In Depth:  Kirsten Birkett

Kirsten Birkett

Actor Ralph Fiennes has apparently said recently that he attributed Trump’s win in the United States presidential election to having a better story.

It seems he thinks that Make America Great Again (MAGA) was able to capture people’s spirit and imaginations in a way that liberal progressivism wasn’t.

Kirsten Birkett

If you have been at all aware of popular thinking about wealth over the past 20 years or so, you have probably come across the phenomenon of manifesting. Apparently it’s very popular on TikTok at the moment; it was beloved of the New Age teachers long before that.

'To manifest something means to make your dreams, goals, and aspirations a reality by believing you can achieve them' says one popular website. It is based on a so-called 'law of attraction', positing that if you think about something often enough, hard enough and positively enough, you can make it happen by the power of your thought alone. It focuses your 'energy' to affect future events out there in the universe.

Kirsten Birkett

I read recently that farmers, who have made up the majority of the world population for millennia, have all but disappeared from Europe ‘in the blink of an eye’.

Up to the mid twentieth century almost half the working population was involved in food production in European countries – now it has fallen to single percentage figures. It has been replaced by large-scale agribusiness, with vast amounts of land farmed by a small number of landowners. It has resulted in much more food being produced, much more efficiently. It has also been ‘heavily subsidised, economically unjust, and ecologically disastrous, in a climate-threatened economy of shortages, destabilised supply chains, growing economic protectionism, and degradation of soils all over the world’. ^[1]