The US has 800 military bases around the world. The rest of the world has 30 outside of its own borders. Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked… Read More Slavoj Zizek and the Terminal Collapse of the Anti-War Left. By Jonathan Cook
Train stations across the United Kingdom and the London Underground remained closed or inoperative on Tuesday. Striking railway and transport workers are demanding better salaries in the context of a sharp increase in prices. Inflation in the country currently stands at 9.2 percent, and could reach upwards of 11 percent in the fall when energy and… Read More UK Railway Workers Begin Largest Strike in 30 Years
NB: The UAPA has become means of rubbing out the lives of ‘inconvenient’ persons without a formal death sentence. That is what happened to Fr Stan Swamy, and it looks as if that is what will happen to Prof Saibaba. This is the Indian justice system today. We can only hope some shred of conscience… Read More Activists urge CJI Ramana to free paraplegic academic Prof. G.N. Saibaba
ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA (Simon Leys; re-published in his book of essays: The Hall of Uselessness, 2014) Sed perseverare… (To err is human, (but) to persist is diabolical) IN APRIL and May of 1974, Roland Barthes made a trip to China with a small group of his friends from the review Tel Quel. This visit coincided… Read More Roland Barthes in China; or how to plumb the depths of professorial vacuity…
In 2001, the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah published By the Sea, the story of Saleh Omar, a man who arrives at Gatwick airport as a refugee. The border official he speaks to says his parents also came to Britain as refugees, “But my parents are European, they have a right, they’re part of the family.”… Read More From Theresa May to Priti Patel – a decade of cruelty. By Kamila Shamsie
Trump’s attempted coup continues…. The Republican party’s biggest backers – such as billionaire Peter Thiel, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of big lie candidates JD Vance and Blake Masters – show no sign of reducing their backing in light of the committee’s findings. Big corporations continue to write fat… Read More Capitalism + lies = mass death / America’s Second Civil War is Underway
Factoring in the value of human life and ethical considerations in economic and social policy making could bring about change. “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society,” warned political economist Karl Polanyi in his book The Great… Read More Deepanshu Mohan: American gun violence is the result of an economy aimed at maximising self-interest
Young victims of the climate crisis will on Tuesday launch legal action at Europe’s top human rights court against an energy treaty that protects fossil fuel investors. Five people, aged between 17 and 31, who have experienced devastating floods, forest fires and hurricanes are bringing a case to the European court of human rights, where they… Read More Young people go to European court to stop treaty that aids fossil fuel investors
What has most drawn me to Singh’s work are the photographs collected in her books File Room and Museum of Chance. In these, we find black and white images of India’s vast state archives, storerooms and registry offices. As we leaf through these books, we become filled with an idea of poetic decrepitude and a… Read More Orhan Pamuk on Dayanita Singh’s mesmerising photos of India’s disintegrating archives
The English journalist John Diamond, shortly before his death from throat cancer in 2001, wrote that ‘there is really no such thing as alternative medicine, just medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t’. Ecological knowledge might be thought of as similarly indivisible. There are no alternative birds, non-traditional plants, complementary ecologies. More often than not,… Read More Richard Smyth: Nature does not care
