Browsing: Recent
Nurseries: Protecting Small Children, Staff and Parents
Jonathan Neale The UK government plans to start opening schools, nurseries and day care on June 1. There is a very large movement of resistance, led by school staff and parents. I have three thoughts that might be useful. First, the worst danger is not that children die. It’s not even that vulnerable staff die, which is much more likely. The worst danger is that a child catches a light case and takes the virus home and a mum or dad with an underlying condition dies, and the child lives with that for seventy years. Some people wonder if children…
Lenin at 150 – an appreciation
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Lenin (born April 22, 1870) David McNally writes: I have long been allergic to the Lenin cult nurtured in many quarters. More than one radical group has been ruined by puffed up “generals” passing off their hectoring commands in place of real politics. But Lenin himself, that’s another story. Perry Anderson once observed that Lenin effectively created a Marxist “science of politics.” But there is more to it than that. It is true that Lenin was uniquely attentive to the concrete specificities of political struggle. The…
Dangerous Times
Susan Pashkoff writes This has been a rather impressive week even for Donald Trump. Whenever you think that he has reached the nadir of his Presidency, he always manages to continue the downward trend; it is like a sink-hole that appears in the middle of an area that simply sucks everything in its path downwards. The freezing of funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic was jaw dropping; Richard Horton the Editor in Chief of The Lancet, Britain’s premier medical journal, rightly called his behaviour “a crime against humanity.” Thinking that this may be useful…
Coronavirus: Nothing is guaranteed, everything is possible
This is a text on the pandemic from Raoul Vaneigem. Vaneigem is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 20 March 2020. Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of…