“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the […]
OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love CO2 James Ephraim Lovelock was the much honoured British scientist famous for a beautiful and irresistible idea known as the Gaia hypothesis. Dr Lovelock was a self-made man in the best tradition of scientists of a previous age. His parents were poor, and he financed his […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 15 It’s not surprising, I suppose. To look squarely at what is happening in the world at this time is extremely disturbing, and people have quickly evolved reasons for not doing so — even in my unvaccinated circles. There is one argument I’ve come across a number of times which seems to rest […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 14 And let us not speak falsely now, for the hour is getting late. –Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower In the garden at Bohemia there’s a brick circle laid into the gravel, and some months ago a young man called Theo fashioned a perfect yinyang inside it, using pale brown pebbles and […]
“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 7 I spent my first five years in a Legoland suburb of London at the end of the Piccadilly Line. I was born at home, 2am on a Tuesday morning, I believe, with a transparent membrane covering my head — a ‘cowl’, the midwife called it, explaining to my mother the traditional belief […]
Parijah Diaries 11 “Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” ― Jacques Derrida After their gig the Filipinos like to go skate-boarding at midnight down on the beach road. It’s their new craze, and a great way to […]
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI, Brixton 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the early eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Thirty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept […]
“When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name — hallucinations?” […]
“Science isn’t really about truth, it’s about power.” This comes close to an admission that his own mechanistic-materialist outlook, too, is predicated not on science but on power. And when he announces in this grandiose and scientistic fashion the end of soul, spirit and free will, he is speaking not for truth but for power.