Many members of the modern Republican party are willing to say things that are blatantly untrue. In fact it often seems a requirement rather than a flaw. This tendency does not just apply to matters surrounding Donald Trump, but the discussion of basic political terminology, as Rand Paul proved when being interviewed on The Daily... Continue Reading →
Vote Leave, Get More Salmonella
One of the many downsides to Brexit is that it will leave the UK in a weaker position when negotiating trade deals with other countries. According to the Financial Times, Japanese negotiators are demanding more favourable terms from the UK than they agreed to in the recent Japan-EU treaty. American Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross... Continue Reading →
Warren Buffett’s Thoughts on Class Warfare
When the phrase 'class warfare' is used nowadays, it's usually to criticise the messages of left-wing parties. Earlier this year Jeremy Corbyn proposed that demographic data on the ethnicity and social backgrounds of employees should be publicly available, and the Daily Mail reacted by accusing him of declaring "class war". In 2014 Tory MP Henry... Continue Reading →
Donald Trump’s Hope and Change
Obama-Trump voters are a counter-intuitive phenomenon, given that, on a superficial level at least, the two presidents have very different styles. Obama had the positive vibe ("Yes we can"), whereas Trump spent a lot of time on the paranoid, racist fantasy that Obama was born in Kenya. Speaking in October 2016, Noam Chomsky pointed out that... Continue Reading →
The Three Policy Pillars of the Neoliberal Age
Naomi Klein has spent decades recording and analysing the darker edges of neoliberal capitalism. No Logo focused on the way that corporations use branding to convince people to buy things that we don't really need. The Shock Doctrine looked at the way 'disaster capitalism' engineers crises and then profits from them, imposing what Klein describes... Continue Reading →
What Is False Consciousness?
Karl Marx's central theory was that in modern capitalism there exists two main groups of people (or classes) and there exists a 'class struggle' between these groups when their interests overlap. The proletariat are the group who have nothing to sustain themselves but their labours, while the bourgeoisie are the group who own the 'means... Continue Reading →
