calltoreason.org

Once again, I’m sacrificing verbosity for sheer quantity of science-related links. Here goes: I notice that despite that my very liberal political sympathies, many of my posts have been showing a markedly anti-democratic bias. This article from LiveScience is a good demonstration of why democracy is inherently flawed: most people aren’t smart enough to judge [...]

If I were really snarky, I’d headline this post with a title like “In Soviet Russia, election frauds you!” Electoral frauds in Russia aren’t particularly shocking news, especially in Russia, but how often do you see it being claimed by the winner rather than the loser? Yet this is exactly what happened when a first [...]

Just a bit of news that popped up over the weekend: Action star Jackie Chan said Saturday he’s not sure if a free society is a good thing for China and that he’s starting to think “we Chinese need to be controlled.” Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in [...]

One thing that often irks me is when seemingly reasonable and well-educated people who hold liberal values actually choose to decry democracy. Their argument is that ordinary people are too uneducated, too narrow minded, and generally too stupid to be trusted with the power to ultimately determine the course of government. A good example of [...]

I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University [...]

Tibet has been in the news for two weeks now so I thought I should probably write a post about it. I’ve abstained from it thus far because it’s hard to write intelligently about what is undoubtedly a complicated situation with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve already had an argument with my wife [...]

Before the elections, I expressed some doubt about the governing experience of the opposition parties, especially the DAP, and unfortunately, it seems that I’m being proved right. The opposition so-called Barisan Rakyat has shown a crack just days after winning historic gains in the election when DAP leader Lim Kit Siang publicly spoke on behalf [...]