Category: Uncategorized
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Memoirs and reflections on the media and the UN
Note – this was addressed to my colleagues at the UN’s Video Section on my retirement, in 2023. Dear all I wanted to share a few thoughts after 25 years working with the UN family – 8 with UNICEF, a couple of years with UN News and OCHA – and then about 15 with UN…
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Dylan still unknown
Watched “A Complete Unknown” – the biopic of Bob Dylan, on the plane. I was disappointed. Yes, it is well acted, well filmed etc – but, for me, it is essentially a carefully made pastiche, a re-presentation of Dylan the public man as I already knew him – the myth. I found it dissatisfying. We…
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Did the world take a disastrous wrong turn? I don’t think so
First the positives: I found this book informative and interesting on several levels – not having read a whole lot of anthropology. The essential message I took away was that human development and the way we organize our societies, is a complex process and the simple narrative of – small hunting bands led to organized…
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Is it cool to like Adam and the Ants? Thoughts on originality
The coolness question is really the wrong question for Adam and the Ants – but it’s still relevant. I went to see them live in London in 1981 and was blown away by a couple of things Adam wrote in the programme notes. I can remember him saying he was a fan of Michael Jackson,…
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D.H. Lawrence. Reading him now I’m much older
My opinion on D.H. Lawrence is inescapably mixed. He’s one of my favourite writers, and there are passages in his works that no other writer could have written (in a good sense). But on the other side of the ledger, Lawrence went through a fascist period for several years, often rejected science and rationality, and…
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Is Joyce’s Ulysses a great novel? No.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed” etc etc James Joyce’s Ulysses – published in 1922, banned, controversial, “ground-breaking”. I have many, many times heard the novel extolled as one of the greatest feats of literature in history, number one…
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Marx, Freud or Newton?
We were discussing the most influential figures in human history. I was plumping for Isaac Newton. My friend said Marx and Freud. I immediately said, “both fading.” I don’t think my friend was overjoyed with that reaction. But that is what I continue to think, on further reflection. Both have been extremely influential – I…
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My tickle does exist objectively, sorry Mr. Searle
Mountains and molecules have an existence that does not depend on being experienced by a human or animal subject; they are ontologically objective. Pains, tickles, and itches exist only insofar as they are experienced by a subject. They are ontologically subjective. John Searle, After the End of Truth – part 1 The above quote is…
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Is ChatGPT really intelligent? Of course it is.
(Written in 2023) I realise I am wading into a contentious and in fact extremely momentous issue. Many of the points I will make are not provable, in the sense that their veracity can’t be strictly measured against unequivocal empirical evidence. They are more in the tradition of philosophical arguments, a framing of the issues…
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