Wide-ranging talks on all things relating to spirituality, meditation, yoga, current affairs, politics and philosophy. contact me via info AT peteyates.uk.
This is the second in our series of podcasts relating to the UK General Election to be held on 12/12/19. This one focuses on Brexit and explains the Labour policy as well as elucidating the context of the phenomenon. [Free. 48 minutes.]
This podcast is the first of several we will be doing in the run up to the general election to be held in the UK on December 12th 2019. It makes the general case for Labour as being the only party addressing the stark fact that 'business as usual is not an option'. It ranges quite far and wide, but with some focus on 'The Green Industrial Revolution'. [Free. 58 minutes.]
This is another current affairs podcast in which we go through the UK Government's plans for the eventuality of a no deal Brexit as outlined in the Operation Yellowhammer document. We include all items discussed in the document but expand particularly on items relating to possible social unrest (item 13), the impact of probable price rises on 'low income groups' (item 13) and the impact on adult social care which is deemed already threatened by 'market fragility'. We note that the government had to be pressured by Parliament to release this document and that a leaked, earlier but very similar version was considered a base scenario rather than a worst case scenario. The document can be downloaded here. (Opens in new window/tab.) [Free. 23 minutes.]
This podcast briefly outlines the political, economic and ecological contexts and ramifications of the unprecedented fires in the Amazon rain forest that have hit the news this week. [Free. 32 minutes.]
In this podcast, I read a short essay I wrote in 1989 describing and analysing the previous ten years of Thatcherism. [Margaret Thatcher became PM of the UK in 1979.] I offer it here to illustrate how the Thatcher electoral victory of 1979 gave rise to ideological and practical dominance by neoliberalism which still has momentum, though now running down. [Free. 13 minutes.]
This podcast is a squib inspired by Michael Hudson's J is for Junk Economics [2017] and the tumbleweed now bowling along the deserted high street. In this light, I examine Amazon's rapid metastasis and the phenomenon of believing that 'the stock is the product', to quote Action Jack Barker of Silicon Valley. Consideration naturally follows of Hudson's central thesis that neo-liberal economists are not really followers of Adam Smith, but have inverted his message, championing finance capital, [and, more generally, gaming the system], over and against productive capital. [Free. 30 minutes.]
In this podcast, I take it that free speech, as an instance of freedom per se, is a very great good. However, this stance is not unproblematic in that free speech and freedom can subvert themselves as well as eroding other goods, e.g. equality. The obvious and often proposed notion that this can be overcome by policing or regulation raises the problem that any claim to the right to do the policing is impossible to legitimate and will therefore ultimately be authoritarian in nature. There is some hope in the possibility of general eduction based on ecouraging questioning rather than on inculcating dogma but this project also encounters a legitimation problem in that curricula are likely to be determined by some authority. [Free. 33 minutes.]
This wide-ranging podcast draws on the same sources as Part One and is similarly stimulated by current affairs. This time, the thesis that the current historical unfoldings of the mutually entangled economic, cultural and ecological systems are characterised by fragmentation is defended and a variety of possible material antecedents of this tendency are considered. We identify environmental degradation, technological developments, contradictions in capitalism in its current phase, cultural fragmentation, the enmeshment of state and corporate power, gross inequalities of wealth and power and movements of populations as mutually dependent factors giving rise to fragmentation, amongst others. [Free. 54 minutes.]
In this podcast, I reflect on recent events that took place in Charlotteville, Virginia. The discussion inevitably ranges far and wide and covers such issues as the role of violence in politics, the nature of the left-right binary, the question of the moral equivalence that President Trump et al seem to draw between neo-fascists and their anti-fascist detractors, the natures of free speech and propoganda, the significance of history and future thinking for politics, the nature of the symbolic universe inhabited by some activists, and the phenomenon of meme wars. The question of how far we can, and should, extend our sympathies is once again brought to the fore. [Free. 47 minutes.]
In this podcast, we roughly sketch out types of feminism including liberal, socialist, marxist and essentialist varients. We try to draw out the theoretical and practical difficulties encountered by these various approaches in the hope that a view of the terrain thus exposed might be useful to anybody currently struggling with the widespread and pathological back-lash to all emancipatory aspirations. [Free. 55 minutes.]
