The rest of the blog
Let’s not pretend there’s a serious policy debate here. The call to ban the burqa wasn’t a contribution to some Enlightenment café of ideas; it was a dog whistle blasted at full volume, a panic-button press designed to provoke.
Trans people are not confused. They are not misled. They have not been lied to. They are responding, with dignity and resistance, to a sustained campaign of dehumanisation, spearheaded by a cross-section of legal hardliners, culture warriors, so called feminists, and opportunists.
Amazon’s humanoid delivery bots aren’t just replacing drivers—they’re accelerating the creation of what William I. Robinson calls surplus humanity: billions rendered useless to capital.
This isn’t a defence strategy—it’s a subsidy for the arms industry, a performance of deterrence, and a reaffirmation of Britain’s role as obedient junior partner in the global machinery of capital.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Lee Anderson doesn’t want a solution—he wants a stage, and the small boats crisis is just the latest prop in Britain’s long-running theatre of cruelty
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
On Jane Borden’s Cults Like Us
They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.
A chilling portrayal of how cruelty embeds itself in routine, and how history is domesticated.
Read side by side, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI and Keach Hagey’s The Optimist show that what Silicon Valley sells as salvation—artificial general intelligence, safety, abundance—is in fact a system of extraction and control, built on scraped data, outsourced labour, and centralised power, with Sam Altman not merely as its architect, but as its most convincing prophet.
On Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism.
Malcolm X was not just a man but an ongoing process. A revolutionary for us all—even children—his journey from rage to clarity shows how radical truth is learned, lived, and handed down.
On Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resilience by D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales (Simon & Schuster, 2024)