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** It was actually John Gray, funnily enough. But anyway, this is the expressed view of a friend of mine a couple of months back.

I agree they are largely separate, but I think it's important to be clear on what 'no platforming' actually is and what it isn't. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_platform "Too many don't understand that their voices have been heard, but that other rights-bearing people have just decided not...

I don't actually see either of those two things. Do you mean she employs a metaphor? Come on, you have an Angular Gyrus. What worries me is that people somehow think it is illegitimate for a rape survivor to protect herself to some extent from trauma, and that whether she exposes herself to...

It is quite funny to think on just how difficult it could be to express a to express a non-conformist thought as an Politics undergraduate at Sussex 20 years ago. I remember some poor young schmo coming to our Politics Society from another university, and getting basically killed for pointing...

I think we now have a better idea about that lol.

Isn't that more or less a category mistake though? Analogies are to be used to support specific positions, they are not to be supported in themselves - or at least one doesn't have to support the use of an analogy in every situation, in order to support its use in some. I think saying that...

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/john-gray-friedrich-hayek-i-knew-and-what-he-got-right-and-wrong

Well I think neocons frequently like the idea of an universalist culture because reasons, rather than actually believing in universals. I was at school (not Eton, he was only there for 6th form in a choral scholarship) with Douglas Murray; he called his book 'Neoconservatism: why we need it's...

I appreciate they have different positions on Heidegger ergo they are v different philosophies in some respects. In simple terms, they both do make a break with enlightenment notions of truth (though Strauss breaks with it largely, perhaps, to culturally defend it). Rorty certainly cited...

Hard to say. Would it have split the Tory Party? Yeah, maybe - I think a lot of them would have joined either New Labour, the LibDems or UKIP. Some of them might have gone AnCap. Things would have remained very centrist, but I think there's every reason to believe that electoral reform would...

I thought it was pretty horrible the few times in the early days I went, but I'm not really a superclub person I guess.

“The right exists in a perpetual state of victimhood” - Keith Olbermann. But bemoans 'weaponized victimhood' at every turn. I mean how any white guy can read the more absurdist #radfem schtick and do anything but laugh is beyond me.

This. If you're going to say 'point blank', then you pretty much have to deliver the quote verbatim not find it vaguely implied by one person.

How strange, I thought you were ambivalent about it. A morally relativistic point of view would be to say that if a rape was to take place in a culture where rape is not considered morally wrong, then it would be essentially incoherent for someone outside that culture to state that it was...

Despite all the accusations of postmodernism, 'relativism' and the like - Leo Strauss came before Derrida, and they're really not that different in many ways. It's just that the right hide their post-truth machinations in estoteria and nuance, whereas the left do frequently, it seems to me at...

1. You listed this under 'hysterical irreason', rather than moral relativism (Not that it was either). Kinda speaks to my point about snarl words. 2. You might want to pick an example that you actually want to stand behind firmly, unless your intention is to just get as much Breitbart schtick...

I know this isn't university, but I feel a citation is called for here.

Yes, but now we're into people believing in 'principles' for consequences - at which point they're not really principles, and we're into that relativist popomo quagmire before you know it.

So what are these moral universals then?

I would suggest that would normally be how a libertarian is defined, though between the Libertarian Party being increasingly non-voluntarist and much of the internet crowd going Pepe, there aren't many of those left. The non-aggression principle is superficially charming, but falls apart pretty...