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rse than that of sri lanka in the face of betrayal by the trump regime china seems to be emerging as european governments best friend along with the repressive petro monarchies in the gulf and india s bjp the idolatry of economic growth has always trumped human rights concerns international law has been shredded by the us and israel for decades the work of all those who risk their lives for the restoration of the rule of law and public accountability in the no western world is severely undermined by the hypocrisy and double standards practiced by those governments that pay lip service to human rights what do the usa canada australia and new zealand have in common apart from being ex british colonies they are all immigrant societies the tens of thousands of britons who still migrate to these countries every year to better their prospects are never called economic migrants that pejorative term is reserved for coloured people from other former colonies so much for colour blindness and liberal british values these examples of moral hypocrisy in politics are not of course confined to the west in sri lanka where i live the government claims to be socialist yet like those who came before panders to the rich business elites it votes in support of palestine at the un general assembly but signs an agreement with israel to replace palestinian workers in israel with sri lankans this is to support the israeli regime s policy of apartheid furthermore israeli military reservists vacation in sri lanka and have caused problems for local mostly muslim communities on the east coast by engaging in commerce sometimes of a dubious nature when local conflict erupts the israeli government calls it antisemitism and western embassies who follow the israeli narrative caution their nationals about visiting sri lanka that affects our economy is the government waiting for another jihadist attack like the easter bombing of 2019 before it acts previously on this blog i have expressed my puzzlement over the term antisemitism semitic is a linguistic term which according to the oxford dictionary denotes a family of languages that includes hebrew arabic aramaic and certain ancient languages such as phoenician and akkadian by extension it relates to peoples who speak semitic languages especially hebrew and arabic but it is used in the english speaking world exclusively as an equivalent to jewish and anti semitic is never used to describe hostility towards arabs and when antisemitic is further conflated with anti israel it insults the many jews both within and outside israel who are fierce critics of the israeli apartheid state and thus sows further confusion how many jews in israel have a semitic background jonathan sacks the late chief rabbi of the british commonwealth was perhaps the most articulate and winsome spokesperson for judaism in today s world judaism is not an ethnicity and jews are not an ethnic group wrote sacks go to the western wall in jerusalem and you will see jews of every colour and culture under the sun the beta israel from ethiopia the bene israel from india bukharan jews from central asia iraqi berber egyptian kurdish and libyan jews the temamim from yemen alongside american jews from russia south african jews from lithuania and british jews from german speaking poland their food music dress customs and conventions are all different future tense 2009 will 2026 bring us more balanced news reporting and a new breed of moral leaders here is a stirring challenge by this year s reith lecturer to all young people a burning planet posted by vinoth ramachandra on december 3 2025 in general 5 comments our planet is heating up as temperatures of land and oceans increase normal weather events increase in frequency unpredictability and intensity a few days ago for the first time in recorded history three cyclonic storms converged simultaneously in the indian ocean to leave a trail of devastation from indonesia to sri lanka rivers and reservoirs overflowed their banks trees were uprooted houses demolished hundreds of people perished and thousands more left homeless and impoverished ten percent of sri lanka s annual rainfall fell in just twenty four hours the search for the missing and the dead continues the year 2025 began with the deadly los angeles wildfires this was followed by record breaking fires ravaging parts of the amazon and congo indeed during this year alone a land area the size of the indian subcontinent has been burned in wildfires is this devastation attributable to climate change a new report a collaboration between scientists across continents using satellite imagery and advanced modelling shows that human induced climate change did exacerbate the world s wildfires more than 100 million people were affected by these fires and us 215 billion worth of homes and infrastructure were at risk the report analysed the los angeles fires and concluded that they were twice as likely and burned an area 25 times bigger than they would have in a world without global warming unusually wet weather in los angeles in the preceding 30 months contributed to strong vegetation growth and laid the foundations for wildfires during an unusually hot and dry january not only are fires on this scale caused or worsened by greenhouse emissions but they then contribute huge amounts of the same to the atmosphere fires emitted more than 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024 25 about 10 above the average since 2003 emissions were more than triple the global average in south american dry forests and wetlands and double the average in canadian forests the excess emissions alone exceeded the national fossil fuel co emissions of more than 200 individual countries in 2024 the wars in ukraine gaza and central africa also pour tonnes of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere the greatest tragedy is that nearly three decades after the first un climate conference in rio global emissions are still rising it s clear that if this continues more severe heatwaves and droughts will make landscape fires more frequent and intense for half the world and incessant rainfall and floods for the other half only last month cop30 in brazil saw rich governments and the oil lobby wrangling with climate scientists and indigenous peoples over a proposed global agreement to roll back dependence on fossil fuels the richest 1 of the world s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3 1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity and precious little of the aid promised at every cop summit by rich governments to help vulnerable nations mitigate the effects of global warming has materialised it is a moral scandal that is not raised in the eu let alone the us according to one estimate the cost of flying and accommodating 100 000 delegates at cop28 in dubai was probably higher than the total amount promised at that same cop to compensate poorer countries for climate related losses the planet is awash with wealth private and corporate at the same time as it is burning the levels are mind blowing tesla shareholders recently gifted their loathsome boss a staggering 500 billion for what it is moral fibre and political will that are in short supply the celebrated economist thomas piketty has long called for a one time global tax on the wealth not just income of billionaires he estimates that in his country of france the combined wealth of the largest 500 fortunes has grown by 1 trillion euros since 2010 so all it would take is a one time tax of 10 on this trillion euro increase to bring in 100 billion euros equal to all the budget cuts the french government is planning for the next three years it would be more than sufficient to help build climate resilience in the most vulnerable countries of the world at the same time the governments of poorer countries must also shoulder responsibility for the relatively heavy loss of life and infrastructure when natural disasters happen ensuring that safety codes are followed in building construction effective forest management and urban drainage re settling poor communities in areas not prone to landslides or flooding and investing in better weather forecasting systems and emergency relief teams should be higher on their list of priorities than pouring meagre tax revenue into military equipment and propping up unproductive national industries can democracy survive posted by vinoth ramachandra on november 6 2025 in general 2 comments nineteenth century industrial england laid the cultural foundations of modern capitalism what the hungarian economist karl polanyi called the great transformation turned people into human resources for factory production and land into a commodity with rental value furthermore a new mindset which max weber famously called the iron cage of modernity separated moral questions from political and economic ones imprisoning the latter within modes of rational bureaucratic and legal reasoning within this technocratic framework morality and religious beliefs are understood as private and personal while political life and economic life are seen as public neutral and amoral this iron cage is the dominant framework within which politics is imagined and economics conducted today wherever we may happen to live democracy advancing hand in hand with the doctrine of national self determination was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century but like capitalism it has been an achievement fraught with ambiguity the warnings of an earlier generation of western liberal thinkers have not lost their force while it may be true that once a democratic nation has attained a certain level of economic development it will not revert to autocracy illiberal forms of democracy always loom on the horizon just witness the authoritarianism in the usa today and the popularity of far right groups in western europe and the usa today political parties increasingly play to familiar themes of scapegoating new immigrants and demonizing minorities especially when the economy stagnates the most perceptive political thinkers of the nineteenth century mill constant tocqueville gladstone argued passionately for the extension of political and civic liberties but agonised over the spectre of mass conformity the downgrading of public tastes and the tyranny of the majority that popular government would bring they devised safeguards against this danger arguing for electoral and constitutional restraints including entrenched rights that limited the scope of democratic decision making while making the most of democracy s potential for good there were of course numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in their political positions not least when it came to dealing with european colonial rule john stuart mill often called the father of modern liberalism famously argued that the barbarous people of india had to be educated into political liberty by first being subject to british rule not surprisingly he followed his father into the board of the british east india company threats to liberal democracy emerge from the top no less than from the masses writing in the 1830s alexis de tocqueville warned that the greatest threat to america s fledgling democracy lay in the greed of the mercantile class gross economic inequalities destroy social solidarity and subvert democratic participation we know that those who have more resources are able to manipulate public policy in their favour at the expense of those with fewer i have commented in earlier posts of how the super rich especially the big banks and hi tech giants have turned the us into an oligarchy rather than a democracy and capitalism itself has collapsed into the reign of oligopolies even while trumpeting the rhetoric of free markets tocqueville warned that where material inequalities widened liberty would be jeopardized the rise of what he called a mercantile aristocracy and the decline of a religious sensibility would alike spell the erosion of popular sovereignty habits are formed in the heart of a free country which may someday prove fatal to its liberties in an essay written 30 years ago the african american novelist toni morrison wrote about fascism in a way that reverberates with us today fascism is recognizable by its need to purge by the strategies it uses to purge and by its terror of truly democratic agendas it is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship all nonprofit organizations to profit making ones so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears it changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good it changes neighbors into consumers so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own it changes parenting into panicking so that we vote against the interests of our own children against their health care their education their safety from weapons and in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist one who is willing to kill a human being for a product a pair of sneakers a jacket a car or kill generations for control of products oil drugs fruit gold democracy does not arise in a vacuum it requires disciplined citizens if it is to thrive citizens nurtured in a culture that prizes not only the love of freedom but voluntary self restraint contemporary studies by the sociologist robert bellah and his associates seem to indicate that where people are too preoccupied with the cult of self gratification and private consumption not only do the bonds of citizenship decay but so does commitment to any social project in his biography of the famous economist john maynard keynes lord skidelsky notes that keynes was acutely aware of how much the economy depended on the moral capital that religious beliefs conferred he quotes him as saying i begin to see that our generation owed a great deal to our fathers religion and the young who are brought up without it will never get much out of life they re trivial like dogs in their lusts we had the best of both worlds we destroyed christianity and yet had its benefits i have extracted morrison s words from a collection of her speeches and essays entitled the source of self regard 2019 how not to defend christianity posted by vinoth ramachandra on september 27 2025 in general 10 comments earlier this month i spent two weeks traveling by train and on foot in central europe i was fortunate to experience marvellous weather it confirmed my long held belief that one of the best reasons for being a christian is to compare soviet era art architecture music and literature when atheism was the officially sanctioned religion and christians forced underground with what preceded it as joseph ratzinger pope benedict xvi once remarked the only really effective apologia for christianity comes down to two arguments the saints that the church h...