In this repetitive and defeated rant I look in despair at the “meetings” and "argue" that we need another word to distinguish incidences of people gathering/being gathered in one place from actual meetings where people meet. Being in the same room is not “meeting.” It’s a gathering in of people. It’s the creation of the... Continue Reading →
Zombie repertoires, lowest common denominators and Beasts of England…
Sigh. What can you do (non-rhetorical question). Three hundred and fifty organisations beg everyone to come to a march in London. "Thousands" (presumably a few tens of thousand?) do. Reminds me so much of the 2009 climate march catastrophe, the "Big Wank" or "the Big Naive" or whatever it was called ("the Wave", btw). It... Continue Reading →
“You don’t know what hard work is like”: pre-Internet writing and collaboration
Quick post because am supposed to be doing other things, which scare me and I am (obviously) doing displacement activities, albeit Worthy Ones. We people who have spent most of our lives in/of the Internet (and full disclosure, I am 50:50) have no real understanding of just how much boring physical work went in to... Continue Reading →
How the smugosphere defends itself, a worked example
What do the good guys do when their failure to win is pointed out to them? That’s the question I grapple with (or gum on, toothlessly) in this post (usual disclaimers apply). Readers of a nervous disposition, who are happy in their own public smugosphere, will want to look away now. I recently talked to... Continue Reading →
Raging against those who rage against the machine. On Chomsky, Michael Mosley, book festival sponsorships, and climate
Quick half-formed (but hopefully not half-baked) thoughts. The last post I put up on this site was a photo of a wonderful letter Noam Chomsky wrote to me in 1995, in reply to a "how do you keep your hope alive?" plea. It got a lot of traction on Twitter, with lots of likes and... Continue Reading →
Skin in the game and the consequences for failure
One of the advantages middle-class people often have, and one that they are often blind to, is multiple opportunities to fail (because they goofed around/weren't quite good enough first time round etc). Obviously even in their lives there are chokepoints, but not as many, not as consequential as for people without the cushions of money/cultural... Continue Reading →
On climate movements and pathologies, cities etc.
Just got a lovely Twitter reply - Marc. I’ve decided I’m going to get into your stuff on climate movements. Where do I start? What has worked, what doesn’t, what’s needed next. That kind of thing. Especially anything practical at city level. This request sounds lazy but I’m very time poor. Thanks! So, this is... Continue Reading →
James Baldwin, the UK climate “movement” and the Safety Dance – what is to be done?
James Baldwin was a very smart guy. For the purpose of this blog post, the key insight is from a January 1962 New York Times column, in which he wrote "not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." And so on to the UK climate... Continue Reading →
Podcast recommendations given and sought. Climate, energy, psychoanalysis, film noir etc
Have gotten back into the habit of long (3 to 4 hour plus) walks along the canal, feeding moorhens, ducks, swans and now even geese. There's only so much talking to himself a man can do (into a dictaphone), so podcasts have become the Way Forward. Below are some recommendations from me, but also I... Continue Reading →
Compulsory (institutional) optimism – or “from straws in the wind to dust in the wind”
I just read an article on a newspaper website about a New Politics that is apparently coming. The article came recommended by people I (still) respect, and was written by a commentator who is sincere, diligent and intelligent. And you know where this is going.... The article was, if not actually pants, then, well, pants-adjacent.... Continue Reading →
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