Category: Current Affairs
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‘Sometimes the Burned Landscape Blooms Most Lavishly’ | ‘All This Is Temporary’
Beautiful – and important words here from Rebecca Solnit, via Robert Macfarlane. Something all writers – and politicians – need to digest: On that same plane, I’m really grateful to Barry Taylor for sharing this talk given by Mark Fisher in February 2016, in which he gives a rather brilliant summary of his thinking… and,…
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The Cloud of All-Knowing | Democracy and Demagogues in the Age of Data
“True power is not the strength to force someone into slavery, but to make them happily lock their own manacles, as if chains were adding to their liberty.” Yesterday The Observer published a long and detailed piece that attempted to join (some of) the dots between the ‘big data’ socio-political technology firm Cambridge Analytica, and…
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From Russia, With Chaos
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been re-reading Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, each page pushing me towards the same, slightly counterintuitive conclusion: if you want to understand Trump’s America, you need to look to Putin’s Russia. I first read the book when a colleague – a history teacher I’d…
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A Gandhi for the West?
I watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi this week. I remember being taken to it by my parents back in 1982. There was an intermission half way through as the reels were changed. I was 10 years old and as the film opened with his assassination, then jumped back in time, I remember being blown away by the…
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Body-Cams for Teachers
Absolutely nothing terrifyingly Orwellian about this then. I think the key issue here is about creep in terms of use. “The cameras are not on all the time. Where there is a perceived threat to a member of staff or pupil for example, they are used. It’s not like a surveillance camera.” That, I think,…