Life
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This Virus Exposes Rot
The difference between how our UK NHS and the US insurance based healthcare systems will cope with this crisis may produce important and alarming data. I suspect it will show how private medicine is insufficient when everyone else’s state of health is a consideration (epidemic, pandemic, everyone etc), and we’ll see the US lower and… Continue reading
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Artificial Flaws
I wanted to write of AI, but I’m unable. I heard Michael Sandel on the radio last week, and, in his usual socratic (we never know what he himself thinks) style, he was asking people what they thought about algorithms deciding things like scoring student papers. I often think, the contestants we’ll call them, participants… Continue reading
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Bar Staff
Bar staff have immense power, for they do the dispensing. Alcohol is fundamental to societal order. It sedates us, it encourages us, it elevates our collective spirits in these times of gloom. It offers immediate salvation in ways that religion never could and reignites fading passions. It gets us reproducing. It digs our holes and… Continue reading
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Is misery necessary?
“Marry well and you will be a happy man, marry poorly and you will become a philosopher” I can’t remember who said this, I do now think it may be true though. I read and wrote philosophy when I was married, I studied economics and politics too, and I felt very strongly about all three… Continue reading
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Prepare to become difficult
I have a theory that people seek out what they are not so they can then possibly become, what I mean by that is vicarious assimilation of experiences through reading or viewing material. I once read a series of travel books by Bill Bryson at a time when I had been nowhere in the world,… Continue reading
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A new focus on psychology
I’ve recently changed the focus of my educational efforts from philosophy to psychology, thinking maybe I have gone as far as I can with the former discipline, but thankfully stopping short of analytics, I hate analytical philosophy anyway so it’s a good time to end. Encouraged by others to pursue a career in psychoanalysis I… Continue reading
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Recognising the right to identify
An old friend phoned last night, he reminded me of something I had been thinking about a long time ago when I lived in my home country. I am from a place where prejudice permeates every conversation and every interaction, my country has effectively got two simultaneously active and opposing cultural identities, the Irish and… Continue reading
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A look in the eye
Herbert Marcuse had a problem, the rationalised world of instrumental reason used as a way of explaining the social behaviour of humans. Measurable, predictable, analytic human subjects conforming to a statistical model, fitting neatly on a graph or perfectly represented by the Nash equilibrium. I agree with Marcuse that this is problematic, people do not… Continue reading
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Too much
I’m reading a book at the moment by Robin Norwood called Women Who Love Too Much, it’s very good and equally applicable to men. Someone I know recommended it to me so I bought it for the Kindle app on my phone. Two chapters in and there are stories highlighting the subject, those folks who… Continue reading
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A life or not a life?
Let me first point out that I am not sure what a strong or weak argument constitutes for this issue aside from what I may find compelling from an emotional point of view. It may be a hard conversation to be involved in, not because of experience but because of a lack of it. Although… Continue reading
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