The global dominance of Virus over the last two years is telling us that capitalism is ready to do “whatever it takes” to postpone its [final reckoning]. It is therefore delusional to think governments, health authorities, and media act independently. … Read More »
David Leonhardt, New York Times, September 27, 2021 The messianic certainty I detect on all sides of the Covid conversation is dismaying. People with no obvious qualification to do so are not only sounding off in FB echo chambers as … Read More »
Capitalist pharmacy produces suboptimal health outcomes, if not outright harm. Seeing the problem as production for private profit, under governments led by plutocrats, is the first step to a solution. A second is seeing that planned production by publicly owned … Read More »
Just two reads this month. (You’ll see why when you clock the word count of the first one.) This past year I’ve been in an uncomfortable place vis-a-vis CV-19. On the one hand I’m impressed by sceptics like Germany’s Professor … Read More »
I’m neither a member of the Socialist Equality Party, host of World Socialist Website, nor likely to become one. I find SEP good on some things (e.g. defence of Syria, where most of the left takes at face value an … Read More »
CV-19 as fictitious is not the only conspiracy theory in town. Just yesterday a fellow dog walker, a likeable bloke and seemingly sane, gave his view of the corona virus as unleashed by China. The “communists”, he told me, are … Read More »
There’s been more than one reason for my long silence on CV-19, so readers might forgive me – if they forgive me on nothing else – for so long an introduction to my first read of the month, by the … Read More »
Two weeks ago an essay appeared on the Lockdown Sceptics site by one Alexis Fitzgerald. Headed, The Left-Wing Case Against Lockdown, it began thus: I consider myself to be left-wing on virtually every political topic: I am a socially-liberal social … Read More »
The thrust of my recent post, If only I wasn’t a commitment phobe, argued that the science and its underlying data are insufficiently developed or clear to support the levels of certainty professed on all sides of a somewhat tribalist … Read More »
Science matches theories with evidence and attempts to falsify them, so they can be refined to better match reality. A theory from a group of scientists is just that: a theory. Believing the opinion of that group without critical verification … Read More »