Since the USA election I’ve been in a state of confusion. In the days leading up to the election I genuinely didn’t think that the American people would vote for Donald Trump again. The mistake I made was in overlooking the thousands of years of research, analysis and peer-reviewed writing that humanity has done into the context of just such political moments, instead allowing myself to be led by new-media influencers and old-media celebrities whose…
A couple of weeks ago I found myself chatting with two highly educated adult men about pirates, as is the tendency of grown men when their partners aren’t watching. The conversation started when one of the men claimed to be confused as to why his two young children were so obsessed with pirates when the objects of their awe were little more than rapists and mass-murderers. The other agreed, referencing a celebrity chef’s programme on…
In my previous post I talked about fascism being the political goal of capitalism in order for it to reach its economic goal. In simple terms capitalism’s primary objective is to concentrate the ownership and control of wealth and resources into the fewest hands possible. In order to achieve this goal capitalists have to concentrate political power into the fewest hands possible so that political power isn’t used to stop them from concentrating wealth. Neither…
I haven’t been able to motivate myself to write for 4 years now. I lost two family members to cancer in relatively quick succession and then the COVID pandemic struck. My friends and family, much like everyone else’s reacted in a myriad of different ways to the pandemic. Among them, certain previously well educated and measured people who I had loved and respected for most of my life seemed to lose all sense of balance…
Giving evidence on Capitol Hill about the events on 6th January, former Capitol police chief Steven Sund made a series of interesting statements. His defence of the Capitol police was based on two arguments. The first being that the federal agencies tasked with providing intelligence ahead of the event had not warned of anything close to what was being planned. And the second was how, rather than just the usual MAGA rally crowd descending on…
In 1798 Thomas Malthus published his ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’. Originally developed as an argument in response to thinkers such as William Godwin, the aspect of the overall argument that has since become synonymous with the name Malthus is that uncontrolled populations will eventually overwhelm the resources that sustain them, and therefore will inevitably lead to mass-poverty and mass-starvation. In order to understand exactly how this idea came about it is worth…
Time and time again this government has siphoned money out of the exchequer to redistribute it to their chums. Albeit, chums that were promising to deliver a product or service to alleviate the pandemic, but which almost always turned out to be entirely unfit for purpose. By October, this policy of “pandemic profiteering”, or to put it a little more plainly, embezzling public funds during a public health disaster was being estimated to have reached…
The American establishment have begun congratulating themselves for the checks and balances built into the constitution which are apparently now heading off an attempted coup by a far-right group within the Republican party. The anchors, editorialists and even late night hosts are applauding one another on how a handful of Judges have seemingly stopped a cult of personality from taking advantage of loopholes in the political system. What is less likely to be mentioned is…
The term ‘fascist’ has become a useful term for many on the left for both simplifying and denigrating anyone else’s political position that disagrees with them. One of the key problems with this is that it often overlooks how closely entwined capitalism and fascism actually are. And with most of us, to differing degrees at least, active in the capitalist system it means that if we are not careful we may well overlook our own…
The modern “democratic” systems of state management and organising communities that are used around the world today are almost without exception based on hierarchical frameworks of one type or another. It is worth explaining what I mean by that. I understand a hierarchy as a system of people organising themselves based on different levels and different roles. The hierarchical framework that I am discussing is about political power, and by its very nature about the…