Everywhere stars rise to power as charismatic demagogues and risk-takers, but these very qualities breed in them an implacable desire to control all power and push away all they see as worthy replacements. Mrinal Pande Somewhere one had come across a story about ageing penguins. It said that a sleepy penguin may float atop the… Read More Yayati Syndrome: The Unreasonable Power Hunger of Ageing Men
The history of many centuries, including our own, shows that the default state of politics is not redistribution and general welfare, but a spiral of accumulation by the very rich, the extreme exploitation of labour, the seizure of common resources and exaction of rent for their use, extortion, coercion and violence. Normal is a society in which… Read More Things are not going to get better as long as oligarchs rule the roost in our democracies
Though I was never in the U.S. military, my life experience has been American wars, wars, wars, and more wars. I was born during World War II. I was in grade school when the Korean War took place. I still have a faint memory of a photo of a gleaming American soldier’s face from that… Read More Juan Cole, Another American War in the Middle East?
Readers who are parents might be forgiven for thinking that Alice Munro who blamed her abused daughter for her husband’s paedophilia was a sociopath whose condition might have a bearing on her books. (Alice Munro claimed her daughter was lying about being abused by stepfather) Mukul Kesavan A year and a half ago, while moving… Read More Life and Fiction
First posted October 06, 2012 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages WHEN Thomas Hobbes was maths tutor to the future English king, Charles II, in Paris in 1646, his young charge reportedly found Britain’s first great modern philosopher to be “the oddest fellow he ever met with”. That was one of… Read More After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’
First posted February 28, 2014 In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers. Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagletonreviewed by Jonathan Rée Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it… Read More Culture and the Death of God: Terry Eagleton
First posted July 06, 2012 As one distraught friend of mine once prayed: ‘May Allah save Islam from Pakistan.’ The self-claimed ‘bastion of Islam’ has gradually mutated into becoming a bastion of deluded messiahs and mindless, violent ranting machines to whom anything, from incoherent malangs to the reopening of Nato supply routes, are conspiracies against Islam. On… Read More EXIT GOD, ENTER MADNESS: Nadeem Paracha on religious extremism in Pakistan (2012)
Farmers and local NGOs say the indigenous rice varieties that are fast becoming extinct have unique nutrition, climate-resilience to ensure food security in increasingly unpredictable weather. Anumeha Yadav Sundargarh (Odisha), Latehar (Jharkhand): Deep inside the lush sal forest in Odisha’s Sundargarh, Albisia Lakda, an Adivasi farmer living in Subdega block had divided the rice crop on… Read More Grains of Life: How Chotanagpur’s Adivasis Are Reviving Native Varieties of Rice
First posted March 10, 2015 The latest issue of Oxford Left Review has a number of engaging articles on the nature and consequences of neoliberalism. Neil Davidson from the University of Glasgow examines the changing social base of neoliberalism, where he explores the shift from vanguard to ‘social’ neoliberalism and the relationship of the latter to the middle… Read More Elizabeth Humphrys: Anti-politics and the illusions of neoliberalism
First posted December 15, 2019 Barclays, HSBC and Santander among names behind companies implicated in rainforest destruction Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley also among key financiers. The burning of the Brazilian Amazon this summer illustrated in the most graphic way possible humanity’s war on the planet. But such scenes play out… Read More MONEY TO BURN: Over 300 banks and investors back 6 of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune of $44bn
After the truth-shower 