The cultists, the mind demons and the coup plan are the sort of thing we’ve learnt to expect from 2021, but some details take a turn for the absurd:

Geoff estimated that there were roughly 10 “super weapons” or “super theories.” He said we already had 1–2, one being we had solved philosophy (but not completely, he admitted — all he had left to do was prove that time exists and maybe a few other details, was what I remember him saying).

I am now wondering whether Peisithanatos counted as a Motivational Philosopher:

"MOTIVATIONAL PHILOSOPHER"
You've Got Respect The Husserl.
There's No Such Word As 'Kant'.
"Vive, Ride, Ama." - Saint Augustine pic.twitter.com/X3nr7mv8gx

— Damian Counsell (@DamCou) October 11, 2021

One of my Durham contemporaries did write on motivational speaking, but nobody was motivated to measure its impact so, academically speaking, it never happened.

Reportedly the new rationale for mandating Covid vaccines for children is as a psychological measure ‘to help them avoid worrying about the pandemic and learning to get on with their peer group’.

In that case a placebo could do the job without any risk. Placebos are still effective if you know they’re placebos, and possibly even if you don’t actually take them. They also work better if they’re expensive, which is why I clearly need the taxpayer to buy me the most lavish placebo on the market, to tackle my anxieties about getting on with my richer peers.

Many estate employees didn’t know the Americans were pulling out until the day they departed.

Not Afghanistan in 2021, but the failure of Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s attempt to create a planned community in Brazil, as described in Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America 1927.

Other topics in the book which audiences on either side of the Atlantic might find familiar include poor economic stewardship (the banking decision that would set off the Great Depression), odd mores and moral panics (‘in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offence for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes’), terrorism (anarchist bombers and the Red Scare) and related suspicion of migrant communities (apparently the Twenties were a rough time for Italians in America as well as blacks and Jews), a concern with what the climate was doing (the oddest of that year’s odd weather being a devastating flood of the Mississippi), grand social projects with unforeseen consequences (Prohibition was ‘easily the most extreme, ill-judged, costly and ignored experiment in social engineering ever conducted by an otherwise rational nation’) and dubious uses of science (the ‘prominent and learned’ ‘coalition of academics and scientists’ behind eugenics).

Too little influence of environmental philosophy, or too much...?

Over 208,000 people support a #StateofNature target in the #EnvironmentBill to stop the decline of #wildlife by 2030.@DefraGovUK has one more chance to make this urgent change the Bill when it returns to Parliament in September. pic.twitter.com/ehomVJPKmc

— CPRE The countryside charity (@CPRE) August 19, 2021