Photo: ‘Gay and Lesbian Couples’, Robert Kalman, 2018 from Photography After Stonewall (Soho Photo Gallery, 2019). Kalman writes: ‘The narrative of LGBTQ civil rights, simply told, draws a straight line from the Stonewall Riots of 1969 to a person’s liberty to love whomever they wish today.... These are portraits of mixed-race, loving couples, rendered as…
Features
It would be difficult to exaggerate the scale of our current ecological crisis. But not impossible.
In XR’s April 2019 video, ‘Act as if the Truth is Real’, actor and XR spokesperson Sam Knights says: ‘we're not alarmist and we don't exaggerate’. [1] Yet, from the beginning, some of XR’s most prominent spokespeople have done just that.
In his 61-page booklet, Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse…
Scabies mite. Photo: Kalumet via wikimedia commons [CC BY-SA 3.0]
Some years after the Second World War, articles appeared in national newspapers in the UK headed ‘Volunteers Sought to Risk Death’ and ‘Human Guinea Pigs Plea’. They were advocating the setting up of a national centre where scientists could ‘infect people with diseases and try out drugs – even if the risk is death’, and were based on a research project during the war.
In 1940, professor Kenneth Mellanby was…
XR is fond of citing political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s ‘3.5 percent rule’ (see eg. 'XR: The Plan') – an empirical observation that it ‘only’ takes ‘3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple dictatorships’ [1], based on the analysis of a dataset of over 100 major nonviolent campaigns that took place between 1900 and 2006. [2]
It should be noted that:
(A) the dataset only considered ‘…
XR ‘swarm’ in the City of London, 25 April 2019. Photo: Adam Wiseman / XR
If one core part of XR’s approach has been to try and scare the bejesus out of people (see ‘XR: The dangers of apocalyptic organising’), a second has been its claim that it has a plan – indeed, one grounded in ‘social scientific research’ – that could save the day.
This has two parts: (a) a set of three demands; and (b) a…
Image
The Shadow Collector. On 7 August 1945, the day after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Shogō Nagaoka, a geologist from Hiroshima University, began walking through the city collecting rubble. The A-bomb’s heat burned shadows of vapourised people and objects onto streets and buildings and it changed the formation of rocks. Nagaoka filled his rucksack and then his house with specimens. He believed they were vital to telling the story of…
I was a pupil at Manchester High School for Girls which, when I started at 11, was a selective, girls’ ‘direct grant’ school. About half the pupils were funded either by central government or by their local education authority (LEA).
In my family, it was considered a great achievement to have passed the exam and to have been awarded a means-tested grant from the LEA to cover fees.
There were great expectations of me, but I was not a model pupil. I did not engage with my studies…
Many of us have seen recruitment adverts for the armed forces popping up on our social media feeds, on TV and on the radio.
Others will have come across recruitment stalls in their local town centres, perhaps with weapons on display for passersby – especially young children – to admire and handle.
If you are 16–24 years old, and from a low-income background, you are especially likely to be targeted with various kinds of military recruitment advertising in your daily life.…
The threat of a US attack on Iran is all too real. Led by US national security advisor John Bolton, the Trump administration is spinning tales of Iranian misdeeds. It is easy to concoct pretexts for aggression. History provides many examples.
The assault against Iran is one element of the international programme of flaunting overwhelming US power to put an end to ‘successful defiance’ of the master of the globe: the primary reason for the US torture of Cuba for 60 years.
The…
Sea Tangle by Sarah Gittins
Sarah Gittins: Seaweed could be cast as a heroine in a story about the ecosystem of Ullapool in relation to climate change. It has been found to be very effective in absorbing carbon, and if it is allowed to grow in abundance it could play an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change and ocean acidification. Seaweed is also a highly…
Students march against climate change on Rue de Treves next to the European Parliament in Brussels on 24 January 2019. Bence Damokos [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Burning fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) is the main driver of global warming. Just 100 fossil fuel producers – including Exxon, Shell, BP and Total – account for 71 percent of all global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since…
Hundreds of young people from the Sunrise Movement flood congress in Washington DC to push for a Green New Deal, 10 December. Photo: Rachael Warriner / Sunrise Movement
At the end of February, over 250 young people converged on US senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s office in Washington DC for a sit-in marking one of the latest escalations in the youth-led campaign for a Green New Deal.
The action, led by youth from McConnell’s state of Kentucky, was planned in direct…
Pro- and anti-Brexit demonstrators in Old Palace Yard, opposite parliament, London, 29 January. Photo: ChiralJon via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s face it. We’re divided.
People who share progressive or radical values in lots of ways – who oppose the same wars, who are equally passionate about stopping climate change, who would all unilaterally ditch British nuclear weapons, and so on – are divided on the hottest topic in British politics: our relationship with the European…
Great March of Return protest by the Gaza-Israel border, El Bureij, 6 July 2018. Photo: MinoZig via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
Below is the official summary of the UN human rights council’s independent international commission of inquiry into the weekly demonstrations in Gaza, named ‘the Great March of Return’, that began on 30 March, 2018. It is followed by an extract on the events of 14 May 2018.
Summary
The Commission found reasonable grounds…
The ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb’ campaign for Scotland was launched at a public meeting in Edinburgh on 16 November 2015. Photo: Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre
In September 2018, the ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb Scotland’ campaign group (DBOTB Scotland) published a guide for divestment from nuclear weapons entitled Stop Funding the End of the World – Working to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Through Divestment: A Guide for Scotland.
The guide was launched as part of the Nae…
Greta Thunberg, outside the Swedish parliament, 31 August 2018. Photo: Anders Hellberg via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
Tens of thousands of children are school striking for the climate on the streets of Brussels. Hundreds of thousands are doing the same all over the world. And some are here today.
We are school striking because we have done our homework. People always tell us that they are so hopeful. They are hopeful that the young people are going to save the world…
Photo: Manolo Luna [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Chelsea Manning, who bravely exposed atrocities committed by the US military, is again imprisoned in a US jail. On International Women’s Day, 8 March, she was incarcerated in the Alexandria, Virginia, federal detention centre for refusing to testify in front of a secretive grand jury. [In the US system of law, grand juries decide (in secret)…
On 7 February, a radical new congressmember from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as ‘AOC’), introduced legislation into the US house of representatives calling for a ‘Green New Deal’. Fellow Democrat Ed Markey introduced the same resolution into the senate on the same day.
The importance of AOC’s resolution is not that it will lead to laws being passed and budgets being set. (It’s a ‘simple resolution’, a nonbinding congressional opinion, not a ‘bill’ or a ‘…
The biggest danger facing the left today is no longer a shortage of ideas or a lack of positive vision.
The biggest danger is lack of preparedness – that we are not yet ready for the hard work of turning that vision into reality. If the left has been unused to being propositional, it has been even less used to holding and wielding power.
If we are serious about fundamentally transforming our economy, we must rapidly build our understanding of the scale of the challenge…