Well this is good. Meera Nanda’s article in the New Humanist is apparently being widely read and discussed. Someone who edited it says so here:

It’s moments like these I like best about my job: getting some recognition, even from total strangers, for a piece I spent hours and hours editing: Meera Nanda’s piece on the intellectual treason of postmodernist scholars from the January 2005 issue of New Humanist is being picked up on various arts&ideas websites and personal blogs, people are reading it, some are even commenting on it. It’s good to see these ideas going beyond the narrow readership of NH – thanks to the internet.

There is another comment on the diffusion of Meera’s New Humanist … Read the rest

A couple of signing opportunities.

Labour Friends of Iraq. This is an open letter to the Stop the War Coalition asking why they have not spoken out clearly and forcefully on the murder of Hadi Saleh, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions.

StWC leaders view the “resistance” as a legitimate national liberation movement. StWC leaders view as ‘collaborators’ the IFTU, all election workers, and all democratic parties participating in the January elections, whether Iraqi Communists, Kurdish Parties or Shia.

This view is quite wrong. The leaders of the ‘resistance’ are an amalgam of Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists, pro-al-Qaeda militants and criminals. There is nothing progressive about their political programmes. If they were ever to take state power

Nick Cohen said something interesting in the Observer the other day:

To take it from the top, the scandal about Britain’s television stations and many of its other cultural institutions is not that they are run by people who are motivated by anything so high-minded as converting the public to a political philosophy, but that they are run by well-educated and very well-paid men and women from the upper-middle class who protect themselves and their privately educated children from competition by feeding the masses mush – the favoured policy of aristocracies down the ages. That they do none the less read liberal newspapers and pretend that their pursuit of profit and market share is a radical blow in the anti-elitist