#Brexit, the populist surge and the crisis of complexity — Paul Arbair
Thank you Paul Arbair who commented on a brief reference in my post on Joseph Tainter to Brexit in Tainterian (sic) terms with a link to his own far far far…
Tag: history repeats itself the first time as tragedy the second time as farce
On virtues of the heroic ages: from “After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre
The exercise of the heroic virtues thus requires both a particular kind of human being and a particular kind of social structure. Just because this is so, an inspection of…
The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter
Somewhere along the way I came across references to Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies and finally read it in recent weeks. Tainter’s prose style reminded me a little of John…
Perpetual Motion. Part 2 of 5. Nthposition, Sept 2010
Part 1 here. Original story here Scene 4: Nineteen years and seven months ago. Along with John Cooper, a student from Manchester itself, older than everyone else in the group,…
From Preface to “Medieval Technology and Social Change”, Lynn White Jr.
Voltaire to the contrary, history is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians. The most remarkable of these illusions is the belief that the surviving written…
Inherit the Earth (part 2) Nthposition.com, December 2004
Part 1 is here Ten years from now Malcolm and Linda and the ones with no names, the old folk whom they picked up on the road, went down into…
Anthony Burgess on decimalisation.
This quote made me wonder about the cognitive impact of decimalisation. There seems to be a consensus that cognitive challenging activities help to reduce and/or delay dementia, and I wonder,…
David Szalay’s “The Innocent” and Andrei Makhine’s “Brief Loves That Live Forever”
While Makine is Russian-born (writing in French) and Szalay is Canadian-born, these two works have much in common. Short, but genuinely epic in scope, showing how individual lives were shaped by…
Séamus Sweeney 