Le Temps Perdu – part III

Why do I persist with this little conceit of mine – pointing back to “Posts Past” – like Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu? Not just posts of previous years’ (see top right-hand corner of blog for list of titles you can access) – but even those I’ve inflicted on you so far this year? 

The answer is simple – this blog posts on “perennial” issues which repay study even years later. Very few of the 1,500 posts have dealt with “current affairs” – and then it has to be a pretty major issue eg the two UK Referenda - the 2014 one on Scottish Independence and the 2016 one on Brexit 

“Current Affairs” is like a conjuring trick – our fixation on the action distracts our attention from the real levers of power. Indeed one of the French words for entertainment is “distraction” and, since the times of Celine and Guy Debord, the French have recognised the dangers posed by the “society of the spectacle”.

Americans have seen such disdain as elitist – with only Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to Death” (1983), Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” and Douglas Kellner’s various books daring to voice it 

This is the third in a series of this year’s posts I am listing this week in celebration of hitting the 1,500^th post earlier in the month. It’s a fairly typical selection…. Starting with scepticism, moving on to groupthink, John Berger, capitalism, Human nature, intellectual history, hyperlinks to the world’s best English-speaking journals, the learning process, the role of the state…to…extinction…

Each post with a brief summary to tempt you in…

What more could you ask for???

 

Post Title - just click to access the post	Inspired by	The basic message
Musical interlude	Gavin Bryers	To soothe our souls
Scepticism and moral panic	courageous posts from a fellow-blogger	Newspaper headlines about Covid19 need to factor in deaths from normal flu; economic lockdown could be counterproductive
Critical Masses, naked Emperors and freebies	a question left hanging in a previous post	What happens when groupthink takes over – a popular post this one
Visual and other Links I Liked	images and spectacle - the weekly roundup	John Berger, Guy Debord and George Galloway (and an amazing mag resource) all figure in this whimsical collection
Back in the saddle	PC issue causes blog silence for a few weeks	Some important Covid19 analyses
Links I liked	A book explores a century of foretelling the end of capitalism; Bregman’s “Humankind”; and intellectual history	We need to think more about what and why  we think
My Day	a (rare) video conference; and a tabular presentation of the structure of a book I’m drafting	How young and self-confident academics are these days
Learning to Learn	A video on the learning process takes me back to my memories of lecturing and training	A polyglot reveals her secrets
Journals worth reading updated	A desire to share goodies	Although newspapers are in deep trouble, small mags seem to be thriving
Links I liked	A richness of links	Podcasts and videos
A Challenge to Financial Thinking	Robert Skidelsky is pouring the books out!	Political economy is the only useful way to approach economics
Money Talks - why we need a new Vocabulary of social change	“Capital Rules OK” – why can’t we come up with an acceptable word for our condition – neoliberalism? The Beast? Minotaur?	Capitalism is undermining what’s left of democracy
revised blogroll	Recognising the few deep, consistent bloggers	It was a bit invidious to select only 6 blogs – all 50 are worth a look!
We need to talk about...the state	Long Pankaj Mishra article in LRB	Covid has demonstrated that only a few states are strategically governed
Who's having a good Covid19 War?	Some political scientists actually giving us useful assessments of government performance	Neoliberalism has stripped the state of its capacity
Covid19 as a warning shot	some Reflections/Lessons from the Future	We face extinction