Alexander Maxwell researches national awakening the Habsburg and its successor states, and particularly Slovakia and Hungary during the long nineteenth century.
The Discursive Supremacy of the Treaty of Waitangi
24 July 2023
On 18 July 2023, a squad of undercover skeptics attended one of Julian Batchelor's “Stop Co-Governance” rallies. The evening proved dramatic. We passed through a gauntlet of counter-protesters to reach the venue. One of us was stopped and questioned by a security guard at the door. When the talk began, protesters in the audience began shouting objections or slogans and disrupting the talk. In one case, there was even a scuffle. Batchelor spent the first half hour asking protesters to leave, declaring that he was “trespassing” them, and waiting for police intervention. The police officers seemed to take their time removing protesters one by one. Audience protest eventually died down, but resumed at the end of the talk, by which point Batchelor's supporters had become short-tempered and shouted insults. Leaving the talk, we then faced another gauntlet of counter-protesters chanting “go home racists.” Somebody even threw a rock at our car as we drove past. In my time with the skeptics, I've never attended an event where emotions ran so high.
Real Religion and Real Science: Pondering an Uncomfortable Comparison
9 January 2023
Skeptics, rationalists, atheists, freethinkers and other secular folk often encounter an annoying rhetorical device when discussing politics, ethics or history with religious people. If conversation turns to some atrocity or scandal committed by adherents of some religion, members of religion often deny that it has anything to do with their “real” religion. Pedophile priests are “not real Catholics,” suicide bombers are “not real Muslims,” and so on.
The Cephalic Index: A Vanished Pseudoscience
25 October 2022
The brilliant successes of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica inspired scholars in other fields to methodological contemplation. Newtonian physics emphasised, among other things, mathematical laws, empirical measurements and quantification: after all, the full title of Newton's great work translates to “mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” Subsequent scholars attempted to apply similar mathematical methods to other fields. The obsession with numerical quantification had unfortunate results when European anatomists started measuring human racial diversity. They projected their personal prejudices onto essentially meaningless data. A diverse array of harmful pseudosciences resulted. One such pseudoscience was craniometry.
Penzias and Wilson as Scientific Saints, or, the ritual scouring of the pigeon shit
23 May 2022
Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, which I recently bought from a charity shop and have been reading before bed, contains a chapter on cosmology. Explaining the evidence for the Big Bang, it discusses, among other things, how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently discovered the cosmic microwave background. In 1962, adapting an obsolete satellite transmission antenna for radio astronomy, they detected an unexpected noise. They pointed their antenna at various astronomical objects, and at New York City, but the signal came from all directions. They examined their instrument and ruled out possible radiation from the antenna itself. Eventually they reached out to Princeton University, where a team led by Robert Dicke had been making theoretical calculations that explained the signal. For their discovery, Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
War in Ukraine: the Dangers of Believing Your Own Propaganda
4 April 2022
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a catastrophe for Ukraine. Casualty figures at time of writing are in the tens of thousands, nearly four million people have fled to other countries, and over six million more have been internally displaced. It's an outrageous act of military aggression that demands a sharp response. The Russian nuclear arsenal makes a direct military confrontation between NATO allies and Russia unwise, but the countries of the NATO alliance are right to impose the harshest sanctions against Russia, and to generously supply Ukraine with arms and munitions.