Occupational Thoughts -

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the downsides of the Stop The War national  march was talking to a comrade at the SWP stall who tried to get me to join the party. This isn’t a criticism of that guy, he was just recruiting for his organisation. The SWP needs members and who better than myself who clearly believes in socialism and has [...]

Over the past week (in addition to school and other things) I’ve taken an interest in the UK Pirate Party. They’re a relatively small, single-issue party who campaign for the reform of copyright laws. They were officially registered as a party on the 11th August, just over 3 months ago. I have previous experience with small parties; I’ve [...]

I was surprised to find that the police force who controlled the Rage Against New Labour protest in fact have a Twitter account. They posted the following messages on the 27th: How’s that for transparency? My footage of that protest is currently encoding and will be up as soon as I sort out my video archive. The [...]

A note from General Studies was that when the Metropolitan Police force was formed in 1829 their uniform was chosen so that it would not resemble that of a soldier. They were meant to be servants of the people, approachable, friendly. British Bobbies do by and large have a reputation for being the nicest police [...]

I jotted down this line in my Politick book some time ago and I’m publishing it now: There are 3 economic systems: Communism, Capitalism and Stealing. Capitalism is a bit like Stealing but you don’t go to jail, and everyone hates Communism because Russia lost the Cold War. It’s an adapted Reggie Perrin quote, it [...]

This post is inspired by an assertion by many politicians that the UK is ‘full up’. I vaguely remember writing on this subject before but seeing as this is a new blog I might as well go over it in more detail and splatter statistics all over the place. Firstly I’ll start by quoting the [...]