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.
Tag: politics
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Sunday, bloody Sunday
So. Things are going well in general. Significant advances have been made towards studio set up. Two instruments are now fully wired into the mixing module, and I’m familiarising myself with all the possibilities.
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 […]
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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 […]
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.
In the 14th Century a man named Francesco Petrarca, surprised at the sophistication and subtlety of the classical works he was beginning to read, came to feel that he was living in a dark age. Petrarch could not have known that six centuries later a similar feeling would wash across the academic world; a feeling […]
Mark Twain probably never said this. It’s another case of the Mass Memory Discrepancy Effect, or if you prefer, the Mandela Effect, or still again, cultural mnemohistory (this is my preferred term). It’s strangely ‘meta’ then that the saying describes its own social genesis as a saying. Knowledge spreads, with many loud and knowledgeable people […]
The Need-Fire (alt. Force-Fire, meaning ‘forced fire’) tradition depended on a structure of exception. In a superstition widely chronicled across Old Europe it was popularly believed that the efficacy of the need-fire (to cure ills, to establish normality where sickness — of animals, relations, etc — had taken hold) depended on the extinguishment of all […]
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What is called ‘joking’?
Rowan Atkinson, whose portrayal of Blackadder in my youth gave me a lot of simple pleasure, is dead wrong to support Boris Johnson. The distinction between a joke and a non-joke is an important one and can only be defined from the standpoint of reception. A joke is something said by a comedian, or one […]
Theriomorphous 