Thinking

Who’s your audience?

I love watching Chris Rock. He’s one of the few stand-up comedians who is pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh every time I watch him. However, watching Chris Rock videos on YouTube recently proved to be a very different…
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The crime of compassion

Sometimes I think I have become so cynical that I am no longer capable of feeling true outrage. I have come to expect fascism, brutality and heartlessness from my elected leaders as a matter of course. But every now and…
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The waters are rising…….

Something strange is happening here. I lived in Britain for about 20 years and never heard much about flooding. There were occasional floods of low-lying areas, but mostly floods, like all other natural disasters, were something that happened in other…
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Children as possessions

I was on the bus the other day when a young mother came on with a child in a pushchair. The child must have been 4 or 5 – he was almost bursting out of the chair, and his knees…
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Payback

Many people in Britain have been wondering for the last few years exactly what we get out of the “special relationship” with the United States. We go along with Afghanistan, we go along with Iraq, we go along with anything.…
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Which group are you in?

I am belatedly getting around to writing about an excellent post over on Colonise This! It really got me thinking, not so much because it challenged my current perspective but because it helped to clarify it. It’s about how we…
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Clueless

It’s become clear since I moved back to London that most white British people have absolutely no idea what racism is. They persist in lumping it together with any other form of name-calling, and denounce any attempt to clamp down…
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Fear-based foreign policy

I’m not a very quick thinker. That’s why I don’t post every day, several times a day, responding to the latest news as it’s breaking. I prefer to let stuff percolate for a little while before forming an opinion. Here’s…
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Taking Liberties

First of all, here are possibly the most chilling words to come from the mouth of a British Prime Minister since… well, probably something else Tony Blair said a few weeks ago. It’s lucky we’re getting rid of this fool…
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