UK Election – a view from North Carolina

31 May

Kenneth Surin, writing yesterday in CounterPunch … Labour under Jeremy Corbyn has been gaining steadily in the polls, despite a massive media campaign to undermine him, extending from the BBC and supposedly “liberal” Guardian to the UK’s famously ghastly tabloids. … Read More »

The Handmaid’s Tale

29 May

Over the years I’ve twice begun this dystopian feminist vision, and twice given up on it – a thing I rarely do with a novel – as woodenly predictable. Seventeenth century Massachusetts garb and post holocaust premise don’t help, striking … Read More »

Corbyn on terrorism

26 May

Why is this statement of the blindingly obvious such a ‘hugely controversial step’? Because we draw conclusions on the causes of salafist terror without troubling to join the dots on a quarter century of western aggression in the middle east, … Read More »

Universalism in an unfair world

7 May

Only connect – E. M. Forster, Howards End For his well researched work on the British establishment, you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between Owen Jones and me. The same goes for George Monbiot’s forensic but neatly penned linking of … Read More »

Syria: what we know and what we don’t

2 May

“Ba’athism promotes a unified Arab state through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary government and the creation of one-party states, and rejects political pluralism …  it is a secular ideology that supports socialist economics to a varying degree, and … Read More »