ELECTIONS AND VOTING
The US is not a serious country
Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. [鈥
UK
DIGITAL COMMUNITIES AND ONLINE PLATFORMS
Youth CND
Here鈥檚 another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they鈥檙e pretty well disguised unless you were there. [鈥
OXFORDUK
PHILOSOPHY RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Teaching pluralizing political philosophy
A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable [鈥
ARGENTINACHINAKRUSHIL WATENE
HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
The Odyssey and the Bronze Age Collapse
How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation I haven鈥檛 yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod鈥檚 Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the [鈥
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
If you can鈥檛 be bothered writing it, I can鈥檛 be bothered reading it.
The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my [鈥