CULTURE & HISTORY

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Let’s clear this up before the girl power parade starts: the first woman to head the US war machine will not be a groundbreaking pioneer of feminist achievement. She will be a mass murderer who wears Spanx. Her appointment will not be an advancement for women, it will be imperialism in pumps. Modern mainstream feminism has abandoned women’s interests so thoroughly and completely in almost all spheres of importance that it has largely become only superficially distinct from the patriarchy it purports to oppose. The plight of mothers, elderly women, young girls, caregivers and wives have been almost entirely shuffled out of popular discourse, with focus instead shifted onto discussions about whether women are being adequately rewarded for their service to the God of Capitalism, or how they’re just as qualified as men to murder thousands of people at a time.

JOHN SCALES AVERY—Today, human greed and folly are destroying the global environment. As if this were not enough, there is a great threat to civilization and the biosphere from an all-destroying thermonuclear war. Both of these severe existential threats  are due to faults our inherited emotional nature.

Our emotions have an extremely long evolutionary history. Both lust and rage are emotions that we share with many animals. However, with the rapid advance of human cultural evolution, our ancestors began to live together in progressively larger groups, and in these new societies, our inherited emotional nature was often inappropriate. What once was a survival trait became a sin which needed to be suppressed by morality and law.

China has successfully sent 13 satellites into orbit this month with a single rocket, including the world’s first 6G experimental satellite. RT correspondent John Huddy looks at Beijing’s space ambitions. China led the world in the number of launches per year in 2018 and 2019. It is upping the stakes in the space race by launching 32 rockets so far this year, and could hit 40 by the end of 2020, Huddy says. “China’s Tianwen-1 probe is currently on the way to Mars” and the country is expected to launch another rocket, the Chang’e-5 with a lunar sample return mission, later this month.

CORY MORNINGSTAR—While bricks and mortar small business were, and continue to be crushed, while those in the informal sectors that comprise the Global South and South Asia starve, the world’s wealthiest (made so by the exploitation and theft of labour, coupled with the rapacious plunder of the planet) became richer than they could have ever possibly imagined. In Canada, the 20 richest people watched their fortunes grow by $37 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic. This broke the record set in 2019. In the US, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos saw his net worth grow by $13 billion – the largest intraday jump in net worth in history while Elon Musk’s net worth increased threefold to 75 billion. They are not alone. Thus far, the world’s richest people increased their wealth by a staggering USD 813 billion during the pandemic.

MATT LEWIS—The early trauma may have also informed his more sober role as king. Henry was a renowned soldier, but piety and honour forged a strong moral compass (the execution of prisoners at Agincourt is often cited against this, but it can be understood in its context, if not excused because the threatened French resurgence did not materialise). Henry offered the King of France a single combat duel between himself and the French king’s son, The Dauphin (the king being too infirm for such a trial). It is most likely that Henry did so knowing not only that the Dauphin lacked military experience and courage and so would be forced to decline, dishonouring himself, but also that in the unlikely event of acceptance, Henry would win. However, he told the French king Charles VI that he wished to settle the matter in this manner to avoid “the effusion of blood”.