CATEGORY: Global POLEMICS

Jon Kaufman22nd February 2021

Kitchen Table Ping

I’ve been carrying out a series of ping lessons via zoom over the latest lockdown. It’s not ideal, but as the old saying goes; ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Despite the obvious technical limitations and the usual technological blips, I think the students rather enjoyed themselves.

Jon Kaufman22nd February 2021

Compass is pointing in the right direction.

To be honest, I’ve always been rather dismissive of the Compass think tank, a left of centre grouping that I usually dismissed as Blairite. For a start, I didn’t like their indifferent attitude to Corbyn when I felt strongly that any and every progressive grouping in the country should at least have given his leadership public support whatever private reservations they may have held. Niether was I enamored by some of the New Labourish MPs gathered around them. But what I failed to do was actually read their stuff. A mistake. Their material is, I now realise, thought provoking and relevant.

Jon Kaufman30th January 2021

Covid in a Sick Nation

It may seem poor timing to polemicise on the causes of Britain’s horrendous death toll at the hands of the coronavirus. But many people in the UK and around the world are starting to debate just that. So, at the risk of being labelled insensitive, I think, in the very midst of the pandemic, this is precisely the moment to address this question. And the answers are likely to be disagreeable to say the least. The government and the official UK opposition Labour Party are far too compromised to ask the big questions, both being highly complicit in the whole sorry mess.

It’s a bloody mess to be sure. Poor housing, poor health infrastructure, decades of social care underfunding and good old fashioned government incompetence. But there’s more, much more. And it centres around the health of the nation. And that is the thorniest of things to discuss. It boils down to one central question; are we all victims of a dysfunctional, greedy, corporatist culture that puts profit first and foremost, or are we culpable for our own failing health. The unpalatable answer is both.

Jon Kaufman24th January 2021

Conspiracy

I’m drowning in a sea of conspiracies

QAnon, 5G and much more

And while shielding from a deadly old virus

A conspiracy has crept in, right through my open back door.

Jon Kaufman20th December 2020

Lockdown Ping

I’m proud to say I never lost a game of ping for a full three months. That’s definitely a record for me. Of course, I must reluctantly add, that due to lockdown restrictions, I didn’t actually play for those three months. Not inside, not outside, not nowhere. Schools were shut, clubs were shut and even the outdoor tables were generally no go areas. But all that changed in the summer. There were a couple of great sessions up at the London Academy where I was duly beaten by a high flying eleven year old. And there was a wonderful birthday party where two mini tables were in constant use by children and parents alike. I even managed to get myself back into action in three West London schools. Tournaments were out of the question of course, but coaching and after school clubs with the ever popular ‘top table’ were given the green light. West London Ping was back in business. But the real highlight of the lockdown era has been outdoor ping. And don’t let anyone tell you that the weather is an impediment. As our friends from the North would say, ‘there’s no such thing as bad weather – only inappropriate clothing.’

Jon Kaufman20th October 2020

Jon’s new book

Alphabet Soup for Christmas.

Alphabet Soup, by Jon Kaufman, is a collection of sharp polemical poems covering a range of personal, philosophical, historical and contemporary material. It would make an ideal thought-provoking Christmas/New Year gift, and one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Alphabet Soup is now available from a range of outlets including Waterstones, WHS, Foyles Book Shop, Amazon and eBay. Alternatively, you can contact the author directly at: sportingpolemics@gmail.com

for bulk orders at cost price. Make this Christmas a polemical one. Jk

Kindest regards

Charleigh Kirby29th August 2019

Burst your filter bubble

Psst? Wanna know a secret? The Internet is indoctrinating you with your own ideas and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Where do you get your news? Who do you follow on social media? Be honest, does your feed provide you a steady stream of information that is culturally and ideologically similar to your own?

Charleigh Kirby29th August 2019

Change the narrative and you can change the world

I recently joined the volunteering team at the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which was launched in August 2016 in the wake of the EU referendum result – originally a response to the surge of hate crimes following the Brexit vote. Since then, what has followed is a near 95,000 following on Twitter and a campaign flourishing into a grass roots phenomenon.

Jon Kaufman14th April 2018

Aussie Ball Tampering – Symbolic of a larger malaise?

Australia, like every nation, has enmeshed itself in an intricate web of self-deceits, half-truths and outright lies. And that is no surprise given that modern ‘European’ society in Australia was founded on one gigantic lie – that the Australian landmass was empty of human settlement when the first European invaders arrived. The very contrary was in fact true. Australia was, prior to the European invasion, the home to some one hundred Aboriginal nations, each with their own language, culture and administrative systems. In fact, taken collectively, the indigenous peoples of Australia represented humanity’s longest continuous civilisation, dating back thirty thousand years or more.

Jon Kaufman29th March 2018

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica – Business as Usual

There is a bit of a hoo-ha going on at the moment concerning dark forces harvesting and manipulating personal data for political and commercial purposes. But it would be a much bigger story if we discovered that no such manipulations were taking place. The clever and the cunning and the outright disreputable have always sought to mould and manipulate the general populace. It started some ten thousand years ago with the start of so-called human civilisation but probably kicked in many millennia earlier – way back into our hunter-gatherer past. In fact, wherever you find religion and high priests, you will find manipulation. And wherever you find economic elites, you will uncover underhandedness and outright deception.

Jon Kaufman18th March 2018

Anti-Semitism claims against Corbyn – It’s got MI5’s grubby fingerprints all over it

Unravelling claims of anti-semitism in the Labour Party is tricky. Perhaps pockets of anti-semitism do still exist in the Labour Party in the way that they still exist in all institutions in this country. Except for a deeply ingrained misogyny, anti-semitism is probably one of the oldest irrational prejudices of European society. General European racism, based on the colour of one’s skin, is a relatively recent prejudice in comparison. A construct of the modern colonial era. But history suggests that all human prejudices, whether ancient or relatively modern, when stripped of their emotive cultural narratives, are ultimately based on territory, power and economic control.

Jon Kaufman18th March 2018

Corbyn’s Response to the latest British anti-Russian hysteria

Jeremy Corbyn may well go down in history as the best Prime Minister Britain never had. I sincerely hope not, but given his propensity for honesty and courage in the face of Establishment hostility, his chances of making No 10 are always going to be slim. All nations spin their own fantasy narrative and Britain is one of the experts in this field. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t like to play that game. He never has.

Jon Kaufman5th March 2018

Table Tennis is good for the brain

There is a lot going on in table tennis, says Wendy Suzuki, a tenured professor of neuroscience at New York University and author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life, a new book exploring how sport generally and table tennis specifically can affect the human brain. Attention is increasing, memory is increasing, you have a better mood. And you are building motor circuits in your brain. A bigger part of your brain is being activated.

Jon Kaufman4th March 2018

March4Women – Sunday 4th March 2018

I Joined the March4Women after reading an inspiring issue of the free Stylist magazine. The entire issue No 402 was devoted to celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Britain’s women securing voting rights, and a very fine anniversary edition it was. If you can still get a copy, I heartily recommend you do so. It’s worth it for the graphics alone. It was the first time I had ever actually read the mag, believing it to be aimed primarily at white middle-class women with plenty of disposable income at their command. In fact, at first glance The Stylist comes across as little more than an advertising medium for the fashion and beauty industry rather than an attempt at serious journalism.

Jon Kaufman11th February 2018

Human Flow, a Documentary by Ai Weiwei

One sign of a modern society might be its ability to generate its own thoughtful critics. North America has them by the bucket loads; it used to be Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Now it’s Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and of course the irrepressible Noam Chomsky. The Indian subcontinent has the equally irrepressible Arundhati Roy and the Anglo-Indian author, Salman Rushdie. Australasia, still something of a colonial outpost in both politics and cultural attitudes, has its highly combatant John Pilger.

Jon Kaufman4th February 2018

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

I know a person of Irish descent who tells me they have experienced varying levels of petty prejudice throughout their life but that it comes and goes. That person is white. I know a person of Jewish descent who tells me they have experienced petty prejudices at varying time in their life but that it comes and goes. They are white. Reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, I get the distinct impression that for Black people living in predominantly European societies, the prejudice never really stops because they are always, first and foremost, in the eyes of the European, Black.

Jon Kaufman24th January 2018

Oxfam Report – How the neo-liberal, corporate elite hate it

The statistics are damning enough. But of course, they are damning every year. It never seems to get better. Nearly a billion of our fellow citizens are without clean and safe drinking water. The stuff they are forced to drink is contaminated with every conceivable parasite and life-threatening bacteria. Two billion of our fellow citizens must make do without proper sanitation. Disease is rife. lives are cut short. One in five girls don’t get a primary school education. They are condemned to a lifetime of grinding poverty and ignorance. To top it off, the extremes of wealth and poverty just get larger. A mere 42 people hold the same wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion. 82% of the wealth created in 2017 went to the obscenely rich 1%.

Jon Kaufman6th January 2018

Brexit Blues

Brexit, Brexit from May to December
Brexit scheming is all I remember
Productivity rising, trade flat-lining
A time for cheering a time for crying.

Brexit, Brexit from Monday to Sunday
Brexit plotting for a pumped-up payday
Opportunities opening, trade door slamming
The predictions are rosy, the forecasts are damning.

Jon Kaufman3rd January 2018

The Crown: Series 2

‘The golden age of TV continues. Not that there isn’t mountains of dross out there. Of course there is. But amongst the dross there seems to be a slow but steady stream of gems. The latest, in my ever so umble opinion, has to be The Crown. Not since the BBC’s I Claudius in the mid 1970’s has a TV series set out with so much ambition. The BBC’s Our Friends From The North and This Life certainly had ambition as did HBO’s The Wire and The Sopranos. Black Mirror is absolutely sublime as are the three series of In Treatment. The House of Cards and Homeland are both likely to be on many people’s best of the best list.

Jon Kaufman9th December 2017

Of course, Russian sport is corrupt, but then so are the Olympics, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

A welcome and overdue return to sporting polemics but predictably it’s the same old story; corruption, doping and unaccountable oligarchy. Simon Jenkins does an excellent job in outlining the corrupt relationship between the Russian authorities and the IOC and FIFA. But more than that, he goes on to make the point that it is not only Russian sport that is mired in corruption and cheating. All nations are at it, not least the British, although they like to play the very British game of being holier than thou.

Jon Kaufman2nd December 2017

Brexit and the Irish Question: Don’t mention the ongoing Occupation

In a half decent article by Polly Toynbee, The Irish Question May Yet Save Britain From Brexit (The Guardian 28/11/17) she gives a hint at the Imperial rule that has so humiliated this small nation for so long. Toynbee writes; They (the Brexiteers) pretended it was nothing. Reviving that deep-dyed, centuries-old contempt for the Irish, they have dismissed it with an imperial fly-whisk as a minor irritation. Beautiful written and historically accurate. But it is not enough. Neither Toynbee, or Andrew Marr or Jeremy Paxman before them, nor the whole gamut of liberal journalists currently plying their trade in Britain, can bring themselves to openly admit that the remnants of the British Empire still occupy six counties of the thirty-two counties of Ireland.

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Pele: The Autobiography by Pocket Books

Jon Kaufman16th May 2010

While the global financial speculators have been busy at their dirty work distorting and undermining global currencies, which themselves are on the brink of ruination due to the mountains of debt accumulated by successive governments, I thought I would indulge in a little light escapism…

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxon

Jon Kaufman27th February 2011

The fact that large corporations and criminally wealthy individuals have been moving their wealth off-shore to avoid the tax man, and the serious fraud squad, is nothing new. What is new in Shaxton’s book is the exposure of the magnitude of, not only the sums involved, but the Byzantine methods employed…

Russell Brand: Capitalist Democracy is Junk

Jon Kaufman17th November 2013

It perhaps takes a junkie, or a recovering junkie, or at the very least, an ex-junkie, to be able to speak with such clarity where normally there is only fudge and subterfuge. I missed Russell Brand’s recent Paxman interview but I did catch up with his line of thinking via his follow-up Guardian article, and without over-egging it, it was hot stuff…

Why Matthew Syed is Wrong

Jon Kaufman12th November 2009

Matthew Syed’s article, the so called, the beautiful game, makes a fundamental mistake. Syed writes, When future historians look back at the age of globalisation, it is not the Americanisation of the planets culture that will amaze them most, nor the pervading presence of brands such as Coca Cola and Nike.

Time For Outrage by Stephane Hessel

Jon Kaufman27th March 2011

Hessel must be a huge embarrassment to today’s authorities because while they, the Bush’s, the Blair’s, The Sarkozy’s and the Cameron’s, pretend to stand for the democratic ideals that helped defeat fascist aggression, Hessel indicts them precisely for having abandoned those very ideals.

Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker

Jon Kaufman22nd December 2014

It is difficult to find the superlatives to adequately describe Charlie Brookers Black Mirror. A powerful and disturbing technological dystopia. A masterpiece of futuristic gloom. An unparalleled examination of where our new technological powers might be leading us to.

Come On – Be A Sport, Linda Whitney, London Evening Standard

Jon Kaufman8th August 2009

Sport is growing as an industry and consequently so are the number and range of jobs involved in sport. Whitney talks about receptionists, catering and leisure centre instructors starting at around 13,000 and then working your way up the ladder to managerial positions in marketing or design on 50,000 plus.

Wiff-Waff for the Riff Raff – Olympic Notes No. 6

Jon Kaufman15th April 2011

Under the cleverly constructed heading, ‘Wiff Waff for the Riff Raff’, I recently received’ a request for a donation towards a bid to win some Olympics table tennis tickets for some youngsters in a hard up community table tennis club. For those unaware, ‘wiff-waff’ was the original name for ping pong…

In My Dreams I Dance by Anne Wafula Strike

Jon Kaufman22nd September 2010

It is great to be able to report on a greatly uplifting human sporting tale. Anne Wafula, in her book, In My Dreams I Dance, paints a beautiful autobiographical picture of her life from a healthy baby struck down with polio, through to her amazing achievements in both Kenyan and British Paralympics wheelchair racing.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

Jon Kaufman15th February 2012

Paul Mason’s blog turned book is definitely the read of the moment. It’s compelling reading and its explosive content is being updated and underlined by the minute. At the time of writing there is a forty eight hour general strike rolling out in Greece. Once again Athens is the scene of angry rioting and police attack.