First posted October 21, 2011 The law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief. Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is not The mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas or, say, five men or, possibly six. In the end, these… Read More Wallace Stevens and the ‘Academy of fine ideas’
First posted February 01, 2019 The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism: by Mark Edmundson Reviewed by Jonathan Derbyshire What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud, on the burning of his books by the… Read More The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism
John Harris You may not have heard of Nat Wei, AKA Lord Wei of Shoreditch. Until very recently, the 46-year-old Conservative peer – ennobled by David Cameron, for whom he once did some work on the concept of the “big society” – had certainly escaped my attention. But when he published a brief article on the activist… Read More Ludicrous ideas, perpetual scandal: British Conservatives are in absolute freefall
Truth, and the memory of truth, are public enemy number one for authoritarian governments today. The most relentless Swachh Bharat programme has been a campaign against Sachh Bharat. Mitali Saran The guiding principle of the Modi government is ‘If you can’t fix it, bury it.’ Information is power, so suck up as much of it… Read More One nation, one version
SUCHET VIR SINGH Param Vir Chakra recipient Captain Bana Singh (retd) joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as the Bharat Jodo Yatra entered Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Friday. Referring to Captain Singh as the “Param Vir Chakra recipient who hoisted the Tricolour on Siachen’s icy heights”, Gandhi took to Twitter to post a picture of himself walking beside… Read More Param Vir Chakra recipient Capt Bana Singh joins Bharat Jodo Yatra
URMI CHANDA A lot of literary writing recognised as peace literature is retrospective, as few writers set out with the intention to write about peace. However, in a couple of new releases, the intention is rather palpable. Sahana Ahmed’s Amity, which released in December 2022, is an anthology of 95 poems by 47 writers from France,… Read More Peace literature is the new boom in South Asia
In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth. In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% took nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – six times greater than the wealth made by the poorest 90% of the global population. “Since 2020, for every dollar of new… Read More Richest 1% Took 2/3rds of Global Wealth Since 2020
Mona Ali The evolution and weaponization of the world dollar The centerpiece of shock and awe of the West’s economic response to Russia’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine was the freezing of Russia’s central bank assets. In the March 7 edition of his Global Money Dispatch newsletter, the Credit Suisse investment strategist Zoltan Pozsar writes that the… Read More Regime Change?
First posted December 15, 2017 The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In fact, no… Read More Dag Herbjørnsrud – The African Enlightenment
On 7 January, a massive protest broke out at the Zybio (Zhongyuan Huiji) medical supply factory in Chongqing that produces Covid-19 antigen test kits. About half of the company’s 20,000 workers were set to be terminated after orders for test kits have recently dropped. Workers were still owed some back pay and took to the streets to… Read More Massive protest in Chongqing belies company’s recent labour awards from the official trade union
After the truth-shower 