The UK’s shaky diet plan
It seems fitting that a government lacking in substance is now urging the nation to lose some of its own. But its strategy for weight loss it has a basic and fatal flaw: it doesn’t work.
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Author: Julian Baggini
Review: Time of the Magicians
The birth pangs of modern philosophy may be discovered in the lives, and disruptive claims, of four intellectual titans.
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Not all slopes are slippery
Asking where this is all going to end is a very effective means of whipping up panic. But slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery and need to be treated with caution. They force us to take one of two extreme, polarized positions and do not allow anything more nuanced.
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The return of the Big Society?
The Covid-19 crisis suggests that the Big Society has legs after all. If it failed the first time, it was not because of any inherent flaw, but the disingenuousness of those who championed it. Officially an attempt to redraw the social contract between state and society by empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives, for many Conservatives it was primarily just a more palatable way to sell the shrinking of the state than a Thatcherite rolling back of its frontiers. Shorn of this not so hidden agenda, the Big Society has life in it yet.
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Reasons to be cheerful
If you want to be seen as a profound thinker, just remember the principle: dark is deep. You must take a dim view of human nature and see its prospects as dismal. There may be more money to be made writing upbeat self-help books promising easy happiness, but you will never be taken seriously in self-consciously intellectual circles unless you are unremittingly gloomy or, as such intellectuals see it, unflinchingly realistic.
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