Watching the first part of AlJazerra’s documentary on pro-Zionist Evangelical Christianity in the USA (‘Praying for Armageddon‘) on youtube makes for some truly chilling viewing.
Category: Theory
(I will be returning to Solovyov’s Sophiology next time, via Bulgakov) Of all the incidentally cogent things that cinematic madmen say, one always sticks with me, but it is in fact a quotation. In the movie Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter refers to a quote by Marcus Aurelius when he says to Clarice Starling, […]
The following post is a development of a series of short notes made on social media.
Suicide rates among young males is a genuine social concern. The left should not back away from this simply because the right wing with its Traditionalist, anti-feminist and Men’s Rights groups have gained online hegemony over the issue. Not every conversation that begins with the chilling factual statistics over male suicide in the young has […]
The grotesque is a wonderfully ambiguous term, or it used to be. Not straightforwardly unseemly, it referred to a kind of secret interiority, the grotto-esque, the wild yet still encultured cave wall decoration of ancient civilisations that the renaissance humanists and early modern proto-romantics were so in awe of. It came to designate a kind […]
Categories
Malthus with Drones
The Tories’ plan for austerity was always severely skewed towards adversely affecting the poorer and more vulnerable parts of society. It involved a dereliction of social and ethical duty right from the onset; the creation of a hostile environment for anyone who might require help — refugees; victimised black and minority ethnic people; unfairly treated […]
When a public figure—tasked with the democratic, modern liberal job of holding government to account on behalf of the people—instead openly and publicly expresses the eugenic question of whom the government should let die for the sake of the economy, then it has become clear just how far the public sphere has shifted from being […]
To paraphrase one of many recently TV-interviewed doctors, ‘Coronavirus does not want to kill the host; it just wants to replicate itself and it can only do that in the body’.
Here we are, politicising a health crisis. And here we are repeating the obvious: a crisis, of any kind, is already a lens in which politics invariably appears, usually clarified, sometimes magnified, and always polarising. The global pandemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV-2 (popularly Covid-19 or Coronavirus) is exactly such a lens.
With the ‘urban renaissance’ of the eighteenth century came new forms of sociality which included unprecedented levels of social mixing.1 One of the spaces in which these forms occurred is the pleasure garden, and this literature review collates varying perspectives on Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in the mid eighteenth century. While Vauxhall has been studied far […]
Theriomorphous 