An interesting story from the Swedish blogosphere: Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister, now foreign minister, has a blog. He is in fact a natural blogger, picky, aggressive, articulate and contemptuous of lower beings; and his blog is a real one, too with comments that he may actually read, where people argue furiously with one another.
In the course of these arguments, they say things impermissible in polite society, and sometimes, in Sweden, illegal. Now Bildt himself is being investigated for commiting a possible crime against the consitution as a government minister because he did not remove the nasty ones quickly enough. His defence is also interesting: that they were anyway archived, so removing them would make no difference to their availablity. I don’t know quite what is meant here — is he referring to Google? I should, I know, find this out later. For the moment, I just put this entry up, so as to rid myself of another open tab that requires action.
andrew
thought this might be your sort of thing, don’t know if you saw it. Apologies for messaging you in comments, but i’ve lost your email and the one offered on this website is broken
all the best
tom
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2007/lectures/bps.html
//
Thursday 11 October 2007
What makes humans so different?
Professor Robin Dunbar, FBA
Director, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology,
University of Oxford
Chair: Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, President, British Academy
Although we share many aspects of our behaviour and biology with our
primate cousins, humans are, nonetheless, different in one crucial
respect: our capacity to live in the world of the imagination. This is
reflected in two core aspects of our behaviour that are in many ways
archetypal of what it is to be human: religion and story-telling. The
lecture will show how these remarkable traits seem to have arisen as a
natural development of the social brain hypothesis, and the underlying
nature of primate sociality and cognition, as human societies have been
forced to expand in size during the course of our evolution over the
past 5 million years.
Professor Robin Dunbar was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in
1998. He is a Project Director of the British Academy Centenary Research
Project ‘Lucy to Language’: The Archaeology of the Social Brain, and is
shortly to leave the University of Liverpool to take up the post of
Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology,
University of Oxford.
//
Thanks for that, Tom. It will be diarised.
And thanks for noticing that I had somehow blacklisted the address on the front page here. I will fix that prontissimo. (andrew) followed by (at) followed by {thewormbook.com} should always reach me.