Yesterday I met someone formally for the first time (we’d crossed paths a couple of weeks earlier). And he told me some background about the person in charge of a current campaign that helped me see recent events in a new light. Without getting into libelous details, suffice to say that sometimes people are using... Continue Reading →
Thanks to a rather brilliant writer (Beejay Silcox, since you ask), I read an 'Outback Noir' novel, by Garry Disher. It involves a cop (bent? Seems not, but who can tell and what is bent anyway) exiled from the bright lights of the (checks notes) big "city," Adelaide to - as the Americans say -... Continue Reading →
A good friend recently pointed me at a very good (imo, ymmv obvs) article "education for democratic resilience." It's full of quotable bits but for now Imma riff on this - "I believe one reason is that too few Americans understand the nuts-and-bolts of associations. An initial meeting often draws many concerned people, who may... Continue Reading →
In the end, it was not even close. The victory of the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton bye-election is, I think that much abused word “historic.” But history has different meanings. In five years we might look back on this as the "moment that Labour changed"; unlikely when I narrated the vomit draft... Continue Reading →
The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
This is the same blog post I have written dozens (?) of times. I am doing it now as a howl of despair (1) It will change nothing, except providing a fleeting spasm of catharsis. That’s all we have left, after the world historical defeat of the “left” (always a label that hid at least... Continue Reading →
“The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble Number 20 of 27 Great British Short Stories Premise: Two women - one a beaten down but surviving mother, the other a well-meaning (road to hell?) pacifist collide in a toystore, their lives controlled by, well, manboys. Review: Holy shit. I keep thinking the latest story is the... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I humblebragged that I was “done with Shakespeare” - in the sense that I had now read all the plays that - in April - I’d listed as either low or zero knowledge. This led to someone asking for a top ten they should read, and with much/further ado here it is. My rough... Continue Reading →
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