the Disillusioned kid
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Sunday, December 23, 2007

Something (via) for you to enjoy before you go off and hunt your Christmas turkey in the wilds of suburbia.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Come here often?

It seems like ages since I posted anything here and, whaddya know, it really is. My sincere apologies to those of you who've missed your daily dose of disillusionment.

There's certainly been a lot of water under the proverbial bridge since my last electronic excretion. While I did burn out for a fair while, I've kept myself busy: I've written a dissertation; moved house; camped to combat climate change; got a merit in my Masters; been arrested; got a job (albeit a temporary one); helped defeat fascism in Notts; been on the radio; kicked against the pricks; and cooked a mean veggie lasagne, but not necessarily in that order. None of this explains my absence from the blogosphere, but I include this list here to demonstrate that I haven't spent the whole time watching paint dry.

Now I've got teh interwebs set up in my new digs I ought to be posting here rather more often, but then how many blogs are there out there where the last post, updated months ago, promises just that? Watch this space. Just don't expect too much.

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Thursday, May 31, 2007

Me Me Meme

Interviewed by Pacian.

1. If someone asked you to provide a concise explanation of anarchism and
its relevance, what would you say?

Errrrmmmm.... Concise you say?

Anarchism is a broad church and I certainly wouldn't claim to speak on behalf of the movement as a whole. For me though, it's about rejecting all forms of oppression whenever and wherever they appear: capitalism; fascism; fundamentalism; racism; patriarchy;heterosexism; ableism; environmental destruction; even speciesism. As such it is the ultimate revolutionary aspiration, a call for the complete reorganisation (or, perhaps, disorganisation) of society.

Crucially, however, anarchism, for me, isn't just utopian dreaming; about imagining what some far-off future society might look like "after the revolution". It's about getting out there and building that society in the here and now by fighting oppresive structures by any means necessary.

As I suggested, concision is a problem. The Situationists had the right idea, however: "Be realistic, demand the impossible!"

2. If you could only take one form of protest with you to the desert island, what would it be?

This is a difficult one. I'm big on the idea of "diversity of tactics," so I'm less than comfortable abandoning any potential forms of protest without a pretty good reason. Initially I was going to go with something exciting like a riot, but it occurs to me that there aren't likely to be many coppers on a desert island which will probably take the edge of the experience. Internecine rioting is likely to be considerably less satisfying.

I suppose then I should go with something practical like a protest camp. Food, shelter, solar showers, compost toilets, every mod-con for the discerning desert island inhabitant. Either that or a mass rally, because that'll mean there are plenty of people to talk to, although there will also be more mouths to eat. Perhaps we could dine on the socialist paper sellers?

3. Your spaceship is running out of oxygen! So that there's more to go around, which contemporary public figure do you push out of the airlock first? (They are all on board, having a microgravity cocktail party.)

I've spent sometime ruminating on this one and come to the conclusion that if all the public figures who deserve to be dumped in deep space are onboard my starfaring vessel and I can only throw one person out, than it's going to have to be me. How else can I deal with sharing oxygen withthe likes of Tony Blair, George Bush, Mahmoud Ahmajenidad, Osama Bin Laden, Islam Karimov and Cliff Richard?

4. One day you go to put something in the bin, and find that someone has thrown away a movie studio and a multi-million dollar movie budget. There is no name-tag on it or anything, and if the owner wanted it, they wouldn't have put it in the bin, so... What film do you make?

I should probably say I'd make an intelligent art-house work exploring political intrigue, character development and sexual repression. In reality, I'd probably find it very difficult to resist the urge to make a big-budget action film, dripping with explosives, shoout-outs, high-octane car chases, crazy stunts and scantily-clad women.

I know, I'm part of the problem.

5. Pop quiz, hotshot! A man wearing a balaclava is holding a gun to your head. "What is your favourite cartoon, animation or puppet show?" he asks you. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

Shit myself?

(It's probably Family Guy, in case you were wondering.)

***

Here are the rules:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions (or leaving them in a comment on your blog). I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

The latest Carnival of the Anarchy took place over the weekend, exploring the perennial violence/nonviolence debate and included a post by yours truly taking Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology as a starting point. Obviously my contribution was brilliant, but some of the other stuff is worth a gander as well.

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Friday, April 06, 2007

Look who's got themselves a new blog.

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Hello Ladies...

It's International Women's Day. A single day for (more than?) half the species might strike some of you as a little stingy, and indeed many organisations (including, rather disingenuously, the White House) mark International Women's Week. Unfortunately, I'm not organised enough to come up with a week of posts on women's right. In lieu of such a series, I bring you a single post as part of Blog Against Sexism Day.

It would be easy to list assorted attacks on womens rights across the world (e.g. the global gag rule, Nicaragua's ban on abortion, female genital mutilation in the Middle East and Africa etc.), but in many ways, what's much more interesting is the multitude forms of resistance to these practices which have emerged around the world: in the US, mothers are organising for rights considered fundamental in most other western countries; in Afghanistan, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), once heralded as the bearers of the country's future by western imperialists, but long-since forgotten by their fair-weather allies, continue to struggle against religious fundamentalism; last December, 2-300 people marched through Ipswich, following the murder of five prostitutes; in Iraq, women are organising in the face of the deteriorating situation and death threats; in Iran, women continue to protests against the regime, despite state repression.

Women continue to play a crucial role in every other social struggle you can think of. While they may not always get the headlines or the prominent roles, their presence is no less essential for that. (Platitudinous? Perhaps, but true.) The struggles for social justice, peace, freedom and good things generally won't amount to a hill of beans if it doesn't fully involve and account for half the species. My contribution to that involvement and accounting is this post, don't say I never do anything for you.

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Monday, February 12, 2007

Apparently I've been pushing people's buttons. Which is always a good thing. I hope. Anyway, it's got me into this week's Carnival of the Green so I'm happy.

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Sunday, February 11, 2007

The UK Chagos Support Association have a brand spanking new blog. Why not have a gander?

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Sunday, January 21, 2007

Jim, who I guess would describe himself as a green socialist, has a very nice post about what attracts him to anarchism, culminating in the delightful reflection that "a world without anarchists is a world where paving stones have lost their real purpose." Check it y'all.

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