Normalising Extremism

Human beings have always tended towards definitions relative to themselves. We feel most at ease with that which is somehow intrinsically the same as ourselves, and when we go searching for something new, it is always in terms of otherness – foreign holidays, alien planets, ethnic cooking, as though our own cooking is not tied to our ethnicity.

Kony 2012

An awful lot has already been said about Kony 2012, the campaign to draw Westerners’ attention to a hitherto rather forgotten warlord in Africa. Its covered the internet, and has received its share of criticism, primarily its reliance on white people to tell an African story, the focus on lobbying US senators not Ugandan diplomats, and the connections with military interests. But where has this campaign even come from? Who’s actually asking us to give them a voice? Who’s paying the piper and thus calling the tune?

UK Riots: Hopelessly Violent?

This has certainly proven to be a year of unrelenting, if deeply contrasting uprisings, and it shows no sign of abating, with India the latest to enter the fray with anti-corruption protests that saw more arrests than our riots did. If its possible to make objective comparisons between the #ukriots and all the other uprisings of recent months, then I intend to do it.

Global Justice in a time of Austerity

in just 6 weeks time, I’m running an event of a fairly unprecedented scale at York Friend’s Meeting House, drawing together over a dozen local campaign groups for an afternoon of talks and discussions spanning the length and width of “Global Justice”. All this seemed so much more urgent before the cuts became the defining issue of the moment, and now its hard to even feel excited about the range of issues beyond our doorstep.

The Rise of Neo-Victorianism

I’m sure I wrote a post about the rise of Neo-Victorianism sometime about 2 years ago, concerned with the anti-social behaviour rhetoric that was prevalent in the media at the time. I can’t find it. Either way, during my time at home this Christmas, we watched the recentish BBC serialisation of Dickens’ Bleak House as a family. Somehow this government is managing to make Dickens’ work even more depressing to watch…

Corporate Tax: A time for Jubilee?

I’ve already written a fairly long political post advocating a movement for a reconnection of the World’s richest with those closer to the bottom of society through correct payment of taxes. This, if you’ll permit me, is a theological post. It feels wrong to divide the politics from the theology, but I’ll admit it took me a while to remember what now seems so thoroughly obvious: Jubilee – perhaps the single most radical command in the Torah, the earliest books of the Christian bible.

You shall not suffer a hedge fund manager to live among you?

A week ago, I was at a church service where the 10 commandments were being discussed. We discussed their influence on society today, and the reasons why they might have been important at the time they were written. At the end we had a big shout-out of commandments we could remember, and the Witches one came to mind. This is a verse I really struggle to understand, but then it suddenly dawned on me that there could be very good reasons for it. Let me attempt to explain…

Has New Labour left British activists spoilt?

This might seem like a very bizarre question. New Labour provided a huge wealth of issues on which to campaign, and saw several massive outpourings of emotion from numerous quarters, including Stop the War, Make Poverty History, and much of the previous “Jubilee 2000” initiative. There were part-privatisations and uncountable breaches of civil liberties, but was there something qualitatively different about the biggest issues under Blair and Brown?

Amoral Conservatism

I’ve been pondering some of the motives for Cameron’s exuberant welcoming of the Lib Dems into coalition with his party. Apart from the obvious (who couldn’t really govern without them), I’m left wondering whether he hasn’t in part played a very shrewd move when it comes to the socially and morally conservative elements in his party.

Why I’m not watching the World Cup

Whilst the rest of the World seems to be going mad over the current ongoing sporting event, I’m neither joining in, nor totally disinterested. I just can’t seem to get in the mood when I’m abundantly aware of the immense social damage, not to mention environmental damage, that this event is causing in South Africa, and the false images being put out around it.