Arron Allmark

Philosophy, Epistemology, Bibliophile

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

You are good at identifying biases in others...and you do so with remarkable ease

But when it comes to ourselves (our own distortions and self-deceptive patterns) we are terrible at it

This tells us something crucial:
You are my best source of self-correction...and I am yours

[Crewkerne Gazette @CrewkerneGaz]

For the next two days, we will pause our satire and share clips celebrating Ann Widdecombe’s greatest moments. Ann was a fearless champion of free speech, and her words feel more relevant than ever.

Please join us in paying tribute to her.

[Chris Willman @ChrisWillman]

Bob Dylan in the NYT today, in a piece where artists in their 80s were asked to describe the best and worst parts of being that age, and whether they had advice for the president on his reaching the milestone. (Dylan apparently passed on the final question, not surprisingly.)

[We don't deserve cats 😺 @catsareblessing]

you're the main character and humans are just background..

[Chris Bryant @RhonddaBryant]

Murder rates
Ohio: ~50 murders per million people
United States: ~59 murders per million
England & Wales: ~8.6 murders per million
Physician heal thyself.
Motes and planks.

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

My son set me this.

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

“A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.”

-Rudyard Kipling

[Naval @naval]

If it’s not one of the best books you’ve ever read, don’t read it.

[Arron Allmark @Cryptoarron]

@ToKTeacher @GadSaad Ordered

[Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk]

“Apprehending violent and dangerous criminals is a full contact and messy task which may appear shocking to observers with little experience of policing in the real world.”

Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley writes to Zack Polanski.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCdaily]

St George he was for England,
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
For though he fast right readily
In hair-shirt or in mail,
It isn't safe to give him cakes
Unless you give him ale.

[Arron Allmark @Cryptoarron]

@youfibre the worlds worst customer service awards goes to @youfibre. 2 years with BRSK not an issue, you take over no Internet for a week, next to hopeless customer support, engineer didn’t turn up as planned. Still no internet. #AVOID

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

This is Goethe on why reading alone is not enough:

“People think that by reading they become learned; but it is not so. Reading only supplies materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. Without reflection, what we take in remains external and does not truly belong to us.”

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

G. K. Chesterton explains that reading gives a man more lives than he was born with:

“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”

[David Davis MP @DavidDavisMP]

For those of you interested in jury trials, this is Parliament at its best. 👇

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story.

A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island?

It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel.

These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time.

Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’

Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’

Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind.

Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world.

I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived.

I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life.

Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

—G. K. Chesterton

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” 

—Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

[Lee Brown @leebrown2]

Goosebumps! People often ask, is Shakespeare still relevant? Here is a great example, from the Steven Colbert Show, in which Sir Ian McKellen delivers an extraordinary speech. Shakespeare’s words are timeless, urgent and important.

#Shakespeare #ianmckellen #stevencolbert

[Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson]

Not long ago I was flying back from Poland after my first visit to Auschwitz, and mulling the horror of what I had seen - the hills of children’s shoes and suitcases, the tonnes of human hair. What struck me was the sheer scale of the operation and the obvious truth that the Nazis had not done this on their own. The rounding up of innocent people and packing them into trains : this greatest ever act of mass murder was committed with the active complicity of huge numbers of European civilians in every occupied country.

On my plane back from Warsaw I happened to meet the daughter of an old colleague who told me that she no longer felt safe to wear a Star of David round her neck in London. I was furious and ashamed at the failures of policing and political leadership that have allowed her to feel so unsafe. Anti semitism is alive again in Britain, Europe and around the world. The old virus is awake. We must never be so arrogant and so conceited as to believe that our civilisation cannot fall again. We must remember the logic of this hateful prejudice and where it leads.

The sad truth is that today’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the most vital for decades.