Walter Gratzer’s The Undergrowth of Science is a remarkable and disturbing book which shows the depth of delusion and self-deception that plagues even the scientists. Science may be the most rigorous tool yet developed by humans for understanding the natural world, yet even it is not immune to
Australian Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty sees no inherent contradiction between religion and science, a view likewise espoused even by Galileo. Despite this, many lesser scientific minds, especially of the media-tart “pop-sci” variety, seem to imagine that it’s their scientific mission statement to attack and disparage
Below is an outstanding video. The lyrics were written by Middle School West Auckland students. It is their response to the bullying that goes on in some schools and society. Fender Maeve worked with them to create this catchy and important message in a song called Hopeful. The students in
I recently wrote that the imposition of the “Safe Schools” gender indoctrination program has not been correlated with a reduction in school bullying – its purported raison d’etre. In fact, the opposite may well be true. The statistics are of dubious provenance, but there are claims that bullying has actually
It was two years ago that Jim Goad warned us to “expect a lot of crying” as the intolerant nuttiness of transgender ideology foisted itself on women’s sport like an uninvited penis in the girls’ locker room. And so it has come to pass. A bunch of American high
The Jesuits famously knew the value of getting their ideological hooks into kids at an early age. So did the Nazis with their Hitler-Jugend. The two great Cassandras of totalitarianism, Orwell and Huxley, also recognised authoritarian regimes’ determination to “get ‘em young”. “We had Elementary Sex for the first
I was out in the garden yesterday and overheard two little kids, a brother and sister I think, having a very animated and enthusiastic discussion. The little chap was about 5 and his older sister the grand old age of about 7. The little brother was waxing lyrical about his
When I was growing up, the entrance to our city library was faced by an enormous monumental wall emblazoned with Thomas Carlyle’s great epigram: “All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”. From the earliest age, that
As I wrote recently, it’s a grave mistake to write off the erudite circle-jerking of academics as nothing more than ivory-tower nuttiness. Eventually, the nonsense that’s passed off as “scholarship” filters down to the real world, with often devastating consequences. Marxism especially has been a font
Students who organised school climate action are now planning a general strike that will last an entire week! Now it is getting ridiculous. Where are the parents in all this? I would be reading my children the riot act and telling them that they can protest on their own time,
That is seriously suggested, not only for the teachers but for everyone. We have to save the planet and the only way is a 75% pay cut according to UK’s Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell. McDonnell has suggested that a future Labour government might introduce a 10-hour working
I recently reported that the appointment of Australian academic Professor Dawn Freshwater as Auckland University vice-chancellor promised to be a rare breath of fresh air for New Zealand higher education. Where other Kiwi universities, especially those headed by Aussie academics, are clamping on intellectual freedom, Professor Freshwater was at
In Daniel Gasman’s The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, he lays out in detail how many of the seeds of Nazi doctrine were sown in respectable, mainstream German scientific journals and debates in the late 19th century. Today’s transgender ideology springs from obscure academic debates in the 1980s
There is a lamentable tendency in some circles to dismiss the Humanities as irrelevant and unnecessary. This is a mistake. Understandable, perhaps, when Humanities departments have been so assiduously white-anted by Marxists, but that kind of misses the point. Just because a bunch of loons are in the driver’
Financial activism has long been one of the favourite tools for the left to punish Wrongthink. Not that the right is immune, as recent boycott campaigns have shown, but the left have raised the tactic to a dark and dubious art. By the 1980s, vexatious lawfare, particularly by race-activist
Nothing perhaps better illustrates the sorry decline of free speech and intellectual freedom on university campuses than the starkly different receptions given to two flamboyant superstars of conservative politics, 42 years apart. In 1974, John Wayne accepted an invitation to speak at Harvard. Never one to do things by half,
