"supernatural"

I've changed my mind about religion and the supernatural. I doubt this post contains anything novel, but the point is important so I'd better say something. (Dont get your hopes up. I'm still an atheist.)

O-levels

I've noticed something rather delicious about the supposed split in opinion over O-levels. No proposals have yet been published so we have only leaks and soundbites to work on. But that is still interesting. The Lib Dems are very angry at Michel Gove for his proposals. This is, I'd like to suggest, amusing.

Consider the following system of education:

1. There will be no national curriculum, instead the government will set tough exams on various subjects (called O-levels), and heads of schools will be totally free about what they should teach. 
2. There will be no state run schools, instead (so called academy) schooling will be provided by the private sector and charitable organisations with the state paying the fees so poor kids can go to school. 

This is the most ardent Tory's wet dream surely? And something the Lib Dems would fight very hard in cabinet to oppose. Except that this is not Gove's leaked plan. This is the system of education set out in chapter 5 of On Liberty.

I hate a lot of people, but not for being religious

I got into an argument the other week about this dickhead. The guy thought he could play around with deadly snakes because he was fucking stupid. He could not play around with dangerous snakes and he died, serves him right. I was criticised for saying “serves you right” by someone who was annoyed at me “hating religious people”.

A crisis update

So remember how I had a crisis? The reason that post didn't really explain what the crisis was was that I didn't know when I was writing. The first part of solving any big problem is working out what the problem is. I think I'm most of the way there. As for the solution. That's less clear. But I'm at least happy that I have a structure for possible solutions. So, here's a rough outline of what went wrong.

Dyslexia

A quick autobiographical thing. I've been thinking for a while that there's one fact that shaped my personality more than any other. It's important to know where people get their intuitions from, so here goes. Almost everything I think has been influenced by just how badly my primary school dealt with the fact that I'm dyslexic.

Polyamory

"Poly-what?" What if there was a huge category of relationships you had never even heard of? What if you never asked yourself what your sexual orientation was because you couldn't imagine others? In the same way a lot of people dont imagine polyamory. So here's some information, no argument, just an idea.

Life is not like a video game

No, not because "it has no reset button". That's boring and if, like me, you first played video games in arcades where your mum would only give you one coin, not obviously true. There's a couple of other fallacies that I want to tackle. The general heading is "life is not fair". Firstly life has no obligation to let you win. Secondly, life does not give everyone the same 100 skill points to start with.