Blogs Don't Burn

November 16, 2019March 31, 2020

Into the Gulag: The Prisons of Soviet Russia

This new video, made for Blogs Don’t Burn by filmmaker James Arnold, tells the story of the Soviet Gulags; a vast and complex network of prisons and forced-labor camps which stretched across the USSR throughout much of its history. Started under Lenin and hugely expanding under Stalin, this system would swallow up millions of lives for good. Many prisoners were incarcerated for decades, solely for the crime of thinking and writing against the regime.

This video is dedicated to the prisoners of the Gulag, the dissenters who spoke out for them, and for all the other victims of the 20^th century whose names have been lost to history.

October 30, 2019January 9, 2021

A Modern Day Hero?

A review of John Williams’ Stoner (1965).

This classic novel from 1965 by American author (and professor of English) John Williams tells the story of William Stoner, a stoic farm boy from rural Missouri, who emerges from a sparse and colourless existence into the world of the University campus. The “campus novel” subgenre, a literary tradition dating back to the 1950s, is a niche yet rich source of storytelling, and John Williams manages to take this rarefied area and spin it into a story which at once feels both human and relatable.

The story’s protagonist, whose name ‘William’ is derived from the author’s surname, starts off as an outsider to the rarefied world of academia. With the aim of aiding the family farm, Stoner attends the University of Missouri to study agriculture. However, after taking a mandatory literature survey course in his second year, he soon discovers an obsession for literature and learning which leads to a lifelong career with the Department of English. It is indicative of the unique type of story with which we are dealing that the most distance actually travelled by our protagonist is from farm to campus. Ultimately it is the internal journey of Stoner, in all its emotional and psychological subtlety, that makes each page more compelling than the last.

October 30, 2019October 30, 2019

Short Story: ‘Chroniker’

On our fourth day alive we killed the elderly, as has always been the custom. Three days of tolerance, of something like restraint, then when the great Chroniker chugged into gear for another cycle, we had at it. I would not have waited so long, but tradition does have some brief part to play in life’s journey.

The three-day rule has its purposes, of course. The baton being passed, lessons from yesterday brightening today. But frankly, my people need very little instruction before being ready to blaze out into the world, and our days are far too few to be spent lingering in lecture halls, enduring those withering old Tenners droning on and on about bygone decades. Five, seven, even ten minutes at a time we are expected to just sit and listen! If you knew anything at all about my race, traveller, you might appreciate a little more how tortuous that kind of patience really is.

October 30, 2019January 9, 2021

“Let the Mad Dog Bark!” – On the Social Media Ban of Alex Jones and InfoWars

Backlog: this article was written August 23rd 2018

An issue which has been doing the rounds recently online, but which has so far failed to attract much mainstream media attention in the UK, is the decision by three major tech companies – YouTube, Apple and Facebook, to ban the controversial content of Alex Jones and his site InfoWars. Those unfamiliar with Alex Jones and his work should probably take a few moments to count themselves lucky.

InfoWars is an online hotbed of frenzied political rhetoric and elaborate conspiracy theories, which in the past have included claims such as that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that Barack Obama is the global head of Al-Qaeda, that the U.S. Government is using juice boxes to “make children gay”, and that the U.S. Air Force has in the past created weaponized tornadoes in the Midwest as part of an enduring geo-war against the American people. Come to think of it there may just be a H.G. Wells-style short story in that last one…

October 29, 2019January 9, 2021

Boris and the Burka: discussing the Danish Ban

Backlog: this article was written August 12th 2018

Update: 29/10/2019 – As Boris Johnson is now our new Prime Minister, there is clearly more reason than in August 2018 to be talking about him. However, if Boris’ polemical style hadn’t been so effective in boosting his popularity over the years, then this article likely wouldn’t have needed to be written. It remains to be seen how Mr Johnson handles his position – complex and insecure as it is right now. But, if the first few months of his leadership have been anything to go by, it looks like there will be quite few substantive issues to call him out on in the coming years. Strap in my friends, it looks to be a bumpy road ahead.

A lot has been said in recent weeks about the controversial comments made by Boris Johnson in an article he penned for the Daily Telegraph, concerning the recent law banning the burka in Denmark. In the cacophony of noise, rage and moral panic surrounding his article, in which he compared Muslim women wearing burkas to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, there has been shockingly little discussion on the actual substance of Mr Johnson’s article.

October 27, 2019November 7, 2019

Short Story: ‘Sweet Tooth’

An adaption of the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The convenience store across the road got a delivery today. Big box of candy, Kit Kats, Hershey Bars – that sorta thing. Saw the little shit who works there too. Ignores me when I want his attention, snickers to himself while I’m buying jimmies, asks if I need help across the road behind a mask of smugness on his pimply, pubescent face! I’ve been trying to take my mind off it, dangerous and reckless thoughts being what they are and all. But strolling over there with that Gary Cooper walk I used to do on a job, taking some candy and swiping all the cash is… well… tempting to say the least. I could afford to buy that whole shop now, Hershey Bars and all. Yet eating them day and night while they lie in crates at my feet wouldn’t give me a fraction of the satisfaction id get from just taking one, using that universal currency of fear.

They were my Crew, I was their leader. We split scores down the middle, equal pay. We got shot at, we shot back, we ran, we fought, we suffered, we celebrated, and we got richer. Good and bad, we shared the burden of our mistakes and the fruits of our labour. Those days were the best of my life, I’ve never felt more alive as when I was so close to death!

October 27, 2019January 11, 2021

Short Story: ‘Horrorshow Roundabout’

Written in the style of Anthony Burgess ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Most of the language is taken directly, other parts have been created for the purposes of the story.

“What will it be then? You lowest of souls, most diligent workers, sufferers of Bourgeois oppression, what is your choice? Revolution or Slavery?”

Now now Comrades, no need to be getting all razdrazzed already! I viddy these starry-timer slovos are tough to ken for some of you simpler droogs of mine, so please allow your Humble Orator to explain in good old salted-earth Nadsat! That’s the lingo spoken by me and mine up and down this country in every workhouse and proleshed from here to the big grey sea. Quite a lingo it is too! All cockney, Slavic and commoner slovos bundled up together-like in a real powerful shared goloss for us revolting so-and-sos! Many a time in the old world did some uppity lewdie get all spooked-up by our collective goloss. None of us gave a cal then, so why would we now?

October 27, 2019January 9, 2021

“Winning the War of Ideas”: Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray in Conversation at the O2 Arena

Backlog: this review was written shortly after the live event on 16th July 2018 at the London 02 Arena, which I attended.

A couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable that the O2 would host an event bearing more similarity to a lecture than a rock concert. It would be a further leap of implausibility, then, to imagine such an event drawing in almost eight thousand people, with a queue of not-just-university types stretching all the way out of the door. The event consisted of three men, on stage, simply talking – a format which is bound to have raised a few eyebrows at the O2 planning department! As Sam Harris joked, “It is especially flattering to us that Justin Bieber isn’t coming out to perform in the middle of this.”

Jordan Peterson has expressed a similar amazement at his own meteoric rise to fame. Going from a largely unknown Canadian Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto two years ago, he has since become one of the most well-known and sought after public intellectuals on the planet. Peterson can be seen everywhere; on national television, podcasts, public debates, YouTube channels, radio shows and more. His biggest UK feature so far has been the (now infamous) Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, which went viral after their heated exchange led to much online ridicule for Channel 4.

October 20, 2019January 9, 2021

The Science of Morality

A review of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (2010).

This provocative book written by neuroscientist, philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris makes the ambitious argument that Science can (and should) be used as a tool to determine human values. It’s a controversial thesis, one that has unsurprisingly stepped on quite a few intellectual toes since the books publication!

Harris’ claim that scientific enquiry can discover objective moral truths is grounded in a position of ‘consequentialist morality’ (meaning the consequences of moral ideas to human well-being is viewed as the only measure for whether something is good or bad). This type of calculation-based morality is familiar to most people in the form of ‘Utilitarianism’, a narrower (and somewhat nastier) version of consequentialism.

October 20, 2019November 16, 2019

Greetings from the Blogsphere!

Hello! This introductory post is coming to you from the main (and currently only) contributor to Blogs Don’t Burn – the “us” in the ‘About Us’ section being largely aspirational at this point! I just wanted to get some quick housekeeping out of the way before the uploading begins:

I will be posting initially some of my older articles written over the last few years -essentially just to collect all of these in the same place, and to give readers an idea of what to expect from this blog. So as to avoid confusion, the older political articles will be posted under the label ‘Backlog‘, with the date they were originally written included (I also want to avoid the impression that I will be writing on current events a year or two after they actually happened!)

Hopefully this will populate the site a little too, before I start producing new content.

All the best and enjoy!

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