Blog Profile / Normblog
| URL : | http://normblog.typepad.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | News / International Affairs | |
| Posts on Regator: | 4372 | |
| Posts / Week: | 19.7 | |
| Archived Since: | February 15, 2009 | |
Blog Post Archive
Not necessarily the most bigoted
I don't have the means to judge the comparative exercise reported on at the Washington Post; it's about degrees of racial tolerance across the countries of the world. But I have to own up to liking this among its conclusions:...
Empathy and its limits
There's an interesting discussion of empathy in a column by Paul Bloom at The New Yorker. Bloom begins by summarizing the generally good press that empathy gets these days, because it is seen as humanizing our responses to the sufferings...
Uphill and down on the boycott
A few days ago I took issue with Matt Hill over the Stephen Hawking decision not to go to a conference in Israel. Against his view that where we have a chance of doing some good consistency doesn't matter, I...
A bar at the UN?
It seems that the position of chair for the UN Conference on Disarmament is due to be taken over by Iran. The US objects to this and so does Canada. I liked the following statement from Erin Pelton, spokeswoman for...
Relatively long
In a brief post on combating relativism at the Prospect Blog (£), Simon Blackburn offers us one quick way of drawing its teeth: Relativism thrives when people do not have to shoulder the burden of actually coming to a conclusion....
Dithering over Syria
I haven't been writing much about Syria. That's because I don't know what's best to do. No, I'll rephrase that, since I often don't know what's best to do and I still venture an opinion, saying which way I lean....
Dangerous Western values
Dangerous, that is, according to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and Western according to the same source - though normblog readers might take a different view about so attempting to limit their geographical application. Here's a report from...
A touch of literary complacency
Here's Robert McCrum with a quick-fix solution to various symptoms of literary malaise: Whenever readers despair of contemporary book culture, pointing to the horrors of Dan Brown or EL James; or to the mind-blowing inanities of "writing classes"; or the...
Workers choose safety
Here's a footnote to the series of posts I ran on the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh. It concerns the 'free' choice aspect of people working in unsafe conditions. The 19-year-old seamstress [Reshma Begum] who spent 17 days trapped in...
Jailed for her religion
Vargha Taefi is a financial adviser living in Melbourne and describes himself and his wife as enjoying a good life - except for the pain arising from being unable to see his mother. Taefi explains: My mother, who is innocent...
Mount Rushmore, the normblog edition
I tried to talk them out of it - so much work - but they insisted. (Thanks: BJ.)
Gathering at the river 4
From Cat Ballou (start 40 seconds in). (Thanks: TS.)
Stoner
One of the books I read for the first time earlier in the year was W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; so that makes it difficult for me to nominate any other book as the best I've read this year. But I can...
Hawking a bad argument
Is it OK to stage an academic boycott on broadly human rights grounds but targeted against one country only and its universities and academics? According to Matt Hill at the New Statesman, it is. But then again he also thinks...
Israeli advice in Boston
Here's a report about six Israeli trauma experts visiting Boston in the aftermath of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. They're members of the Israel Trauma Coalition for Response and Preparedness (ITC), and were there to help with advice, as...
Old Jews, ancient prejudice
If you want to know about Jews, there are some relevant statistics here: '14 million Jews around the world, representing 0.2% of the global population'; 41% of them in the US, 41% in Israel; numbers of Jews for other countries...
Active retirement
Theodore Dalrymple is discussing the benefits of retirement. That's apropos Sir Alex, but you don't have to be interested in football for this. Dalrymple makes the following general observation: There are few sensations more delightful than waking up in the...
Bad law on terrorism
Ben Saul, professor of international law at the University of Sydney, highlights a feature of Australian federal law that makes it a criminal offence for an Australian national to take up arms on the side of the rebels in Syria....
Saul Bass
Today Google has a tribute to Saul Bass, set to the music of Dave Brubeck. Bass was born on 8 May 1920, and I've always regarded his work for Hitchcock and others as sitting at the very top of the...
Gathering at the river 3
Here's one you probably won't know. It's from Sing You Sinners of 1938. They all count.