I don’t know whether to feel vindicated, delighted, frightened or depressed as I read through Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Much of what he says reflects many of my own observations and opinions. I started reading this book in part
Continue readingTag: critical thinking
Scripturient: Blog & Commentary: What’s it all about, Alfie?
“What’s it all about, Alfie?” sings Cilla Black in the title song for the eponymous 1966 movie. But it could be the anthem for the human race, or at least those with a philosophical bent. “What’s it all about?” is certainly a question that springs to my mind daily as
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Ignorance Is Bliss (For Some)
George Carlin left us far too soon. Watch as he offers his trenchant views on what the corporate agenda wants and demands from us. WARNING: SOME PROFANITY AHEAD: Recommend this Post
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Hell 2.3
Before I carry on with my exploration of Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell, I wanted to note that I just got my copy of her other book – the Encyclopedia of Heaven, from Abebooks. It’s dated 1999, so it’s a year later than her book on Hell. Yet it
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Hell 2.2
Might be time to recap my reasons for writing this series. New readers could get confused about the content in the Hell posts, of which this is the fourth. They’re all the result of a convergence of several recent themes and activities in my life; a lot of which have
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Kill the Apostrophe? Rubbish! Keep it!
A site has popped up with one of the stupidest ideas about English I’ve read in the past decade or two. It’s called Kill the Apostrophe. Subtle. At first, I thought it was a joke, a spoof. After all, how can one realistically get rid of perhaps the most significant
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: Teddy’s Words of Wisdom
I’m not a great student of American history – my tastes run to other places and people: Napoleon, Casanova, Elizabeth I, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, China…. but I do read about it. Most recently Rick Perlstein’s history of the American Sixties, Nixonland. And in that book I
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: What in Hell…?
Hades, you know, isn’t a place. It’s a guy. The Greek god of the underworld. His territory consists of a bunch of domains, including the rather unpleasant Tartarus, where souls – called shades – suffer eternal punishment. Hades wasn’t a fun god. If you weren’t getting your skin ripped off
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: The sum of all knowledge
In his 2004 book, The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs tells of his quest to become “the smartest person in the world” by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. Right away, you can see the fly in this intellectual ointment: knowledge doesn’t equal intelligence. Jared Diamond, in his introduction
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Believing is Seeing
“He who permits himself to tell a lie once,” wrote Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, from Paris, France, 1785), “finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Troilus and Cressida
I’ve always found Troilus and Cressida a difficult play. The characters all seem jaded, cynical, opportunistic, stuffily sanctimonious, lecherous or simply underhanded. Some are merely unpleasant, others are despicable, reprehensible. All seem self-serving, more concerned with their own gains and … Continue reading →
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Digital Life
The Disaffected Lib recently wrote a post expressing ambivalence about the ubiquitous role that technology plays in our lives. It is an ambivalence I think many of us, especially those of an older generation raised on typwriters, print and analogue television, feel. On the one hand it has been an
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Reading, Writing and Memory
“Memory,” he read the headline as he settled into the armchair, resting his elbows on the wide arms to expand the National Post paper to its fullest, “declines much slower in people who read, write throughout life.” Ah. Interesting. He … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Decline in Media Credibility and Profitability
Last August the Pew research Center released the results of its latest study on how much the American public trusts the media. This has been part of an ongoing study since at least 2002, and ever since the first report, … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
I was thinking of the lines from that Fairport Convention song this week as we walked through Toronto on our three-day mini-holiday. I can still hear Sandy Denny’s wonderful, haunting voice singing the chorus of that dreamy, sad song, as … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Game of the Book of Thrones
No, it’s not about that heavyweight book series by George Martin, or the TV series based on it (or even about how you really need to read the books to understand anything that is happening in the TV series). It’s … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Not All Words Are Equal, or Used Equally
There’s an economic principle known as the rule of fungibility that states a commodity is equivalent to other units of the same commodity. For example, a litre of gasoline is the same commodity regardless of the brand or source. A … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: More’s Speech to the Mob
The scene is a riot, on the first day of May, 1517. It would later be known as Evil May Day,or Ill May Day. An angry mob, mostly comprised of apprentices, marched through the streets of London, their passion inflamed … Continue reading →
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Susan Jacoby – The Age of American Unreason
I would recommend adding this to your reading lists, I’m only a third of the way though, but it has been a detailed and interesting account of genesis and growth of the large mean streak of anti-intellectualism that is currently dominating the zeitgeist of American society. Jacoby was interviewed
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: What if you’re wrong?
Great visualization of the now-famous response from evolutionary biologist, author, and well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, when asked in 2006 about his argument that there is no god, “What if you’re wrong?” “Anybody could be wrong, ” he replies. “We could all be … Continue reading →
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