the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Perpetual Peace

This book (available from that link as a .pdf online for free) is a 1794* essay by Immanuel Kant on the possibility of ending war between sovereign nations. He basically argues that we need to seek to establish an international federation of co-dependent nations under a singular representative state. Pretty modern ideas for the 18th-century, but then, this is Kant we're talking about. His arguments are largely pragmatic and don't veer too much into philosophy** and should be generally digestible by a majority of readers. As stated repeatedly throughout the text, this is NOT a manifesto - I don't think Kant believed that any single state of policy would be able to even kickstart the move towards a perfectly peaceable world - but by holding out these plausibilities as ideals, he makes a very convincing case that establishing such a world is not beyond possibility even within a cynical grasp of reality, and so the main thrust of this test stands on its own two feet. Recommended reading for anyone whom this theme strikes curiosity into, but if you somehow happen to be a person of international political influence who reads this blog, I specifically implore you to read this and think of how Kantian your rationality as regards your work is.

* And the translation, by one M. Campbell Smith, was published in 1903 - so even the Very Lengthy (as in, longer than the translated text it was the introduction to) Introduction recounting the history of ideas around the core topic of this essay came too early to be able to speak of anything regarding such institutions as NATO, the EU or UN even, which might have quite substantively reshaped Smith's introductory commentary on the ideas herein.

** Except for the pair of appendices, where he first considers the disagreements between proper moral ethics and political reality, and then secondly looks at the singular overlap point between proper moral ethics and political reality - that being the idea of a public right.

Rights of Man [abridged]

This book (available as a free .pdf on that link) is a 1792 pamphlet by Thomas Paine, or at least a substantive squashed version of the same edited by Glyn Hughes (the original text is 90,000 words, he makes it 7,200ish). As Paine's reputation and its year of publication suggest it is chiefly concerned with the political fallout across Europe of the French revolution.

   Part one opens with a dedication of the work to George Washington; so far so good, I guess. He then dives straight into a no-holds-barred critique of Edmund Burke's reactionary take on the whole affair - defending the revolutionary French Constitution, with support from a restatement of his view on the unhelpfulness and illegitimacy of all hereditary power. Next he copies out the seventeen articles of the universal rights of man as enshrined in aforementioned French Constitution: these aren't as comprehensive as those we currently have under the United Nations, but one can see clearly that for the time they were invoked they were true game-changers in civil and political liberty. He concludes this first part with a prolonged case for liberal, internationalist, democratic values being the chief product and essential safeguard of public Reason; writing "my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."

   Part two opens with a brief letter to one M. de la Fayette. He goes on to praise the American revolution and its core values as an example to all nations. Then follow several chapters on society and government; these are delightfully anarchistic, with Paine dropping bangers like "the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government" and "it is impossible that such governments as have hitherto existed in the world, could have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle sacred and moral." Based as fuck. Next he discusses the nature and purpose of constitutions - which, he says, is nothing more than to concretize and safeguard the true purpose of governments, which is to promote the common good. In his ensuing internationalist ramble there is a possible prophesy of the EU: "for what we can foresee, all Europe may form but one great Republic, and man be free of the whole." I have no surety which side he would have landed on but I know Thomas Paine would have had a great deal to say about Brexit if he were still kicking about. The final chapter is a heartfelt polemic for the need of reform in the taxation system, with the derived benefits going to support the poor. And in his concluding paragraphs there are a couple of sentiments that undeniably pre-echo the writings of Marx and Engels half a century later - he says "the iron is becoming hot all over" and closes on the lovely image that "it is... not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun".

   Overall this is a punchy little pamphlet. Okay, maybe too little as I could have stood to read the full version, but I feel Hughes's editing made a good job that this felt like a complete set of well-put ideas rather than a Sparknotes summary. Anyone interested in the political history of the modern west should at least give this a once-over - it's one of the most controversial and influential texts in aforesaid history and so cannot be ignored, and many of its arguments still hold water as things that we need to pay close heed to today.

Common Sense

This book (available from that link as a free .pdf file) is a 1776 pamphlet by Thomas Paine, and it is no understatement to say that it's probably one of the most influential and important texts in the history of the modern west. Britain and its north American colonies were fighting a breakup war at the time, and Paine threw his weight into the ring of public discourse with the profoundly optimistic statement that "the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." He was an ardent advocate of democratic, egalitarian freedom, and as such a key figure for the ideological discussion around the Great Experiment of American society.*

   He begins with a cogent socio-political definitional outline of the nature and necessity of government, arguing that reason leads us to claim representative democracy as the most stable and reliable way to preserve moral value. Next he launches into a scathing critique of the British constitution, as complex and vague as it is, with specific vitriol reserved for the monarchy and hereditary power, which he argues are not only immoral** but impractical and inefficient. What follows is a pragmatic and passionate defence of the case for American independence; a profound strength of internationalist cosmopolitanism*** pervades these passages in ways that often feel far too modern to be from the 18th century. He completely destroys the morally bankrupt commonplace British objections to America's desire to be free of its "mother nation" - as what kind of good mother wages war against her children who wish to fly the nest? An interesting side point here is that he claims it a fact of divine providence that America was discovered by Europeans just when it was, as it provided a perfect new home of promise and plenty to the many tens of thousands of refugees generated in the decades following the Reformation. In his closing passages he considers the necessity and opportunity of America developing its as-then-yet infant naval forces. Finally there is an appendix, added for the third circulation of this most-inflammatory pamphlet, in which he full-on attacks a recent statement by the King on the American situation, and restates the urgency and human potential of the experiment trying to take shape across the Atlantic. In one of his final lines he sentimentally declares, "let each of us hold out to his neighbour the hearty hand of friendship, and unite in drawing a line, which, like an act of oblivion, shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissension" - which strikes me as just as politically ideal as authentically Christian.

   Ultimately this is a text that you will recognise as being as rightly controversial as it was at the time if you have even the smallest grasp of its historical context - but its dogged and clearly-put rhetoric about self-determination and moral government is just as relevant today as it was then. Well worth a read for anyone interested in western history and timeless politics.

* I dread to think what he would've made of the state of things 250 years later.

** His points herein are unexpectedly biblically grounded (he describes the divine right of kings as "the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry"), and robustly supported by cursory glances at the history of these institutions.

*** On not only nationality but creed too; he writes "I fully and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us".

American Fascists

This book by Chris Hedges seemed topical for some reason.*

    If you are even halfway familiar with the actual biblical ethic of Jesus Christ and the actual political ethic of modern-day American 'Christianity', you do not need me to tell you how grossly divergent these things are. The roots of this go pretty far into the past but since the latter decades of the 20th century have metastasized into something truly dangerous and that I can only imagine how much God grieves over. Hedges, who studied at Harvard Divinity School before becoming a foreign correspondent, goes into great and granular detail about how the intricacies of personal faith are distorted and manipulated by the nationalist right-wing of American political actors, and just how far so-called 'Christian' leaders have either been complacent or wholeheartedly capitulated to this scheme of outright power-grabbing.

    This is not an easy read for a Christian as it so depressingly and thoroughly shows how the fabric of our faith can be manipulated for truly hateful ends. The lengthy anecdotal passages in this book are just as harrowing as the insightful theoretical explanations of what exactly is going on. I know I am too young and thus too late for a blogpost about this book to have any meaningful impact on future politics, as we have already swung far enough that I genuinely fear there may be no coming back for American democracy. The only way in which I would thus recommend this book is if you want to salve your confusion by knowing a bit more about how exactly the religion of the world's superpower became so co-opted by capitalism, racism, anti-intellectualism and so forth, that we now face ANOTHER FOUR FUCKING YEARS with the "leader of the free world" being a draft-dodging, tax-evading, bigoted rapist who prior to his entry into politics was most famous for telling people on reality TV that they were fired - ugh, but yeh, if you want a fragment more insight into how American Christianity became so horribly un-Christlike, this book would be a good place to start. If only my blog had a large-ish readership and I'd read this when it came out nearly twenty years ago - then at least this post would have maybe had some kind of impact. Now it just feels like a whinge.**

* I actually meant to read it the first time Orange Fraudster Man was running for president, but never quite got round to it. This time however I beasted the whole book in a day out of desperation to understand a bit more about how a country could be so utterly dumb.

** Assuming I have readers - which is a stretch in itself - but assuming any of you are American - if you have them, please take close care of your LGBTQ+ friends and family in the days to come. Their fears are by no means illegitimate. Remember even Hitler came for the trans community well before any concerted attack against the Jews.

Fire with Fire

This book by Naomi Wolf is a powerfully optimistic perspective on the rising tide of female power toward the end of the 20th-century, envisioning how this trend can be held onto & grown into the 21st.*

   The text is split into five parts: firstly, an examination of what she calls the "genderquake" and the declining hegemony of masculine power, with a concomitant shift in female consciousness; secondly, considerations of where feminism may be falling short of its potential in recent years as it becomes co-opted by middle-class consumer models alien to its radical roots; fourthly, a dissection of the feminine fear of power & the need for a new psychology to emerge to overcome this; fifthly & finally recommendations for where to go from where the book concludes.

   I neglected to mention the third part above as that forms the longest chunk of the book, and is most central to Wolf's whole gist with it. Here she outlines two competing traditions within feminism as she sees it: "power feminism", which is all about maximally fighting for & holding onto equality without shame or doubt; and "victim feminism", which is more about emphasising the difference between men & women then highlighting the ways in which the former harm & suppress the latter all in an impotent hand-wringing sort of way. Wolf makes it very clear that she vehemently feels victim feminism has run up against number of cultural & socio-political impasses, and is now largely holding the wider movement back. There are implications in these chapters to be found of relevance to modern marginalised communities - those protesting their rights on the streets versus those who would rather simply retreat into a demarked safe space. In my opinion Wolf goes a little too harshly in her critique, and though her principles are in the right place she can't expect everybody to have the circumstances or disposition necessary to join her at the same exact spice level of her own activism. Another critique I would make is that her discussion of feminism in general is far from satisfyingly intersectional, though given the age of this book I suppose that's to be expected.

   While outdated in many places, I still found this a compelling and interesting perspective on the promise & potential of feminism, and though the basic points are almost certainly better said more relevantly to the 2020's by more recent authors, I guess this would be worth a read if you're interested in the evolution of contemporary feminist thought.

* So much & yet so little has changed since this was published over thirty years ago - one has to wonder how much of this book's core theses would still be held by Wolf today, as well as how many extra chapters she would need to add to discuss the tectonic shifts in feminism generally in those intervening decades.

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race

This book by Reni Eddo-Lodge does what it says on the tin; a staunch and well-argued case for how race has been historically argued and understood so poorly by white people that people of colour may as well give up their hopes. Though that is not what Reni's argument concludes on, nor her career as a speaker on racial issues; it is clear throughout how white fragility conspires to minimize if not ignore the contributions on these topics made by the people affected by them. I won't summarize her points here - only say that if you are a white person, especially if you are a white person who doesn't "feel the benefit" of being so, you need to read this book.

A Wilderness of Mirrors

This book by Mark Meynell is, as its subtitle puts it, a Christian apologetic via an exploration into "trusting again in a cynical world". And boy, is it timely. In fact maybe too timely - but we'll come back to that point later. First let's get a grip on what it actually talks about.

   The first part of the book looks into the legacy of fracturing trust in the modern age. In three heavily-endnoted chapters, Meynell talks about the failures on this front of our ruling authorities (although largely here drawing on historical examples, which is all very well, but I would have liked a bit more of a juicy socio-political analysis), our mediating authorities (informers and the like), and our personal authorities (or caregivers - though the chapter swiftly brushes aside both the medical and teaching professions within a single page and then is mainly charged with the failures of the church*).

   The second part is a short, theoretical pair of reflections on the loneliness-inducing alienation, lostness and paranoia that we can all-too-easily succumb to in such a climate. These chapters are fine enough I guess, but Meynell doesn't really say anything that hasn't already been said in far more insightful ways by both academics and meme-smiths, so I won't toot the horn for this middle section too much. I also think he entirely fails to address a few key factors that are driving our sense of alienation, betrayedness and paranoia - the rampantly shifting techno-social landscape, the death throes of late capitalism, the ecological crises, to name just three. You can probably think of more. A bit of legwork in talking about the sociology or political-economic theory of trust would also have been appreciated.

   But it is in part three that we get to the meat of the book - the Christian apologetic section. Firstly he deals with the biblical conception of original sin as both the starting-point and to-some-degree justification of such a culture of mistrust: this was an interesting chapter and made a lot of connections I hadn't seen before. The next three chapters are far more simply predictable: Jesus is the one we can trust; the Church is the society in which we can start to break away from patterns of cynicism; the gospel is the message and narrative we need to begin building a more trustful future. Nothing bad, but nothing original: especially in the final chapter, a few more pragmatic pointers about how to break through psychologically or socially into the cynical miasma of the postmodern world wouldn't have gone amiss.

   As I hinted in my opening paragraph, the real problem with this book is that it came out too soon. It was published in 2015, and while "post truth" was already a thing in certain academic circles at that time, it wasn't yet the predominant socio-political normativity - had this book been put together even three years later, let alone six and he'd have had all the Covid madness to break down to boot, it could have had a lot more to draw on and impactfully say. But that's a pretty cynical two cents to dig into a book which is a perfectly respectable Christian apologetic speaking into a vital issue in most of the contemporary western world. It's not great reading, but it's perfectly readable, if that makes sense. I'd probably only recommend this to you if you're already a Christian and you're specifically looking for a resource on how to engage the cynicism of our times; as exhortational as the final sections were for me as a believing reader, I really doubt they'd convince anyone who wasn't already convinced of the Truth beyond truth in a world where truth barely even exists anymore.

* Something I am all too familiar with, as the elder of my old church The Crowded House, one Steve Timmis (who, interestingly enough, wrote one of the blurb reviews on this very book - he describes it as "well researched, well written, and well worth reading" - I tentatively agree), was pushed to resign as CEO of global church-planting network Acts 29 and as leader of the church for persistent allegations of bullying behaviour and fostering a culture of spiritual abuse under his leadership. I have talked about my personal journey in all this in other posts which I'm not going to bother to link here, but if you're really interested feel free to search through my blog's (not inconsiderable, I know lols) history until you find the particularly long, whingy posts.

Politics and the English Language

This book - well, rather a long essay - by George Orwell, has become something of a talking-point across the political spectrum in recent years, for interesting reasons. The right seem to think that it upholds their stance against "politically correct" speech policing, while the left seem to feel it upholds their idea that all too often vague populistic and non-committal speech is supplanting public honesty. Exactly where Orwell himself would have lain in this argument we will never know, as he's been dead for seventy years, but still people on all sides of all political spectrums love to claim this man who fought for an anarchist army against Spanish fascists is on their side.

   I'll quit rambling. This is an essay about vagueness; the ways in which the English language can be made flimsy, indeterminate, in order to couch the political ambitions and goals of the speaker - regardless of their ideology. Some of the most insidious ways in which this happens are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. If these terms mean nothing to you then I suggest you click on the link at the very start of this post and read the free-online .pdf of this very essay so that Orwell himself can elucidate you. After explicating the ways in which these linguistic tactics can be used to obfuscate and befuddle, Orwell goes on to retranslate a passage he had quoted "in political language" earlier into normal, honest English - and the differences are quite startling. Even as someone who was a keen student of linguistics at college, I was startled at how much of a difference can be made pragmatically to the same semantic statement through a handful of minor tweaks. But all of this is moot. The world has moved on a great deal since Orwell passed on; we have been living in the "post-truth" era for about eight years now, and I dread to think what George would make of the political-linguistic landscape if he could see it today.

   Read this if you want for historical curiosity. It's a somewhat interesting insight into the past evolution of populist propaganda-speech. But it won't help you all that much in navigating the shitshow that is how politicians use language today. Unless, that is, you trust them, in which case, God help you.

That Hideous Strength: How the West was Lost

This book by Melvin Tinker I am going to deal with incredibly briefly. I know that its author is the father of someone I consider a friend so this may come back to bite me in the arse but I have to be frank. This book was written by an ignorant coward who was more concerned about farting out a book about "how to be a distinctive Christian in today's complex landscape" than they were about actually finding a fucking map or compass. There is virtually no theological content to this book that you couldn't get from Sunday school, and there is virtually no intellectual content to this book that you wouldn't find on PragerU. 25% paranoid anti-intellectualism, 30% anti-LGBT rehash with zero context or point, and 45% zombified hand-wringing about "cultural Marxism". I genuinely feel that C.S. Lewis would be slightly sick in his mouth to know that a book so ignorant and reactionary was written in the name of one of the novels he was proudest of. If you're not a Christian I guess you might read this for straw-man entertainment. If you are a Christian, I implore you to be better than to read shit like this.

Project Öcalan

This isn't really a book, it was my Masters dissertation. But it's as long as some books! And more scholarly, if I may say so myself, than many others! And I've reread it, so it gets a post! Not a long one though as I've already done one (see previous link).

If you'd be interested in reading an examination of whether & how post-nationalist ideologies are reshaping the Kurdish question in the contemporary Middle-East, then I've left a .pdf of it open to all on my Google Docs folder. So click here. By the way, the reason it's called Project Öcalan on here is that the founder of the PKK and key thinker behind the recent ideological shifts I talk about is that very same Abdullah.

playing

This book by James Evans is a really interesting series of Christian reflections on culture, society, God, "the margins" and how playfulness encapsulates & shapes the creative and prophetic dimensions latent in all things; I found this book far more academic than I was expecting but it was a refreshing deep dive having been working on something similar for much of last year. Evans covers a lot of ground in a concise book - the Spirit's guiding acts in subverting things of worldly wisdom and convention, Jesus's examples of how "playing" with rules/norms can refocus sociocultural imaginations out of self-maintained prisons & on toward things of Heaven: underlying his conceptual frameworks and plentiful in examples is the lived experiences of African-American Christianity, and I think for that alone this book should be high up the reading lists of all white christian leaders; the graceful depth and theological poignancy here make this a must-read for this oh-so-typically-unplayful demographic in my opinion. 

Why I am not going to buy a computer

This book, a Penguin Moderns release comprising two essays by American pastoral poet Wendell Berry, is a brilliant, enlightening and challenging read on diverse topics brought together into a powerful tangible whole.

   The first [eponymous] essay is a very short but deeply cogent manifesto, on modernity's over-reliance on information technology, and how amid the changing nature of work by these tools, Berry, a farmer and writer, ruminates on the primacy of the pencil over the keyboard for his latter craft just as he prefers time-tried hand-work over surrendering to the growing preference for new-fangled gadgetry in the agricultural field.* What struck me on bristling at some of his arguments is the sincerity, well-meaningness and eloquence with which the case is made; some double the number of pages taken up by this essay are given over to printing original letters sent into the magazine where it was published and several of these questions (it must be said, varying in relevance & graciousness) are given fullish appropriate responses by Berry - however he also mentions that numerous letters received about thus were directly critical & presumptive about his relationship with his wife, particularly regarding the nature of domestic work; touching a personal nerve, the responses herein go on to form;

   The second, Feminism, the Body and the Machine, is more an academic freestyle on defending the basic nuances ignored by feminists, would-be's & aren'ts in the (admittedly shallow) critique of Berry's domestic-economic situation blurted in response to some lines of his above piece. His arguments in this are wide-ranging, complex and yet I think quite convincing - and while I found much I thought I was going to disagree with him on during the reading by the time he'd wrapped it up I found myself apologetically onside. Well worth a read on its own merit as offers a really interesting male perspective on current (or maybe, generationally, arguably just pre-current-ish) gender norms & how these link in with spheres of political-economic and technological reality & attitude.

   Overall these two brief pieces bring a fresh-yet-bucolic vision to long-standing debates; and however much you want to scream at this patriarchal Luddite - give him a read and think for yourself. Definitely a recommended little book if you're into exploring the quiet hidden interconnections of the tools, personalities and structures making up modernity.

* No pun intended.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

This book by Matt Haig is a punchily honest & disarmingly thoughtful series of reflections on how we can try to maintain our mental health in a world increasingly beholden by all of our modern era's weirdnesses, stresses, etc: drawing on everyday biographical snippets and pretty robust common sense this book skips around a lot but weaves together a bright cogent narrative of our Real Living Selves, navigating political chaos, new technologies, & all the myriad fuckeries these bring to bear on our poor battered brains. Personally I got a lot of encouraging ammunition from this book to apply to my own struggles with the stuff Haig* talks about here; I'd highly recommend this to anyone similarly looking for some kind of individual stability and reasonableness throughout the bluster that is becoming of this fucking decade.

* Btw it is indeed same author as this fantastic novel, which in itself was inspired by Haig's own disassociative experiences with extreme depression & anxiety, as further unpacked in this other more testimonial work.

Poetry, Conspiracy and Radicalism in Sheffield

This book, edited by Hamish Mathison and Adam James Smith, well - I spied it in a lefty bookstall in the Winter Gardens and knew from the title* that it was a book I needed to read. It's a collection of poems printed in the Sheffield Register, a more-or-less radical (in that it espouses basic civil equalities and liberties) paper that was hush-forced out of existence in the late 18th-century.**

   There are ten poems, mostly published anonymously or under pseudonyms: they deal with matters ranging from slavery and the (still quite young in 1793) British abolitionist movement, income inequality and the corrupting power of wealth, the futility of patriotism in a country fighting a war which made no sense to the common people, the fundamental necessity of individual freedom to think for oneself, and such things. The poems vary a great deal (considering they're all from the same city in the same couple of years during the early onset of the Romantic period, that is) in style and tone, with some being borderline polemical and others veering playfully into ironising or picking up metaphors and running off into the horizons with them; also, each poem is discussed in a short reflective essay later in the book, placing its content and themes into social and historical context so as to better explore their potentcies and intents. There is also a longer essay about Joseph Gales (who founded the Register) and his apprentice who was also an influential poet James Montgomery (who later also founded the Iris), their work and its impact on the artistic side of things but also how meaningful it was for the establishment of publicly-available socially-conscious information in the form of non-conservative newspapers; Sheffield has a deep and strong history of progressive grassroots movements and the work which the contents of this book barely scratch the surface of has a significant place in the history of my city's development of such a community tendency. Finally, there are contained in appendices a handful of readers' letter to the Register, as well as another two poems, and some speech extracts and editorials by Joseph Gales and James Montgomery both.

   Excellent little book.

   By means of explicating my personal reflections on this book, see the asterisky bit, and note that I have since finishing it not only found myself experimenting with writing poems that actually rhyme, I've even [self-censored in case any deep-state intelligence agencies are surveilling this blog to find out what I, a known rampant (if relatively eloquent, and, some would even venture as far as to say, well-informed) anarchist, am up to on the whole subversive collective action front]. Just joking. I'm going to a fracking site next Friday but I was doing that anyway before I read this book and it's hardly my first encounter with that kind of thing. I have however written a poem about fracking in a similar style to one of the poems in this book, which I will not hesitate to whip out into action should I manage to trap one of the rig-site staff in conversation. That's how you get to them, you know.

* Poetry is my craft, radicalism is more-or-less my politics, Sheffield is my home, and who doesn't love the excitement of a good conspiracy from time to time?

   I'm properly just on a hype for the intersections of these things at the moment anyway - there's an exhibition in Weston Park Museum about Sheffield's over-200-year history of radical collective action movements, and another in the Millennium Galleries about the power of art and activism drawing on and enriching each other. I'd feel spoilt - if I enjoyed it for its own sake only, but such delightful overlaps remind me of the call to action that creativity is; art which is not perceived with moral-political consciousness becomes mere production/consumption rather than the gorgeous messy explosive collaborative dialogue about what is true and beautiful and good and what this means for us; art which is perceived with moral-political consciousness, even if it wasn't necessarily created with the same, gains the capacity for inspiration beyond abstractified*** arguments about detectable stylistic influences or liable auction values - inspiration for concrete acts of moral-political creativity, which of course take place in the grandest medium of all, human society.

** Fortunately a more tentative (but with just as much emancipatory intentionality in its long-term sociocultural subversiveness) paper, the Sheffield Iris, replaced it.

*** Is this a synonym for bourgeois? Not sure I'd stretch that far, but maybe.

Optimism over Despair

This book is a collation of interviews by C. J. Polychroniou with Noam Chomsky about the state of the world in 2017 - and boy, lemme tell you, it's bleak going. I got it chiefly because I hoped from the title that Noam was going to slice through the despair-inducing series of global events and trends dominating the headlines of this past year with a knife made of pure hope, but no, it's basically just a thorough, concise, and horrifyingly well-informed exploration of just how fucked we are, but of course resorting to despair will only make us get more fucked, and so the only morally or politically viable course for all those with progressive agendas to maintain as an attitude is a resigned, stoic, optimism.*

   Throughout, C. J. and Noam discuss:

• Collapsing American hegemony
• Unravelling European integration
• The new phase of the global 'war on terror'
• ISIS, NATO, Russia, and the shitstorm in the Middle-East
• Inequality and unsustainability in the plutocratic model of post-neoliberal 'really existing capitalism'
• Trump and the decline of American civil society
• Republicans (the most dangerous group of people on the planet) and global warming
• US meddling in other countries' elections/societies/etc
• Religion's dogged resistance to separating from politics
• Utter failures of US healthcare and education systems
• The potential of anarcho-socialist democratic change when all these trends/events are placed with optimistic consideration in their historical context

   It is very scary stuff. To be honest, with the level of detail and insight Noam brings to each of these broad fields of discussion, one is left with an overbearing sense of dread at the state of the world far moreso from reading this book than if one had read separate books on each issue or even a potent digest of leftist critique-responses to most of the actual news items comprising these larger problems over the past year. I'd recommend it as an oh-shit-inspirational text for progressive activists, but really most of those already know to a large degree just how fucked we are on all the fronts discussed herein, and so this book effectively just serves as an educational reinforcement from that raspy old prophet of contemporary western anarchism. You would probably learn a lot from this book, especially historical blips of detail that often elude mainstream narratives on these big issues - but overall I don't feel there is as much to be gained from reading this as there is by simply reading the news and maintaining one's dedication to taking action, if one is politically inclined similarly to Chomsky or myself, which if you're thinking of reading this you probably are. But yeh. It lives up to the title in prose conclusion only.

* That's not to say good things aren't happening, because they are. Just nowhere near big or fast enough to substantively offset some of the bigger and more pressing factors in why we're fucked.

Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan

This book, published by a research organisation called TATORT Kurdistan, comprises a series of in-depth interviews with activists and organisers and citizens in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where the ideology of democratic autonomy is being put into practice though establishing community-level self-governance councils, economic cooperatives, and educational and cultural institutions to help propagate itself as a movement. Gender equality and environmental sustainability are core focuses of the projects, and they strive to be as participatory and open as possible - however, uptake is slow among traditional under-developed civil society of the region, and the movement faces heavy repression from the Turkish state. Overall this is an enlightening book on some revolutionary happenings in a corner of the world rarely heard from in mainstream media.

Occupy

This book, an edited selection* of material by Noam Chomsky concerning the movement Occupy Wall Street (which soon sprawled to many major cities across the world** and ended up seeping into the general global left-activist consciousness), is an insightful and heartening peek inside what was probably the most important popular movement in the west this millennium so far.

   The general thrust of Occupy was extremely broad - people taking part cited concerns ranging from climate change to mental healthcare to western foreign policy to institutionalised racism - but at the core of it was the classic Marxian struggle: the disempowered working masses against an entrenched established elite.*** Neoliberalism has accelerated this inegalitarian conflict to enormous levels; our whole societies are increasingly structured so as to benefit economic growth, which disproportionately benefits a tiny clique of investment-holders and financiers at the top, whose control and influence over economy, media, policymaking, and more, is high enough to pretty much maintain their position so long as the people don't realise what's happening, remember they live in a democratic society, and kick off. The first rule of Anarchist Club is you don't talk about Anarchist Club always question power structures to determine whether their authority can be legitimately purported to be for the public good and can be held accountable to be so. Democratic societies, in principle, make this easy; but neoliberalism knows this, and has spent several decades feeding the idols of careerism and consumerism that make people feel autonomous while they're being exploited, without them clocking onto the system that is funneling power that should ostensibly be democratised upwards as wealth concentrates it in ever smaller pockets of control. Unless primary political decision-making power is in the hands of the general public, then issues like institutionalised racism and climate change and everything else will only be tackled when it is either cheap, easy, or politically unavoidable to do so - unfortunately, solving these kinds of issues is rarely cheap or easy, but given the sheer capitalism-induced apathy of much of the western public and the outright irrelevant spectacle of the actual political system, these things are often extremely politically avoidable to boot. Which is why Occupy scared the shit out of the establishment - and of course, the police were sent in, and peaceful groups of people congregating in public spaces to hold constructive discussions about tackling our societies' biggest problems were arrested in large numbers. The 2008 crisis was the beginning of the end for neoliberalism: it became clear that it was a highly unstable system, and one that people are starting more and more to wake up to as having not served the public interest at all. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are now serious prominent political figures, showing that the public has rediscovered its capacity to think past the establishment-preferred disgust/hate/fear reaction to 'socialism' and are seeing how thoroughly congruent with the ideals of democratic society these notions are - not to mention that higher equality helps support progress in a wide range of other socioeconomic issues.

   Occupy, while only really supported by leftish activists at the time, was big enough and loud enough to propel the idea of the 99% and the 1% into wider awareness - and that has had enormous sociopolitical repercussions and hopefully will continue to do so. Things change. Often for the worse, often surprisingly, sometimes for the better - more often if large numbers of people group together, organise, mobilise, and make themselves heard. That is the essence of democracy, and of progressive activism. I am proud to have been a participant (an extremely minor one - see **) this historic movement, and this book by the inimitable indefatigable Noam Chomsky was like an adrenalin-boost to my gusto for activisting**** - and if you're of similar ilk to me it would probably work for you too. So yeh, I'd recommend this book chiefly to lefties, as a potent encouraging reminder of what movements can achieve by bringing people together - even if tangible change is not immediately achieved, it always has longer-term deeper impacts by setting off ripple effects that start provoking conversation that can help to change the general consciousness.

* The selected bits include transcripts of a lecture, a Q&A, an interview, another interview, and a short passage in remembrance of Noam's late fellow radical Howard Zinn, and how the values he espoused in academia and activism were being rekindled.

** Including, at the peak of its spread, a small gathering outside Sheffield Cathedral, which I (only eighteen at the time, and nowhere near as actively political as I am today) tentatively visited for half an hour and had a really interesting conversation with a guy who looked like a cartoon punk brought to life about co-operatives (he recommended Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread to me and I read it on a family holiday - my first anarchist book!) and another with a friendly hippy-type about windfarms. 

*** Occupy's biggest achievement, other than rebooting western leftist activism with a massive surge of cross-pollinating ideas and methods for organisation, and (arguably) spawning anarcho-hacker collective Anonymous, was reframing this class conflict in terminology that made the reality of inequality far more accessible to the generally depoliticised (and often highly suspicious of people who talk like Marxists) public; out with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in with the 99% and the 1% - and then presumably out with the 1% as their obscenely excessive privileges are curbed and redistributed.

**** Which admittedly is why I read it - as you're probably aware, there is a general election coming up soon, and the Tories are probably going to win big, and it's hard to cling to constructive optimism in the face of all the present's turbulent perversions of systematic social and political reasonableness.

[edit - June 9th: ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, what a night to be the underdog. Jeremy, go and have yourself a well-deserved day off at the allotment.]

Feminism: Issues and Arguments

This book was the core textbook for the feminism module (if any longtime readers remember?) that I took in my final year of undergraduate study, written by Jennifer Saul, a prominent philosopher in feminism and language use and the lecturer for that module.* It's been almost two years since I completed that module but there were five chapters of this book that I'd never read - so up the currently-halfway-through-pile it went (easy extra blog post; also an extremely interesting jam-packed book, worth sharing).
   In it, Saul walks us through nine of the biggest topical areas of debate in contemporary feminism, in explorations that are primarily philosophical but draw on political analysis, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and many case studies from real women. These nine chapters are:

1. The politics of work and family
2. Sexual harassment
3. Pornography
4. Abortion
5. Feminine appearance
6. Feminism and language change
7. Women's 'different voice'
8. Feminism, science and bias
9. Feminism and multiculturalism

   Remember, this is a textbook - so Saul isn't ploughing through all these topics blasting her own arguments. Each chapter is an accessible and balanced overview of key issues, questions, and thinkers within the debates; she lays out opposing sides, weighs them up, presented in both as much empirical and intellectual context as possible. It is often heavy but it is far from preachy, and would serve anyone new to feminist thought extremely well as an introductory volume.

* A module which, may I now say, was one of the more interesting in my whole degree and certainly the one that challenged me to question and revise my own views the most. I went into that module not really knowing what I thought about feminism, having grown up in (admittedly relatively egalitarian-value-minded circles but still) a patriarchal culture as a male, it was simply not something I was prompted to think about at all - but thanks to the political consciousness of several female friends, I started to see the systems of oppression for what they were, and wanted to learn more. By the end of the summer the year I'd taken this module, I'd consumed an enormous breadth and depth of feminist political, social and philosophical thought, having seen how the patriarchy manifests in often-insidiously-subtle and often-hideously-unsubtle forms of day-to-day sexist oppression to this day in society. Having grappled with how it intersected with my Christian faith (much mainstream writings by/for Christians on any topic involving gender has a lot of explaining itself to do), I feel I eventually reached a fairly (intellectually) satisfying conclusion, spelled out here. Of course, this would be pointless without coinciding with expressing actual solidarity, and trying as best I can to limit uses of my male privilege to those times that it can be used to get another male who doesn't realise his own privilege to sit down or shut up. If you're a man reading this and you're feeling vaguely angry, case in point - you got learning to do.