Good morning comrades! There is heaps to talk about as this year is starting to wind down but let’s start with a new playlist. Playlist 69 is an emotional rollercoaster with everything from the new Robert Smith x Deftones remix, a cover from Low that will seriously fuck you up, some 90s classics, Coltrane and Mancini to tap into some Jazz, my favourite ISIS song, experiments in electronica, live tracks from Fontaines DC and Jeff Buckley and some classic hop hop.
The below 5 minute speech by Michael Parenti from 1986 is an incredibly important listen if you are interested in anti-imperialism, the 3rd World and a deeper look into the political realities that continue to shape our world today. Now, Parenti isn’t without criticism, especially his book “To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia” and his admiration for Milosovic is wrong, but his work is invaluable. Watch this.
The UK will leave the EU in just a little over 3 weeks and despite having the benefit of dual citizenship and thus being relatively unaffected by Brexit I am genuinely shitting bricks about what will happen. I certainly belong to those who do not see a sliver of positivity in regards to Brexit but am always willing to at least listen to whatever solutions there are to this nightmare. However, a recent leak from the UK government and that you can read here in full, gives a “The 'reasonable worst case' if EU talks collapse” and, well, fuck. Click on the tweet below to read the summary.
First and foremost, fuck the Economist, it’s a trove of bootlicking pawns that spew some of the most disgusting pro-capitalistic brainwashing I’ve yet to witness but let’s briefly touch on the below, only because I have seen this nonsense being floated around a lot of Centrist European media outlets. Whilst I am fully aware of my own personal privilege of being able to work from home - something I have done for almost a decade - this pandemic has forced many people to work from home - something new to many of us and with the realities of living in metropolitan areas with confined, expensive housing, children at home again due to the pandemic and schools closing, this has become a test. I don’t know anyone with enough space to set up a home office as well as a study room for online schooling whilst being expected to maintain the level of productivity expected from work and school- that’s a different debate I hope to touch on this week- but this is where it gets fucked up: there is a growing consensus being played in an additional drive to increase profits to cut wages because we are working from home, implying that our productivity is down. Take a moment to hold that thought before exploding into a fiery ball of rage. If anything, wages should be increased, simply based on the fact that companies fixed costs are down - think of the savings on office’s electricity bills alone and passed on us, again, because of increased electricity bills. I feel as if these pigs are genuinely trying to find out how far they can push us before shit explodes.
With that, here are your regular hot takes that made me either chuckle, angry or, well, usually a mixture of the two.