PU#242 - AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT: On Our Obligation To Acknowledge That Things Are Not Right
Read More“It was important, once, we were told, that we learn the lessons of history. “
PU #239 - MAKING LINKS - The Skills Atrophy We Haven't Noticed
Read More“My suspicion is that, in a world where connections we used to have to work for ourselves have been repeatedly handed to us for so long (and without any resistance) by pre-loaded links and algorithms, adults raised in the previous paradigm will have seen a serious skills atrophy in their cognitive abilities to make such links for themselves, and children, who have never needed to develop those initial skills to atrophy, will be raised with a serious deficit“
PU #238 - CENSORING TOURETTE'S - Baffled By The BAFTAs
Read More“How the BBC dealt with John Davidson’s attendance at the BAFTAs last week is definitely morally questionable and offensive, but not because they let the racial slur slip past the censors when other insults were cut…“
PU #237 - CHANGE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE - If You Want It To Be
Read More“The more we recognise how much of the way we do things in the world is the result of human choice rather than unavoidable circumstances, and that some different choices could make a different world, the sooner we might start making such choices and dismantling the impoverished way things are for something better.“
235. EVERYTHING GOOD COULD STILL EXIST - On The Internet Without Capitalism
Read More“The most powerful idea we can ever hear is this: if we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist.“
234. WHAT IF THEY WERE RIGHT? - On Kids These Days
Read More“What if what our parents warned us about did cause us harm but we were too harmed to see?“
232. WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER - On Not Wanting To Win
Read More“Winning is important to people only because capitalism has made it so. Winning is a means, in our rigged and unfair system, for some of our intentionally limited resources or opportunities to be granted to the victor(s). Winning means access to prizes previously forbidden or inaccessible. But it’s important to acknowledge that prizes are a social construct made meaningful only because of their manufactured scarceness or the inequalities we’ve chosen to allow in the distribution of the resources from which the prize comes.“
231. ABNORMAL NORMS - On Philosophy’s Futility In Our Continuing Decline
Read More“To say there are things of philosophical interest about Donald Trump’s unilateral kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and takeover of the country’s economic resources by force, is to, perhaps, show the failings of philosophy.”
230. CHRISTMAS SHOPPING - In Defence of Chainstores
Read More“This is not a defence of capitalism, nor a defence of the current order, but it is a defence of the notion that perhaps the proliferation of corporate chain-stores everywhere, which once made me mourn the quirky individuality of the independent high street, is not necessarily a bad thing.“
229. WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING? - My Social Media Avoidance Project
Read More“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Because the desire to make something can make us redefine the original “nothing” and see new potential in it we were previously blind to.
226 - TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER - Or How To Burst A Bubble
Read More“It’s always worth paying attention when you get your insular little bubbles popped. “
224. LIP SERVICE - On the Difficulty of Transforming What is Entrenched
Read More“As Audre Lorde so famously put it: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Yet schools, as reproducers of the dominant culture of any given society by design, are the very definition of “the master’s house” and it is they which are giving students their useless tools. “
222. JUSTIFYING FREEDOM - On Assuming Rights We Might Not Have
Read More"Freedom is not as self-evident as these young people seem to think it is, and an appeal to individual freedom is not the knock-down killer argument they seem to think that it is. In a world where are freedoms are routinely curtailed, often for very good collective reasons, the argument that X can’t be allowed because it will take away some freedom or another is simply insufficient."
221. FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE? - Has Philosophy Failed Us?
Read More“The comfort of thinking it can’t happen here is the surest sign that it is already near. Right on your doorstep, right on your street. Amazing how well we can walk in our sleep”
219. CULTURAL COLLAPSE - What Happens When We Lose All Context?
Read More“We are adrift and discombobulated. Deeply so. “
218. FLAGS - Against Lamppost Patriotism
“Once we did have a symbol of the country that used to make me proud:
hotels welcoming those seeking asylum from persecution with open arms.
Now the hotels are being shut down by angry mobs
and all we have in their place are cheap flags tied from lampposts
wilting damply in the rain. “
Read More215. IT’S OK TO END THINGS - On Saying No Under Capitalism
Read More““I’d prefer not to” - the catchphrase of Melville’s scrivener, Bartleby, is a slogan of privilege. And yet it shouldn’t be. “It’s ok to end things”. And yet for many under capitalism, ending some things are impossible.”
213. IS GOOD CONTEXTUAL WHEN IT COMES TO ART? - Aesthetics and Geography
Read More“This conclusion doesn’t intend to demean our ideas of what we find good or bad in art. Rather it intends to expand our definition. Recognise that the thing we have written off before might only be written off because it was the wrong time or place to receive it. That everything can be given a second chance, or a third, or even a fourth if you are open to seeing what it is that others seem to appreciate but which you cannot, yet, seem to access.“
212. A WASTE OF TIME? - How Ought We Spend Our Days?
Read More“the older I get, the more I am coming to realise that everything we do could be perceived as both a potential waste of time, or as precisely what time is there for: to fill it. The assumption that there is an objective “ought” about what we should do with our days is the mistake. “
210. HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND? - Radical Intentions Within the Seemingly Mundane
Read More“I have long been inspired by the teaching philosophies of bell hooks, and a core element to her ideas about both teaching to transgress and teaching community, is to “genuinely value everyone’s presence” in the classroom. to “have interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognising one another’s presence.““