reason Britain Culture wars 

The need for a new Enlightenment

A BBC film to be shown in schools to pupils aged between nine and 12 claims there are “more than 100 gender identities”. How have we arrived at a situation in which, under the rubric of spreading tolerance, freedom and reason, people who challenge this kind of thinking are told they are bigots and bullied off public platforms and out of their jobs? The introduction of such ideas can be traced to the seismic impact of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The fact that genocidal Nazism had arisen…

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Labour party antisemitism Britain Israel 

Dual loyalty taunt? Israel slandered? So what’s new?

Within hours of the Labour party giving its members wriggle room to defame Israel without any pushback, posters appeared on central London bus-shelters slandering Israel as a “a racist endeavour”. The virus of left-wing antisemitism is out of control. Why is anyone surprised? None of this is new. Jeremy Corbyn may have made the poison more toxic but he didn’t release it. He is rather its most malevolent symptom. I first experienced this in 1982. Colleagues implied that my real country wasn’t Britain but Israel. At the time, I’d never…

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radar Culture wars 

Cultural radar leads resistance to extinction of reason

Across our species there seems to be an innate ability to lock into a cultural radar based in reality which those who subscribe to socially destructive or sinister ideologies can’t detect. In the former Soviet Union, millions were able somehow to access and absorb ideas that were ruthlessly censored. Sometimes political prisoners smuggled out their writings from jail. The intellectual dark web is our contemporary equivalent to those samizdat channels that stood up to the mind-bending process of repudiating not just certain ideas but the exercise of reason itself. Dave…

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