Category: Archive
-
stimulation theory
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…
-
and such small portions…
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…
-
mortal thoughts
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…
-
the state we’re in
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…
-
philosopher kings and collateral damage
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…
-
church of the minorities
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.…
-
‘this’ is this – on the weaponisation of moral outrage
originally published 21st September 2023 “Consumer capitalism is a theoretical economic and social political condition in which consumer demand is manipulated in a deliberate and coordinated way on a very large scale through mass-marketing techniques, to the advantage of sellers.” (Wikipedia) To the casual and disinterested bystander, the recent hysteria over Russell Brand sits on…
-
war lore
originally posted 14th January 2024 Narratives don’t give us reality or truth but we live by narratives because they give us meaning. And meaning, the way we interpret sequences of events, is more important to us than truth. It’s in this way that history, our own sense of our lives and who we are and…
-
antisemitism now
It’s interesting that when the existence of Israel, the Jewish nation, is once again threatened by so many delightful human beings, the opportunity for anti-semitism in the U.K. and, of course, elsewhere, is aired so passionately, so disingenuously, not just by anti-Semitic journalists and keyboard warriors, but media institutions like the BBC. It’s also interesting…
-
angry humans, happy birds
We need to live more like birds and less like dogs. Most birds are social animals, like dogs, but with a key difference, being that, unlike many mammalian species, avians are generally free of group hierarchy. Of course, this may only be a general rule for birds that can fly. After all, chickens, for example,…