Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

. @ANGLIhere and my paper "Vaccine sentiments and under-vaccination" is now out about in the world and online for everyone to see: https://t.co/bEn4HBE75w — Mathew Toll (@MGHToll) November 18, 2020 New paper out co-authored with  Ang Li  on the issue of vaccine hesitancy and under-vaccination that looks at the factors associated with vaccine attitudes (very strongly agree with vaccines to very strongly disagree with vaccines) and vaccine behaviours around the MMR vaccine (full dosage, partial dosage, no dosage).  And the consistency between factors associated with attitudes and behaviours, showing when practical barriers impede the translation of positive vaccine attitudes into full uptake.  Title: “ Vaccinesentiments and under-vaccination: Attitudes and behaviour around Measles,Mumps, and Rubella vaccine (MMR) in an Australian cohort ” Abstract:  Objective The study aimed to examine the consistency in factors associated with attit...

A short  Goodreads Review of Sun and Steel  by Yukio Mishima that I wrote a little while ago. I have to say – I do not quite get the adoration that people have for this book on YouTube. People talk about it as a kind of masculine self-help book about mastering the “discipline of the steel”, weightlifting and weapons, and embracing your physical being and physical experience. The book does detail Mishima's journey to leave his room and transform himself through lifting steel, running, and fencing. Flirtations with the military, etc. Yet it isnt simply that, as the subtitle suggests "Art, Action and Ritual Death", it presents a worldview on relationship between word (spirit) and action (body) and their reconciliation in death. One of the notions that I was sympathetic to is that there is a problem of overindulging in introspection and the idea that the ‘surface’ of things might contain its own kind of depths (of experience) and that the ‘depth’ within oneself are a series ...

This post is a review I wrote of  Salvatore Babones 's book 'The New Authoritarianism'  for Good reads  a couple of years ago. I intended to write an extended post on the book for the blog but never did. So here is the original review: Babones offers an account of a “new authoritarianism”: an illiberal transformation of liberalism from the classical philosophy of individual freedom to a rights-based discourse that ‘empowers’ people on their behalf and removes rights from the realm of democratic contestation. This transformation of liberalism is underpinned by the authority (or rather tyranny in Babones's framing) of a new liberal expert class of professionals and managers that control liberal institutions, nationally and globally, and filter the range of policy options presented to the voting population. This is an intriguing thesis – elements of the argument have an logic that we have heard before. Garrett Hardin suggested that human right framework...