People all seek to know what they do not know yet;they ought rather seek to know what they know already: Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC) Food, not PCR tests … Reform, not the Cultural Revolution … We want to be citizens, not slaves.” And alongside that, most astonishingly, a call to overthrow Xi Jinping. The man who dared to unveil… Read More Xi Jinping and China’s party congress: no end in sight
Andy Beckett Neoliberalism, the belief that free markets, low taxes and a state with little or no interest in equality will produce the best economic and social outcomes, has fallen out of fashion even among the business elite and their chroniclers. In the Financial Times this week, the columnist Rana Foroohar argued that the west… Read More Truss is frantically blowing on the embers of neoliberalism. But it is a funeral pyre
First posted July 22, 2017 Sam Kriss Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the class-collaborationism of… Read More ‘Neoliberalism’ isn’t a left-wing insult but a monstrous political system of inequality
Mainpuri – Fears are growing for the survival of a 15-year-old girl who was allegedly set on fire by a family member who is also accused of raping her as she fights for her life at a hospital in northern India. In a case that has shocked the country, police in Uttar Pradesh state arrested an 18-year-old man… Read More Teenage girl fights for her life in India after alleged rapist’s fire attack
First posted on June 12, 2014, upon learning of his passing NB: Stanley Rosen passed away on May 4, 2014, in Philadelphia, USA. (Read an obituary here). I never met him, but only managed to convey my regards via a couple of messages. I was introduced to his writing about a decade ago, and was profoundly moved and… Read More Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher
The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors Darshana Narayanan Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions. “A… Read More The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
Deni Farm, owner Edilson Pereira Duarte”; “Mato Grosso Farm, owner Vanderlei Martins de Oliveira”. These two signs, incorporating the Brazilian flag, are nailed to trees on either side of the road leading to Kapot village, in the Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Land, northern Mato Grosso state. A barrier spans the road leading into Kapot. Drivers must get… Read More Brazil’s Indigenous peoples mobilise against encroachment on their lands
As the private transportation sector shifts focus to batteries, biofuels, and green hydrogen, fossil fuel stakeholders have been seeking new avenues of revenue in the petrochemical industry in general, and in plastics in particular. That’s bad news for a world already swimming – literally – in plastic pollution. Product manufacturers and other upstream forces could reverse… Read More 600 million metric tons of plastic may fill Earth’s oceans by 2036 without immediate action
First posted January 26, 2017 Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the… Read More Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter – even if those who quarrel never see each other again – just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes… Read More Jean-Paul Sartre: Tribute to Albert Camus (February 1960)
