I was in a Carlton bookshop, browsing but not buying. I opened “And the weak suffer what they must” at a random page and read compulsively. Written by Yanis Varoufakis after resigning as Greece’s Finance Minister, this was no economic treatise and certainly no dry text book. It turned out to be...
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That's the best revenge of all - happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life - Chuck Palahniuk
It’s so simple it sounds ridiculous. They take everything they can lay their hands on and commodify anything left. The commonwealth is replaced by private assets and the earth is left bare.
Privatisation as Orthodoxy
Not just the SEC and the Board of Works, not just the tollways and the ports an...
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Inevitable but sad news, reprinted from Tom Dispatch, 17 April 2015. On Monday, Eduardo Galeano died of cancer.
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So we must fly a rebel flag, As others did before us, And we must sing a rebel song And join in rebel chorus. "Freedom on the Wallaby", by Henry Lawson, written as a comment on the 1891 Australian shearers' strike, published by William Lane in the Worker in Brisbane, 16 May 1891.
Reflections on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, Melissa Lucashenko’s The First Australian Democracy and Abdullah Ocalan’s The Roots of Civilisation
Above: Jospeh Lycett's Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos 1817, National Library of Australia
We n...
Brexit has put the cat amongst the pigeons. Stock markets in chaos and currency overboard left right and centre. The comment is mainly along thelines of "how could they be so stupid?" but the real dangers lie with international capital flows.
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Frederike Geerdink has reported on Kurdistan for nearly 10 years, until she was deported just before Xmas. She wrote this open letter with restraint, something Erdogan and the Turkish state know little about.
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Aah Amerika - if only we knew what we do not know. As Argentinian writer Alberto Manguel wrote “. . with the passing of the years my ignorance in countless areas . . . has become increasingly perfected.”
View all of Why they spell it with a "K"
Tax is a constant theme in our world of financial capitalism. Hidden taxes, promised tax cuts, flat tax, consumer tax and so on endlessly. But facts are not at a premium and the rich get away with whatever they like.
About Ranterulze
This Ranter's been around for a while, writing and thinking and corresponding when not actually ranting. He remembers a kinder,
gentler time. He recalls youth and its belief in itself - when we thought we mattered and would prevail.
He reads history and imagines 17th Century England,
when a peoples' movement almost established a true democracy with radical political and legal institutions.
The world was "Turned Upside Down" by Diggers, Ranters, Levellers, Quakers and Seekers.
He knows too of the Paris Commune a century and a half ago, as well as of Rojava today.
He knows winter is coming but also remembers the spring of childhood.
So Winter is Coming?
We all know that winter is coming though many in the world claim it's already here - Syria, South Sudan and half of Africa, Nepal,
asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus, Greece, the homeless throughout the supposedly rich world. And so on.
The hook comes of course from Game of Thrones. It's metaphorical, referring to an unspeakably horrific future looming over the edge of the known
world. In a time of dramatic climate change this is no literal warning - the warming planet itself is threatening our human domination and even
our very existence.
So this presents a really nice challenge for all of us. Do we panic and follow populist leaders? Do we dance on the deck while the ship goes down?
Do we wander off into the desert photographing the sunsets, or drink ourselves into a fine old state, or chase money or that perfect wave or
the next bit of skirt? Or do we consider the broad sweep of history with its movements and struggles and ebbs and flows. The shifts from
hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture, from consensual community to patriarchy, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism - considering the
way individuals come and go while patterns develop and set the fundamentals irrespective of what the Murdoch press might say.
This website makes the choice to listen to the world, think about long term trends and act for the best interests of both us, humanity, and our home, the planet.