The Digger

Published on  December 7, 2019 On Gender, Blurring the Line Between Dogma and Farce written by  Jonathan Kay Everyone has heard of Charlie Chaplin. Less widely recognized is the name of his older half-brother Sydney (often called Syd), who was a gifted comic actor in his own right. Unlike his younger brother, who invented his own kind of comedy, Syd relied on the established comic tropes of the day, which often were nothing more than feature-length versions of boys-school dress-up sketches. This included the 1925 version of  Charley’s Aunt , in which Syd starred as an Oxford student who pretends to be a wealthy middle-aged widow as part of a hoax aimed at helping his friends Jack and Charley propose to their paramours Amy and Kitty. Predictably, this “aunt” attracts the romantic attentions of the villain, a penniless former grandee who seeks to plunder the aunt’s fortune. As  this clip  shows, the brilliance of Syd’s acting is expressed not by s...

The Generational Divide and the Death of Dialectic by Gabriel Scorgie   December 5, 2019 Each generation goes to battle against the ones that came before. The most recent skirmish on this front has involved a millennial and Gen-Z coalition fighting against Gen-X and boomers. The territory is cancel culture and the right to protest. The result, if the newcomers win, will be the death of dialectic. Few young generations have made their stand while so obviously occupying the low ground. One of the millennial spokespeople is Ernest Owens, a journalist who has  published a piece  in the  New York Times  that explains away Obama’s criticism of cancel culture as “boomer logic.” Owens classifies the opponents of cancel culture as “Boomers, Gen-Xers and a small number of millennials with more regressive views,” and frames the debate as the out of touch against the up and coming. Given those options, why would you ever choose the former? As Owens righ...

The Uses and Abuses of the Human Sciences December 3, 2019 19 comments 11 minute read Galen Watts by Galen Watts  December 3, 2019 We are awash in the language of the human sciences. Each new day brings a slew of hyperbolic headlines, each brandishing the results of some recently published study that claims, in the arid language of science, to have uncovered what we are like, where we came from and why we do what we do. The results of these studies are incommensurable: each discipline offers its own means of reducing us to our most basic. Sociologists and social psychologists tell us that we are products of our social circumstances, that our desires and ambitions are shaped by the structures around us, and that our sense of ourselves as unique is a myth. Neuroscientists and biologists tell us that we are simply brains and bodies: the outcome of firing neurons and biochemical processes that operate far below our conscious awareness. Economists, with their abstract mod...

Bill Gates Wants to Export India’s National ID System Around the Globe Old-Thinker News | December 4, 2019 By Daniel Taylor It’s not just a social credit score system spreading around the world from China that threatens the free people of the world; India’s Aadhaar National ID program has the full support of Bill Gates and the World Bank as a model for other countries to follow. Gates said in a 2018 CNBC interview that it was “too bad” if someone thought that Aadhaar was a privacy issue: The  Gates Foundation has pledged  to fund the World Bank in an effort to take the ID program to other countries. Despite Gates plea that there are no privacy issues with Aadhaar, s everal court cases  have gone to India’s supreme court on grounds of privacy violations. The ID system has had serious security breaches, with  access to a billion identities being sold  for less than $10 through WhatsApp. One of the court filings ( Mathew Thomas vs Union of I...

7 December 2019 On Thursday, over a million public-sector workers and youth went on strike and marched in protests against French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension cuts. Strikes by rail employees, teachers and other workers continued on Friday, bringing most public transportation to a standstill and closing many schools. These events mark a new stage in the international resurgence of the class struggle. Once again, in the heart of Europe, the fundamental class lines in society are being drawn, and the working class is demonstrating its enormous social power and revolutionary potential. The frightened response of the international bourgeoisie was indicated by the headline of the New York Times ’ report on Thursday’s mass strike: “A Day of Revolution in France, Targeting Macron.” A man stands on a traffic light during a demonstration in Paris [Credit: AP Photo/Thibaud Camus] The fundamental issue in France—as in the mass strikes and protests in Chile, Bolivia, E...