The Sooty Empiric

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...

I recently read and enjoyed  this  dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam . While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ɔdɔfírinne: They’re trying to defund us, would you believe it!?
 Grádwuma: I would, trusting sort that I am, but all the same I’d feel better if you’d tell me who they are and what they mean to defund.
 Ɔ: Oh, cute — at least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on. G: Working on my tight-five. Ɔ: Well in the meantime, I just got back from faculty senate where I was told that in light of...