Category: Politics
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Are Your Beliefs My Problem? | Liberal Belief in the Transcendent
I spent a fantastic New Year down in Devon with a great group of people – open fires, good walks, food, drink… and opportunities for ‘deliberate’ conversation too. In one such session, pretty late one night, a bunch of us had been thinking about ‘life in a post-truth era.’ It was fascinating stuff, but just…
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Mutiny | Withdrawal of Labour in the Age of Zero Hours
I’m no firebrand when it comes to trades union activity (though I am a lead rep in the education union I am a part of) but when a Tory government starts rattling sabres and threatening even more draconian legislation to outlaw strikes, it has me worried. Last night I finally got round to watching The…
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Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze
‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…
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Post Truth 1
Two stills from Adam Curtis’ excellent polemical documentary, Hypernormalisation. They’re from a section on the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and the parallel collapse of any sense that any grand claims could be trusted, among a people who had been asked to believe one pack of lies, and then revolt, only to –…
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Radical Politics: Position and Momentum
Earlier today, Cameron Freeman – who runs a Facebook group on Radical Theology responded to something I’d posted about Nigel Farage’s resignation with the following: Kester, I’d really like to hear sometime how do you mesh your (very) radical theology with you’re support for the centralized undemocratic control of an external top-down power like the…