Brilliant news - Tommy Robinson has been banned by Facebook. In recent weeks he's been more brazen in spreading his dangerous nonsense. He shared a photo of a rape charity advert which included a specialist line for black and minority ethnicities, claiming that the charity was anti-white. The hotline was overwhelmed with harassment from his... Continue Reading →
The official name of North Korea is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. East Germany's official name was the German Democratic Republic. Do their names prove that the countries were democratic? The obvious answer is no, that the names alone prove nothing. Delving deeper, both North Korea and East Germany hold and held elections. But... Continue Reading →
On Friday the Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope made headlines by objecting to a Private Member's Bill on Female Genital Mutilation. The proposed law would make it easier for judges to remove children from parents who have put them through FGM, and has already been approved in full by the House of Lords. However as... Continue Reading →
Prejudicial propaganda doesn't necessarily take aim at it's target openly and directly. Often the person spreading prejudice will twist facts and insert insinuations to manipulate a third party. Manipulate them into hating a minority group who they have no rational reason to hate. For instance, in 2015 the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website reacted to a... Continue Reading →
Three days ago I posted a satirical version of a post that's gone viral on Facebook over the last week. The original - making ludicrous claims about the 2007 Lisbon Treaty - has been shared broadly enough to prompt a point-by-point analysis of the lies from a Professor of EU law. I wrote my version with... Continue Reading →
On Friday Green Party MP Caroline Lucas spoke at an event organised by campaigners for a second Brexit referendum. She began her speech by thanking those who had voted to leave: "I also want to say a genuine thank you to the 17.4 million people who gave the Establishment such a well-deserved kicking in 2016.... Continue Reading →
With Brexit being in the news today, I think it's worth reminding people that 'no deal' means no parachute - we'd be leaving the EU with no plan on how to adapt. You'll probably hear the line from Brexiteers that other countries get by with only WTO (World Trade Organisation) terms. This isn't true -... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
On June 26th the socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated the long-time incumbent Joe Crowley for the right to run on the Democratic ticket in New York's 14th district. Her surprise victory prompted discussions about whether Ocasio-Cortez' socialist, grassroots-led campaign can be replicated in parts of the country. These discussions immediately turned Ocasio-Cortez into a major name... Continue Reading →
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 →
As the near-impossibility of putting a practical Brexit into action becomes increasingly clear, public support for a second referendum on EU membership is increasing. A protest in London last month calling for a second referendum (a 'People's Vote') attracted a reported 700,000 participants. The Brexit campaign was led mainly by former private schoolboys, including the... Continue Reading →
Happy Sisyphus 