Posts Tagged ‘ Nick Cohen ’

Nick Cohen spurns the proffered compromise

Dec 11th, 2013 5:16 pm | By

Nick Cohen has posted round 2 of his disagreement with Universities UK over its guidance on gender segregation.

On the Today programme this morning Justin Webb covered the decision by Universities UK to allow fundamentalist speakers to segregate women from men at public meetings.

With a characteristic disdain for accepted standards of behaviour, Universities UK refused to go on air and answer his questions. Webb had to ‘put the other side of the story’ himself. He told a Palestinian woman demonstrating outside Universities UK headquarters in central London, [1hr 36mins in] ‘What Universities UK say is, if non segregated seating is also provided it could be all right.’

Put like that it can sound just about all right.

… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: , ,


Designs by a wonderfully acid British cartoonist

Nov 24th, 2013 10:25 am | By

Nick Cohen has a piece in the Observer on censorship at UK universities. He starts, as he should, with Chris and Abhishek.

On the morning of 3 October, Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis put on joke T-shirts, of the kind students wear the world over, and went to man the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society stall at the London School of Economics freshers’ fair. The bullying the university authorities visited upon them for the next 36 hours should provoke the most important free speech court case to hit British universities in years. It certainly deserves to.

Damn right.

Both the left and the right complain about censorship, both engage in it, Nick points out.

The Moos and Phadnis case

… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: , , , , , ,


The notion Lord Rees so casually endorses

Apr 10th, 2011 11:21 am | By

Nick Cohen is not unduly impressed by the Templeton Foundation.

Initially, it made no secret of its admiration for clerical hucksters and dispensed prizes to the evangelical showman Billy Graham and Mother Teresa, who sought to wallow in Calcuttan poverty rather than end it. Now it has moved upmarket and seeks to reward intellectuals who allow religion to scrape an acquaintance with science; who imply, however vaguely, that evidence-based research and ancient fable are compatible.

That’s the one. I point this out because the gnu-haters have been so energetically defending it in the past few days – I want to underline the fact that Nick is not an ally in that project.

Rees is not, Nick points out, actually religious.… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 138 comments
Tags: ,