Once people have had a taste of a proper public healthcare system, they won’t give it up. It’s a one-way street. In the UK, which is in general more closely aligned to the politics of the US (a neoliberal consensus on the centre right) than the mainstream of Europe, the NHS is the one public service on which the political classes dare not ravage with market fundamentalism.
Why Republicans are bashing the NHS
August 16th, 2009 § 0
The evil ideology of Star Trek
May 11th, 2009 § 0
Never mind the Federation’s code of non-interference or whatever it’s called. The fact is that the Federation starships zoom around the galaxy armed to teeth. Of course the enemy fires on them first; that’s the standard justification for militarism, an external threat that must be defeated. This is not unusual in Hollywood, but something like Star Trek, that has at least pretensions to belonging to the canon of speculative fiction, it is not unreasonable to hold it to a higher standard. Kirk’s father drives his starship into the enemy: he ends his life as a suicide bomber. You can’t get much more militaristic than that.
The Left faces a predicament at election time
May 8th, 2009 § 0
On a strictly deontological basis, none of them deserve our vote. But this is the real world, and we have to make decisions based on the best outcome possible…
The end of the hornéd phonograph
December 16th, 2008 § 0
Let’s not pretend it is a God-given right to digitally encode music and profit from its distribution. It was simply an accident of technology and economics. Mass production, in the days of vinyl, was well out of reach of the general public. Scarcity was therefore a given; of course people want to buy records, so demand was there: thus the record industry flourished. The humble cassette tape was a warning that this scenario would not last forever; file sharing on a large scale is upending the game…