Responses and critiques
I don’t really update this blog too regularly. If you want to read more of my recent writing, here are some links. I write occasional articles for New Frame, the organisation I work for: https://www.newframe.com/writer/aragorn-eloff/ There are a few recent pieces up on Medium: https://medium.com/@aragorneloff If academic writing is your thing, I have some stuff… Read More »
* An old piece written for Incendiary Times, a newspaper we used to publish at bolo’bolo. Being an anarchist can be pretty exhausting sometimes. When we’re not fanning the flames of revolutionary change, desperately trying to maintain some tiny glimmer of light amidst the growing darkness of a planet gone mad, we’re often forced… Read More »
You may not yet be aware of it, but just recently all the world’s governments – which, it turns out, were just a cover for the corporate global elite – were shut down. We the people are now the rightful and equal owners of all the titles and rights of these corporations and all their… Read More »
His enemies say he was a king without a crown, and that he confused unity with unanimity. And in that, his enemies are right. It has been several months since the death of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, predestined leader of Latin American anti-imperialist resistance to US hegemony, hero of the people, reincarnation of Simon… Read More »
The long walk to nowhere “Comrades!” The cheap sound system crackles to life, a shrill, distorted voice piercing the Saturday morning air. “Comrades, we must not march yet. There are five more buses coming.” We wait, like untold thousands have waited before us at this square, for another hour, but the buses do not arrive.… Read More »
“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.” – Murray Bookchin There is something significant in how the forms of collective action and the underlying ethos of the Occupy movement have been misunderstood and misrepresented. For critics, there’s something deeply discomforting about the conceptually slippery and… Read More »
What is the crime of looting a corporate chain store next to the crime of owning one? – Luther Brecht The sheer volume of commentary from across the political spectrum has made it hard to keep up with, and even harder to know where to stand on, the widespread riots that have set fire to… Read More »
Ivo Vegter was rousing. In a recent article on The Daily Maverick website the well-known local free market ideologue and climate change denialist dutifully performed his well-rehearsed cherry-picking dance of apologist rhetoric in an unsuccessful attempt to ward off the growing grassroots opposition to Shell’s application to prospect for natural gas in the Karoo using… Read More »
Andreas Spath has written an article on News24 arguing that veganism is not a nutritionally sound diet, and that meat can be ‘green’. And here’s my rebuttal, in point form. I have tagged Andreas in this note [i.e., on Facebook] in the hopes that he will engage the points I raise in more detail. 1:… Read More »
This is a response to Lierre Keith’s argument in The Vegetarian Myth, a poorly researched, fallacious and dishonestly argued anti-vegan screed. It was originally written for www.thevegetarianmyth.com, a never-completed crowdsourced response to Keith’s book. Inconsistent animist ethics Keith defends her position with a confused animist-type ethics that veers unclearly and inconsistently between hylozoism (everything… Read More »