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…
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…
We are coming to the end of July, and it has been 6 months since the world, billionaires and their neo-liberal apparatchiks excluded, first properly acknowledged that we are all facing an imminent and potentially catastrophic global health disaster. At that time certain governments around the world had the basic human compassion and emotional maturity to put the well-being of their respective populations ahead of the wealth and status of their peers. Others did not.…
While the 25th Amendment to the Constitution is the legal mechanism for removing a mentally unstable psychopath from the White House, there is no democratic mechanism for the people of the USA to initiate that process. Similarly, while Article 2 - Section 4 of the Constitution allows for the removal of a criminal or a traitor from the White House, once again the American electorate has no tangible say in that process either. The fact…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic the cultural mechanisms for maintaining class deference have been at their most apparent in years. While we are told that we are all in this together, time and again the behaviour and the subtle subtexts of the pronouncements of the 1% demonstrate that their true world view is not as egalitarian as they like to pretend. Not only do the rules for the 99% not apply to the…
While nearly every country on the planet is now fighting the same virus from largely similar starting points, there will over time, be very different outcomes. For instance, less than 3 months into this worldwide disaster, we could already see that the COVID-19 per capita death rate was running at 22 for every 100,000 people in the UK, while in South Korea it was 0.45 per 100,000. Or to put that more simply, for every…