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.
Saviour or distraction?
Should we give everyone in society money to live a more comfortable life? A lot of people think so but is it sensible, feasible? Will it achieve the goals its proponents hope for. What other effects might it have? This is a discussion of the Universal Basic Income which I hope makes some contribution to these questions.
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.
Greed and competition are not the result of immutable human temperament; greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the money we are using. We can produce more than enough food to feed everyone, and enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The job of the central banks is to create and maintain this scarcity, and the direct consequence of this is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive
— Bernard Lietaer
Clive Hamilton
This book looked really interesting from the first time I heard about it, and with Noam Chomsky recommending it on the cover (Along with Rev Tim Costello and Natasha Stott Despoja) I kept trawling the library for it until it finally came in. I must say the first few pages really rocked my world, particularly about the disjunct between the union and social justice facets of the left. From then on it got into what the book is about, that we have given economics far too central a position in the political and social life of our culture. It makes...