One of the most popular silence-fillers you’ll hear parroted around this country is “no-one’s got any respect for the old anymore”. We’re told of a golden age when youngsters sat in mute deference as Grandpa rambled on about that one time he gutted an entire family of w*gs. When grown…

"A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined." Fernando…

Fragments on a Broken System — While on all sides of the street the harlot, Capitalism, was decked in horrible array of all possible and impossible colours, there was projected from the windows of the SDF a transparency of five feet, giving the statistics of deaths in war, deaths in concentration camps, the numbers of paupers…

An Old Review of the Spanish Master — Orwell considered the capacity to recognise and accept unpleasant facts a power, equal to intelligence or compassion. If he was right, and he certainly is, Francisco Goya’s work stands as testament to a man who elevated it to the level of a superpower. One doesn’t seek out Goya’s paintings or…

Today there is a general tendency to revive past theories of objective reason in order to give some philosophical foundation to the rapidly disintegrating hierarchy of generally accepted values. Along with pseudo-religious or half-scientific mind cures, spiritualism, astrology, cheap brands of past philosophies such as Yoga, Buddhism, or mysticism, and…

Thinking through a paradox — Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin A storm is coming at us from a broken future. A rising plastic wave of people, as much as sea. Integration into the system requires that isolated individuals be recaptured…

Fragments and Drawing — Gore Vidal referred to late modernity as “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for everyone else,” but that doesn’t quite capture the obscenity of our present. British society has all that was bad about feudalism, without any of that system’s meager benefits. Are we captured by an intensive, undemocratic…

Fragmented observations, from Benjamin to Baldwin — The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are…

And the Crimes of Hillary Clinton — I wrote the following early in 2016, predicting Trump’s victory when Sanders still had a look in. As we know the Democratic Party centrists got their way: Clinton was put up, and so Agent Orange got the White House. …