik Lukeš ·

English is Spoken Here - Yahoo! News The second dumbest statement in the debate over Senate legislation establishing English as the national language came from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who said it was needlessly divisive. ADVERTISEMENT Wait. A law that unifies a country under a single language is divisive? What kind of logic is that?…

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Linguistic nationalism and the USA

by Dominik Lukeš ·

CNN.com - 'National' or 'common'? Senate ponders what to call English - May 19, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate. The Senate first voted 63-34 Thursday to designate English as the "national language" after lawmakers who…

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Role of examples in social debate and research

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Cartoon Warfare (Ann Applebaum, WP) In recent years "the personal is political," a phrase whose origins are lost deep in the history of the women's movement, has among other things come to mean that just about anyone is allowed to transform her personal experience into a political program. Writing about oneself has a long history…

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Periodicity of nationalist conservatism: A hypothesis to be tested

by Dominik Lukeš ·

I was just listening to the UK Prime Minister's Question Time. I don't do it very often, because the questions and answers are predictable in content and not particularly informative, but maybe I should tune in more often to get a sense of the tone of the exchange. As I was listening, I was struck…

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Prejudice, shared meanings, local grammars and Google as a resource for research

by Dominik Lukeš ·

The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for... Here's an interesting 'mash up' of Google's API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q="germans+are+known+for+*" to create a graphical overview of the different 'prejudices' about various cultures in the world…

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Franklin and the complexities of American national identity

by Dominik Lukeš ·

January 13, 2006, Science Friday = Franklin at 300 Franklin as inventor, socialite and statesman, and take a look at the Tercentenary Exhibition in his honor, now open in Philadelphia. America is often said to be an experiment in new national identity (or something along those lines). However, any closer examination of American national identity…

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Transformation of symbols across cultural borders

by Dominik Lukeš ·

NPR : Muslim Migrants, 'Embracing the Infidel' Author Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years traveling with Muslim migrants and collected their stories on safe houses, bribes, police custody, and human trafficking. He talks about his book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. An interesting podcast about a book illustrating the transformation…

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Urban Legends as examples of folk theories and cognitive models

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem) This legend combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a "positive thinking" motif which turns up…

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Complexities of representation of women in traditional narrative

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Christmas season's TV brings a lot of classic stories back to people's narrative environment. Many of these contain complex and multilayered representations of humanity's quest for self-understanding. These narratives play other roles, as well, connected to the psychological well-being of individuals. They are broadcast in moments of communal and familial rituals designed to promote group…

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Individuality and culturality of psychotherapeutic needs

by Dominik Lukeš ·

BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind It's just under a year since the Tsunami devastated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean . Raj reports from his recent visit to the Tamil Nadu region of India with the charity Action Aid, where he met some of the people affected, and observed the work…

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CADAAD - Conference on Discourse Analysis

by Dominik Lukeš ·

I am coorganizing a conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) to be held at the University of East Anglia on June 29-30, 2006. The first call for papers goes out today. More on http://discourse.uea.ac.uk .

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Consequences of video games - and the cognitive aspects of data interpretation

by Dominik Lukeš ·

The Video Game Revolution: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for…

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My Week In Thought and Hermeneutic Suspicion

by Dominik Lukeš ·

My Week In Thought This PBS essay neatly summarizes almost all the arguments I would ever make - or in some cases have made - in defense of video gaming. OK, there may be a fine line between vanity and self-referentiality but here we go. It struck me how powefully I was affected by this…

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Perspective and data in historical analysis

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Introduction Imagine that two millenia or so in the future, literary experts attempt to collect the glories of our literature. Most of our paper writings have crumbled into dust or used for kindling; all our digital files are long gone or indecipherable. English is a dead language and many of the cultural references are a…

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Online scholarship

by Dominik Lukeš ·

"I've read the internet, and it's rubbish" - a comedian on a BBC Radio 4 show. In this essay, I will diagram exactly how this happened, but also include some speculation as to how things could have turned out differently, though it is no way intended as a work of "fan fiction". By highlighting how…

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Cultural images of the powerless

by Dominik Lukeš ·

One article, two thoughts . Good going! TPM Online Article One of the things you notice, both as a skeptic and as an American in the UK , is that according to the British media – and a lot of non-media folks, too, I might add – pretty much all foolishness comes from the US…

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How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times

by Dominik Lukeš ·

How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times Naturally, human rights groups are appalled by the suggestion that harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking time bomb as a "red herring" and argues that "you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture…

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Reliability of common wisdom - models and power

by Dominik Lukeš ·

TPM Online Article So: whom to believe? There seems to be no doubt, as these authors and recent research suggest, that there's a genetic component to obesity. Nor is there any doubt that obesity, like alcoholism before it, seems to bring out the self-righteous moralist in people; fat means you've been greedy, gluttonous, or slothful…

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Salient cases and social causality

by Dominik Lukeš ·

The great 'On the Media' had an interview with 'the devil' - Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard. But he did bring up an interesting point regarding the actual influence of the magazine in particular and the media in general. On The Media-- OLD STANDARD BROOKE GLADSTONE:: What do you think the world would be…

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Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones Anthropology is defined as the study of humankind and their origins throughout different places and times. The study focuses in detail on cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological research. Anthropology.net's mission statement is to expand understanding and appreciation of humanity by way of creating a cohesive online community of individuals…

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Kazakhstan and the principles of democracy

by Dominik Lukeš ·

World News Article | Reuters.co.uk Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev won re-election by a landslide on Monday, official preliminary results showed, but the opposition in the former Soviet republic alleged vote-rigging. The result means Nazarbayev will rule for another seven years in the vast Central Asian state, a reassuring signal to big oil investors in the…

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Common sense vs.hypocrisy

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Be realistic about death penalty: PM - National Breaking News - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au "But I think we have to be a little bit realistic in suggesting that the Government should complain as loudly as a death sentence being carried out on Saddam Hussein as we did in relation to Nguyen [Australian citizen…

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