How immigration restrictions are starting to hurt academic research 1 Nov 2009 Jorge Cham of PhD Comics was nearly deported from the UK recently. His story is most interesting, and somewhat scary: From here. Part one here. Who doesn’t believe that we allowed terrorism to win? Education Politics
Humor Unnecessary people 10 Oct 2010 I was kind of musing on the road to ruination we are all skipping merrily down the other day when it occurred to me that there are some well-defined classes of people whose activities are the major reason why things are a mess. And the next thought was: who could… Read More
Biology The Demon Spencer 16 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 When I first started to read philosophy and history I heard about this demon. His name was Herbert Spencer, and he was famous for three things: Incomprehensible prose Coining “Survival of the Fittest”, and Coming up with a “devil take the hindmost” laissez faire political philosophy that was called “social… Read More
Politics The Haneef washup 1 Feb 200818 Sep 2017 Readers will know that I got very angry about the Haneef Affair, in which a muslim Indian doctor was accused of being a terrorist and deported by the improper abuse of power by the minister for immigration of the previous government [here, here, here, here, here and here]. Now his… Read More
My wife is a scientist. We are, here in the US, finding it more and more difficult to compete with the Europeans for top-talent because of all this stupidity. The Euro’s stay home and the many of the Asians like Europe better now. Even some US students/post-docs that would have stayed are having second thoughts… It’s pretty sad.
The US, UK, and maybe some others, gave the terrorists a win beyond their wildest imaginings — to whatever extent W. Bush was right in saying that the terrorists hate our free and open societies, he gave them their greatest desire by making the society more closed. As it is, I’m fairly often the only US-born scientist around the table of scientific colleagues. If not the only, one of a minority. US science requires that people be able to come here to do science.
I have probably said this before but I will say it again. You don’t resist terrorism with war, you resist terrorism with justice. And when you commit injustice against your own residents, you encourage terrorism.
“allowed”? I guess things must be better in Australia. Here in America, we didn’t just “allow” terrorism to win, we made damn sure it steam rollered right over our rights to privacy, our constitutional protections from unreasonable search and seizure, our right to peaceably assemble, and other rights as well.
Well, llewelly, the terrorists hate us for our freedom, right? So all we need to do is lose our freedom and the terrorists won’t bother us, right? Right?