Reading Chomsky
When I first started reading Noam Chomsky’s work it was with a large amount of, dare I say it, shock and awe. Every few sentences I went scurrying off to the copious footnotes, unable to believe that the US really…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…