The Cartesian Questions Nobody Wants To Answer

Did Jesus die and rise to live forever
to uphold a world where robots, automata
and other creatures who appear to have reason
but apparently don't have souls should be
recognised as being 'among the living'?

And should those without souls live well?

When they do I would like to think
that it because those who esteem themselves
as having both a soul and sound reason,
and therefore the Eternal Moral Authority,
to realise that their 'having a soul'
makes them even more responsible
for the futures of those that don't
than they can ever understand.

And if it should be different
and those with souls
can treat those without
as shabbily as humanly possible,
with no risk to themselves,
then Eternity is surely
the acme of pointlessness.....

Popular Turn Off's (13)

The illogical overuse of superlatives
by politicians from Micheal Gove to Donald Trump,
and many shades of politician in between in public speech.

Such language is hailed as 'bold and 'inventive'
by their followers, whilst it is actually nonsense on stilts.

The misuse of these superlatives renders language
so meaningless and banal and so turns off the listener
capacity for reason that I dare not quote any examples
for fear of boring the reader into a submission
where their mind goes blank and I am responsible.

We can all find out own examples and silence them
before they numb us into a state of not being able to listen.

When We Are Bored With The Best

then the rest of  what life has to offer
won't get the appreciation that it deserves.

Not even our capacity for snobbery.

Common Judgement And The Limits Of Life

When a family of algorithms unite,
to attack something that humans put up online,
then it is natural for us to worry about internet security.

We are taught to think that the point of technology
is to provide us an infinite expression of thought,
as long as it avoids real people speaking to us directly.

We resist anything that attacks 'our freedom'.

But people have been divided by different ideals
and the records of events that they have survived
long before human beings passed so much time
amused by the effects of computer algorithms,
some of which will prove by turns to be hostile.

In The New Testament, which quotes The Old
the classic binary division was sheep and goats,
both of whom had to face their final judgement.

We are not there yet.
So before any such judgement
we can be the animals that we are,
in mixed flocks, and prone to entropy
and rather less binary divisions.

Popular Turn Off's (12)

'Slowly, the tide is turning....  '

see also

'The tanker [of state] is slowly changing direction'.

When ever pundits and politicians
talk of slow change it means
that they will be doing too little way too late
for those other people whose serious problems
they are meant to be addressing,
but they will protect their own interests with vigour.

And such talk gets them off the hook twice.

Whatever change happens and good is done
for those living in the future it cannot be credited
to any leader who is living in the present.
  

How Blindness Breeds Perversity

This is clipping from the local newspaper 

in the town I grew up from 1962,

the year after I was born.

It says that the council are celebrating

the opening of a public toilet.

I wonder, was there a ribbon
over each entrance
and did the mayor cut it?

And was he the first to use the facilities?

I knew that toilet well, for reasons common to me

and many others-the sense of my sexuality 

being fit only for keeping well out of the family house. 

I find it perverse to imagine the pomp and circumstance

that the council and the local press cooked up between them

being invested in something that was going to embody shame 

and become the stain of self mistrust for many generations of men 

who were going to wave their willies there, 

in the hope of attracting similarly stained/shamed men.

All because nobody wanted them 

as the people they actually were.

But then again this cutting is evidence 

of how much perversity can be blind to itself,

as if blindness itself breeds perversity.... 

The Low Tech Revolution That Never Happened

Part of the left wing life in the 1980's
was being critical of the lobby
that made the values of a military economy
out to be more important than the civil life
that we were told that it was there to protect.

I was one of many who wanted to see
the factories that made military hardware
that supplied the arms for all the little wars
around the world that never stopped kept open.

I believed that the factories should stay open,
but be turned over to making peace time goods,
for people that needed them.
We should end 'Want' as well as we could.

Nearly forty years on from then, and what we have
in the developed west is vast amounts of money
spent on high tech pleasures developed in Silicon Valley
where the goods are controlled be the few and used by the many.
In the digital age pleasure is defined as detached
and it is supported by the glossiest promotion possible.

For all the change in budgets and priorities
this is not how I saw the future back then,
what I saw put skills into people's hands,
rather than disabling their critical faculties.