Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

 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 borders of new a

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