No Sacred Cows
Scepticism served medium rare
Category: Reflections
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I regularly watch Mehdi Hasan on his Zeteo channel. I have always admired him. He is quick-witted, combative, incisive, formidably well informed and, at his best, almost impossible to evade. He has a particular gift for pinning politicians to facts when they would much rather disappear into rhetoric, and for spotting the evasions, sleights of…
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Les Passantes I was 18 and living in France when I first heard Antoine Pol’s poem put to music by Brassens. Along with Graeme Allwright, Dylan, Moustaki, Cohen and a few others, their words spoke to me, stirred something deep inside. Voices from an impenetrable and cloudy unlived future, beautiful yet disturbing in a way…
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The deeper and broader thought becomes, the harder it is to sustain the rigid binaries on which much of the populist right depends: native and foreign, deserving and undeserving, loyal and traitorous, normal and deviant. “Us” and “them”. Greater understanding reveals causes, alternatives, competing perspectives and unintended consequences. It makes scapegoating more difficult because it…
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There was a time when ordering a meal involved an exchange between two human beings. One stated what one wished to eat, another pretended to be interested, and eventually something resembling it arrived. The system was not perfect. It depended upon memory, goodwill, language, competence and, occasionally, even eye contact, all notoriously unreliable technologies. Fortunately,…
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A man climbed onto the baht bus today who could have walked straight out of the early chapters of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha – the years when Siddhartha leaves his comfortable life with his father, the Brahmin, to join the Samanas[1], the wandering ascetics who strip existence down to hunger, silence, and sheer will. This was…
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On the gardener’s sidecar at my daughter’s school in Thailand, 11 years ago. “Keep it up there’s still hope. You cannot climb the ladder of success with your hand in your pocket”. Whether success means career, purpose, a scrap of happiness, or simply hanging in there with sanity intact, the message still stands. You won’t…
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I’ve long wondered whether human beings are anything more than elaborate, error-prone information processors – complex, yes, but not fundamentally different from other life forms. As artificial intelligence moves from science fiction to daily reality, the question seems less about our limitations than about our supposed uniqueness. People often insist that AI will never replace…
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# Postscript: Bill Wedderburn, Robert and the return to Inveresk There is a final part of Bill Wedderburn’s story that deserves to stand separately from the account of his remarkable legal and political career. When I met Bill at the House of Lords in 2001, he already knew of Robert Wedderburn as a historical figure.…
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What the sea remembers, the land forgets. The first people to walk this green and pleasant land came from Africa.Not recently – but in the long dawn of our species, when the only borders were rivers and mountain ranges, and the only language was survival. They carried no papers or flags. They followed herds, water,…
No Sacred Cows 