On the choreographed moral panic over social media

You’ve probably heard the take that “social media is poisoning our society and threatening our young”, or some variation of it. You’ve probably also heard the speaker proclaim themselves to be spouting an “uncomfortable truth”, despite the fact that you can barely turn on a TV channel or even set foot online without seeing people…

The UK is an authoritarian country

Britain is often portrayed as a champion of “freedom” and “democracy” both by our government and its faithful servants in the media, as well as anyone else who clearly does not know any better. Mostly we are told that we are a free and democratic country because we “stand up” to dictatorships, a point bolstered…

The hypocritical crusade against Mermaids

Whenever the Tories are in trouble—and indeed it looks clear that they in fact are in deep trouble—the first thing they do is look for a convenient scapegoat to try and distract the public from their real problems. While they have been doing this throughout their twelve years in power, I believe this particularly ugly…

Europe’s fascists aren’t even hiding it anymore

Italy’s snap election ended exactly the way most had expected it to. The Brothers of Italy, the heir to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), is now the largest party in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Italian Senate, with its leader Giorgia Meloni expected to become the new Italian prime minister with the…

Life after Boris and the prospect of a Labour government

The old cruelty of Boris Johnson has passed. Let a whole new wave of cruelty wash over the land, courtesy of the new Prime Minister Liz Truss and her cadre of reactionary ideologues. Having trounced leadership rival and reluctant realist Rishi Sunak by about 20,000 votes, Truss has begun the task of building a government…

What is a socialist to make of China? – Part Two

Introductory Remarks for Part Two In the previous post, I sketched out a Marxist analysis of China and how to look at it in the grand scheme of things. In Part One I concentrated on issues related to economics, class, climate change, imperialism and foreign policy. My aim for that post was to illustrate that…

What is a socialist to make of China? – Part One

Introduction: The Poisoned Well of Discourse Nothing has caused more consternation, heated debate, and in general bad takes in our time than the discourse around the self-described People’s Republic of China. In the 21st century, it has assumed the role previously played by the USSR as the big bad “communist” superpower in Western—particularly American—imagination, only…

The world-historical defeat of the sexual revolution

On June 24th, the US Supreme Court finally did what we had all suspected it would do since the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020. With Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote that the right to an abortion was not protected by the US Constitution,…

No, the rise of fascism is not a distraction

Lately there has been a rather disturbing trend amongst certain “anti-establishment” commentators. In the wake of the January 6th hearings, held by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack and broadcast live on primetime TV, there are voices which seek to portray these hearings as a distraction from “more important” matters such as…

What the gun control discourse is missing

Introduction: On the Grim Banality of American Tragedy The scene at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas was a depressingly familiar one. Another crazed young gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos, storms his school armed with an AR-15, kills some of his fellow students and winds up dead himself (this time the cops killed him), the…