Author: Daniel D. Watkins

First published, 1st October 2018 Hemingway’s swan song, The Old Man and the Sea, was more perfectly written than it has been read. I mean, it seems to me that those who have buzzed about it, like flies around some Faberjé egg, may have given the fable less thought than it deserves. The work is true…

First published, 7th October 2018 Here’s a blond/e joke: before the pleas are taken from the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War, the president of the Tribunal, Lord Justice Colonel Sir Geoffrey Lawrence addresses the twenty four Nazis in the dock: “Before we begin, gentlemen, which one of…

First published, 15th October 2018 What is potentially interesting about the Dunning-Kruger effect is not so much that there is a cognitive bias in those tested but between those at opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum, when perceiving each other. Intelligent individuals may well have a tendency to assume all are as intelligent as themselves.…

First published, 21st November 2018 There is something seriously wrong with the processes of domestication be it of wolves, wild cats or human beings. Domestication is, itself, a form of violence. Domestication is the abuse of the natural state that leaves some battered and bruised and almost all (dogs, cats and people), ultimately, agoraphobic xenophobes.…

First published, 7th December 2018 The world is the mind in which we live. Ours is a tropical universe. Those who believe that reality is really real are those most at ease with their own fantasies, some might say, delusions. Monotheism, perhaps, has given us some of the most theatrical ‘realities’ and yet Judaism and…

First published, 20th November 2019 Is life a cycle or a path? Well, it’s kind of neither either/or both. Is a trajection. Let me explain… In common parlance, our life is referred to as being connected to the idea of cyclicity. Of course, though the ‘life cycle’ is a fairly common way to express the…

First published, 28th March 2020 One thing Steven Pinker succeeds in doing very well in his recent book on progressivism, Enlightenment Now is to explore and expose how effectively and efficiently human beings are so easily self-misleading and, in more recent times, willingly and wilfully ignorant of data and facts, even though these are more freely and…

First published, 20th March 2020 Is there something rotten in the state of the state?  The Covid-19 ‘thing’ is possibly the biggest test of blind faith in the so-called social contract we, the present generations, have ever had to endure. It’s so significantly unsettling, to all but the most zealous doorstep applauding dupes, that a…

First posted, 7th April 2021 Plato was probably a fool. The reason this is a fair assertion is because, unlike his mentor, he failed to understand that it is not the role of the philosopher to proselytise but to question. But that Plato was a fool is easier to accept if we are able to…

First posted, 18th August 2023 There was this guy who came into my classroom at a school in Malaysia. He insisted that I should wear the house colours for the next inter-house competition. The students had to wear the purple and white harlequin polo shirts, so it was only right that the staff did too.…