Fake news and the ethics of belief

First in a series.

On 15 December 2020 I finally graduated with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. My thesis was on the ethics of belief. It was finished at the end of 2019 and submitted in January. In September I heard the final version had been accepted.

In this Covid year the graduation ceremony was of course a virtual rather than physical event. Even if it had been a physical event I may not have attended in person as we had returned to the UK in 2016.

University of Cape Town, Upper Campus
By Adrian Frith – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=845804

Eton mess

Interesting article by John Harris on the Guardian website. He quotes from ‘England Your England’, which is the first part of George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn:

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

Nine Lessons and Carols

The Nine Lessons and Carols is a Christian service traditionally associated with Christmas Eve. It is horrible stuff.

The First Lesson is from Genesis 3: 8–19: