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RUSSIA and Belarus are unlikely champions of democracy and freedom of speech. But a postmodernist approach to politics can yield odd results in the post-Soviet world. In recent weeks these authoritarian regimes have denounced each other’s authoritarianism and deployed state-controlled media to attack each other’s lack of media freedom. Bizarrely, this war of words has been waged in the name of brotherly ties and economic union.

What do educators in Singapore and China do? By their own internal accounts, they do a great deal of rote learning and "teaching to the test." Even if our sole goal was to produce students who would contribute maximally to national economic growth — the primary, avowed goal of education in Singapore and China — we should reject their strategies, just as they themselves have rejected them.

both nations have conducted major educational reforms, concluding that a successful economy requires nourishing analytical abilities, active problem-solving, and the imagination required for innovation.

Observers of current practices in both Singapore and China conclude that the reforms have not really been implemented. Teacher pay is still linked to test scores, and thus the incentive structure to effectuate real change is lacking. In general, it's a lot easier to move toward rote learning than to move away from it

on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.

I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.

Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.

John Naughton, writing in the same British paper, deplored the attack on the openness of the Internet and the pressure on companies such as Amazon and eBay to evict the WikiLeaks site. “The response has been vicious, coordinated and potentially comprehensive,’’ he said, and presents a “delicious irony’’ that “it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamoring to shut WikiLeaks down.’’

A year ago, he noted, Clinton made a major speech about Internet freedom, interpreted as a rebuke to China’s cyberattack on Google. “Even in authoritarian countries,’’ she said, “information networks are helping people to discover new facts and making governments more accountable.’’ To Naughton now, “that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.’’

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."

Chua argues that “Chinese” mothers “are superior” because they demand absolute perfection—and won’t refrain from berating, threatening, and even starving their kids until they’re satisfied.

Chua acknowledges that her argument will offend softy “Western” parents, who prefer to coddle rather than throttle their kids—parents who prioritize happiness over achievement.

Though I’m anything but permissive, even by Chua’s standards, I am one of those “Western” parents that absolutely does prioritize children’s long-term happiness over their achievements and performances.  Ironically, I adapted these values from a confluence of Eastern philosophy—particularly Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Buddhist teachings—and Western science, which provides ample evidence that success follows happiness, and not the other way around.

John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, has identified a need to be "grossly intolerant" of certain views that get in the way of dealing with important policy problems: We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality... We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method. One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense. That we don't kind of shrug it off. We don't say: ‘oh, it's the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it.

Fortunately, Andrew Stirling, research director of the Science Policy Research Unit (which these days I think just goes by SPRU) at the University of Sussex, provides a much healthier perspective: What is this 'pseudoscience'? For Beddington, this seems to include any kind of criticism from non-scientists of new technologies like genetically modified organisms, much advocacy of the 'precautionary principle' in environmental protection, or suggestions that science itself might also legitimately be subjected to moral considerations. Who does Beddington hold to blame for this "politically or morally or religiously motivated nonsense"? For anyone who really values the central principles of science itself, the answer is quite shocking. He is targeting effectively anyone expressing "scepticism" over what he holds to be 'scientific' pronouncements—whether on GM, climate change or any other issue. Note, it is not irrational "denial" on which Beddington is calling for 'gross intolerance', but the eminently reasonable quality of "scepticism"! The alarming contradiction here is that organised, reasoned, scepticism—accepting rational argument from any quarter without favour for social status, cultural affiliations  or institutional prestige—is arguably the most precious and fundamental quality that science itself has (imperfectly) to offer. Without this enlightening aspiration, history shows how society is otherwise all-too-easily shackled by the doctrinal intolerance, intellectual blinkers and authoritarian suppression of criticism so familiar in religious, political, cultural and media institutions.

tirling concludes: [T]he basic aspirational principles of science offer the best means to challenge the ubiquitously human distorting pressures of self-serving privilege, hubris, prejudice and power. Among these principles are exactly the scepticism and tolerance against which Beddington is railing (ironically) so emotionally! Of course, scientific practices like peer review, open publication and acknowledgement of uncertainty all help reinforce the positive impacts of these underlying qualities. But, in the real world, any rational observer has to note that these practices are themselves imperfect. Although rarely achieved, it is inspirational ideals of universal, communitarian scepticism—guided by progressive principles of reasoned argument, integrity, pluralism, openness and, of course, empirical experiment—that best embody the great civilising potential of science itself. As the motto of none other than the Royal Society loosely enjoins (also sometimes somewhat ironically) "take nothing on authority". In this colourful instance of straight talking then, John Beddington is himself coming uncomfortably close to a particularly unsettling form of unscientific—even (in a deep sense) anti-scientific—'double speak'.

The idea that your personal characteristics could be linked to your political ideology has intrigued political psychologists for decades. Numerous studies suggest that liberals and conservatives differ not only in their views toward government and society, but also in their behavior, their personality, and even how they travel, decorate, clean and spend their leisure time. In today’s heated political climate, understanding people on the “other side” — whether that side is left or right — takes on new urgency. But as researchers study the personal side of politics, could they be influenced by political biases of their own?

Consider the following 2006 study by the late California psychologists Jeanne and Jack Block, which compared the personalities of nursery school children to their political leanings as 23-year olds. Preschoolers who went on to identify as liberal were described by the authors as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient. The children who later identified as conservative were described as easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable. The negative descriptions of conservatives in this study strike Jacob Vigil, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, as morally loaded. Studies like this one, he said, use language that suggests the researchers are “motivated to present liberals with more ideal descriptions as compared to conservatives.”

Most of the researchers in this field are, in fact, liberal. In 2007 UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute conducted a survey of faculty at four-year colleges and universities in the United States. About 68 percent of the faculty in history, political science and social science departments characterized themselves as liberal, 22 percent characterized themselves as moderate, and only 10 percent as conservative. Some social psychologists, like Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, have charged that this liberal majority distorts the research in political psychology.

we're so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we're neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it's not too late to make some "corrections" to our high-tech habits. It's time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.

examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that "the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways."

the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television.