Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland?
It looks like there’s trouble brewing north of the wall. A giant ginger beast that has lain dormant for the past three years has awoken, possibly the illegitimate love child of Ed Sheeran and Nicola...
View ArticleRushdie’s victory
image credit: elena ternovaja. image used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. ‘What you have made will long endure.’ This is how Salman Rushdie signed off one of...
View ArticleThe Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to...
The concept of the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ is widely considered to be a liberal one. It is, indeed, liberals who have argued for the free exchange of ideas as a positive good. However, in a more...
View ArticleRap versus theocracy: Toomaj Salehi and the fight for a free Iran
Toomaj salehi. image: Hosseinronaghi. CC BY-SA 4.0. Although elaborate hate speech laws can make it extremely difficult, we have the right to freedom of expression in Britain. Generally speaking,...
View ArticleDonald Trump, political violence, and the future of America
image: Evan Vucci. details and non-free use rationale per wikimedia commons. Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will...
View ArticleAn upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a...
Stephen Evans highlights the myriad threats to secular liberalism and sets out what’s needed to preserve it ahead of the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on protecting liberal values, at...
View ArticleThe Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali
professor sher ali. photo by ehtesham hassan. Introduction In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics...
View ArticleEscaping Ideology with Jonathan Church: Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp...
Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp recently spoke to Jonathan Church, host of Merion West’s ‘Escaping Ideology’ podcast (and Freethinker contributor), about the magazine and its history, freethought...
View ArticleImage of the week: first edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’
first edition of The Satanic verses, in honour of international blasphemy day. Read more here.A little late to the party, perhaps, but to celebrate International Blasphemy Day (30 September), I thought...
View ArticleMy punk rock cancellation
As both a participant and observer, I’ve seen the underground punk scene increasingly succumb to identity politics and cancel culture at the expense of free thought and expression. But when you find...
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