We are careless about the words we use and the way we use them. I don’t mean the evolution of language over time, the entrance of slang into our lexicon, or even the rampant misuse of there, their, and they’re, even though that last one drives me mad…but not angry.
Continue reading “Your Crisis or Mine?”Dead places
I live in a neighbourhood of Scarborough, Maine, called Blue Point. “Neighbourhood” is probably the wrong turn; to me, that inspires thoughts of a high street with shops that you walk to, corner stores and pocket parks and three-decker houses with three families per deck. Blue Point is a village in the old English meaning of the term – a collection of houses, with a few places of business and a church, between other villages, some of which might merit the title of town or borough, or might not. Blue Point is a village, and interestingly, it’s one of the many sites of the genocide of native Americans hundreds of years ago.
Continue reading “Dead places”Robots at the opera
Conflict between humans and machines has become a fertile theme for futurist science fiction. The Matrix films explore some philosophical issues about personal and political freedom, within the context of a brutal struggle between the subterranean community of human survivors and, at surface level, the tyrannical empire ruled by their electronic adversaries. By contrast, the Blade Runner films imagine a world in which ‘replicants’, designed and made by powerful corporations, serve humans through their work – mostly collaboratively, but sometimes not – while lacking the status and rights of ‘people’. If Matrix suggests a war for human survival once the machines have taken over, Blade Runner suggests a civil rights campaign for machines, in a world run by humans.
Continue reading “Robots at the opera”Not so Fast! Wilderness Matters
This year, I lost my pilgrimage to the wild. While Wuhan was still the only city under lockdown, I planned a backcountry trip in Yosemite National Park. I wanted to be awed by the power which can crack a mountain in half and leave sheer vertical cliffs behind.
Continue reading “Not so Fast! Wilderness Matters”Finding a soul
There’s an old aphorism, variously attributed to Edmund Burke or Clemenceau or Churchill or any of a dozen others, saying that if one is either a conservative or at the very least not a socialist (or communist, or liberal, or insert era-appropriate label for the elevation of the common good over individual benefit) before the age of 25 (or 20, or 30, or whatever), then one “has no heart.” The punchline, of course, is that if one is a socialist or at the very least not a conservative (or a Republican, or reactionary, or insert era-appropriate label for the elevation of capital and the individual over the common good) after the age of 40 (or 30, or 29, or whatever), then one “has no head.”
Continue reading “Finding a soul”