Dilip Simeon's blog

There’s a battle under way at the heart of British politics and reactionaries are in the ascendancy. With the Brexit wind in their sails, when an issue of history or culture comes into prominence, they set the terms of the debate. Whether it is the singing of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia on the closing night of the Proms; history teaching in schools; statues in public spaces: the Right has a consistent story to tell and they find plenty of places to say it. Whether it is tub-thumpers like Richard Littlejohn, Rod Liddle and Toby Young; opportunist academics like Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufman; or Etonian intellectuals like Douglas Murray and David Goodhart, they tell a common story about Britain’s proud past that is now being trashed by ‘metropolitan liberal elitists’ and the ‘woke’ mob who are threatening our ancient liberties. In response, progressives are allowing themselves to be distracted and pigeon-holed, ignoring the economic and social content of many women’s, ra...

NB: To this excellent commentary on justice I will add a few lines from J.P. Stern's book, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (1992). They are taken from pages 113-114; a chapter called The Spirit of National Socialist Law: "National Socialist law is not, as in Dickens, 'an ass': that is, extravagant, purblind, and pompously remote from the true interests of the litigants and the community at large. It is the exercise of objective-seeming power in support of purely arbitrary and subjective decisions, its true character on no way hidden but emphasized by the mock-formality of its wordings. It is the law as it informs Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, The Trial (1914-15). 'Someone must have falsely denounced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning', runs its famous first sentence; and from this opening to Josef K.'s execution at the end, neither he nor anyone else in the novel ever asks the obvious question as to what ...

The last time there was open war between major European powers was in 1945. The last time the Northern Hemisphere was this hot was probably 125,000 years ago. Yet the FTSE 100 is worth more than ever, corporate profits are higher than ever, there are more British billionaires than ever. And oil companies are richer than ever. If we took climate change seriously, the petroleum industry would be bankrupt. These firms borrow billions against the future value of reserves they are yet to drill, but atmospheric physics demands we can’t burn that carbon if we wish civilisation to survive. If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognisable form, oil companies’ assets are worthless. And if we aren’t, they are still worthless... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/heatwave-climate-crisis-nhs-fossil-fuel-capitalism-hunger/ Banks are incentivised to fund climate chaos. Here’s how to change that The world’s largest banks are investing billions into heavily polluting industries, ...

Blaming the failings of an entire political culture on the moral deficiencies of one leader might make us feel righteous, but most of us know that the rot goes rather deeper than   one flamboyant character . The fall of Johnson could be taken as a historical juncture to be built upon and not just in the UK. S ome have   argued   that the political debate preceding the Brexit referendum was a   nadir ; that public hopes and fears were cynically exploited by politicians who did not even believe the substance of their own messages. Bye Bye Boris Johnson’s premiership fell because it seemed to recognise  no distinction  between what is true and what is politically expedient. Once that distinction ceases to matter, democratic discourse becomes unsustainable and political communication becomes a matter of permanent decoding. Integrity depends upon binding structures, such as codes of conduct and ethics committees. It also relies on a cultural commitment by politi...

When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. The UK government and the US supreme court look as if they are willing the destruction of our life support systems. It feels like the end game. In the US last week, the third perverse and highly partisan supreme court decision in a few days made American efforts to prevent climate breakdown almost impossible. Ruling in favour of the state of West Virginia , the court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency is not entitled to restrict carbon dioxide emissions from power stations. The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. So stupid and perverse are its policies on issues such as energy sav...

There’s no dispute that general working-class support for Democrats has fluctuated from election cycle to election cycle. The one constant, though, is that “working-class” is almost always used in the media to suggest white, male workers. The representative Reagan Democrat was, literally, a white autoworker in Michigan. Even when the white prefix is used to indicate a specific research interest - as in Joan Williams’s White Working Class -  there is still an unspoken assumption that this is the part of the working class that matters most. White workers were supposedly neglected in the 2016 campaigns, and so we ended up with Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. ...

NB:  This is the kind of detailed documentation that we require in India. Those interested in studying the jurisprudence of lawlessness further could read William Scheuerman's book:  The End of Law . DS Chris Hedges: Fascists in our midst Supreme Court rulings, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, herald the ascendancy of Christian fascism in the United States... The Supreme Court is relentlessly funding and empowering Christian fascism. It not only overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to an abortion, but ruled on June 21 that Maine may not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program. It has ruled that a Montana state program to support private schools must include religious schools. It ruled that a 40-foot cross could remain on state property in suburban Maryland . It upheld the Trump administration regulation allowing employers to deny birth control coverage to female employees on religious grounds .  It ruled that employment discrim...

Factoring in the value of human life and ethical considerations in economic and social policy making could bring about change. “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society,” warned political economist Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, published in 1944. Had Polanyi been alive today, his statement would have found prophetic validation in the condition of society in the United States, one of the world’s most dominant economies. For most of the late 20th century, the economy of the United States was built around an industrialised, mass-scaling model of weaponising itself and other nations while designing tools of finance to profit from war. That same economy is now in a situation where its gun industry, guided by the compulsions of less- regulated market forces, is wrecking its own society. On May 24, a mass shooting at a school in Uvalde in Texas , kil...

Several of the major central banks are stuck in a trap of their own making. This includes the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and others. The credit-based global financial system we have constructed and participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die. It’s like a game of musical chairs that we have to keep adding people and chairs to in order for it to never stop.  This is because cumulative debts are far larger than the total currency supply, meaning there are more claims for currency than there is currency. As such, too many of those claims can never be allowed to be called in at once; the party must always go on. When debt is too big relative to currency and starts to get called in, new currency is created, since it costs nothing other than some keystrokes to produce.  It’s like this for most major countries...  In other words, claims for dollars (debt) grows far more quickly than the economy’s ability to...

NB : A very well written and timely reminder. My two caveats are 1) with the word back ; and 2) with the positioning of the word crisis . It is not 'back', because after the Napoleonic wars it never went away; and a more appropriate title description  of our time (with due respect to Gurudev), would be the civilisation of crisis . DS In May, 1941 Rabindranath Tagore was in such poor health that nobody knew for sure if he would be able to take part in his birthday celebrations that year. In the end he did, though he was still too weak to read out himself his birthday message to his well-wishers, as he did every year in Santiniketan. The poet’s last message to the world, then, was not delivered in his own voice, and this adds to the poignancy that permeates his message. For  Crisis in Civilisation  can truly be called his last testament. One of the greatest men to have ever lived was bidding goodbye to the world, and was doing so at a time when everything around him seemed ...