The set-up in The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, is that the Bad People have managed to end women’s economic independence at the tap of a few keys on a keyboard. You had to take those pieces of paper with you when you went shopping, though by the time I was nine or ten most... Continue Reading →
So many other reasons among the 8646 others. Here's another. The people who study, and who think about why social movements haven't done a better job on climate change are - how to put this - blind to the some of the reasons why social movements haven't done a better job on climate change. This... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I met someone formally for the first time (we’d crossed paths a couple of weeks earlier). And he told me some background about the person in charge of a current campaign that helped me see recent events in a new light. Without getting into libelous details, suffice to say that sometimes people are using... Continue Reading →
Thanks to a rather brilliant writer (Beejay Silcox, since you ask), I read an 'Outback Noir' novel, by Garry Disher. It involves a cop (bent? Seems not, but who can tell and what is bent anyway) exiled from the bright lights of the (checks notes) big "city," Adelaide to - as the Americans say -... Continue Reading →
A good friend recently pointed me at a very good (imo, ymmv obvs) article "education for democratic resilience." It's full of quotable bits but for now Imma riff on this - "I believe one reason is that too few Americans understand the nuts-and-bolts of associations. An initial meeting often draws many concerned people, who may... Continue Reading →
In the end, it was not even close. The victory of the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton bye-election is, I think that much abused word “historic.” But history has different meanings. In five years we might look back on this as the "moment that Labour changed"; unlikely when I narrated the vomit draft... Continue Reading →
The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
This is the same blog post I have written dozens (?) of times. I am doing it now as a howl of despair (1) It will change nothing, except providing a fleeting spasm of catharsis. That’s all we have left, after the world historical defeat of the “left” (always a label that hid at least... Continue Reading →
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