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Post Archive
Category Archives: Politics and sociology
Believe governments
Lord Putnam (famous as the Director of the film Chariots of Fire) was on the Beeb this morning in his role as leadetr of a government all-party commission on misinformation. He was bemoaning delays in the government’s getting a bill passed to outlaw such “misinformation.”
Posted in Politics and sociology
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Things in the news are not always as they seem…
The first UK street protests over the George Floyd killing, in which many police were injured and statues damaged, occurred on 6-7 June. The very next day, a private limited company called Black Lives Matter (UK) Ltd was registered at Companies House, by a white guy from the middle-class ghettoes of Wallingford, Surrey, named David Wilks-Carmichael, its sole director.
Posted in Politics and sociology
13 Comments
How many fingers am I holding up?
Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of an English forensic psychiatrist. Way back in 2005, in an interview, he spoke about the end-stage of propaganda in a totalitarian state – the stage when it no longer matters that you know what you’re being told is the opposite of the truth:
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
6 Comments
New Commandments I give unto you
Only last year (and I’ve no doubt it’s still the case throughout the media) the Independent dismissed the concept of Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions” as a far-right conspiracy theory. This may be the case, but if so we are seeing this month exactly the same phenomenon made starkly manifest under whatever name you choose to give it.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
6 Comments
Twenty percent infallible
I heard an interesting quotation from Pastor Mike Bickle, to the effect that over forty years of charismatic ministry he considered that 80% of the prophecies and miracles he’d witnessed were false, but that 20% were genuinely from the Lord. Let’s look at that idea, which roughly matches my own, more limited, experience… or to be brutally honest, is a lot more optimistic than my experience.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Post-(modern-)millennialism
Post-millennialism is the interpretation of the Book of Revelation that holds that the Church, empowered by Christ, will bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth, after which Christ will return to a world already fitted for his reign. The main alternative views are pre-millennialism, in which Christ returns climactically to a world in chaos and establishes an earthly kingdom for a thousand years before the new creation; and a-millennialism, which interprets the “thousand years” as the “already but not yet” rule of Christ in the Church Age, prior to the Great Rebellion and his triumphant return to transform the cosmos.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
4 Comments
Weasel Communities and weasel identity
Just a couple of days after the police let rioters destroy a statue of the 17th century philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, I saw on the BBC website that the Canal and River Trust, apparently under instruction from the Museum of London Docklands, removed a statue of Robert Milligan that it owns in London, outside the museum.
Posted in Politics and sociology
7 Comments
This is the Night
Here’s another lockdown video for you , once more from a remix of an old recording of one of my songs. The views of The Vegetable Man have been encouraging, so the effort seems worthwhile. This one’s in darker vein than the last, and would probably be more effective when countries produce their first emergency budgets after lockdown and, in the UK particularly, reveal just how big a knife we’ve stuck in the economy. The Nobel Prizewinner Michael Levitt estimates that, whereas the usual averaged cost of a death (using “quality added life years,” or “QUALYs”), and therefore the “economic” health cost of saving it medically, is £40,000, the cost … Continue reading
Posted in History, Medicine, Music, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Optimophobia in science
The leader of the UK opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, was quoted on the BBC news today as saying that if there is any increase in the Coronavirus “R-number” it will be the direct fault of the government. And therein lies much of the cause of the current fear pandemic across the world.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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The New Normal – a Brave New World
YouTube algorithms gave me a “blast from the past” last week, in the form of videos by Dr Vernon Coleman. Vernon was writing for the same medical periodicals as I was back in the early eighties, though he started five years before me, and because he gave up clinical practice, was also writing for the major newspapers and producing books long after I eased off on that aspect of my career.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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