Jonathan Purkis and Helen Wilkinson of King Ink

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From Mixcloud, Under the Pavement Radio

Jonathan Purkis is an anarchist writer, a tutor, and an independent academic.

During his teens until his late thirties and beyond hitchhiking was his main form of mobility. Jonathan joins us to discuss his new book, Driving with Strangers: what hitchhiking tells us about humanity.

Also an interview with Helen Wilkinson of Sunderland poetry collective King Ink, recorded at cafe/performance space Pop Recs with live performances.

Wide ranging interview with Jonathan (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-i-am-not-a-man-i...) starts at 1hr 30 after the song 'Ghost of Tom Joad'.

Jonathan talks about the intellectual influences behind his book Driving with Strangers which extend back to writing about Earth First!, being a vagabond sociologist in the academy and, of course, hitchhiking. Jonathan celebrates the legacy of his old colleague and friend John Moore, talks about how Murray Bookchin inspires in new contexts, and why writing like The Dawn of Everything gives us scope and, perhaps, hope.

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"The Dawn of Everything gives us scope and, perhaps, hope"

"The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.

Fact is human history has "progressed" by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the "stuck" question --- "the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" --- [cited from their book] is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never answer, predictably).

A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in the title) --- see last cited source above. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!

"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.

"The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown

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