Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Oh! The Places You’ll Go! Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away! You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go. You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street. And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air. Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you. And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too. Oh! The Places You’ll Go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! Y...

 Current avatar; banned by the Guardian Comment is Free mafiosi One of my Avatars - I have many - was FreshOrangeJuice . It has just been banned from the Guardian comment pages. Big deal. Or BFD at they say. Now what is interesting is to understand exactly what gets you banned from the comment pages of the 'Voice of Liberalism'. This should be understood in context. I am generally supportive of Polly Toynbee's writing, I have corresponded with her. However, I am not welcome on the Guardian comment pages and when they discover I am behind an Avatar they do ban me. The points I was making on this thread were not really about Toynbee, they were about the lost soul of the Labour Party and the support of the Guardian for Ed Miliband. Polly was my foil. Moreover, it is only for arguments sake that I describe the party of Wilson and Callaghan as a 'socialist party'. Truth be told it was merely a social democratic party. It was Polly Toynbee's party, but it sho...

Bryan G. Dear Phil, Thanks for the article and I’m sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. As I read it I heard my own voice echoing the same or similar arguments some years ago when I wrote a series of articles on political, economic and ethical issues for a European journal. The points you make about rights having their complement in responsibilities is a point that needs to made with increasing emphasis. In his famous book, The World we have Lost, a book about the early modern period in English history, Peter Laslet describes how employers in the sixteenth century employed apprentices in just the way you suggest: they accepted all of their broader responsibilities. In effect, the apprentice would become a full member of the family, not just a ‘hand’, to use that most revealing of all metaphors that arose in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. They accepted that when they employed someone they were employing the complete person, not just one aspect of his comp...

Lakshmi Mittal on board his yacht. Rather than imagining they are powerful citizens, the ultra rich prefer to believe that they are naturally unconstrained and owe little to individual states. They fantasise that they roam the world like Captain Nemo, and assume they have far more rights than duties. At the root of the problem of modern capitalist societies are the concepts governing property rights and duties. There should be limits set to what can be owned and what cannot be owned. Effectively, nothing is ever really fully privately owned, all property is a lease from the state.   You may buy your island from a country, but you are not buying a country . Instead of simply re-nationalisating, though a few re-nationalisations wouldn't go amiss, we should reformulate property law. The problem with nationalisation is the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. In other words, if no one owns something - fishing areas in international waters, for example - then that resourc...

New Atheists and their agnostic fellow travellers like Andrew Brown  portray believers as cartoon Americans. Andrew Brown's article is cartoonish. Most educated Catholics and Anglicans are indeed creationists. But they are not the Brown caricature of a creationist. If you believe in something infinitely intelligent and subtle, then you are hardly going to second guess it. And for this reason most Catholics and Anglicans have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the theory of evolution to the extent that it is an explanatory falsifiable account of what is. To that extent. It is only when the theory of evolution is overextended - extruded - into suppositions, semantic games, theology and the meaning of life that it is partially rejected by religious people. This is reference of course to the deluded who are working in the field of evolutionary psychology, the heirs to phrenology, and their confreres in ancillary fields. When Andrew Brown,who is on the agnostic border...

The ridge above the Weald To live on the edge of a forest is to live by a path into dream, or childhood; when you were small and the legs of adults were like trees and their heads rustled with words, when the sky was oily and flowed and sparkled. Just as we can easily conjure up the face of a grimacing wolf, staring at us from a dark window, eyes wide, teeth bared; just as we can sense against our midriff the whispered ripple of a shark in water; we enter a forest. What remains of our own Weald was once the scrubby border of the great temperate northern European Forest. Those of us who were brought up in Britain, and who have read enough and completed a Grand Tour will overestimate our imaginative ability, supposing we can picture this Ur forest properly. We can't, but what we can do is sense the Weald and its Silesian heart in the stories of the Grimm brothers, in older fairy tales. Forest boys and girls live in a the middle of Europe, in fairy tales. Just ask Carole J ...

Christopher Hitchens, supporter of imperialist wars. Oh the horror, the horror . In reading Hitchens in the Guardian today (9/11/2011) we read a specious apologia. He is ridiculous, and yet the Guardian, drawing inspiration perhaps from its own Janus faced support for interventionism, exhibits Hitchens vulgar self justification on the anniversary of 9/11 as if his words were pearls. Hitchens presents his mental puppetry to us as insight. It isn't. He 'illumines' us, or does he? Atta was a cold hearted loveless zombie. Mohamed Bouazizi was sick of tyranny. We know that zombie does not accurately describe Atta. He was not a zombie. To call him a zombie sheds no light. Sound and electronic letters signifying absolutely nothing. Puppet play. In second place we also know that despite the fact that he was a catalyst for the events he sparked off, Mohamed Bouazizi was in fact suicidal long before he decided to politicize his suicide. If he did ever politicize ...

Philip Blond explaining the Big Society The answer is that we ARE living in a new Dark Ages. What makes this time a new dark age is that the light of reason is being snuffed out. We have people here who claim to be children of the enlightenment, but they are philosophers and thinkers who actually do not believe in the power of philosophy, in the power of rational thought, or in the ability of humans to act forcefully and rationally upon their environment. The philosophers began by imagining what a good society would be like. The 'Good Society' is the objective of most decent political philosophy. The Good Society can make rational decisions about the way society should be run, which is why capitalism opposes it. How on Earth can we live in a society that does not believe in the intelligence and capacity of human beings and human societies to solve the problems that confront it? In the New Dark Ages theorists are forced to use a religious language of the market, they ...

We arrived in Mexico City in the year 2000 and left it in the year 2002. I've written about it. But I want to write about it again because I want to refine an experience that puzzles me. That really puzzles me. I know it is real because I phoned my mother and discussed it with her. My mother could not come to see us because she was undergoing an operation for a minor cancer. The house is a 1930s house or was. It was due for demolition from what I saw on street view. A hotel to be built in its place. It was a beautiful house in its way, but quite dark. On the ground floor the windows opened out onto our privada. The walkway we shared with six other houses, decorated with tiles. The houses were large with wooden flooring and high. There were three floors but then there was also a long spiral staircase which took you to the roof and a servants' quarters on the roof.  The stairway was dramatic. It swept down to the lounge, and in the lounge there were white pillars. The stairwel...

George Monbiot, a modern Calvinist Global warming is going to happen so we should work out ways of dealing with it, and geo-engineering is one rational way out of the labyrinth. We have to go under the knife and the fact that you, George Monbiot, downplay the importance of geo-engineering is neither here nor there. Echoing the author of the Gaia Hypothesis, J. E Lovelock, David Deutsch in his TED talk pointed out that it was already too late to prevent global warming. It is already a disaster. The actions taken to reduce CO2 are not even purported to solve the problem. The lesson seems clear to him. We need a stance of problem fixing not just problem avoidance. He goes on to say that the world is buzzing with plans to reduce gas emissions at all costs, but that, instead, it should be buzzing with plans to reduce global temperature, and reduce the higher temperature efficiently and cheaply. He notes that, at the moment, these initiatives are on the fringe, but says the...