Barking Coins

Over the course of semester one, and in particular towards its close the conflict around autonomous time for queer women in the queer room reached somewhat of a climax. This conflict is centred on the desire of some women to have access to the queer room without the presence of men and the surprisingly fierce opposition to this posed by some. What is interesting in this conflict is the way that ‘safety’ is used and more particularly why. A discourse of safety is used to disguise a deeper conflict between a social clique defending its fiefdom from people interested in undertaking political activity on campus. Asking why the issue of safety is the discourse of conflict for those seeking a political milieu and why the space is given so much attention by them reveals a certain problematic that, while always existing, has come to the fore in the post-VSU university environment – at least at Monash.
Continue reading Women’s Autonomous Organising, Queer room safety and the post-VSU Student Union…

Haven’t posted in a while so here is a comment that I made on another blog (leftwrites again).

There is a short stroy, my name was attached to a comment that was put on the site by ben under this post regarding the APEC summit. This is the comment ben left:

An interesting comment on this position paper here .

Following that Ablokeimet commented:

Frankly, I can’t remember a single posting from kernal.corn that was putting forward even approximately sound political ideas. Some solid class analysis is called for.

Seeing as I have (and to my knowledge my name has) only made three or four comments I felt that my honour had been unfairly trammpled upon. Hence, seeing as ‘virtual’ duels don’t exist, I did the closest ‘virtual’ equivalent and made a silly comment to even out the honour dising, partly as a response to Ablokeimet’s previous Solid Class Analysis comment:
Continue reading Solid Class Analysis…

It seems pertinent at this point to raise a voice of caution in regards to the interests of our species. Our near total domination of this planet should not lead to complacency, potential challengers to our authority should not be derided as merely ‘stupid animals’. Although we get great enjoyment out of degrading these rivals, keeping them as pets, making them ‘look like people’, making us look like them, idolising them and pretending they ‘talk’ to us and generally treating them as pathetic losers whilst also killing them for food, clothing and fun, we should not ignore the risks that they pose to our domination. We should be able to enjoy our domination but equally we must never forget the great effort that our ancestors had to go through to achieve our position today. In order to avoid falling into another 100,000 year conflict it is necessary that we remain ever vigilant in maintaining our position.

Continue reading Lest we forget… the Great War of Human Triumph against Neanderthal man….

Just read an article from metamute by Matthem Hyland on a documentry on squatting in London, which I think is worth the read…

Continue reading Squatting as Commodity on Film……

Malai kofta

4 potatoes
1 medium carrot
3/4 Danish havarti
1+1/2 tbls sour cream
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1/2 cup cashews
1/4 tsp salt
(for the sauce)
2 large onions
10 cherry tomatoes or 2 large tomatoes
3 cloves garlic crushed
2 tsp coriander powder
1 tblsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp red chilli powder
1 tsp poppy seeds
3 tbls cashews
1/2 cup water

1. Mix the cheese and cashews together.
2. Steam the potatoes and carrot. Then mash together with spices, cream and 1/4 of the cheese and nut mix.
3. Form the potatoes into 4 balls with a portion of the cheese and nut mix in the middle of each (the centre of the sphere that is the ball)
4. Fry the balls in excess oil until they are lightly browned then set aside on absorbant paper.
5. Deep fry the poppy seeds then grind into a paste. Set aside.
6. Fry the onions until they are browned.
7. Combine onions, poppy seed paste, tomatoes, garlic, spices and cashews and blend until smooth.
8. Bring the sauce to a simmer and cook for two minutes. Then add the water and stir through until an even consistency is reached.
9. add the koftas and serve when heated through.

notes:
Instead of using cumin powder I used cumin seeds dry fried and ground up – they could alter the taste so if the spice doesn’t seem right try doing that instead of using normal ground cumin… to ‘dry fry’ put the cumin seeds in a pan without oil and cook until they go a nice dark color -more brown than black though - and are nicely fragrant, but not burn smelling…

Also the bloody koftas fell apart when I fried them. The collapse wasn’t catastrophic just annoying – a couple end up having a rupture that resulted in fried cheese being stuck to one side (still to decide if this was bad or good). I think that this was mainly due to the cheese being in the middle, perhaps using a firmer cheese, less cheese or no cheese in the middle of the koftas would fix this. But also, when I fired them they stuck to the bottom of the pan and because they weren’t coved in oil I had to turn them – leading to some collapsing going on. So the problem could be solved with improved frying ‘technique’.

The G20 (that is arterial bloc and co) defence people have put out another press release of the liberal kind. I had a bit to say in comment largely prompted by the last comment in combination with this second liberal press release so I am going to paste it here (as well as the comment before mine).

Continue reading Escaping inertia and heading towards a radical defence campaign……

So I am about to go back to study this year - in an attempt to complete a BA, but also as a way of avoiding work…because of this I have been brought back into the loop on University operations. In particular how VSU is being rolled out…

It seems that in order to maintain their institutional existence student unions have signed up to extortion efforts with Monash University. Efforts to try and get money out of students to pay for their own transformation into efficient machines by the degree factory. Perhaps the result of VSU can be seen as a diminishing of the power of student unions in relation to anything but being part of the machinery of the factory that is the neo-liberal univeristy.

I recieved an email from the University advising me of the Monash Community Card (with the uni in community emphasised).

Continue reading Student Union Rackets…

The breach of property rules that is at the base of squatting seems to suggest that this practice will always have a profoundly anti-capitalist nature. But it is not so much the explicitly political squat projects that prove that are the more interesting in this respect. The ‘explicitly political’ projects that I refer to are the social centres that dot the geography of europe and to some extent much of the world. The most recent of these that I have come across would be one set up in North London by a bunch of people that were evicted from a squatted University building in July - run by londonsocialcentre.org people. But aside from much rhetoric about subverting capitalism these squats seem to be indistinguishable from what amounts to arts industry projects such as talked about in this article - where squatting is a business advantage (no rent) as well as a sort of value adding chic.

Continue reading A new squatted social centre in london……

Despite democratic silliness and uncritical approach to engagement with summit protests the Arterial bloc did manage to make the most out of a dull day and have some fun at the G20 protest and thereby give me a degree of optimism over things coming from counter-summits.

Unfortunately the material that has come out from these people has slowly eroded my limited sense of optimism, but I still hold out for more possibilities from this diversion.

This is the latest statement (coming from Arterial bloc and co blog ):

Continue reading Breaking the summit protest monotony?…

Good old centrelink is making me do job-seeker training with the salvation army. So far I have been 6 times and am almost at the desperation point. I managed to work it so that I only have to come in 2 days a week for 6 weeks over an 8 week period instead of the usual three weeks full time deal and hopefully I will find otherways out before I have to suffer to many of these classes.

At the first class I went one of the highlights was the finding your ideal job game. This game involved trying to find a job that you could delude yourself into thinking was good and therefore motivate you to work. To find the job we were going to explore the ‘hidden job market’ - which according to our commissar there are only 300 types of jobs advertised but over 12,000 that are not and are in the hidden job market. When i asked for an example of each I was told the 300 category was ‘ordinary jobs’ and the 12,000 category was unusual jobs - job that aren’t in the age. Still unsure of the distinction I asked for more precise examples. So then our commissar listed some ordinary jobs and hidden job market jobs - which ran something like this…

Continue reading The ‘nouns and verbs game’ and other jobseeker skills….