Occupational Thoughts -

Yesterday I got up at 4:30 to blockade the AWE ‘nuclear bomb factory’ in Aldermaston. It was cold, some people were arrested, and there was a tent operated by the Oxford branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which gave out food to the protesters. Protesting makes people hungry, they passed out some excellent organic [...]

I have been told, and I’m too lazy to actually look it up; that Trotsky advocated putting all children in the care of the state – citing that the family as an institution is broken and unfair. If anyone actually has this elusive quote or could back me up, please comment. My best guess is [...]

Before I go full rant I should say that I totally understand the upset caused by state propaganda. I’m writing this in response to a former comrade who clearly flinched at the notion. It offends their libertarian instinct.
I had that same knee-jerk reaction too, now after careful reflection and having read the first few chapters of this book, I’m reconsidering [...]

Apologies for the spree of posts, I’ve again picked up on whatever it is that motivates me to write and I’m running with it. This post is about this story. I know it’s an old story but I’ve only just discovered it. The jist of it is that there’s a law in place to protect [...]

Back from my last post I was thinking about design and I remember having played Bioshock this week. I returned and took some pictures:

Apparently the game is a critique Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I don’t know Ayn Rand, or her theory of Objectivism. But I gather it has something to do with leaving humans to do what [...]

I’ve been working on this sketch in ten-minute spurts for about a week now. I wanted to use the same iconography of capitalism on the flag that was displayed by the Clan Destined in this video and this post. It’s pretty self explanatory really, oh and the background is the London stock exchange.

The image is [...]

After my last post I thought I’d go back and scrutinise the list of other Wave participants more closely. One name which I was most surprised to see was the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.
The reason I was surprised was because  I’d always had the CPRE down as an organisation of tory village folk who [...]

On Saturday I went to the Wave demonstration in London. The fact that such a demonstration took place was a really good thing and I fully support it. It was a huge demonstration with a police estimate of 20,000 marchers and the organiser’s estimate of 50,000.
What I eventually realised was that the demonstration was too [...]

There’s a person in my politicks class who set out to defend the fashion industry. By opposition it’s my job to bring down the full brunt of my mighty rage upon this misguided soul. But then when working around the issue I decided I’m not entirely against fashion.
As one of my solutions to this I brought out the reasoned argument that [...]

This morning I watched the documentary ‘Outfoxed‘ by Robert Greenwald. It’s about how Fox News in the USA is not a fair & balanced media channel, that it’s full of lies and right-wing propaganda. I didn’t really need a documentary to tell me this because I knew already but it was insightful nevertheless.
Watching this comes a [...]

This morning I drew up a little piece of political satire about Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill:

If you don’t get the joke it’s a play on the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme from the game Zero Wing.

As I mentioned previously I went to the local Alliance for Worker’s Liberty’s socialist-ecologist reading group on Tuesday of last week. We analyzed some of Marx’s ideas on the environment in Das Kapital Volume 1. We were specifically analyzing Marx’s idea of stoffwechsel (metabolism). I’ll explain these ideas in simple terms (something which Marx completely [...]

This post is about the level “No Russian” in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In the weeks leading up to the game’s release we were puzzled why it was rated an 18, all other Call of Duty games have been rated 15 and this one didn’t look any different. This classification information from the [...]

I started my first flamewar with a tweet suggesting that the poppy appeal is propaganda. I caught this idea from an article Mark steel wrote in the Independent last week. In the 48 hours since it’s birth it has gained a full 45 comments on Facebook. My defense of my original tweet is reproduced here:
It seems I’ve kicked [...]

On Wednesday I went to a radical feminist meeting, several points were made that I totally agree with:

Fashion works against women turning them into objects of consumerisation and demeaning their collective personalities by emphasising useless features such as their choice of lipstick.
Raising the glass ceiling is pointless if there are many women still languishing in the [...]