I have been living in retrospective nostalgia for the life n times of George Orwell this last week, when I read Homage to Catalonia, and discovered the very good BBC Arena documentary which interviews dozens of interesting and important characters from his life, who were still alive at the time (1983 but also with snippets … Read more
I hang out on debateanatheist on reddit, trying to be satisfied, but something’s just missing y’know? i can’t tell when i lost the ability to be satisfied by logic. Now i need some crazy to feel like life has a meaning. I’m hooked on the mystery like a drug. Sure i love physics, but even … Read more
For a long time whenever i meditate i have wandered in my mind back to Arunachala, the holy mountain in Tamil Nadu, India, which i visited when i was 19. The mountain, and the Ramana Ashram at its foot, have stayed with me through all the subsequent years, a touchstone of silence like no other … Read more
I began writing my memories in this post, and i think i’ll put down some more though it is a very messy state right now. my first three years were at Farrer Primary, a small public (government) school in the newish suburb of Farrer, in Canberra’s south. My grandparents had lived there and mum in … Read more
At the hour of midnight on 1 January 2000 I was up a tree outside the Tate Modern, watching the fireworks shot from a barge in the Thames bursting through the smoke and London fog. I had become separated from my friends in jumping over a barrier to escape the crush of the crowds. Sadly, … Read more
One of my favourite times in London was circa 2000 when I lived in West Hampstead, at 13 Ravenshaw street, with Jula the bellydancer and her many cats and dogs. The window of my little first floor bedroom looked out over the garden onto a patch of wilderness and a railway line beyond, the metropolitan … Read more
my first sensations are of the light and the sun.. flooding into the front room of my grandparents’ house where my parents and i were living in Farrer, Canberra, in 1978, and the sounds of mum playing the clair de lune on the small ‘minion’ piano there.. the green sofas of that front room and … Read more
Despite his ineffable charm, Trump has again been shown to be unpopular. What this suggests to me is that if his strategy is to remain in office past the next election, then he is not going to be able to rely on the normal democratic methods. Any second rate autocrat can tilt the balance of the … Read more
The challenge for humanity in this century is to coordinate itself into a single organism. With the internet we now have the beginning of a central nervous system and are able to be conscious of the state of ourselves as a coordinated whole. We are conscious of the challenges we face more clearly than ever, … Read more
The philosophy of tolerance and of tolerating intolerance is of course an interesting paradoxical one, much more interesting than any philosophy of intolerance. The reason I can’t understand ideologies of intolerance, is that they seem to be mired in hopeless contingencies. How do you decide what to be intolerant of? What to hate? The decision … Read more
Imagine going about your daily life and never being sure if the people you meet around you are real humans. Some of them, no one knows quite how many, are AI powered robots that churn out the propaganda of their creators. They seem real at first but when they are engaged, it is clear that … Read more