Category Archives: Philosophy

Truth will out

Well, I’m not talking about the fall of Boris Johnson, though clearly the general principle applies, on the small scale, to habitual liars ant their parties and lies about one’s poor memory, and on the large scale to the West’s repeatedly claimed humiliation of the madman Putin by mighty victories in a proxy war, quickly turning to a rout for its own economies as well as for the Ukrainian regime. No, I’m thinking of identity politics.

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Moral Immunity

Here’s a quote from an Unherd essay by Jacob Howland: Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that infects people who are morally immunocompromised.

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Logic on fire

A two-part essay by the excellent Nick Hudson, of PANDA, is available here and here. Nick discusses how the disastrous worldwide COVID response stems, in large part, from epistemic failure.

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RUSSIA – and the logic of final causation

Joe Bloggs is a useful YouTube channel for analysis of the terminal state of many nations’ economies following the West’s sanctions against Russia, though of course it also notes their individual problems of corruption, COVID or whatever. Replying to queries about why each title begins with an accusatory “RUSSIA,” he explains that if Russia had not invaded Ukraine, the destructive sanctions would not have ensued.

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Understanding Putin

An old university friend who also follows The Hump wrote to ask me about the sources I use most on the Ukraine conflict, and shared some of his own with me. Among them is Postil Magazine which carries some weighty and worthwhile articles. One which I highly recommend is this one by Etienne de Floirac, giving a deep insight into the political (and irreducibly religious) basis of Vladimir Putin’s vision for Russia. It confirms what I had suspected since the start of this war, that to see Russia’s role apart from its spiritual aspect is an almost universal error in the West. To what extent that neglect is deliberate, and … Continue reading

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Essential misinformation

It’s got to the stage when the GMC’s current move to get doctors struck of the medical register for “peddling misinformation” on social media is just another run of the mill event, rather than registering on our minds as the atrocity it actually is. I guess it’s like the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when the show trial of yet another revered government leader discovered to be a capitalist spy must have become routine. You took it for granted that most of your heroes were really traitors, and could only rely on Comrade Stalin.

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How to be an innocent witch

Instinctively, you’d think that the longer propaganda goes on, the more cynical and worldly-wise the population would become. Maybe that’s true in the long term, but it ain’t so in the present psychological onslaught that we have experienced particularly in the last two years.

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Ducking mispropaganda

I abandoned using Google when, after reading Edward Snowden, it became obvious that not only was it designed largely as an information-gathering exercise on me, but that it was in itself generating propaganda by deciding what I am allowed to learn.

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Mere authoritarianism and its role in COVID

Chris Whitty offers an olive branch to vaccine refusers by saying they’ve mainly been taken in by online misinformation. One such conspiracy theory is that the restrictions imposed by those like Whitty are nothing to do with preventing COVID, and everything to do with coercing people into having vaccines whose actual value is suspect, and whose serious dangers are well-documented. Why would anyone ever think that way?

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Old views on biology tested empirically

With biology nowadays so focused on evolutionary theory (“nothing makes sense” etc – Dobzhansky) it’s easy to forget that the predictions of older theories about the living world can still be tested against the wealth of modern data. Sometimes, they do surprisingly well: sometimes they don’t.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | 1 Comment