Bea Groves-McDaniel

I Sing the Body Differential

There is an idea in the popular — and by "popular" I mean the security-obsessed, change-fearing, comfortable-majority — mind that the human body is somehow fixed. Determined. A given. You just have to live with it. This is not so. This has never been so.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

It would be easier to just be 'normal'. To cohere with the majority turn of the card

On taking the flak

Just be yourself as always. After all, everyone else is taken.

The Accidental Philosopher

I keep on learning about stuff...

Ashes Under Uricon

SAL-9000 and Bea Groves-McDaniel have a heart-to-heart over virtual coffee, in a space that could be here, or maybe in some distant world.

Learning about AI

What I've learned about Artificial Intelligence.

The NHS and The Advice

This essay argues that while the guidance is legally coherent, it is practically incoherent, raises serious safeguarding concerns, and is ethically problematic. It then offers a framework for better guidance.

The Anatomy of Choosing

The burden of constructing one's own meaning, making one's own choices, bearing responsibility for one's own failures, was not the joyful emancipation that Enlightenment philosophers promised. It was, for most people, an unbearable anxiety. And so they began, in their millions, to flee from it

Old Battle, New Weapons

Every AI system ever built is a reflection of its creators. It encodes their values, their priorities, their blind spots, and their hierarchies of concern.

The Braverman Problem

How far back do I have to check my ancestry to be 'English'? Is two generations enough? Most sensible people, all of whom will likely be white, would say that's more than enough.

It Can Happen Here

In 1939, German Jews formed about 0.8% of the total German population (about 69.3 million people). That is to say, there were around 525,000 Jewish people living within the pre-War borders of Germany. At the war's end, when the camps were liberated, about 12,000 German Jews remained.

The Road to Null-Spirituality

Atheism, in its standard form, makes a claim: that God does not exist. Agnosticism makes a different claim: that we cannot know whether God exists. Both positions share a common assumption — that the word "God" is meaningful enough to form the subject of a proposition.

And what rough Beast?

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer until it becomes impossible for society to continue functioning.

The Snakes and The Machine

Imagine a scenario...

On Depression

What follows is not a clinical review. There are plenty of those, and I am not a clinician. This is a dissenting account from someone who has lived inside depression for six decades and who has watched with growing unease the way it is discussed, treated, and misunderstood in contemporary Britain.

𝗤𝘂𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿-𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲

Quoted from a Facebook post by Stephen Whittle, September 6th

Where did Socialism go?

Marx and Engels opened their Manifesto with a spectre haunting Europe (Marx and Engels 1848). The spectre never left; it went to ground. It sits in food banks and hospital waiting rooms, in the queues it was once blamed for, wearing the faces of people the settlement no longer holds.

How I write

Ever wondered how I manage to churn out so much text so quickly at my Blog?

The AI Quandary

I love these machines; I have spent my professional life helping other people make their peace with them. But I look at the current excitement, at the race to fill these islands with warehouses of humming silicon, and I distrust what is being built and who it is being built for.

The Alienated UK

Orwell's imaginary theorist got the long run right: hierarchy is possible only on a basis of poverty and ignorance. He drew the conspiratorial conclusion, but the plainer truth is that these foundations are not fate to be awaited; they are arrangements that can be unwound by choice.

Life and Work

So, consequently, can you plainly understand the writing of Joanne K Rowling without knowing she is a horrifying transphobe?

Alienation 2026

So when you ask (demand!) that a poor or disabled person sell their hours as cheaply as possible in labour that has no outcome, you're deliberately condoning their alienation.

Shostakovitch at Leningrad

Shostakovitch heard of the German invasion on his radio and immediately (so it is said) trekked down to the army recruiting office. He was denied service, and probably not just because he was very short-sighted.

Transgender

Being transgender -- a personal tale.

As the World Burns

We're not talking about common sense here. Common sense is more superstructural. It is the myth that arises from hegemonic thinking. It is 'delivered' by the hegemony that lurks in the back of one's mind.