Consensus and respect are hard to monetise – but perhaps we can take back the power to redefine our world from the algorithms Peter Lewis Before our eyes, a political and media ecosystem algorithmically programmed to seek out and amplify conflict is gifting the no campaign something it has neither earned nor deserves: false equivalence.… Read More The Politico-Media Complex has turned ‘balance’ into an outrage machine
First posted October 26, 2011 Clark Whelton The decline and fall of American English, and stuff I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you… Read More Vagueness: the linguistic virus in spoken language in the late 20th century
First posted April 11, 2012 By Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. In advanced capitalist countries this process is now outstripping our political and social capacity to adjust… Read More Commodification: the essence of our time
Chrissy Stroop For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival’. Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin. The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christian fanatics, has been slow to secularise relative to European countries. In fact, the… Read More Americans are rejecting religion as the Christian right becomes more extreme
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth Ideology – that is what… gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good… in his own and others’ eyes From this point the roads go to the right… Read More The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil
First posted December 18, 2016 Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty? Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers and writers of the 20th century. He lived through World War II first as a French prisoner of war, then as a professor of philosophy associated… Read More The Republic of Silence: Jean-Paul Sartre on the Aftermath of War and Occupation
Dear Colleagues and Friends, As a full month draws to a close since the tragic death of philosopher and teacher Samarveer, the words and the attached article below, supremely inadequate though they might be as tokens of remembrance, are nonetheless by way of a small tribute for him. I shall be grateful if the mail… Read More No Banner For Samarveer
First posted June 06, 2016 Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein reached and swayed the 1921 Nobel committee. NB – it is remarkable that the Roman Catholic Church banned three of Bergsons books in June 1914; and the Nazi’s banned Einstein after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 – DS This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for… Read More Jimena Canales: This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity
First posted December 23, 2013 Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot: Charlie Chaplin Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot: Groucho Marx My way of joking is to tell the… Read More Lewis Lapham on Mark Twain, laughter and ‘the world’s colossal humbug’
When British people say ‘we do pageantry like nobody else’, they are indirectly admitting that we depend disproportionately upon the past to give meaning to the present. Jeremy Seabrook It may have been the grey of the London sky and the tender green of new leaves on plane trees along the Mall that lent to… Read More The Underlying Sadness Beneath the Glittering Coronation of Charles and Camilla
After the truth-shower 