What strikes me the most about the claims made by this coalition of covid-conspiracists, including anti-vaccine adherents, is just how close some of them are to understanding what is really going on. Some of them are actually on the brink of grasping broader left-wing ideas of class dynamics in society. Capitalism
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Writings of J. Todd Ring: What Must Be Done
Open letter to friends of freedom: Hi folks, People are beginning to realize that we need a different attitude and view with regards to how we see nature, life, humanity, and ourselves. Very few get past rudimentary first steps, however. Since this shift in paradigms and consciousness is essential and
Continue readingNorthern Currents: Freedom stops when work starts
Share this article: Dmitri Sotnikov Dmitri Sotnikov is a software developer with an interest in progressive politics. Dmitri believes that we must strive for a world with justice and equality for all. Find Dmitiri on Twitter Freedom can be seen as the measure of personal agency an individual enjoys within
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Who Are The CIA?
Who are the CIA? This will tell you everything you need to know. Here’s where things really started to go wrong: 1947, the National Security Act, which created the National Security Council and the CIA, giving the CIA sweeping, ultra-secretive, unconstitutional powers, and near limitless budget through the legalized, covert
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Race, Class, Empire & Authoritarianism
The new empire we live under is a global neofeudal corporate imperialism, which is now morphing into fascism, to be precise. It is systemically racist, self-deluded, and culturally arrogant in the extreme, but its primary allegiance is always to class. Everyone who is not among the 0.01% ruling elite is
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Central Challenge Of Our Time
What is the central challenge of our time? It is not what most people think it is. It is not race or gender, or climate change, or the environment broadly, or issues of war and peace, or poverty, or justice, or equality, or fighting terrorism, crime or violence, WMDs and
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Collapse of Modern Civilization
More than 150 years ago Thoreau commented, “Our sills are all rotten.” He was right. It is for that reason that Western, and Westernized, “modern” “civilization” is collapsing. This could be cataclysmic, of course, (as in, an ecological holocaust), or relatively peaceful, (akin to the Maya abandoning their great cities
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: US 2020 Election: One Choice Only – The Oligarchy
Chris Hedges states there is no choice in the 2020 US election if it is a choice between Trump and Biden: both are a vote for the consolidation of the oligarchy. Now that sums it up perfectly well. Mind you, it was the same in 2016. People in Germany felt
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Importing From China: A Virus? Or A Totalitarian Model Of Elite Control?
Someone prescient once said, “Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for a little security, deserve neither, and will lose both.” We would do well to remember those words now. And we are most definitely in the process of losing both, as we speak. But maybe we aspire to be
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Fantasy and Indoctrination: Rough notes on a few fantasy novels: part one
New Spring, The Novel: The Wheel Of Time: In The Beginning – Robert Jordan (so the cover says) (Lord of the Rings films and Terry Brookes Shannara novels got me hooked on epic, high fantasy – and no, I have no slight embarrassment about that. I think too much. Sometimes,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Low Income Housing Doesn’t Negatively Impact High Income Housing
The graph above shows that the introduction of low income housing into a neighbourhood does not negatively impact the value of other homes. Real estate agents perpetuate a myth that social (or public) housing destroys local housing prices. Clearly this myth is based on no reality. If you’re a homeowner
Continue readingKersplebedeb | Kersplebedeb: New Classes for a New Class Politics (Gabriel Kuhn)
I spent the past weekend writing a German review of the new Kersplebedeb edition of David Gilbert’s Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically, originally published in 1984. While the original piece mainly consisted of reviews of three relevant publications – Ted Allen’s pamphlet White Supremacy in the U.S./Slavery and the
Continue readingKersplebedeb | Kersplebedeb: The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat
by J. Sakai paperback 308 pages ISBN: 978-1-894946-90-2 J. Sakai’s ground-breaking, The “Dangerous Class” and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat, is our first major exploration of this most controversial and least understood “non-class” in revolutionary politics. It is an attempt to unknot the puzzle. It encompasses the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Fighting Myths of the 1%
Income inequality has been growing since the 2008 self-inflicted bank chaos, indeed that banking stupidity from 2008 accelerated the growing gap. The inequity was so obvious that the Occupy Wall Street protests took the streets and the public consciousness of “the 1%” grew out of it. Sadly, politicians failed to
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Not the 99%, Class is About the Top 80%
Since the Occupy movement in 2011 there has been conversations about the 99% versus the 1% of wealth holders. The idea then was to show the massive inequality between those in the top 1% of society and everybody else – sadly that inequality has only grown. The rich get richer
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: We Can Agree that Sexism and Racism are bad, but what about Class?
Class based analysis of the system is what is required in order to raise consciousness so the work can be done to change the ground rules that are making a hot mess of things . “A now-retired colleague of Marxist persuasion once remarked on what he saw as a telling
Continue readingMichal Rozworski: Canada missed the memo: it’s OK to talk about inequality and capitalism
There is no political rocket science to the Oct. 19th election result. Even with our slanted first-past-the-post system, it would have been difficult for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to squeak out a parliamentary majority, or even minority, given that more than two-thirds of the population wanted him out. If vague notions
Continue readingmark a rayner: Did I Miss Anything?
Question frequently asked by students after missing a class by Tom Wayman The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver: Polestar, 1994. Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours Everything. I gave an exam worth 40
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Classroom Makes More Energy Than it Consumes
Anderson Anderson Architecture has built a classroom in Hawaii that generates more energy than it consumes, making what they call a “energy positive” building. The term “energy positive” is being encouraged to replace “net zero” as the benchmark for environmental consciousness in architecture. The classroom does use roof solar panels
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Mark Blyth: The Return Of Class Politics In The UK
Mark Blyth: The Return Of Class Politics In The UK. For David Cameron, cutting spending in a highly unequal society works because it doesn’t affect those who matter to him. This used to be called class politics. The prime minister’s speech at the lord mayor’s banquet last year was notable in part
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