70. TRUMP, UNFORTUNATELY, HAS NOT BEEN SILENCED - Thoughts on Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age

“Good ideas grow, bad ideas shrink. As a consequence, good speech gets louder and bad speech soon gets drowned out. Not censorship, but developed understanding and evolution towards better ideas that, at a certain point, recognise certain voices as no longer worthy of being listened to. The fascists, the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the conspiracy theorists - they have little to offer once we look beyond mere transgression and take the ideas seriously as speech. And so, rightly, they are discarded.“

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67. DISPATCHES FROM THE CAVE - Why Being "Realistic" Demands The Impossible

“The pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light…This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus…“

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58. WHAT DOES JUSTICE FOR BREONNA TAYLOR ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE? - When Both Black Lives And Abolition Matters

“Breonna deserves justice. She should not be dead right now and the police killed her. But if I advocate the imprisonment of the police that killed her I am not advocating justice. I am advocating more barbarism. I am advocating the continuation of the prison industrial complex. I am advocating justice only when it suits me and injustice where it doesn't.“

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49. AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY & COVID 19: a Postscript on a Pandemic

“Unfortunately for the world, though helpful to my book, far from illustrating the necessity of government, Covid-19 has served only to support the thesis defended within the pages of Authentic Democracy, proving even further how our current, flawed, political arrangements continue to fail us.“

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47. A LIFE WITHOUT SANCTIONS - Thinking About Consequences And Their Lack In An Age Without Punishment

Sanctions, punishments, threats…these may bring some short term sense of comfort that justice is being done, but true justice comes when we no longer need such threats to ensure good behaviour. When the logic of the genuine consequences of an action is enough to make people make better choices. When police aren’t racists and politicians aren’t liars because the obvious wrongness of being a racist or a liar, and its logical consequence in the death and suffering of innocent people, is sufficient to not want to be racist or lie. “

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- Commercial Break: NEW BOOK OUT NOW -

My new book - Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is out now as an e-book on Amazon and out in paperback from May 11th. Pre-order now from the publisher, Tippermuir Books, or from Amazon.

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41. TO CLAP OR TO CRY FOR CARERS? - On The Importance of Being Able To Hold Two Ideas In Our Heads At Once

“By clapping, was I supporting the myth, the propaganda, and the lies which have put so many unnecessarily in harm’s way during this crisis? From the unprotected nurse to their dying patient, infected because they couldn’t stay home for fear of losing their job - each a victim not of Covid-19, but of our political system?”

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