By Owen Pinnell Far removed from the world leaders making climate pledges at COP, are people like Ali Hussein Julood, a young leukaemia survivor living on an Iraqi oil field co-managed by BP. When the BBC discovered BP was not declaring the field’s gas flaring, Ali helped us to reveal the truth about the poisonous… Read More Air pollution: Uncovering the dirty secret behind BP’s bumper profits
Magdalena Taube Krystian Woznicki The planet, as authoritarian capitalism’s plaything, is subject to real-world economic-ecological downward spirals. And yet exorbitant space exploration projects continue to build escapist dreams on extractivism. And the threat of nuclear war continues to push at the limits of tenuous environmental stability. Earthrise reloaded When the Tesla Gigafactory opened in Brandenburg, Elon… Read More Apocalypse in the rear-view mirror
First posted June 12, 2015 To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care any more. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators… Read More Lee McIntyre. The Attack on Truth and our age of willful ignorance
First posted March 11, 2013 Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation: Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics (1987) It seems almost unnecessary to note that this theoretical perspective is matched by the self-abnegation of its praxis. To be sure, postmodern theory itself arose due to the… Read More Michael Rectenwald: Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors Darshana Narayanan Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions. Harari’s… Read More The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
Ian Sample Parkinson’s was first described in medical texts more than 200 years ago, yet there is still no cure. It’s a common condition, particularly in the over-50s. About 1 in 37 people in the UK will be diagnosed at some point in their life. Existing drugs aim to manage patients’ symptoms, rather than slow… Read More The scientists working to defeat Parkinson’s disease
By Shobhit Mahajan Humankind’s fascination with the heavens is as old humankind. The sight of countless stars and the faint band of light which stretches from horizon to horizon must have been the cause of amazement and awe for the earliest homosapien as she trudged along the plains of East Africa. From the hunter-gatherer to… Read More James Webb Telescope: Light on Dark Matter
by Alan Sokal The debate over objectivity and relativism, science and postmodernism, which for the past eight months has been rocking American academic circles — particularly those of the political left — has apparently now arrived in France. And with what a bang! Following Denis Duclos (Le Monde of 3 January), we now have the eminent sociologist… Read More Professor Latour’s Philosophical Mystifications
Lisa-Maria Kellermayr, an Austrian GP, was a doctor who dedicated her life to her patients and was vocal about the risks of Covid-19 on Twitter and in the media. She had endured months of death threats from Covid conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. Colleagues expressed frustration with the lack of support she received for dealing with… Read More Devi Sridhar: A scientist in the public eye has taken her own life. This has to be a wake-up call
Postmodern ideas have gained the status of absolute truths. Relativism, selectively appropriated into the language of both left and right politics, has metamorphosed into dogma. As oversimplification distorts communication, public trust in scientific fact has eroded. Could renewed ideas of objectivity be a way out? ‘A relativism metamorphosed into dogmatic absolutism is obviously logically incoherent,… Read More Peter Kreko, Alan Sokal: In defence of the objective world
After the truth-shower 