blogs.kent

According to Walter Benjamin, Brecht used to have a little wooden donkey around the neck of which he’d placed a sign which read, ‘Even I must understand it.’ The point was that whatever political point he was making in his plays (or his songs or poems or essays or short stories), this must be made [...] […]

The First Vatican Council in 1870 gave us an infallible pope. Protestant Fundamentalism in the 20th century gave us an infallible Bible. Now the media row over the role of government scientific advisors  seems in danger of creating a new form of infalliblity – science. Many of the issues raised by the dismissal of David Nutt [...] […]

Yesterday evening, Helen Carr (Director of Learning and Teaching and module convenor for LW588 Public Law 1) and I took 100 TurningPoint handsets over to Woolf Lecture Theatre for a lecture Helen was giving about the English Legal System to prepare students for their upcoming summative assessment in Week 6.  The advantage of using TurningPoint [...] […]

Reaching week 7 is often a bit of a watershed ... […]

If all the moral, ethical and practical considerations against torture that I have examined in the various posts are inconclusive, I’ve now been sent an article from the highly specialist journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that examines in medical terms how stress resulting from torture or enhanced interrogation techniques so impair the memory of the [...] […]