We humans adore a simple dichotomy. It’s frightfully efficient. White or non-white. Male or female. Disabled or abled. These binaries promise neatness in a messy world – a cognitive filing system for complex humanity. Yet as philosopher Val Plumwood observed, these “master/slave” frameworks operate through five dangerously slick mechanisms: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalism, and homogenisation. The result? A society perpetually queueing at the wrong post office counter. The five quiet engines of oppression Plumwood’s mechanisms work like bureaucratic stealth. Backgrounding treats one identity as society’s default setting – the unmarked “normal” against which others are measured. Consider how medical textbooks historically used white male bodies as universal templates. Radical exclusion rigidly polices borders: trans folk facing scrutiny over toilet access, or mixed-race individuals pressured to “pick a side”. Incorporation defines the “slave” category purely by its relationship to the master (“disabled” meaning “needs help”). Instrumentalism reduces people to tools – like expecting minority staff to fix diversity problems unpaid. Homogenisation flattens groups: assuming all disabled people need identical ramps. ...

Premise: Functional by design By 2040, BRICS+ emerges as the world’s most effective climate alliance, not through luck, but through shrewd strategy, sovereign solidarity, and an uncanny ability to turn adversity into opportunity. What begins as a pushback against western hypocrisy evolves into a multipolar green order, driven by energy pragmatism, diplomatic agility, and some rather bold infrastructure experiments. How it happens The west’s green hypocrisy backfires (2025–2030) The European Union launches its much-touted carbon border tax with great fanfare, and little diplomacy. In the Global South, it is promptly dubbed “eco-colonialism in spreadsheets”. Meanwhile, the United States fails to pass its second Green New Deal, after a series of fiscal deadlocks and an unexpected banking crisis send climate funding into retreat. ...

Premise: Dysfunctional by design By 2035, BRICS+ doesn’t collapse under its own contradictions, nor does it morph into a cohesive challenger to the G7. Instead, it stumbles into superpower status by a series of messy accidents, economic disasters, and geopolitical farces. Less deliberate empire, more Frankenstein with a membership card. As the West self-harms through sanctions, debt cliffs, and diplomatic hubris, BRICS+ rises, not through coordination, but sheer entropy. They didn’t build an empire. They inherited the scrapyard and accidentally started selling tickets., Anonymous EU diplomat, 2034 ...

The BRICS alliance began life as something between a Goldman Sachs marketing gimmick and a drunken bet among emerging market traders. “I’ll wager you a case of champagne these four economies will dominate by 2050!” Fast-forward two decades, and what started as an investment banker’s acronym has somehow morphed into a geopolitical bloc with expansionist ambitions. The recent addition of new members under the “BRICS+” banner suggests this is no longer just about economics. This is about building an alternative world order where the rules are made by autocrats and petrostates. ...

The received wisdom, trotted out at Davos panels, EU Commission summits, and in the more sentimental columns of the Financial Times, is that Europe, having learned its lessons from two world wars, has spent the past eight decades basking in a glow of enlightened tranquillity. No more trenches, no more blitzes. Just a polite consensus of democratic cooperation, cross-border trade, and the occasional fracas over mackerel quotas. How charming. And how utterly wrong. ...

In 2025, the financial sector continues its courtship with generative AI, hoping it will finally make compliance less of a bureaucratic slog. According to Global Relay’s State of AI in Surveillance Report 2025, attitudes are thawing: there’s been a 19% drop in firms reluctant to implement AI. Apparently, nothing eases doubts like the promise of automated paperwork and plausible deniability. Still, not all is rosy. Explainability remains elusive, regulators are breathing down necks, and integration often resembles a Frankensteinian patchwork. Innovation, it seems, comes with a compliance hangover. ...

How I lost my mind (and won an AI war) for a depressed octopus office worker: a tale of shrimp, sharks, and prompt-engineering madness. Chapter 1: The vision To understand what fake imagery can look like, one has to do it. So I investigated these AI image creators. And browsing around it began, as all terrible ideas do, with a whisper: “What if under water, but capitalism?” Armed with nothing but a keyboard and a dream of a silly image, I set out to create the ultimate underwater dystopian office scene, a place where octopuses ring up kelp groceries, clownfish drown in paperwork, and shrimp riot against the 1% (plankton). ...

Neoliberalism crept into Europe wearing a sharp suit and talking about efficiency. It promised a leaner, meaner state, less red tape, more growth, and a brighter future. What it delivered was stagnant wages, crumbling services, and Jeff Bezos in a rocket. For Europe, the cost has been clear: growing inequality, weakened public institutions, and a sense that someone, somewhere, has sold the family silver, and is now renting it back to us with interest. ...

European democracy, once sold to us as government for the people, increasingly resembles government for the shareholders. The slogans haven’t changed, “freedom”, “fairness”, “choice”, but behind the scenes, the boardroom has quietly replaced the ballot box as the place where real decisions are made. It’s not that politicians have stopped caring what the public thinks. It’s just that donors, lobbyists, and corporate advisors tend to shout louder, and arrive with champagne. ...

When European leaders speak of “security”, it’s worth asking: security for whom, exactly? Not for the millions navigating crumbling health systems or housing crises. Not for those struggling to afford heating or fresh food. No, the current drive to rearm Europe has little to do with public safety and far more to do with shareholder satisfaction. As Grace Blakeley has sharply noted, the sudden rediscovery of defence budgets has less to do with strategic necessity and more with economic opportunity, for the right kind of people, of course. Not your neighbour. Not your nurse. But certainly your nearest weapons manufacturer. ...