Search Result for 'philosopher's reflection'

by Sinéad Murphy  Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory (1997) Firstly, let me thank you for Lockdown Sceptics, which has provided such desperately needed comfort over the last months. I have sometimes wondered what it was like to have lived through one of the milestones of history. I never imagined I would come to know what it is like. Now I do know. It is sometimes bracing. It is mostly suffocating. Your website has been a must-read daily support throughout.  Until the events of this year, I have allied myself, for the most part, with the political Left; I have been a member of the Labour Party, and a Guardian watcher, if not quite reader. I have no compunction now in expressing my total abhorrence at the near-orgasmic enthusiasm for authoritarian control that has come to dominate the Left, and my gratitude for the reason and humanity that have, by contrast, characterised many on the political Right.   But there is a blind spot on the Right, which threatens the reason if not the humanity of its analyses of the Covid-response. It is the insistence that there is no ‘conspiracy’ afoot and that this whole unfortunate affair is attributable to the blunders of those in power.  It seems to me that there is something in this repeated denial of ‘conspiracy theory’ that is akin to ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Is obesity really to blame for high Covid mortality? Can your employer force you to be tested? And what is going on in Israel? Plus: Is Covid a religion?

Dr Thomas Crew marks the passing of a giant of the German resistance against Covid tyranny: Gunnar Kaiser, who has died from cancer at the age of 47.

The Sentencing Council's abortive effort to introduce two-tier sentencing highlights a crucial issue, says law expert Dr Kyriakos N. Kotsoglou: people should always be treated as individuals, not members of a social group.

Here We Go Again... Matt Hancock raised the alarm in Parliament yesterday when he said a new variant of Coronavirus was doing the rounds and linked this to the rise in community infections in Kent and London. The press release from Public Health England has the details. The strain was identified due to Public Health England’s proactive and enhanced monitoring following the increase in cases seen in Kent and London. The variant has been named ‘VUI – 202012/01’ (the first Variant Under Investigation in December 2020).As of December 13th, 1,108 cases with this variant have been identified, predominantly in the South and East of England. PHE is working with partners to investigate and plans to share its findings over the next two weeks. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the strain has any impact on disease severity, antibody response or vaccine efficacy.High numbers of cases of the variant virus have been observed in some areas where there is also a high incidence of COVID-19. It is not yet known whether the variant is responsible for these increased numbers of cases. PHE will monitor the impact of this in the coming days and weeks.It is not uncommon for viruses to undergo mutations; seasonal influenza mutates every year. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been observed in other countries, such as Spain.This variant includes a mutation ...

Gyms Are Essential Services A group of 100 gym owners from across Wales have got together to tell the Welsh Government that it is wrong and harmful to shut gyms during the so-called "fire break" lockdown. They told Lockdown Sceptics: As of 18.00 Friday we enter a 17 day “fire break” period where all but non-essential businesses will close across the entire country.As a collective, we strongly believe that gyms are an essential service, and scientific evidence shows that active participation in exercise through establishments such as gyms relieves the strain on the NHS through the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing.  In forcing the closure of gyms, the Welsh Government will be harming a large proportion of the Welsh population and we cannot stand by and allow that to happen.Just as the Liverpudlian gym community fought (and won) against gym closures in its city, we are now going to do the same for our country. However, we want to take it a step further in getting gyms officially recognised as an essential service by the Government, as they have in other countries across Europe.– According to ukactive, there were 22 million gym visits in England between July 25th and September 13th and they resulted in just 78 confirmed Covid cases– The number of cases per 100,000 gym visits in ...

by Sinéad Murphy Giorgio Agamben Universities have been dying for some time. As their prospectuses have grown glossier, their gateway buildings more spectacular and their accommodation for students more stunningly luxurious, the Humanities subjects have been gradually hollowed out. Academics’ intellectual work has been streamlined by the auditing procedures of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ and by growing pressure to bid for outside funding, which is distributed to projects that address a narrow range of approved themes – Sustainability, Ageing, Energy, Inequality… Student achievement has been dumbed down by the inculcation of a thoughtless relativism – Everybody’s different; That’s just my interpretation – and by the annual inflation of grades. The curriculum has begun to be tamed by continual revision – never broad enough, never representative enough – and by the drive for ‘equality and diversity’. And teaching has been marginalized by the heavy requirements that it represent itself on ever proliferating platforms and review itself in endless feedback loops. Universities, in short, have been gradually transforming into what they proudly trumpet as a Safe Space, a space that has been cleared at greatest expense to Humanities subjects, a space in which the slightest risk – that a thought might lead nowhere, that a student might be uninterested, that an idea might offend or that a teacher might really persuade – ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a rebuttal of Sam Bowman's pro-Government propaganda, a Postcard from Bangkok and another harrowing tale of someone's mum lost in the labyrinth of the NHS.

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. We hear that Scotland seems set on Zero Covid, the Government all but admits it has no evidence for restrictions, and Texas ends the lockdown.

Dr James Alexander, a politics professor, analyses the conservative philosophy of Peter Hitchens, whom he thinks is as talented a polemicist as his brother Christopher.