, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”
This wasn’t Churchill’s finest oratorical effort, but it was clever. As well as denouncing the forces of darkness and the enormity of their aggression, it was an invitation to ordinary Britons, suffering the horrors of war at home, to reflect on the challenge ahead. He was, in effect, asking fellow citizens: “Of what are we made?”
Seven decades later, one wonders how the great man would view the kind of people the British have become. What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which he urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.
For evidence of our self-inflicted abasement, look no further than this month’s ruling from Europe’s Court of Human Rights that Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist preacher, regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s main inspirational leaders in Europe, cannot be deported from Britain to his native Jordan because his trial there might have contained evidence obtained by torture.
According to a recent government report, some 3,775 former foreign prisoners, who were in line for deportation by the UK Border Agency, have been released from custody and are living here, most thanks to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a family and private life. A Nigerian rapist was due to be sent home after losing a series of appeals in British courts over his jailing for an attack on a 13-year-old girl. But Strasbourg’s worthies insisted that they must protect the culprit’s “social ties” with Britain, which had blossomed while he defied expulsion.
…
ruments do today. Maybe they will even feel like musical instruments. Maybe there will be a virtual saxophone-like thing you can pick up in an immersive virtual world. Maybe you’ll have to wear special glasses and gloves to see and feel it, or maybe there will be other gadgets that do the trick. Pick it up, learn to finger it and blow, and it will spin out virtual octopus houses and worlds of other fantastic things with the ease and speed that a saxophone can spin out musical notes today. This will be a new trick in the repertory of the species, a new twist in the human story. The same parts of your body that were used to make language possible will be leveraged to make the stuff of experience, not symbolic references to hypothetical experiences. True, it will take years to learn how to play things into existence, just as it takes years to learn to speak a language or play the piano. But the payoff will be tangible. Other people will experience what you breathed into being. Your spontaneous inventions will be objectively there, shared to the same degree that perception of a physical object is shared. In order to approach this ideal destiny, VR would have to include that expressive reality-emitting saxophone or other protean tools, and it is an unknown whether these tools can be created or not. But suppose it can be done.fn2 Then virtual reality would combine qualities of physical reality, of language, and of innocent imagination, but in a completely new way. This destiny for virtual reality is what I call postsymbolic communication. Instead of telling a ghost story, you’ll make a haunted house. Virtual reality • will be like imagination in that [IT] will engender unbounded variety. It will be like physical reality in that it will be objective and shared. And it will be like language because adults will be able to be expressive with it at a speed that is at least comparable to the speed of thought.
Jaron Lanier - Dawn of the New Everything (p. 295). Random House. Kindle Edition.
…
ome. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.
Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible. I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.
The Coronation – an essay by Charles Eisenstein
…
ller in the HISTORY of ART from his home city of Nuremberg he crossed the Alps more than once in trecherous conditions, staying in icy mountain shelters. The ship on which he sailed for six days to see a beached whale in Zeeland was almost lost in a winter storm. He lived in Venice in times of cholera, and possibly picked up malaria on a trip to the Low Countries where he was astounded by Aztec gold in Brussels and the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent. And all of these journeys were undertaken during outbreaks of the plague" and so you can only just imagine how disappointed I was also, that as far as the National Gallery's Exhibition in, London was concerned "the strange creatures, saints and distant landscapes depicted by the great German artist were thrown together with the work of lesser painters in a show that veers between wondrous and inexplicable." What an absolute shame therefore that although "His travel journals are full of astonishing sights – soaring comets, conjoined twins, the bones of a giant (which in fact belonged to a whale). He sees, and draws, girls in Dutch costume, Turkish merchants, African women. Boats lie at low tide in the port of Antwerp, fantastical castles rise on pinnacles above the river Rhine. There is a sheet of magnificent sketches of dozing lionesses, a blue baboon and even an alarmingly sharp-eared lynx in the new zoos of the Low Countries, alas only the last appears in this long-anticipated exhibition devoted to Dürer’s travels. To say that the experience in the Sainsbury Wing is baffling would be an understatement. Veering between wondrous, meandering and occasionally inexplicable, this is a show without a map."
…
Added by Michael Grove at 11:42 on November 26, 2021