ByGOT – one step away from being an actual app…
Category: Society
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On The Right Side Of History
Like my father before me, I’ve been a Labour supporter all my life, but now I fear that the UK Labour Party has lost its way. These are not terrorists, but people protesting against the genocide in Gaza.
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Roll Up! Roll Up!…
I would like to think that Marina Hyde’s withering contempt would actually count for something, but to a person with no apparent morals whatsoever, it clearly won’t..
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The Nobel Peace Prize 2025
I nominate Francesca Albanese for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves it. To award it to Trump would be an utter travesty.
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The Alan Turing Lecture 2025
Sandi Toksvig gave this year’s Alan Turing Lecture. I urge you to watch it. She is thought-provoking about the nature of bias and the creeping stultification of thought that seems to be pervading Western societies.
The Mappa Mundi Project that she is involved with is also very interesting. It has the simple but essential goal of telling the stories of women. There’s a Chinese Proverb (probably apocryphal) that “women hold up half the sky”, but women only account for 0.5% of recorded human history.
On a related note, the book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn is worth reading…
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The Aids Memorial Quilt
I remember visiting the warehouse in San Francisco where the Aids Memorial Quilt is stored in 1992, and then seeing the Dutch contributions to the quilt laid out in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam during the 1998 Gay Games.
I wept both times.
Now the UK Aids Memorial Quilt is being displayed in London’s Tate Modern museum for a short time.
Lest we forget.
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The Lesson of 1933…
Professor Marci Shore explained in a video Opinion Piece for the New York Times why she was leaving the US to teach in the Canadian University of Toronto:
The lesson of 1933 is – you get out sooner rather than later
What might have seemed hyperbole at the time of the video’s making seems to be becoming more grounded in the reality of events in the US. She expands on her views in this interview in today’s Guardian. Required reading, I would suggest…
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No Man Is An Island
I was born on the Isle of Man and grew up there. Fortunately, I was able to leave it and have a full life elsewhere. Not everyone was able to do that.
This documentary hits me hard and the final words are very powerful.
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A Force For Good
The death of Pope Francis is a loss to the world. He was a radically different Pope to the authoritarian Pope Benedict and brought compassion to the papacy.
He was not afraid to speak truth to political power and clearly viewed Trump as a force for evil, decrying Trump’s deportations of migrants. He wrote, in an open letter to American bishops, that he had “followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” adding that any policy built on force “begins badly and will end badly.”
So now the process of choosing his successor begins. As an atheist, I obviously have no skin in this game, but I would hope that his successor will carry the torch of Pope Francis’s moral authority forward and not be a Pope that returns to the attitudes of Benedict.
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A Digital Coup
Carole Cadwalladr has a warning for us all…
Addendum 21 April 2025: And in this piece for the Observer newspaper, Carole gives the backstory to that TED talk. It’s worth reading, but depressing in that, once again, it shows that AI is being driven by Careless People*.
*From the Great Gatsby:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
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RIP Alexei Navalny
Today it is one year since Alexei Navalny died in a Russian Penal Colony. By coincidence, last night I finished reading his memoir: Patriot. It is an extraordinary book and terrifying as an insight into the Putin machine. Navalny is a great loss to Russia, and to humanity, killed by a system run by a thug.
The Observer has an editorial today describing Navalny as “Principled, charismatic and humorous, the murdered Russian opposition leader was everything Vladimir Putin is not”. It is worth reading and ends on a particularly chilling note:
When Trump calls Putin a “genius” who exhibits great “common sense”, does he understand – does he care – that he is dealing with a ruthless killer? When, shattering the western consensus that Putin is an aggressor to be repulsed at all costs, Trump proposes a chummy tete-a-tete on Ukraine, does he have any idea how he is manipulated by this cynical ex-KGB thug? Does JD Vance, Trump’s ignorant vice-president, realise what a dangerous game he plays when he flirts with Europe’s pro-Putin neofascist far right? It seems not. Navalny would put them straight. Except he’s dead.
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A Sermon For The Age
This week, Marianne Edgar Budde, the bishop of Washington delivered a sermon in front of President Trump urging him to show mercy towards LGBTQ+ and migrant communities. The president condemned it as ‘nasty’.
I’m not a Christian, just an atheist by nature, but it’s a very good sermon. It speaks truth to power. No wonder Donald Trump hated it and described her tone as “nasty”. The fault lies with you, Donald.
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A Grain of Rice
Remember the old story about the grain of rice and the chessboard? Here’s a modern day take on it used to illustrate the disparity of wealth in the US. Do watch it.
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Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here…
So Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that he will be getting rid of all his factcheckers on Facebook and joining Elon Musk on the race to the bottom in social media. He’s clearly kissed Trump’s ring.
To reuse a particularly powerful turn of phrase: “they are swirling in a human cesspit of their own making”…
As Chris Stokel-Walker writes:
This is an extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media – an organism that was already on life support, but was clinging on in part because Meta was willing to fund independent factchecking organisations in order to try to maintain some element of honest fact, free from political bias. Night is day. Up is down. Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk. Buckle in for a turbulent, vitriolic, and fact-free four years online.
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What Really Happened in Amsterdam?
The recent riots in Amsterdam are being treated by the media and the Dutch Government as antisemitic. Wilders, in particular is doubling down on this. Frankly, what I saw was football hooliganism turned up to 11 by external events. This was not a “pogrom”, this was a riot – on both sides. And for the mainstream media (and Wilders) to cast it in purely antisemitic terms is both damaging and immoral.
Addendum 15 November 2024:
Here’s a balanced report on the events from The Guardian; however, the damage has been done and Wilders must be delighted as a result…
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Going To Hell In A Handbasket
The news that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sower of hate, is to become the next US President is beyond depressing to me. As far as I can see, it means nothing but bad news on many fronts for the next four years. Only the Musks of this world will benefit, the rest of us are likely to be heading to Hell in a handbasket.
Many years ago, I had a T-shirt made for myself that bore the text: “Never underestimate the power of large groups of stupid people”. I should have kept it.
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A Fact Of Life?
The US vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, recently accepted shootings in US schools as “a fact of life“.
Along these lines, the sociologist Kieran Healy made some observations on the rituals of childhood back in 2019. I found his observations quite prescient and chilling, and they immediately put me in mind of Shirley Jackson’s short story: “The Lottery“, except his observations are not a work of fiction.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 