International – Page 27 – For the fainthearted . . .

There is no point in arguing with them

Abandoning Facebook two years ago, because I was tired of prejudice, I persisted with Twitter for a while until it too seemed to have become a place filled with name-calling, hair-pulling and face-scratching.

Starting teacher training last September, I was advised that I should have a Twitter account to access the wisdom of the best theorists and practitioners. Having no desire to be re-acquainted with the vitriol I had previously encountered on Twitter, I opened a new account and sought to follow those who had interesting or constructive things to …

Say “no” to the miserabilists

The late-1960s seem to have been a fertile time for generating anniversaries that have been marked In countless media items fifty years later. A brief look behind many of the stories reveals the times were not the best in which to live. The civil rights movement emerged because of the denial of fundamental human rights; the Vietnam protests were a response to the massive slaughter in the Vietnam war; the psychedelic culture caused death, or permanent psychological harm, for many of those who withdrew into a narcotic-fuelled lifestyle.

Life fifty …

Law-breaking for beginners

This far south, the price of lighter evenings in the winter is earlier darkness in the summer. Although it is only the beginning of August, very little light remains at 9.30 pm. Staring out across the fading landscape, a dark grey long wheeled base Land Rover went down the road. It was fitted with a roof rack and three young men, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age, were sat on the roof, holding onto the roof rack and chatting as they went along.

Having once ridden on the roof …

A spirit of humanity

The Holocaust was the focus of Year 8 history lessons between Easter and the summer. Lessons on the origins, the events and the aftermath, lessons also on the participants, the perpetrators, the victims, and those who tried to resist the Nazis and to rescue the Jews.

Among the resisters and the rescuers there were men and women who were not obvious candidates to be heroes, but who achieved extraordinary things. This week, Google is recognising Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania whose personal initiative and willingness to take risks …

Hippos and railway trains

BBC television’s Hippos: Africa’s River Giants recalls an unlikely combination of memories: an encounter with hippos in the wild with questions about a historic railway. Taken to a lakeside restaurant in the Burundian capital of Bujumbura meant eating to the sound of argumentative hippos further up the shore. At the other end of the beach, it seemed odd to see docks; where on Lake Tanganyika would one sail with a cargo ship? What place could combine one of the strangest of animals with the most mundane activity of transporting …

There’s no ending capitalism

A column in the New Statesman asserts that only the end of capitalism will ensure the environmental survival of the planet. The writer does not suggest how capitalism may be brought to an end, only that end, it must. The definition of “capitalism” implicit in the column seems to embrace the entire working of the free market.

How would the writer propose an inhibition of the free market? Create a siege economy? Ban travel outside the country? In the absence of a price mechanism, how would decisions on production and …