Posted inMediaNews/PoliticsTech

The French philosopher and the American whistle-blower

Unless one acknowledges the complex nature and often unexpected connections among things, events and people, one might find it a smidgen astonishing that what the French poststructuralist philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard, wrote in his “report” on the state of knowledge in “advanced” societies, better known as The Postmodern Condition (1979; English translation: Manchester University Press, 1984), […]

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US journalists are self-censoring their work

By Brendon Bosworth This year, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified documents about digital spying, we’ve come to learn that big brother is definitely watching. As revelations about the National Security Agency and the US’s massive digital spying regime continue to surface it’s become increasingly clear that the majority of digital communications […]

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conservative with a small c and Liberal with a capital L

I recently listened to an engrossing discussion on BBC radio, featuring Douglas Murray and Peter Hitchens, about modern day conservatism as distinct from classical liberalism or libertarianism, and in contemporary Britain, Toryism. It’s usually very difficult to systematise conservatism as it generally eschews such rigidity, and true to its name seems more content to “conserve” […]

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When fact imitates fiction: The Snowden case

In the history of (especially moral) philosophy, a recurrent theme involves the tension between the affirmation of so-called “free will” on the part of humans, and its denial, or what is called (a variety of) “determinism”. Without going into too much detail, it seems to me safe to say that most philosophers have favoured free […]