Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Meat Life
-
In recent days there has been a tiny bit of discussion on this blog about whether a group of 9 unelected philosopher-kings should be able to decide social issues for 330 million people, so it seems appropriate that I turn my attention briefly to the chaos rolling over Europe and the threat of a Greek…
-
This weekend I read the Turner Diaries, a famous and influential right-wing apocalyptic insurrection fantasy written in 1978. I picked up this nasty little piece of racist literature because of the recent events in the US, thinking to get a bit of background on the white nationalist terror threat in the USA, but I was…
-
Today the Supreme Court found in favour of Obamacare, as I had predicted,and the wheels fell off the Republican clowncar. This is great news for America, as it now means that the law has overcome most of its significant Supreme Court challenges and become settled fact, and the 10 million people who are benefiting from…
-
Rumour has it that the US Supreme Court will hand down its decision on Obamacare this month, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the health care system in the USA. Various supporters of Obamacare are either optimistic about the damage a decision to gut Obamacare will cause the Republicans, or pessimistic depending on how cynical they…
-
It’s Friday night here in Japan and I have better things to do with my time than political punditry, but I’m very interested in the shock results coming in from the UK general election. It appears that, against the flow of two years of opinion polls, the conservative party (the Tories) have not just held…
-
This week 700 asylum seekers drowned when their boat capsized somewhere in the Mediterranean sea; reports suggest that a large number of these poor souls were locked in the hold of the ship and had no chance of escape. A year ago the people on this ship might have been found rescued earlier by the…
-
This week I stumbled upon another one of many articles in the Guardian complaining about fat-shaming, which is apparently something society does unsuccessfully to try and force everyone to be skinny. In an interesting parallel, this week Rabbett Run has an article digging through the role of Big Tobacco in funding libertarians to talk up…
-
[Warning: Australian politics] I read in the newspapers yesterday that Clive Palmer, mining magnate and funder of the Palmer United Party, is going to sue two former party members for campaign financing he provided to help them get elected. Given how mercurial and weird Palmer is, the news is probably already out of date and…
-
Indiana, USA[1] has just passed a law that discriminates against ordinary arseholes, and especially confirmed atheist arseholes. This law would make discrimination okay so long as the discriminator [hereafter referred to as “the arsehole”] is religious, and clearly sets up three categories of people with different sets of rights: nice people who want everyone to…
-
This week Vox posted an article on “Japan’s blackface problem,” which aimed to give an American perspective on the practice of Japanese actors putting on black faces, and to discuss what the author calls Japan’s “bizarre, troubled relationship with race.” I wonder what Japanese people can learn about how to treat race from that sophisticated…
Compromise and Conceit 