Religion and political allegiance

What are the religious differences between Australians who prefer the Australian Labor party, the Democratic Labor party, or the Liberal/Country parties? Before we answer this question from the data of the ‘religion in Australia’ survey¹ it may be useful for at least some readers to give a short summary of the relationship between denominations and voting patterns. I apologise to those readers for whom all this is old ground.     

ONE FIGHT,ONE TEAM: THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT ON INTELLIGENCE,FRAGMENTATION AND INFORMATION

In its report published in 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (known as the ‘9/11 Commission’) analyses the functioning of the Intelligence Community (ICo). It indicates that the ICo is both over‐fragmented and guilty of not sharing enough information. The Commission recommends that central control of the ICo needs to be strengthened and that more incentives for information‐sharing should be designed. This article takes a critical look at these two recommendations. Sharing information carries major risks and is therefore not something that can take place as a matter of course. Moreover, information has to be subject to a selection process before it can be shared. This selection cannot be measured objectively, so mistakes in the selection are unavoidable. Strengthening central control also poses risks: it engenders more battles over territory, it does not improve understanding of the capillaries of the organization – the capillaries being where the primary processes of information gathering, validation and assessment take place – and it involves the destruction of checks and balances. Fragmentation may even be functional since it leads to redundancy, itself a safeguard against the risk of misselecting relevant information.     

CAST THE FIRST STONE?

Notorious scientific scandals leave the impression that a line between ethical and unethical research can be drawn, but routine examples show that an ethical penumbra exists. Breaches of ethics in science rarely surface. Most collegial charges of unethical conduct can be dismissed as being partisan; outsiders’ethical questions are more threatening, because they imply that violations are widespread. Such implications can be neutralized by “self-regulation.” Unethical behavior must be purposive. Technical violations can be attributed to ignorance. The downplaying of ethics preserves the “community-of-scholars” myth; highlighting the ethics issue would destroy this myth.     

Cosmopolitan Aspirations: New Media,Citizenship Education and Youth in Latin America

A wide variety of supranational organizations and networks are currently promoting educational initiatives aimed at disseminating particular values and notions of citizenship in Latin America via new media and in particular the Internet. These organizations exercise a growing influence on educational objectives and techniques in the region. Despite the fact that access is still modest among many sectors in Latin America, the hope is that these new media will contribute to the eradication among young people of undesirable behaviour such as delinquency and political apathy, and instead foster a stronger sense of civic responsibility. That sense might underpin a more constructive, entrepreneurial global youth culture espousing universal, multicultural values rather than particularistic, parochial ones. The Internet is presented in such initiatives as possessing intrinsically educational, entrepreneurial and democratizing properties. The article explores the activities of supranational organizations and networks operating in Latin America, and seeks to provide a glimpse of the idealised youth identities that they envision. It is argued that the new roles assigned to education are shaped by new media optimism, cosmopolitan aspirations and a post-national rather than nationally anchored conception of citizenship. Theories of governance and governability are used to understand how these developments can be seen in terms of the globalization of politics and the ensuing changes in the forms, rationalities and techniques of governance in a wide range of issue areas, including education.     

North Korea Accord Is a Model for Iranian Crisis

As the Soviet Union collapsed and China shifted to the market, it was said that communism was nothing more than the longest road between capitalism and capitalism. It now looks like the Bush‐era neo‐conservatism is similarly a long road back to the realism from whence it departed. The US is now talking with North Korea and Iran instead of preempting them through war. A dissident Iranian scientist, the former top UN arms inspector and a former US secretary of state ponder this state of affairs.     

Critical Rationalism: The Problem of Method in Social Sciences and Law*

Abstract. The author characterizes the model of rationality devised by critical rationalism in opposition to the classic model of rationality and as an alternative to this. He illustrates and criticizes the trichotomous theory of knowledge which, going back to Max Scheler, is received in a secularized version by Habermas and Apel, also under the influence of the hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and of the so-called “critical theory” of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The author criticizes historicism as it expects to be an alternative to naturalism and not to make use of the method based on scientific laws. The author proposes as an example of technological social science the model developed in economics starting from Adam Smith. With regard to legal theories, natural law is rejected because of its sociomorphic cosmology. It is proposed that legal science as social technology has two parts. One part aims at efficient interpretations of valid law (for the space-time region concerned) and a second part aims at the construction of efficient norms for the modification of valid law by legislation