Introduction
Revolution is the political part of E.A.R.T.H. In this introduction, I try to outline where we are at politically, what progress has been made, what is yet to come and how we might help get there.
A fairly middle of the road environmental party of which I am a member, the Australian Greens, is often labelled extreme by conservative opponents. This is a discussion of what it means to be labelled extreme.
A friend was publishing The Equal Standard magazine as part of her Phd, and asked for submissions on the topic of Extremism. I did two versions and this is the one which got published.
I wanted to write an explanation of why I thought anarchism was the only philosophy capable of taking us into the future. It ended up being more of an extended mind dump, so forgive me for that, but I hope you find something interesting in it. Caveat lector!
A long stream of consciousness I wrote in my twenties at the point I started to become who I am today. I've changed since then, and I've written better things since then, but the direction of my ethics as expressed in this article hasn't changed too much.
An email was sent to an environment collective I was part of asking how it is that the conservatives so easily won the 2004 Australian federal election when they were so clearly morally bankrupt? This is my vitriolic answer.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both
— Louis Brandeis
Christopher Hitchens
It is with some annoyance that I see cigarettes feature so prominently on the paperback covers of this book. Smoking is a wonderful example of the nihilistic, destructive, stupid side of contrarianism. It does this book no justice because it is one of the most positive, constructive books I have read in a long time. The book takes the forms of one side of a conversation with a young contrarian, with Hitchens providing advice on navigating life for such a young person. (There are many books in this vein, starting I believe with Letters to a Young Poet in the...