Month: October 2011
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Shopping as Panic Suppressant | What to Really Fear this Halloween
I don’t want to be petty or anti-American, but one of the scourges of the past decade or so is the growth of Halloween as a fully marketable ‘festival’ to give supermarkets a little bump in the run up to Christmas. Halloween is big in the US, and it’s getting bigger…and more depressing here. It…
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Mutiny! Why St Pauls is the perfect place for ‘Occupy’ protests…
Rather than remain online, I thought I’d flyer-up some of the ideas I’ve been working on and hand them out at the Occupy demo in London today, camped at St Paul’s. You can download the PDF here: Mutiny Or just read the text… In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from…
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Insurrection | You are being unreasonable | Confirmation Bias
You go to a shop to buy a bat, and a ball. In total they cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the bat cost? Listened to a very interesting episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on ‘the enigma of reason’ yesterday. The interviewee – Dan Sperber – was…
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Carnivals come cheap: Zizek Visits Occupy Wall Street… And Cannot Speak.
Interesting video here showing Slavoj Zizek at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York. His speech can be read in full here, but what I love about the video is that, for some technological reason no doubt, he cannot himself speak. The crowd around him who can hear directly have to shout out…
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Occupy Wall Street – Turning Pirate on Capitalism 101
The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement – though I’m not…