Here is an interesting editorial calling for radical restructuring of universities. The basic point is that “universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no [...]
Well it looks like Canada and the United States of Torture are not the only countries with embarrassingly incompetent judges. Tomas Norström, the Swedish judge that recently found the Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright infringement, is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection. So let me [...]
I have seen two separate defenses of torture from U.S. officials, media and pundits. I call these the Jack Bower defense and, since he gave it a few days ago, the Barrack Obama defense. Jack Bower Defense The Bower Defense goes like this: ‘If you’ve got a nuclear bomb about to go off, and the [...]
Many adults do not understand human rights – what they are, why they’re important, how their presence or absence affects the well-being of society. As far a I can tell, the reason adults don’t understand human rights is that they didn’t learn about it in school. What’s worse, even if human rights issues are covered [...]
This is just fucking crazy. On March 26th, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a non-binding resolution calling “defamation of religion” a human rights violation. I don’t think so. When, under Islamic law, Saudi Arabia beats a woman half to death and then throws her in jail for the heinous crime of being gang-raped, that’s [...]