3rd Gen Exile

“...talking to Gillespie has the feel of a history lesson about the records, all with their story to tell – not just musically but also touching on socio-economic issues, thanks to the incumbent Tory government. In his mind, nothing has changed since the 1970s; if anything, it's got worse:

"It really felt like there was no future – permanent repression, permanent bleakness. But when I look back on those times, they were better then than they are now. I mean that in a nostalgic sense, because the nature of the country has changed in terms of there now being endless wars, deregulating everything, what with public assets all being sold off. Now they're closing down the libraries and it's a deliberate ploy to cut off people from self-education. They do not want a well-informed, educated, intelligent, smart, turned-on, astute public population," says Gillespie. "They want backward, dumb-arse, illiterate, easily-guided and manipulated people. That's what they want."

"So our reaction to that was to start Primal Scream and dream our way out by being creative," says Gillespie, "because as working class kids from Glasgow, our future was being destroyed. As a kid I found the real world intimidating, so rock & roll was my only way of escaping it. It was my own private world that I lost myself in."

FIlmcomment’s Nick Pinkerton explores the few remaining local cinemas in Queens. They are now virtually extinct, replaced mostly by the giant multiplex behemoths most of us are familiar with. I grew up watching movies in places like these so the piece gave me a nice kick of warm nostalgia feels. 

From 2003: Bernie Sanders takes on Alan Greenspan. His speech and Greenspan’s response is the perfect encapsulation of the Neoliberalism vs. New Deal Style economic debate . Greenspan’s smug response seems to have triumphed back in 2003 but Sander’s position, which is identical to viewpoints he holds today, has proven to be more and more solid as time has gone on. 

Things have changed so much that Greenspan’s ideas are being utterly rejected this campaign; the mainstream economics of 2003 seem to be so discredited that even working class Republicans are voting for Trump, who despite his odious views on immigration and taxes, claims to support a strong welfare state and is against NAFTA style “Free Trade Agreements.” 

Horgan: What's your opinion of the recent philosophy-bashing by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson?

Rovelli: Seriously: I think they are stupid in this. I have admiration for them in other things, but here they have gone really wrong. Look: Einstein, Heisenberg, Newton, Bohr.... and many many others of the greatest scientists of all times, much greater than the names you mention, of course, read philosophy, learned from philosophy, and could have never done the great science they did without the input they got from philosophy, as they claimed repeatedly. You see: the scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and Kuhn) and think that this is the "true" philosophy, and do not realize that this has limitations.

Here is an example: theoretical physics has not done great in the last decades. Why? Well, one of the reasons, I think, is that it got trapped in a wrong philosophy: the idea that you can make progress by guessing new theory and disregarding the qualitative content of previous theories. This is the physics of the "why not?" Why not studying this theory, or the other? Why not another dimension, another field, another universe? Science has never advanced in this manner in the past. Science does not advance by guessing. It advances by new data or by a deep investigation of the content and the apparent contradictions of previous empirically successful theories. Quite remarkably, the best piece of physics done by the three people you mention is Hawking's black-hole radiation, which is exactly this. But most of current theoretical physics is not of this sort. Why? Largely because of the philosophical superficiality of the current bunch of scientists.