Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”
Critically, though, what should be …
The Playmobil Society vs. The Game of Nations
Language, and by extension its emergent feature, narrative, is one of the distinctive characteristics that make us human. Humans are “storytelling animals,” as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall would say; cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer called man an “animal symbolicum” (or “symbolizing …
Technocrats Cut Ireland at the Knees
Driving home after Christmas, we pulled in at the last toll plaza on the M8 to Cork. It had been dark for hours with ‘Storm Gerrit’ still pelting. As I lowered the window to hold out my card, a voice …
Technology: Weapon of the People
In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.):
The utopian and dystopian visions of the …
Technology: Weapon of the People
In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.):
The utopian and dystopian visions of the …
3, 2, 1, Timber
[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]
Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time….
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn …
What We Lost Between Then and Now
Sometimes you find evidence that a prior generation had thought through and solved a moral problem in the oddest of places.
Several years ago, while pondering the fact that life went on perfectly normally during the 1968-69 flu pandemic (even …
How universities killed the academic
Po-faced poIs it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there …
How universities killed the academic
Po-faced poIs it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there …
The Consensus Conspiracy
What is a consensus? At its heart it is a group of people thinking that something is most likely correct or good or the best way to do or think about something.
What is a conspiracy? At its heart it is a …
The Cruelty of Modern Death
Progress involves improving on the past. Once, we used leeches to suck out an excess of cancer-causing humors, or just blamed them on the wrath of the gods. In modern hospitals, we now image such tumors deep within the body, …
Levers of Control: Accept or Flee?
The extreme levels of control that were in evidence across the world during the ‘pandemic’ did not usher in anything new, in principle, but merely its exacerbation. To be sure, there were all kinds of justifications for such an intensification …
Mountains to Climb, Civilization to Save
For reasons I can’t explain, I said ‘Yes’ when asked to join my daughter for a weekend cycling in the Victorian High Country. My wife and I would do a little gentle ride on Saturday, nothing too severe, then on …
The Cartelization of Beauty
Who at one time or another in their lives has not wondered about the suitability of their looks, and their adequacy as currency in the popularity and mating games? I would have to guess pretty much everyone, especially between the …
Authority Isn’t What It Used to Be
When one frames the current developments in the world – which may be framed in several ways – according to the question, whether the gradual waning of authority in the course of time, particularly since the end of the Second …