The Sooty Empiric

What follows is not quite something I believe, nor even something I fear. It is something I fear I believe, my worst tendencies as a thinker and person. I share them in the hope it will be purgative, and also hoping that maybe others who are afflicted with similar thoughts might at least feel some camaraderie. Here is how society seems to me when I am at my worst. The very top echelons of our power hierarchy are occupied by extremely wealthy people, or those who have managed to secure high office in states large enough to seriously push back on capital. For the most part this latter means politicians and generals in the USA and China, though Putin and the odd EU bigwig might just about count here. These people are, when of sound mind, amoral sociopaths whose goals are utterly alien to the rest of us. Our global social order filters for callous disdain for human lives, hardening one's heart to the sufferings of the main part of humanity, and single minded focus on accr...

My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post. The first of his, which I also enjoyed, can be found here . I really appreciate his honest and frank look into the emotional and social stakes of his own work on animal rights. Without further ado over to Birch! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Liberalism and animal rights sit uneasily together. Liberalism calls for mutual toleration between different ways of life. Among the deepest, most entrenched parts of many ways of life are practices involving the farming, killing and eating of animals. In calling for robust animal rights to be written into law, animal advocates are calling for many of these practices to be banned. If a ban is to mean anything, it must be enforced. If robust animal rights were to be enforced, many would face criminal convictions for continuing to live as they do now. The tension is obvious and arises constantly, because many animal advo...

    In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The dates I see often given for the heights of this supposed social phenomenon are 2014-2020, and the thought is there's been a general tapering off since the pandemic of whatever woke was. I actually also feel like I can sense a vibe-shift, but then maybe that's just the very fact that my online circles keep saying as much reflecting back on to me. In any case, people who believe this has occurred have also been offering retrospectives on what they think we have learned from this era and how it will be remembered. I thought I would use my blog to contribute to the genre. So this will be that: some words on what I think wokeness is/was, the extent to which anything has changed, and what lessons will be learned from this. There is actually a small-industry of philosophers trying to define " wokeness " (sometimes " wokeism ") a...

For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own impressionistic sense of things. The big picture view is that I think that in some ways the USA is in a worse state than the UK, but I would be more optimistic about the USA's future despite that. So the major difference that has basically defined my whole experience of adult life is that since 2008 the British economy has more or less been stagnating when not actually declining. Source . It's not that there's been no growth, it's just been on the whole pretty slow. This is unlike the USA, which has actually experienced periods of sustained economic growth in that time: And, like, you can f...