I can remember at about the age of eleven being at one of the many Arabic parties I would attend growing up. The women were all laughing and dancing, their head scarves off, no men in the room. They wore ...
Read More »ISIS behead American journalist
The beheading of American freelance photojournalist James Foley by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has shocked the world. He was taken prisoner in northwest Syria in November 2012 while on assignment for the Global Post. ISIS ...
Read More »Terrorist groups and European fighters in Iraq
At present there is no independent Kurdish state but the ‘land of the Kurds’ crisscrosses Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. However, the Iraqi Kurds have been able to gain autonomy from Baghdad. Kurdish aspirations for an independent state stem ...
Read More »Obama, human rights and ISIS
Western leaders have suddenly woken up and realised that ISIS is a regional global security threat. This realisation has also forced policy makers and security experts to abandon their orientalist monocles. The desire to act ‘now’ by launching airstrikes on ISIS targets ...
Read More »Radicalization – Causes and Consequences
Yesterday, 7th of July 2013 was the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attack in London. The attacks led the British government to launch initiatives to identify why and how one becomes radicalized[1] and develop measures to counter the terrorism threat. ...
Read More »Stephen Hawking’s God: A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion
Homo sapiens has enjoyed singular success at tweaking the environment because of the unique psycho-social wiring of the human mind ( Pagel ). Hearkening back to the nature-nurture debate, the human mind is a multi-dimensional intellectual construct that emerges from ...
Read More »The Ideology of Darwin
Humanity used to believe in God, but now they believe in Darwin. This is a bit of an extreme statement, since most people still believe in God, but the sentiment is accurate. Darwin's theories of the MECHANISMS of evolution has had a major impact on the social, emotional, and even spiritual fabric of this planet. There is a problem though. In a lot of ways Darwin's theories seem more like canon, or ideology, than good science. This article explores early awareness of the ideological nature of Darwinian theory, and provides some suggestions on how scientists can break free of dogma that has more to do with religion than with good science.
Read More »Live Long and Prosper: The 100 Year Starship Project
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”—Albert Einstein The Defense Advanced Research Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced an extraordinary new project, the 100 Year Starship ...
Read More »Planet of the Persnickety Apes: Darwin and the Aesthetics of Survival
For reasons that anthropologists have not yet fully uncovered, Homo sapiens evolved a pronounced aesthetic sensibility (Schellekens and Goldie, 2011): not only has Homo sapiens developed more sophisticated tools and weapons than any other species, Homo sapiens has also cultivated ...
Read More »A Turn to Hegel
What is money? What is the nature of money? This is a problem that has occupied Sociologists since Karl Marx wrote his magnum opus, Das Kapital. If you go by Karl M's massive, or by any of the many Economics 100 texts (which often don't even bother to define money), money is a mystified, magical thing that requires incredible effort to understand. In reality though that's not the case. Money is simply abstracted labour, pure and simple. Once you understand that, then you have the key to understanding the whole of modern society, including the pernicious problems we all face, problems caused by the easy way money allows us to accumulate labour.
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