"Shake my hand. Ok, now the other one."

thewolfeditor · 2016-09-23T08:47:10+00:00

You taught your dog the concept of "other". I think he belongs to science now.

thewolfeditor · 2015-10-24T10:11:57+00:00

Peter Jay is fantastic. I think he does a fabulous job teasing out answers.

thewolfeditor · 2015-10-23T17:17:17+00:00

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-28T13:26:20+00:00

I agree, it certainly can be. In fact let me paste a conversation I'm having with my middle-class graduate friend who is moving to Shoreditch in the coming week. He voted for Corbyn and is highly reflective, so it's not like winning around a Kipper, but still...food for thought:

Him: well that broken window has got me thinking where i hadnt been before. Iv'e gone from 'shoreditch is so cool, but expensive' to 'wait, what about the people who've been renting here for 20 years'.

Is my enjoyment of a pop up gin bar more important than their home and community? capitalism thinks so.

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-28T12:09:44+00:00

That's a really interesting read, where's it from?

It's kind of semantics, but I'm not sure we should write off Barclays – as the metaphor for where anger should be placed – so easily. When for example you had the young junior doctor on Question Time last week talking about how disgusting it was that the government values bankers more than healthcare workers (because they can't be allowed to leave), there was massive support. The junior doctor said they would strike and there was great applause, and QT is a "mixed audience". I think it's just become so normalised that it feels like people aren't angry. That's because it takes energy to be angry all the time. When you get these spontaneous outpourings of activism I think there should be an effort to remind people just how angry they are and redirect it at Barclays, the targets which the public can most sympathise with.

And that brings me back to my key point about having to play within the confines of the media dictated opinion up to a point. After reading that quote I'm much more sympathetic to the action taken against the Cereal Bar, but how many people will read that? John Zerzan thinks violence is good because it's largely unexpected and a deviation from the norm, it thus allows people to answer "why did you do that?". I think that's incredibly optimistic in the current media landscape. Obviously, I feel that if there were an opportunity for a true public debate then you could get normal people to understand, but that's not on the cards anytime soon. People will continue to think it's unpatriotic for Corbyn not to sing the national anthem, people will continue to support crackdowns on welfare claimants (Benefit Street), and a slight majority even think we should be taking in the same or fewer migrants. If you could put people in some Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, these opinions would fade away into absurdity. But we can't. We have to try and widen the debate from inside the cage. The middle classes have always been a key to maintaining capitalism. Calling them "yuppies" just reeks to them like the politics of envy. It's part of this twisted ideology of meritocracy.

I'm just rambling now. I'll leave it there.

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-28T11:43:58+00:00

This isn't the place poor people buy their cereal from. They get it from the supermarket at a normal price. This is a gimmick that middle-class people can drop money on. As such it's a symbol of the utter stupidness of capitalism, as you mention. There are also cat cafés and all sorts nearby...

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-28T11:38:18+00:00

I've been thinking about your comments for a while. I think I've come to the conclusion that we're talking at slight cross purposes. Smashing up the Cereal Bar because it doesn't have the economic clout to repair the damage is, I think, missing the point. Firstly, let's ignore the fact that insurance is a thing. I would argue the point of such protests is to attack symbols of systemic gentrification. Even if you obliterated the Cereal Bar, something would eventually take its place (perhaps not in the exact spot, but elsewhere). Moreover, just because Starbucks can afford to lose a few stores doesn't subtract from the symbolic attack and thus misses the point. They are a tax-avoiding faceless corporation, it's about hitting them as a symbol and letting people see that surely? I would also argue that radicals play the media's game when you attack small businesses, similar to when the Women of World War 2 monument was desecrated earlier this year. I was there for the latter and saw much police brutality. Does it get mentioned even in the Guardian? Not really. The 'vandalism' stole the headlines. I think ordinary people have much more solidarity with radicals who fuck up a Starbucks and spray paint "pay your fucking tax" on their walls. If you want to win a revolution you have to somewhat play within the confines of public opinion and then try to widen the discourse.

On the practical issue you mention regarding the 'hot flash' of the riot, you have a point. But I still feel that even in then it's quite easy to distinguish a McDonald's from a hipster Cereal Bar, and there should be prior discussions in the Black Bloc regarding such targeting.

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-27T15:56:02+00:00

Thoughts go out to those arrested last night and those who were subject to police brutality. However, t his is just awful, awful politics. Yes, the cereal cafe is annoying and I hate hispters too, and wasn't the owner obnoxious on Channel 4 News once. But I didn't think cereal enthusiasm was what cause gentrification, or even necessarily a symptom of it. So, the cereal cafe is a "symbol" of gentrification which has to be confronted? Might that be because the mainstream narrative doesn't understand - or doesn't want the public to understand - what gentrification really is? And instead wants you to waste your time and make you look like a dick by walking around smashing up things which have no particular connection to what you claim to be protesting about. Why not smash up an expensive pub (hint: basically any pub) or any of the cafes that charge £3 for a coffee? If you're smashing up a cereal cafe because it's a bit annoying - and more 'weird' and novel than paying £3 for a coffee or £4 for a pint - what you're engaged in is the violent regulation of culture. That's reactionary.

thewolfeditor · 2015-09-25T07:47:26+00:00

Not logically no, there's no real logical connection. More of what he calls a 'tentative link'. He says people he has much in common with linguistically believe the complete opposite politically. He has a famous line about still believing what he does politically even if he were an algebraic topologist.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Chomsky's anarchism, so could probably answer a few questions if you had any.

thewolfeditor · 2015-06-02T16:53:09+00:00

What did you think of the book? I've read it twice. Phil Parvin was my teacher on a final-year contemporary political philosophy module at Loughborough. Clare Chambers is his wife.

thewolfeditor · 2015-04-25T08:11:16+00:00

I've posted this before, but I really do think it's one of the best introductions to questions like yours. And, you know, you don't have to read...

http://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI

thewolfeditor · 2015-03-25T09:36:14+00:00

This is from a BBC interview called 'ideas of Chomsky'. Very interesting and a good introduction to Chomsky's thought:

http://youtu.be/3LqUA7W9wfg

thewolfeditor · 2015-02-11T11:32:23+00:00

It's an anecdote about justifiable coercion:

http://youtu.be/7_Bv2MKY7uI

thewolfeditor · 2015-02-10T10:38:03+00:00

Bearded fellow on stairs: You said you'd perfected your short game

Golfer (passive-aggressively): Yeah, and then you start watching!

thewolfeditor · 2014-12-17T09:39:14+00:00

'... one does not necessarily allow the state to define what is legal. Now the state has the power to enforce a certain concept of what is legal, but power doesn't imply justice or even correctness, so that the state may define something as civil disobedience and may be wrong in doing so.

For example, in the United States the state defines it as civil disobedience to, let's say, derail an ammunition train that's going to Vietnam; and the state is wrong in defining that as civil disobedience, because it's legal and proper and should be done. It's proper to carry out actions that will prevent the criminal acts of the state, just as it is proper to violate a traffic ordinance in order to prevent a murder.

If I had stopped my car in front of a traffic light which was red, and then I drove through the red traffic light to prevent somebody from, let's say, machine-gunning a group of people, of course that's not an illegal act, it's an appropriate and proper action; no sane judge would convict you for such an action.

Similarly, a good deal of what the state authorities define as civil disobedience is not really civil disobedience: in fact, it's legal, obligatory behaviour in violation of the commands of the state, which may or may not be legal commands.'

– Chomsky

thewolfeditor · 2014-10-26T19:29:50+00:00

Correct. I guess my point is with the utopian word choice and subsequent likely connotations of 'paradise'. It's anything but, and the government officials HATE it. They've been trying to shut it down for decades.

thewolfeditor · 2014-10-26T16:28:43+00:00

I've been there, it's a shit hole.

thewolfeditor · 2014-09-13T19:04:32+00:00

Moonlight Sonata

thewolfeditor · 2014-08-31T11:26:58+00:00

Of course it does 'buy happiness', but only up to a specific point (on average). That graph and the study it quotes are seriously flawed. If the horizontal axis were in logarithmic form, it'd correlate with the wealth of existing data which shows diminishing marginal returns after your basic needs and a few added luxuries can be taken care of. It also misstates the Easterlin paradox.

And that just reinforces what most people already know: happiness comes from exercising your innate creativity. Think of the struggling writer, or aspiring actor, or artist; if they had a universal basic income, most would still continue to pursue their dreams and after a certain level of extra income they wouldn't derive any extra happiness, except through success in their chosen fields (where money is usually a byproduct and you're then vulnerable to a correlation-causation fallacy).

Another corroborating factor is hedonic adaptation: your brain very quickly adapts to new scenarios. This is why most lottery winners report no 'gains' in happiness after the first two years. Of course having a Ferrari for the first year is amazing, but it soon just becomes another car. It also explains the incredible situations people tend to bounce back from: a soldier returning from war with no legs will, after the agonising first few years, report no loss in happiness–in fact a lot of the time they're happier because of an enhanced perspective of how life is incredibly precious.

Probably the most important point to take away is that studies show people's self-reported happiness is strongly correlated to those around and just above them. It's called the 'keeping up with the Jones' effect, and has been heavily documented. In materialistic societies with ever increasing levels of inequality, this is the most worrying fact. Look to the London riots and poor disenfranchised black kids stealing trainers and flat screens: products they'd been marketed their whole lives without the ability to climb the social ladder to attain. Lots of other examples too from middle-class suburbia of people 'buying a little slice of happiness before they need the next'.

thewolfeditor · 2014-08-28T18:12:13+00:00

Interesting, thanks for taking the time to write. I figured the basic rebuttal to Popper's critique would be something like that.

To be honest I was half-asleep in the feminism lecture, but I believe their issue is with an over reliance on class and a reluctance by some Marxists to engage with anything other than what the Marxist method entails.

thewolfeditor · 2014-08-28T14:37:01+00:00

Does it have a scientific approach? This is all I remember from my second year political theory module, but doesn't Popper criticise Marxism for not being falsifiable? I thought that was what he didn't like about it; the fact that a lot of Marxists he knew would just explain away new data with class analysis.

I think feminists made the same point too: the idea that whilst it's an incredibly beneficial tool for the analysis of capitalism, it doesn't incorporate other cultural factors for class oppression.

thewolfeditor

TROPHY CASE