Archive | 2007
Marxism 2007: Day Five (Monday)
OK, Day Five has been hanging over me throughout a very busy week, so rather than waiting for the right time I’m going to write about it now, while I still have a million other more pressing things to do. First up was “A history of rebel art from Dada to Banksy“. I only went [...]
Marxism 2007: Day Four (Sunday)
“Cuba after Castro” was a great talk, with one small problem: it wasn’t about Cuba after Castro. The speaker, Mike Gonzalez, focused most of his talk on Cuba under Castro, and spent only the last few minutes talking about Cuba after Castro. It wasn’t the only speech at this conference to disregard its advertised topic, [...]
Marxism 2007: Day Three (Saturday)
“Engels and the rise of class society” wasn’t quite what I expected. Firstly the speaker was not Mark Thomas the comedian-activist, but Mark Thomas the manager of socialist bookshop Bookmarks. And secondly, he was talking not about modern class society, but about the development of class in ancient and prehistoric societies. Fortunately, neither of these [...]
Marxism 2007: Day Two
The day started perfectly. A last-minute programme change and poor organisation meant that only two other people turned up to hear Ernesto Gonzalez and Andres Lofiego talk about their experience with occupying a printing factory in Buenos Aires. Sad for Ernesto and Andres, but lucky for me, because it turned the event into an intimate [...]
Marxism 2007
I am attending the oddly-named Marxism 2007 conference for the next few days. I say “oddly-named” because the Bearded Wonder himself doesn’t get much of a look-in as far as I can see – the usual broader left-wing causes like Iraq, Palestine, racism, the environment, etc., seem to be covered much more extensively than the [...]
Shorthand thinking
Newspapers face a fundamental design problem. They need to put headlines in huge, bold letters to grab the attention of would-be readers, and yet they have very narrow columns. The solution is to abbreviate remorselessly, creating new words, or new meanings for old words, if necessary. Thus, for example, “conspiracy” becomes “plot”, “consider” becomes “weigh”, [...]
Get in touch with your inner racist!
When I lived in New York, there was a small shop across the street that was owned by a man from Afghanistan. I used to visit him in the days after September 11, and he had a bewildered, beleaguered look about him. Business was slack, he said, and the few people who did still come [...]
Happy July 4th!
As Americans celebrate their Independence Day tomorrow by grilling dead animals and hoisting flags, I have a proposal to make for the rest of the world: let’s declare our independence from America. So many people are doing it already – the new left-wing leaders of South America are paying off their debts to the Washington-controlled [...]
“The Muslims are breeding”
It’s sad that there’s a site called “Islamophobia Watch.” Not, as its critics would argue, because there’s no such thing as Islamophobia and it’s all just political correctness gone mad, but because it shows that every day, several times a day, someone makes some flagrantly ignorant, racist attack on Muslims. And these attacks are published [...]
-
The 20 best Caribbean book blogs
-
The cafe killer
-
Liebster Award reloaded
-
The Kindle Report: does it beat paper?
-
The next big thing…
-
We could take a train, be miles away by morning…
-
Ten years ago: Voluntary poverty in New York City
-
Some interviews
-
Giveaway: Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2003
-
How to Improve your Foreign Language Immediately
-
LV Outlet Online Italy: Louis Vuitton Outlet Paypal Payment...
-
ski holiday: Good way of explaining, and fastidious article to ...
-
ski vacation: I every time used to study post in news papers but...
-
2013: These are genuinely enormous ideas in concerning b...
-
Evan: What I'm starting to think here is that the refer...
