26/3/2020

Trying Some Stuff

Filed under: — Bravus @ 12:06 pm

I’d had the same theme for this blog for years, so I thought I’d mix it up.

Still working on this theme, which looks a little untidy in the header and for which I think the post titles are much too big relative to the body text, but I’ve used similar colours to the old theme to make it feel a little familiar.

The archives are missing as a menu but the categories are there, and the search is available.

While we’re talking meta stuff about the blog on the blog, I have a broken link checker running, and it tells me about new broken links just about every day. In most cases there’s not much I can do about it – it’s a link to an old page or news story and the page has just gone away. Short of deleting those old posts, which seems like deleting my own history, I think I just have to leave them there with the broken links.

Still writing here now and then, when I want to write something that fits this medium better than Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Any feedback on the theme very welcome, but I’m still tweaking it at the moment.

17/3/2020

For Whom The Bell Tolls, or, Death and the Dutton

Filed under: — Bravus @ 11:52 am

Pretty sure I’ve quoted this here before, because I think it’s so powerful, but it’s relatively short and it bears repeating:

No Man is an Island

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

It first came back to me when I heard that Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton had contracted COVID-19. Dutton is a vicious and awful man, who has brutalised refugees for many years and continually seeks opportunities to brutalise them more and harder.

Unlike quite a few others, though, I didn’t wish that he’d die from the infection. There was an online debate about ‘civility’, but to me that isn’t the point: the point is Donne’s poem. Anyone’s – any human being’s, and arguably any animal’s, but that’s a more complex conversation for another day – death diminishes me.

If I’m to genuinely be a humanist, then Dutton being voted out of office and losing his power to harm is something devoutly to be wished, but his death is not something I can wish for.

The other context that made me think of Donne was the sentiment – probably only pronounced in black humor, though in many cases I don’t think so – that “don’t worry, this virus only kills the old and sick”.

That, too, devalues the lives of others and, I would argue, devalues our own lives by extension.

There are good and important arguments to be had around euthanasia but that’s also something for another day. When it’s a death from disease, what we ought to be doing is whatever we can to ensure that others live.

None of us is an island.