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...

Society is underpinned by standards and expectations as to what social worlds should resemble and operate. But when the very foundations of that world are rocky and open to misuse and abuse, the society is left in a destabilized position. What remains is the question of how these worlds are tolerated in this destabilized form? Can they continue indefinitely in such a way? This place of discomfort is the abject, that which is contrary to everyday harmony. Often the locus of the abject can be expressed in violence. In the case of the Holocaust the abject impacted the individual Jewish people and the wider community of Germany and the world. The meaning that was derived to spark the violence and the meaning that remains are in stark contrast. Prior to the Holocaust the Jewish people were not abject to their community, but with a little guidance and propaganda they were led to a mass hysteria that the world hopes to never witness again. During Europe’s enlightened period the annihi...

I co-wrote a short piece on using computational methods in a history course.  If you're interested in teaching text and data mining, digital humanities, and digital methods - you might be interested in this .

Title slide for the talk. The Third Legitimation Code Theory Conference  (#LCT3 on twitter) is coming up this year and I have submitted a paper co-authored with Shi Chunxu   ( who runs the LCT Research Group in China  & works on legal discourse with LCT and Systemic Functional Linguistics).  We have a couple of manuscripts in the works - so hopfully they will be published soon.  For now here is the abstract for our conference paper: Title :  Knowledge and Rhetoric:  A Specialization Analysis of Courtroom Argumentation Abstract : Legal cultures grounded on abstract principles or rhetorical appeals to moral feelings would seem to be diametrically opposed.  Yet, in courtroom argumentation, there is a balance between interpreting events with legal statutes; and moral evaluations of character and intentions (Shi, 2017). The mix of epistemic and social elements suggests a problem: what is the basis of legitimation in courtroom argumentati...

I did some digging and I found a series of old essays I wrote during High School and just after published on the che-lives.com e-zine (i.e. a blog, but we were going for a digital analog of zines put out by activists and anarchist collectives).  One of the last ones, " The Concepts of Alienation and Surplus value, A brief look ", was my first or second sociology essay for Open Foundation at Newcastle Uni (alternative pathway into Uni). I seemed to have liked situationlists,  Cyril Smith , and Non-leninist Marxists.  Here is my ealiest collection, under the pseudonym euripidies. And here is a second collection, later, under the name Monty Cantsin.