Blinking links

Anna’s tamasha 

• The first issue is that Baba Ramdev, like Anna Hazare & Company before him, is trying to legitimise the instrument of fast unto death by misappropriating Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. 

• The right of only Magsaysay awardees to be members of a government-appointed joint committee for deliberating on the Jan Lokpal Bill is most ridiculous. 

A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice: 

• One problem of liberal social thought is that it consigns a larger and larger proportion of the human race to the category of people driven into trouble. But there are other difficulties, too. Precisely because it is impossible to think of human life in consistently mechanistic terms, the liberal is soon led into contradictions. Moral evaluations are inseparable from thought about human existence, even if the metaphysical foundations of such judgments remain contentious; so it is not surprising that the article about Griffiths’s victims fairly oozes with morality, albeit of a saccharine and self-regarding kind, while at the same time pretending to avoid judgment.