You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller In recent years there's been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system…
Read moreTowards an anti-fascist AI
This article was published in partnership with Human Rights and the Internet. Read more from the series here. concrete Computers are essentially just faster collections of vacuum tubes. How can they emulate human activities like recognising faces or assessing criminality? Think about a least squares fit; you're trying to assess the correlation between two variables…
Read moreThe obstacle to Gay rights in Lebanon: homophobia or westphobia?
There is a historical paradox: the last decades, not the preceding centuries or millennia, seem to shape the present. The homoerotism of 8th century poet Abu Nawas, the medieval love between Hind and Al-Zarqa – a history of queer desire in the Middle East vanished under the rug of a briefer history of desiring the…
Read moreSwitching the UK on to mutual credit
If you ask a business owner if they would like to make more money the answer is usually "Yes", followed swiftly by "but what's the catch?" The default competitive market has bred a naturally suspicious mindset, which creates a challenge for ideas that promote reciprocity, co-operation and collaboration – especially those that promise more profit….
Read moreThoughts for my fascist brother in the North of Italy
In a small town in the north of Italy, fog and humidity make parmesan cheese and ham tasty. But most of the time it smells of a tomato sauce factory and pigs. I hated life there. When I go back to my hometown, I argue with my brother who has joined a neo-fascist group, I…
Read moreLabour's expulsion of Alastair Campbell shows it's tied to old ideas
There are moments in politics that simply and neatly crystalize everything. Today it was the absurdity of Labour expelling Alastair Campbell for voting Lib Dem last week. The only analogy my mind can conjure up is the prison guards on the Berlin Wall shooting the first people flocking through the gaps on 9th Nov 1989…
Read moreThe war in eastern Ukraine left these people without homes. The state is yet to compensate them
Maryinka, a satellite town outside Donetsk, is under constant artillery attack. Today, the once million-strong city of Donetsk is under the control of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR), while Maryinka is under control of Ukrainian forces. In some places, the distance between firing positions is a few dozen metres. Many streets on both sides…
Read moreDon’t feed the Farage trolls
This is the only time I am going to mention Nigel Farage in this election campaign. And I’m going to do it just to ask you to please stop mentioning him too. Clearly both Brexit, and the rise of the far right that it has fuelled, are deeply concerning. We are seeing the return of…
Read moreHungry, homeless, exploited. How does Europe protect the most vulnerable children?
Musa* arrived in Greece alone. He was 16. After fleeing Afghanistan on foot, he crossed the Evros River, which runs along the border between Greece and Turkey. His first encounter in Greece was with the police. Click Here: Thousands of unaccompanied children, like Musa, travel to and across Europe, through mountainous terrain and across dangerous…
Read moreDear Liberal Democrats – you are so much better than this
Dear Liberal Democrats, My hearts sinks at all sorts of now daily encounters with how awful our politics has become – the debasement, the cruelty, the almost total absence of generosity, compassion, care and yes love for each other. The binary, the black or white, the them and the us – a world, it seems,…
Read more