PIMA Bulletin No. 35 - March 2021

Shirley Walters's picture

This is the year of paradoxes. Everything has changed and maybe nothing has altered. The impossible is easy, the familiar impossible. Taboos become normal conduct, as the taken-for-granted slips away.

New information technologies and the use of media open up incredible learning opportunities, and more sinister ways to influence, control, enslave and destroy. There is nothing like a global pandemic or war to make the impossible obvious and easy.

C-19 pandemic sweeps across everywhere and everything. The rate and range of responses are remarkable; yet millions have lost faith in governments and leadership, science and rationality. Citizens are fed fake news by the false prophet and, fall prey to fantasy and terror; yet rediscover family, neighbourhood, and ways of living together, even as wealth-poverty gulfs widen further, New technologies hasten to gain ground on an ever-accelerating climate-change extinction crisis brought upon ourselves. The glass is half full and half empty, as Chris Brooks pointed out in Bulletin 34, in Two Victories for Science and Rationality: Why so much doom and gloom?

Extract: Editorial – the new normal? Chris Duke

 

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