One of the best 42 minutes I have spent this month was listening to a Start the Week broadcast on Radio 4, presented by Adam Rutherford on 29 September 2025 - herewith is link:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002k37y
It is definitely worth spending 42 minutes of your time.
Quite apart from that the world we currently live in seems to have taken a rather large step backward. The old adage (a word that would come under the category of common knowledge) of moving two steps forward and one step backward, to indicate slow progress, no longer applies. Since the advent of Trump and Putin as buddies, and others of their ilk we have moved backwards at least a millennium to the dark ages. To paraphrase Ernest Borgnine’s comment about John Wayne in response to the movie Brokeback Mountain in 2006, I would say “If Petrarch were alive today he’d be turning over in is grave”. You may recall the film was an American western portraying gay cowboys. In any event there are very few indications that the 21st century is anything like a renaissance, which is what it should be.
The skills are literally at our fingertips. With smart phones we can find any reference and communicate in any language on earth with simple translation software. We can buy and sell our wares at the tap of a screen. We can organise transport and delivery without leaving our homes or not as the case may be. The freedom that technology has brought us is phenomenal. What we appear to lack is the education and the knowledge that should go with it. It has also opened itself up to scams and frauds of all kinds and proliferated mendacious behaviour on a grand scale.
The control of that technology and the abuse it can allow is frightening, and because of the poorly educated and gullible it is being used to further ignorance rather than knowledge and consequently it is taking us backward to a dark age of dictatorships, nationalism and isolationist regimes. We have a chance to move things forward in the most remarkable ways, yet the world seems intent on pissing it all away by catering to the whims of the likes of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and any other narcissistic political scoundrels you care to name.
But Ed great and heartening result in Moldova!
ReplyDeleteAlso just started to read “On Antisemitism “ by Mark Mazower which is, funnily enough about your topic in your blog. Just started it.
Quite agree with your observations. The usual suspects Daily Express Telegraph Mail etc. but the social media could be used as you suggest. Iain