Monday 4 November 2019

The age of protest.

Continuing the theme of my last post I also read in the latest issue of The Week, under the 'Controversy of the week', how the world is in a rage.

"How across the globe, angry people are taking to the streets in vast numbers. Sometimes the proximate cause is a price hike: in India, it was of onions; in Chile, of the fares on the metro. In Lebanon, it was a new tax on using Whatsapp; in France, higher fuel duties sparked the gilets jaunes protests. But the protests elsewhere - in Hong Kong, Moscow, Barcelona, Algiers - are more overtly a response to political repression and corruption."

The common thread according to Joshua Keating on Slate are austerity and the worsening inequality it brings.

A distinctive feature of these current protests is that they are largely leaderless organised by smartphones and inspired by hashtags and not central committees which makes it far more difficult for the authorities to trace the ringleaders.

Another factor is that the protesters are mostly the young who incidentally now make up about 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion who are 24 or under and in Africa 41% are under 15. Incidentally the growth in student numbers across the globe has risen giving us a ready pool of youngsters with too much time on their hands and a belly full of anti-establishment in their guts.

The more placid British don't seem to be rising to the occasion and I really do wonder, as I have for some time, what it will take to wake people up?

As I said in my post yesterday, once Brexit is out the way, we really do need to increase the efforts to educate the public at large and anyone interested in spreading the word can contact me off THA website front page at the 'contact' link at the top of the page.  

4 comments:

  1. Spread what word?

    You support austerity? You won't vote for social democracy? You wouldn't want the billions under 24 yrs old pressing you for anything? You want them to stay where they are, and stop troubling you and yours?

    I suspect the only thing you don't like about what you suppose to be the Establishment is you imagine it is preventing your precious Brexit, a narrow political claim not supported by any majority.

    So, spread the word - of what?

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    Replies
    1. Spread the word that we need a sovereign people'

      The trouble for you is that I suspect your problem would be that you would object to the views of the majority unless they agreed with you.

      Delete
  2. From this blog, Oct 2016:

    "we can lead the way to help create a genuine free trade area between all the countries of Europe."

    From Feb 2017:

    "[I] left some students thinking that I was a Climate Change sceptic."

    From 2018:

    "'Socialism' has been tried and proved to fail"

    and

    "we clearly state that all constitutional measures or any laws which had the effect of changing the constitution would automatically trigger a referendum for the people to decide if they agreed with what was proposed in the bill."

    [Note - you don't actually argue for a second referendum]

    This, from 2018:

    "....with a sovereign people many existing 'minority' pressure groups would lose their influence over governments and so the whole 'Green' business and bandwagon would have to face the cold reality that most sensible people are not duped by their propaganda."

    And this:

    "The current anti-capitalist movement blames capitalism for all life’s ills and as with all scapegoating their criticisms of capitalism actually make things far worse. Capitalists are not perfect but largely left to their own devices they do more good in the world than bad and are certainly preferable to government initiatives and intervention that so often make matters worse. Furthermore the more the government restricts and penalises capitalists, to pander to the anti-capitalists, the worse things become."

    --------------

    Why should people that disagree with all this stuff help "spread the word"? You seem to miss the fact that people disagree with you over these things. Such as those young people protesting around the world? Such as Labour supporters. Such as environmentalists. Such as socialists. Such as feminists. Such as fascists, too.

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  3. When did I ever suggest that those against democracy would spread the word of THA?

    In a real democracy meaning people power, which we have never actually had, while minorities must be protected the will of the majority, with various checks and balances, has to ultimately prevail or society will collapse into conflict.

    ReplyDelete