Stephen Law

Tony Benn: is he stopped clock here (correct by lucky accident), or right on the money? If you are scratching your head wondering why we seem to be drifting scarily ever more rightwards, this is as plausible explanation as any I have come across. When I was last out canvassing for Labour, the message I got from a lot of voters was: 'I won't vote - they're all the same'. And they had a point: even under New Labour, inequality actually increased. They engaged in some positive tinkering around the edges, but there was no substantive change to the status quo. When the only real mechanism for significantly improving working people's lives has been airbrushed out, then all they're left with is simplistic, blame it on the so-and-sos (i.e. anyone but the real beneficiaries of the system) propaganda. It's the so-and-sos (Europeans, immigrants, benefits claimants, black people, jews, socialists, Russians, etc.) that are to blame for their increasingly shitty lives. IF

If you believe inequality reduced under Labour, you've fallen for a myth. Sure, Labour redistributed, as the IFS confirm. But not nearly enough to reverse growing inequality. We're heading back to Victorian Britain under both parties, just at different speeds. See  here . There was, recently, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actually reverse this trend. It was destroyed by a coalition of forces that included most of the Parliamentary Labour Party (Labour MPs), using some of the most disgusting tactics ever seen in British politics (though, thanks to our MSM, most folk are largely ignorant about what went on). Those Labour MPs are, even now, making it very clear that nothing significantly threatening our economic inequality-driving status quo will ever be allowed again on their watch. And yet, bizarrely, polls show the general public favour the much more radical democratic socialist policies that were on offer under Corbyn & 1940's NHS-creating Labour. (see e.g. her

After Part 1 of Al Jazeera's three part investigation 'The Labour Files'   into Labour Party dirty tricks and smears against the Left, Michael Crick Comments.   Crick is the only mainstream journalist who has even acknowledged the programme, to my knowledge. Part 2 is out Saturday. It is absolutely shocking what went on, but also absolutely shocking that the 'thugs, trots, and antisemites' narrative went pretty much entirely unchallenged by all mainstream media. Typically, there was no pushback at all from journalists when allegations were made. Not even from the Guardian and BBC, who mostly just uncritically and repeatedly recycled the poisonous allegations. You can watch 'The Labour Files' on Al Jazeera's youtube channel and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elp18OvnNV0 Crick says it was 'hard to nail down the truth'. In many cases, it really wasn't. For example, the famous Angela Eagle brickgate story (not mentioned in this programme:

Here's a first draft article for THINK. Any errors, do let me know....   Ayer on Religious Language   Stephen Law   ABSTRACT: Here is a brief introduction to Ayer’s radical criticism of religious belief. According to Ayer, a sentence like ‘God exists’ doesn’t assert something false, rather, it fails to assert anything at all.   Religious belief is of course criticised on a variety of fronts. Critics often focus on the truth-claims of religions, such as that a God or gods exist, that Jesus rose from the dead, or that there is an afterlife. They insist these claims are unjustified. Some go further still, arguing not only is it not reasonable to believe these claims are true, it’s reasonable to believe they are all false.   However, there is another much more radical kind of criticism to consider. This more radical sort of critics agrees with the religious naysayer that religious claims are not true. However, they also insist that neither are they false. In fact, according to the more

  A while back I wrote a paper on the existence of Jesus. It is available  here . I wrote the paper because I was struck by the vehemence with which many Biblical experts insisted that anyone who doubted whether the New Testament documents alone establish the existence of Jesus beyond  any  reasonable doubt was a crank, or at least horribly ignorant.    In my paper I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.   Here is the

A while back I wrote a paper on the existence of Jesus. It is available  here . I wrote the paper because I was struck by the vehemence with which many Biblical experts insisted that anyone who doubted whether the New Testament documents alone establish the existence of Jesus beyond  any  reasonable doubt was a crank, or at least horribly ignorant.    In my paper I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.   Here is the c