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'Politics'

New Year Thoughts 2017: LOVE and RAGE

5th January 2017

‘The world won’t get no better/If we just let it be/nana na naa naa na naa naa‘ – Wu Tang Clan ‘Where is the love, the love, the love‘ – Black Eyed Peas I came across the phrase Love and Rage sometime in the middle of 2016. It turns out it’s been a phrase used […]

'Politics'

The Need for Action Against Our Extremist Government

5th October 2016

This was written to be a short facebook status as a follow-on from an earlier blogpost – Lessons from Berlin//Be Vigilant – but ended up being a bit longer. It wasn’t planned or structured much, as blog posts usually are for me, more a stream-of-consciousness reaction. Hence the personal narrative where I go on about how I write […]

'Politics'

Human Rights and Sovereignty

5th September 2016

The current Conservative Government wants to remove the Human Rights Act (HRA). This has been their policy for many years, reaffirmed by each new Justice Minister, though no actual proposal has yet been put forward (largely because it’s quite hard to turn nonsense into a concrete proposal). In this post, I’ll talk about two of […]

'Politics'

Quick Note on the DNC Leaks

28th July 2016

DNC Leaks = Lots of leaked electronic documents (emails and phone data) from the Democratic National Committee, the blue political party in the USA. Wikileaks posted a lot of them last year from an anonymous source. They haven’t been talked about much by most of the media, especially in the UK, so I thought I’d […]

'Politics'

Actor Politicians and Post-Truth Politics

15th July 2016

The state of UK politics at the moment… not great. The EU referendum had a very strong media campaign by many media outlets based on lies and misinformation, such as portraying the EU as ‘unelected beaurocrats’ (a lie) and talking about £350m/week (another lie, plus the fraud of talking only about money out instead of […]

'Politics'

Attempting to Explain the 24th June 2016

24th June 2016

To many, the result of the UK’s EU Referendum might be a shock. Here, I try to explain what I think happened. This is, of course, all going to be historical interpretation by me. Everything I present as fact I believe to be so and with sound evidential basis, even if I haven’t had the […]

'Politics'

The EU Referendum and Black Swan Events

22nd June 2016

Note: This post is a bit raw. Usually, I would write something in draft, then come back and redraft and edit it. Usually that means some changes, making sentences smoother and the whole thing flow better. On this occasion, I wrote this whole post in one go and have published it without redrafting or editing. […]

'Politics'

Othering and Empathy

11th June 2016

Instead of seeing people as humans like us, we see many as something ‘other’. They aren’t like us: they’re muslims, refugees, jews, negros, gays, homeless, whatever. This undermines the feelings we should have towards them, means that we treat them as sub-human. Don’t help them – they aren’t like us. Leave them to […]

'Politics'

Towards a better understanding of “Islamic State”

4th December 2015

By way of introduction, I’ll use a quote from later in this post:
“To deal with a problem, you must understand the problem. If you misunderstand a problem, your response will be inadequate and not deal with it. So this is written to attempt to better understand the problem – which the media and politicians are (on the whole) not portraying properly.“

Here I discuss the name of “so-called Islamic State”, the real nature of the threat that we face “from them” (which is about “home grown jihadis”, not a war we are in), challenge the language and narrative currently dominant about “war”, and ask questions about the role of Islam in all of this.

'Politics'

Some thoughts on bombing ISIS

2nd December 2015

Some background.

It is rare to see any sort of meaningful discussion about the history, where ISIS came from, and so on. He who controls the past controls the present…

-> Our interventions in the middle east (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria a couple of years ago) have done the opposite of what their claimed objectives were. We went to war in Iraq on some sort of vague notion that there were ‘weapons of mass destruction’, though in retrospect it turns out that Bush and Blair knew that this was not the case, and Blair lied to the people and to parliament about it (having promised to Bush that he was going to war, while telling the