politics

How to win back women: The Liberal Party review

https://johnmenadue.com/how-to-win-back-women-the-liberal-party-review/
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 04:54
The Liberal Party Review has once again recommended a 50 per cent target for women but the apparent belief that this will win back electoral support from women is misplaced. The Liberal Party’s Review of the 2022 Federal Election, co-authored by former federal party director Brian Loughnane and Senator the Hon Jane Hume, makes a Continue reading »

Reduce consumption, or face reality of civilisational collapse

https://johnmenadue.com/the-need-to-reduce-consumption/
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 04:55
An important debate is developing in Pearls and Irritations on the need to reduce consumption. In his article “Labor’s Environmental Denialism”, Stephen Williams acknowledged several positive steps being taken by the Labor government to help protect the environment, and then argued that Labor was failing to address the fundamental drivers of environmental disaster, which he Continue reading »

Shoving democracy aside in Brazil… and elsewhere

https://johnmenadue.com/shoving-democracy-aside-in-brazil-and-elsewhere/
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 04:56
The destruction of the Brazilian congress by supporters of the former, and now self-exiled, President Jair Bolsonaro is yet another example of the power and real consequences of misinformation and deceit peddled on the internet. Viewing events from the afar, it’s easy to be bewildered by the fact that someone like Bolsonaro was elected in Continue reading »

Rules-based international order: What rules? Whose rules?

https://johnmenadue.com/rules-based-international-order-what-rules-whose-rules/
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 04:57
When interviewed on Great Game on Russia’s state-run Channel One (8 Dec. 2022), Russia’s Foreign Minister, Secretary Lavrov, was given ample opportunity to set out Russia’s views on its role in the Ukraine and on the differences his country has with its many adversaries. The interview is long and Lavrov is aided by presenters who Continue reading »

Is Any of Analytic Philosophy’s Dominance Owed to McCarthyism?

https://dailynous.com/2023/01/10/is-any-of-analytic-philosophys-dominance-owed-…
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 03:00
“It is clear enough that McCarthyism and its legacy were sufficient to make life hard for a particular strand of opposition to the analytic mainstream, characterized by its general adherence to empiricism and liberalism: those who were broadly Marxists.” So writes Christoph Schuringa a philosopher at Northeastern University London, in an article in Jacobin. He continues: But its power in cementing the analytic mainstream went beyond this. The whole tendency of the period was to block out alternatives to a paradigm that stretched across disciplines. This paradigm, which consisted of methodologies developed for the purposes of Cold War research and development such as rational choice theory, operations research, and game theory, functioned to reinforce a vision of society, and of inquiry, reliant on the classical liberal idea of the autonomous rational individual as the fundamental unit of society. The article includes accounts of some philosophers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee or persecuted by the FBI.
politics