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The spectre of loneliness

The spectre of loneliness

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.” Sigmund Freud There is a loneliness epidemic, the headlines warn. People feel disconnected, distant and disengaged from those around them. And loneliness kills. Lonely people have worse...
Democracy is dead. It was killed in plain sight

Democracy is dead. It was killed in plain sight

Democratic states have only ever existed as an ideal – an abstraction more malleable than is often acknowledged and a form of government utterly incompatible with capitalism. ‘We must make our choice,’ warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis, ‘[w]e may have...
Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Long Road to Democracy

Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Long Road to Democracy

“A share in two revolutions”, Thomas Paine wrote to George Washington in 1789, “is living to some purpose!” That same sentiment may well be applied to the Burmese leader Aung San, who didn’t just share in two colonial struggles, but led Burma’s battles for...
The problem with Stephen Fry’s atheism

The problem with Stephen Fry’s atheism

By now, if you own a computer and have a reliable Internet connection (no mean feat in this wide brown land of the NBN) you’ve likely seen Stephen Fry’s fuck-you to god. If you’re one of those liberal atheists who favours pithy internet videos over books, is...
Aung San Suu Kyi: Colluding With Tyranny

Aung San Suu Kyi: Colluding With Tyranny

Reflecting on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, George Orwell wrote that: Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. Aung San Suu Kyi, writing after being...