Dilip Simeon's blog

Speaking at the  Nobel Women’s Initiative conference , Valerie Hudson argues that best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated. Little analysed in international relations theory, state security and women’s security are inextricably linked. Valerie Hudson, one of the authors of  ‘Sex and World Peace’ , has made the compelling case that, just as state security impacts on women’s security, so women’s security significantly impacts on state security, something that has barely been discussed within the field of international relations.  In fact, she argues, the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its wealth, democracy or any of the other traditional factors highlighted in international relations theories, but how well women are treated in a state.  The greater the gap between the treatment of men and women in a state, the more likely it is that the state will be involved in intra- and interstate conflict. This analysis turns ...

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has  decided that lingerie bearing mannequins are akin to “sex toys”  and their public display is “embarrassing” to women. Furthermore, according to the Shiv Sena controlled BMC,  such mannequins provoke men into sexual crimes against women. A few observations: While the BMC is trying to spin this move as a means to control men by removing from sight a ‘provocative’ object, it should be more than clear that the real attempt is to control women’s sexuality. The argument is eerily similar to one adopted by apologists for the burqa or by those advocating “traditional”, “decent”, “appropriate” dress for women – don’t provoke men, because if a women does, then the sexual harassment shes faces is, if not justified, at least causally linked to her mode of dress and her “behaviour”. In an article published under the byline of “FP Staff”, the news website firstpost.com has asked the BMC to  cut the men some slack . Much digi...

Far from having replaced metaphysics, science is in a mess and needs help. Einstein saw it coming ‘The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally.' In 2010  Stephen Hawking , in The Grand Design, announced that philosophy was "dead" because it had "not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics". He was not referring to ethics, political theory or aesthetics. He meant  metaphysics , the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space and time, the fundamental stuff of the world. If philosophers really wanted to make progress, they should abandon their armchairs and their subtle arguments, wise up to maths and listen to the physicists. This view has significant support among philosophers in the English-speaking world. Bristol philosopher James Ladyman, who argues that metaphysics should be naturalised, and wh...

26th May, 2013 PUCL Condemns Killings of Congress Party leaders, their PSOs and Ordinary Villagers by Maoists  in Dharba Ghati of Sukma District, Chhattisgarh             The PUCL strongly condemns the ambush of a Congress party election cavalcade by the dalam of the CPI(Maoist) party at Dharba Ghati area in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh on Saturday, 25th May, 2013, resulting in the death of 28 people including Congress party leaders, their personal security officers and ordinary villagers of the area. PUCL denounces as totally unacceptable, the abduction, kidnapping and subsequent killing in cold blood of the Congress party President of Chhattisgarh, NK Patel, and his son Dinesh. The Maoists also killed Mahendra Karma, the founder of the dreaded Salwa Judum, and his security guards.             What is particularly reprehensible is the killing of unarmed political workers of the Congress party by over 200...

In the summer of 2006, I had a long conversation with Mahendra Karma, the Chhattisgarh Congress leader who was killed in a terror attack by the Naxalites last week. I was not alone — with me were five other members of a citizens’ group studying the tragic fallout of the civil war in the State’s Dantewada district. This war pitted the Naxalites on the one side against a vigilante army promoted by Mr. Karma on the other. In a strange, not to say bizarre, example of bipartisan co-operation, the vigilantes (who went by the name of Salwa Judum) were supported by both Mr. Karma (then Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly) and the BJP Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh. ‘Liberated zone’ From the 1980s, Naxalites had been active in the region, asking for higher wages for tribals, harassing traders and forest contractors, and attacking policemen. In the first decade of this century their presence dramatically increased. Dantewada was now identified by Maoist ideologues ...

No soldiers survive the first Great War. But the author of  The Last of the Doughboys  talked to some of the last vets before they passed. This is an excerpt from  Richard Rubin ’s  The Last of the Doughboys :  The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War , the story of a decade-long odyssey to recover the stories of the forgotten world war. Rubin interviewed dozens of American World War I veterans for the book, including William J. Lake, a private in the U.S. Army’s 91 st  (“Wild West”) Division who was drafted in 1917 and served with a machine gun crew in France. At the time of the interview, in October 2003, Lake was 107; he died in June 2004.  The Last of the Doughboys  is being published this week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Pvt. William Lake and the rest of the Wild West Division trained at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., he told me, for nine months before they boarded trains for Camp Merritt, N.J., whence they would head...

In March 2004, the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta probe on its way to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It’s still on its way there—space is big. But it made a few detours along the way, including  a pass of Mars , three  of Earth  (to gain energy and boost it along its way), and two asteroids ( Steins  and  Lutetia ).  On Mar. 3, 2005, during the first Earth flyby, it took several images of our planet, including  this achingly beautiful picture  of the crescent Moon rising over the limb of our home world: My scientist brain immediately notices that the Moon looks small compared to Earth because of how close Rosetta passed to us—just under 2000 kilometers (1200 miles) above Earth’s surface, a fantastically close shave—as well as how dark the Moon looks. Its surface is, on average, far less reflective than Earth’s, so to expose the planet correctly means the Moon looks much fainter. But the part of my brain that appreciat...