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Britain is a sick society. The riots that raged across the UK over August have provided ample evidence for this observation. But far-right violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of a deeper underlying trend: the rise of mistrust, insecurity, and despair. According to the National Centre for Social Research, trust and confidence in the […]

The scene on the terrace bar of the House of Commons was enough to chill the blood of any watching democrat. Here was Nigel Farage’s threatened ‘bridgehead into Parliament’, the Reform UK leader and his four-strong band of newly elected MPs quaffing pints and joshing, as comfortably at home as though they belonged in the […]

On the night of 18 January 1981, 16-year-old Yvonne Ruddock and 18-year-old Angela Jackson celebrated their birthdays at 439 New Cross Road in South London. What should have been a night of celebration would end in horror: a sudden blaze swept through the residence, killing Yvonne, her brother Paul, and a further eleven young black partygoers. Many […]

Germany’s die linke was once the shining light of the European left. Created in 2007 as a merger between the post–Communist Party of Germany and a pro-labour breakaway from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), in its first decade Die Linke became a major force in national politics. In the East it represented left-behind young people […]

Since February 2023, artist, university lecturer, and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella has been conducting interviews with a wide array of subjects who have formed their politics out of internet subcultures. It would be a crude oversimplification to say their so-called ‘e-deologies’ range far and wide across ‘the political spectrum’, as the real hallmark of […]

‘He may be a liar, even a crook, but I’m voting for him because he’s smart. He’s like our own Elon Musk.’ This comment was made to me on a sunny Saturday in a São Paulo favela, on a small bridge spanning an open sewage stream, the day before the city’s municipal election on 6 October. […]

A figure that has long spelled fear, resentment, and rage on a personal level has more recently acquired literary status. Of course, landlords have featured in novels and plays for as long as either form has existed. Pick a stupid but obvious example: Mr Toad is a character that most of us encounter in early […]

At a time when much left publishing seems to have exchanged political resolve for posh essayism, it is a relief and a delight to encounter Helen Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood. A likely breakthrough work for one of the Left’s most eloquent new voices, this is a remarkable debut which somehow — despite […]

Until the last few years, most people of working age in Britain would have had little experience of inflation, at least outside of the usually (and inexplicably) exempted case of housing. Although the inflation of the mid-1970s is the one your grandparents may remember, nothing has ever compared with the German inflation of a 100 […]

In Todd Haynes’ 1998 masterpiece Velvet Goldmine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ David Bowie–inspired character is asked about the construction of his successful pop persona. ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,’ he quips, directly quoting Oscar Wilde. ‘Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.’ In Patrick Clarke’s astute new […]

While left-wing governments hold power across most of Latin America, ultra-right social forces remain a threat. In Bolivia, powerful left-Indigenous social movements have managed to keep an insurgent right wing at bay since the devastating coup of 2019. But a growing political crisis for the plurinational state highlights the urgent need to maintain unity in […]

This summer saw Britain’s worst rioting since the 2011 police killing of Mark Duggan. In the aftermath of the murder of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar in Southport, anti-immigrant protesters were directed to attack Southport Mosque. Copycat protests broke out across the country, fed by rumours spread on WhatsApp and […]

As the British media began analysing the unprecedented outbreak of racist violence that followed the Southport murders earlier this year, relatively little attention was paid to events in Belfast, where the rioting continued long after it had ended in English cities. Belfast has a depressingly long history of rioting, but this was different. The racist, […]

The Labour Party doesn’t have a single black MP, there are no black people on the NEC [National Executive Committee] and the number of black councillors is still relatively tiny. To ordinary black people it seems increasingly hypocritical for the party to claim to be anti-racist when no black people are involved in the decision-making […]

Upon being asked to participate in a symposium about György Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason, the late Fredric Jameson observed: [F]ascism certainly seems to be making a comeback, and some of Lukács may no longer seem quite so annoyingly ‘orthodox’. I think Lukács must always be read in terms of his own historical situation, which […]

Bed: A group of tired women.

Coalition: Women who are tired of hearing about their reproductive rights getting trampled on.

Guys: Actually, a group of women.

Girls: Actually, a group of fully grown women.

Old Bats: A group of women who used to be goths in high school and still listen to The Cure.

Brood: A bunch of women talking about raising backyard chickens.

Swarm: Women who hate Sting for some reason.

Clowder: A group of childless cat ladies.

Band: Any three women who are successful solo artists and get together to form a supergroup, like the Highwomen or Boygenius.

Herd: A bunch of women who love border collies.

Susans: A group of women who vote.

Shrewdness: A group of women who are mad at men who voted for Trump.

Drove: Women who are discussing carpooling in a group text.

Charm: A bunch of women who dress like Stevie Nicks.

Alex Jones found out NBC News: The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform. Jones announced the sale on X Thursday morning. “I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said. “The Connecticut democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us,” he added. For those needing a reminder of what this is all about, The Washington Post explains: Infowars and its property are among the personal assets Jones was forced to sell in a court-ordered auction after a bankruptcy judge in June sought to compel Jones to paythe roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes for claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

. Med en klimat- och miljöminister som Romina Pourmokhtari verkar tiden stått stilla sedan 1964 …

I thought I was done with free speech. For nearly two decades, I reported on it for the international magazine Index on Censorship. I wrote a book, Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, about controversies over it. I even sang “I Like to Be in America” at the top of my lungs at an around-the-clock banned-book event organized by the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression after the musical West Side Story was canceled at a local high school because of its demeaning stereotypes of Puerto Ricans. I was ready to move on. I was done. As it happened, though, free speech — or, more accurately, attacks on it — wasn’t done with me, or with most Americans, as a matter of fact. On... Read more

Source: A Democracy of Voices (If We Can Keep It) appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Blake's 7 Season One is getting a Blu-Ray release for the first time (including in the US). Here's a teaser previewing the updated FX work.

Dear Americans,

During your country’s recent presidential campaign, President-elect Trump spoke about the threat of climate change: “So they talk all the time about how the ocean will rise in five hundred years, one-eighth of an inch, who the hell cares?”

Now, before you decide where I’m going with that quote, please allow me to give a disclaimer as to what this letter is not.

It is not meant to interfere or intermingle with your country’s affairs. It is neither an interrogation of the rise of fascists in the US (we too are teeming with them here in India, where I live) nor is this a critique of your country’s policies, whether economic or environmental, domestic or foreign.