As usual, economic freedoms are held accountable for the blunders of centrally planned policies: Mr Rognlie mounts three main criticisms of these arguments. First, he argues that the rate of return from capital probably declines over the long run, rather than remaining high as Mr Piketty suggests, due to the law of diminishing marginal returns. Modern…
“The incident happened just a month after the murder of secular blogger and science writer Avijit Roy.”
“Yet there is no ‘Wallström affair’. Outside Sweden, the western media has barely covered the story, and Sweden’s EU allies have shown no inclination whatsoever to support her. A small Scandinavian nation faces sanctions, accusations of Islamophobia and maybe worse to come, and everyone stays silent. As so often, the scandal is that there isn’t…
Sam Harris recounts a conversation he had with Ayan Hirsi Ali last year. In this dialogue, both authors unmask the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of so-called liberals who seem less bothered by Islamic radicalism and more panicked by criticisms of the motivational doctrines which make such fanaticism possible in the first place: That’s a point I really wanted us to cover. Most liberals think that religion…
Nice article about the moral hypocrisy of mainstream media coverage on Islam in the west. When the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby was reported in May 2013, the headlines, for many hours, avoided any indication that the murder was connected to Islam or Muslims. On the other hand, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris,…
“He was Richard Dawkins of Bangladesh. …Today I know what is the philosophy of science, what is evolution, what is freethinking, what is logic. Today I can dare to dream of writing popular science in my mother tongue only because of him. He was a true master of modern thinking and writing. He, literally, was…
Probably not stampeding a mentally ill woman to death and then burning her corpse, all over some ancient textbook which might have been mishandled. KABUL, Afghanistan — The mentally ill woman, her face covered in blood, rose to her feet and looked out across the mob. She pleaded. But these men meant to kill her. A kick sent…
What does it take to convince a young and ambitious mind, privileged enough to have inherited the tools of success so scarcely available to everyone else, to throw away a promising future of prosperity and join the ranks of some sadistic, desert cult? Well, apparently its not a lack of education or books, but rather an excess of the…
Freedom of speech is the most vital organ of a healthy and functioning liberal democracy, let alone that of a free society. Without this index of liberty, all disputes and complaints about what is wrong with our political systems would be automatically muted. It is for this reason that on January 7 in the Paris offices…
Many studies have shown that non-religiosity is on the rise in America. This is not news, per se. What strikes my attention, in particular, are two salient trends (from the graph above) in the data: from 1970 until about 1980, we see a steep rise in non-religiosity. Furthermore, from about 2000 until 2010, we observe an even…
Certainly Doubtful 