The mindset of the university’s leadership is telling Zainab Firdausi NB: A timely reflection by an ex-student. The article speaks for itself. I will add some remarks about a scenario in which founders make sweeping public statements which subtract from the dignity of the Vice Chancellor and the academic community. To contrapose ‘Bhagat Singh’ with… Read More Ashoka University’s Reluctant Politics
The new chairman of NatWest is facing scrutiny over his former role with international oil group PetroSaudi, which is embroiled in one of the world’s biggest financial scandals. City veteran and former MasterCard boss Rick Haythornthwaite worked for PetroSaudi International (UK) Ltd, the oil group’s British arm, for eight years, earning £200,000 a year. The oil… Read More National Westminster Bank boss worked for oil firm under investigation in ‘world’s biggest financial scandal’
I am reminded of a conversation years ago with Pakistan’s defence attaché in London, who later became the Director-General (Analysis) in the Inter-Services Intelligence. I got a call from Brigadier Javed Alam asking what I was doing then. I responded that I was working on my doctoral thesis and a chapter titled ‘threat perception in… Read More India calling itself Bharat fulfills Pakistan’s age-old wish
The gang-of-four powerful oligarchs: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreesen, are after increasing profits and world domination — and no one is trying to stop them. In Jonathan Taplin’s new book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, the internet innovation… Read More The Four Billionaires Who Want to Control the Universe
J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer by M.W. Rowe Reviewed by Thomas Nagel Among philosophers of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial… Read More Leader of the Martians
Please let’s put much, much more of our future security in the hands of people who treat war and the fallout from invasion like a broadband contract… it remains one of the more pathetic tragedies of our age that Musk is seen as a superhero analogue – but perhaps also an inevitable one, given that… Read More And then Elon Musk said there’ll be no more war – not via his satellite. Aren’t we lucky to have the world in his hands?
Ruby Lott-Lavigna The UK’s newly appointed minister for net zero is facing questions over her links to a think tank funded by oil giants that called for climate protesters to be jailed. Claire Coutinho, appointed minister for energy security and net zero this week, was a senior fellow to the opaquely funded right-wing think tank… Read More Net zero minister linked to oil-funded group that targeted climate protesters
Yan Shenkman A few months ago, I received a message from a random social media account in Russia, which asked me to sign an open letter in support of Russian political prisoner Azat Miftakhov. I knew the man behind the account, which has since been deleted; these days, he is ‘deep underground’, trying to stay… Read More Russia wants this young anarchist to stay in prison forever
Chrissy Stroop Elon Musk rarely states his own political views outright on X (formerly Twitter), other than to make vague nods in favour of “centrism” and “free speech” – one of his favourite topics – or to adopt a general “anti-woke” attitude. The owner of X has denounced the “woke mind virus” and even taken… Read More Elon Musk is using X to fuel right-wing hate in the US
NB: This is an astonishing declaration, The most outstanding Rusian conservative of the twentieth century, an ex-Red Army officer, imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years for criticising Stalin, expelled from his homeland, and winner of the Nobel Prize, still invoking the democratic spirit of the soviets of 1917; and asking for civil dialogue amongst… Read More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
After the truth-shower 