Kester Brewin

Thought it would be good to catch people up a little on what I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. As you’ll know if you’ve read here for any time, one of my areas of interest is around pirates and piracy. I posted a series entitled ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ some time [...]

Being in that part of the UK for holiday, and hearing on the grapevine that a few people are interested in exploring the thinking I’ve been doing around Hakim Bey’s work on pirates and TAZ, I thought I’d round up a few things here… Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for [...]

As a teacher – and an INTJ on Myers-Briggs – I can quite understand Sartre when he writes in a play that ‘Hell is other people.’ (I wouldn’t go as far as Zizek and say that ‘I hate my students – they are boring and stupid’, partly because they’re always trawling around the web looking [...]

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people. I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever [...]

Emerging/Retreating [1] I’m quite surprised at the traffic caused by the last post – been the most read thing I’ve posted for a while, and that seems to suggest that the theme has resonated, though not all in agreement. I had a good chat to Jonny on the phone yesterday, who said he initially thought [...]

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ] | Violence of Heaven [ 3 ] According to Revelation – the apocalypic birth narrative of our future utopia – “when heaven is established, it will be a bloody business.” I have been trying to argue that any attempt to establish utopia [...]

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ] In the previous post I ended with some thoughts about the options that utopian communities have when they have established a new purified space: they can either defend their space to stop dirt getting in, or move out from that space to [...]

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] I opened the first post with the story of Christiania – a ‘micro-nation’ in the centre of Copenhagen that has been going since the early 1970s. Seen as a ‘social experiment’ by the generally left-leaning governments of Denmark, it is now under increasing threat from more right-wing administrations, as [...]

As promised yesterday, a post about a brilliant piece by Porter Fox in this month’s Believer about the micro-nation ‘Christiania.’ Christiania began when a group of Danes broke down fences to a long-abandoned military base in the centre of Copenhagen and started to use some of the space as a playground for their children. Covering [...]

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2] In the previous two posts I’ve tried to set out a critique of the choice agenda that main parties are promoting, and also the ‘rights’ / devolved power agenda that is a central tenet of the Conservative Party manifesto. The key question that was rightly asked yesterday was [...]