Tu quoque
Tu quoque (you too) is a type of argument that is classified as a logical fallacy, that is, an argument that does not offer evidence of the point the arguer is trying to make...
Author: Matthew Smith
As election nears, the witch-hunt steps up
So, the week before last, the date for a forthcoming general election — 12th December — was finally announced and parliament was prorogued (dissolved) for real, after months of wrangling so as to stop...
Homesickness and nostalgia, and why they make bad politics
I’ve lived away from home for two prolonged periods in my childhood and young adulthood. The first was boarding school, near Ipswich. The second was university, in Aberystwyth. The first was two hours from...
What is leadership?
The other day a friend shared this meme on Facebook: it reads “I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills”. It reminded me of...
Expel Keith Vaz
Today the Labour MP Keith Vaz was suspended from the House of Commons for six months for offering to buy cocaine for male prostitutes in August 2016 in an encounter at his flat recorded...
Essex truck tragedy: why the driver is probably innocent
Note: this was written on Thursday 24th when the story was a day and a half old, the dead were still believed to be Chinese rather than Vietnamese, and Maurice ‘Mo’ Robinson had only...
Guardian Daily: nice new app, shame about the upgrade
Yesterday The Guardian published the new version of its “daily” app (which delivers the digital version of the printed Guardian and Observer newspapers, as opposed to the news app which delivers most of that...
Photography update
Since I’ve not had much time to write this week, here are some pictures I took on recent trips to gardens in southern England (all National Trust properties): Cliveden, Buckinghamshire: a vast estate with...
What was a ‘Bantustan’?
Last week it was revealed that the Australian politician Alexander Downer, who had been foreign secretary and high commissioner to the UK, had made a speech to an audience in Europe which advocated that...
Romanticising the bad old days
The other day I saw a meme which consisted of a list of what British food was like in the 1950s, presumably when the author was young, and it claimed that much of the...
Riots don’t start; people start them
There is a video going round on Twitter of the American representative (from Hawaii) Tulsi Gabbard responding to a question about the Indian prime minister’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which hundreds...
Ignorance and poverty, not religion, lie behind abuse
Yesterday the Mail Online website published a story about a “Qur’an school” in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, from which 300 boys and men were rescued last week having been held in chains in squalid conditions...
On Labour’s private school dissolution policy
This evening, the Labour party’s national conference passed a motion to make the party committed to the dissolution of Britain’s private schools. The three-clause motion commits the party to include in its next general...
The Stallman affair and what it means for Open Source
Last week the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman, who was also a visiting professor at MIT (right), resigned from both of those roles after remarks he had made on an...
Hamza Yusuf was not famous just for being White
In the aftermath of the Hamza Yusuf Syria controversy (see previous entry), a Medium post by Umar Lee, once a fixture on the Muslim blogging scene of the 2000s, has been circulated on social...
How does any society build civil society?
In 2016 the American imam, Hamza Yusuf, gave a lecture in Turkey which was a commentary on certain hadith including the famous hadith of intention (that actions are judged according to intention) in which...
Stonehenge by-pass is vital
As a truck driver I have regularly had to use the A303 which goes past Stonehenge, the prehistoric stone-circle monument in Wiltshire. In today’s Observer there is a piece by Tom Holland which claims...
Time to put a stop to the 20mph zone fad
Over the past few years, a number of boroughs in London have imposed 20mph speed limits across most or all of the roads under their control (which in London is all except motorways and...
Yes, we need our hands-free phones.
Last week it was reported that the UK Parliament’s transport select committee (a committee of MPs drawn proportionally from each party with seats in the Commons) had recommended that consideration be given to the...
Equality feels like oppression
There is a saying in social justice circles that when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Earlier this week I saw a thread on Twitter which demonstrates this experience very nicely....