Category: Latest
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Guilty Until Verified Adult: The EU KIDS Act and the Anatomy of a Con
There is a special class of legislation that announces its own virtue so loudly that one is tempted, before examining a single clause, to ask what it hopes we won’t notice. The European Union’s proposed KIDS Act — a title chosen, one presumes, with the same cynical tenderness that once gave us the PATRIOT Act…
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Do You Trust Me?
“Do you trust me?” So began a former manager of mine during the ritualised humiliation we call a performance review. It was, to put it mildly, a discomfiting inquiry from a man whose own breaches of confidence had already rendered the term meaningless between us. But the discomfort runs deeper still, for it presupposes equality…
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On the Dignity of Withdrawal
There is a distinct, suffocating odour that hangs over the modern digital agora. It is not the scent of fresh inquiry or robust debate, but of stale, recycled outrage and the metallic tang of algorithmic manipulation. It is the smell of a civilisation that has forgotten how to speak to itself, preferring instead to scream…
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Linguistic Theatre
There is a new and particularly insipid form of superstition sweeping the West, a kind of digital animism that would have made the most credulous Victorian spiritualist blush. It is the conviction that the silicon chip has acquired a soul, or at least a conscience, and that we must now hold it accountable for the…
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Politically Homeless
Once upon a time, before the beard grew grey and the world went so thoroughly stupid, I considered myself securely of the left. Healthcare, education, solidarity; these weren’t luxuries but the bare minimum of a civilized society. The strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burdens, and the weakest should not be left to rot. I…
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Reality doesn’t require Apologists
It remains a source of great amusement to me that some people style themselves “religious apologists.” Religion certainly has much to apologize for – inquisitions, crusades, genital mutilations, the ongoing sabotage of science and education – but that is not what they mean. They mean that their job is to defend religion. This is already…