small self

This is from a book my wonderful brother is doing a kickstarter...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:00:31 +0100

This is from a book my wonderful brother is doing a kickstarter project to get printed, please have a look and share with anyone you think might be interested…

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1112299486/hugs-from-dad-childrens-book

Freedom Benefit Bike Ride

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 17:03:00 +0000

Yesterday I joined in a sponsored ride to raise money for repairs and restocks at Freedom after the firebombing in February. Knackered after 3 nights out in a row, a badly planned dentist appointment meaning no lie-in and drinking beers in the afternoon on Friday an early start was not really what I wanted but I joined Will and Tony to pedal in the cold easterly wind. Today despite a lie-in and 4 mugs of strong coffee I think I slept for another 2 hours this afternoon and I am still tired. If you’re reading this, please consider sponsoring us and sharing with anyone else you think might be interested.

http://www.gofundme.com/Freedom-Benefit-Bike-Ride

or if you don’t fancy that, check out the other planned events:

http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/events-2/freedom-firebomb-events/

o yeah and on Friday I had a gear malfunction in front of a bus at a busy intersection, ripped my favourite trousers and came down on that bike seat HARD I am still sore:-/

Freedom Benefit Bike Ride

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:43:15 +0000

Freedom Benefit Bike Ride:

Just printing some maps for this…..

not saying things for myself

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:29:32 +0100

Yep, not posted much recently. If I’m honest it is probably because I actually told a few people about this blog instead of keeping my mouth shut and just posting into the ether (I don’t have to deal with what strangers think of me or at least I find myself thinking I do not care, I prefer to imagine no audience for any of this).

Yep I’m awkward.

So I’ve been reposting quotes here and there and spending a lot more time off-line. Maybe I will put down some of the things I’ve been thinking, but until then here’s a lovely Middle Ones track to go listen to x

http://themiddleones.bandcamp.com/track/a-year-without-regret-2

quotevadis: “There is only one god and his name is Death. And...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:40:05 +0100

quotevadis:

“There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: ‘Not today.’”

— George R. R. Martin, an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his bestselling series of epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted for their dramatic pay-cable series Game of Thrones. Martin was selected by Time magazine as one of the “2011 Time 100”, a list of the “most influential people in the world”.

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to..."

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 08:23:26 +0100

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

- Labor organizer, co-founder of United Farm Workers union, and civil rights activist César Chávez. Chávez was addressing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 1984.

"The horror of no action is greater than the scorch of pain."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:34:08 +0100

“The horror of no action is greater than the scorch of pain.”

- Charles Bukowski

"Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:35:01 +0100

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

- Neil Gaiman

This makes me want to cry

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:23:02 +0100

This makes me want to cry:

Part of the reason this upsets me is I’ve really noticed recently I’ve been getting more stressed by people trying to their views of how people should ‘be’ onto each other. I know I can find myself thinking ‘why don’t they do this’ or ‘why do they have to be like that’, but unless my memory is really failing me I don’t often (I’m not confident enough to say never) try and impose that on another person (I just get grumpy which is unfortunately an indirect way of doing the same thing, but at least I’m trying). We can talk about how things are for us, we can never really know what things are like for someone else. We’ve all got to where we are through so many varied experiences. I want to respect that. So we can talk about different ideas and ways of doing things, we can inspire each other through those interactions, who knows what may result, but please don’t let’s pretend there is one right way, however attached to ‘ours’ we may have become.

Yep maybe I’m taking this too seriously but wow really fucking wow someone even wrote this shit.

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know..."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:10:55 +0100

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”

- W. Somerset Maugham (via wisdom-justiceandlove)

I was on my way back from Exeter tonight and stopped off at a...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:54:45 +0100

I was on my way back from Exeter tonight and stopped off at a seminar on the role of accountants in sustainability - arriving and seeing this made me feel pretty out of place ( own fault for wearing my patched hoodie, but it was cold on the train). The talk was by the finance director of the eden project and she was pretty inspiring. She covered a lot of problems with traditional ways of accounting and proposed some good suggestions. I still came away feeling there was an element of trying to solve a problem from within the mindset that created it (still the emphasis on profit!) But diversity of tactics and some of those things coming from people who are respected by business people may have a lot more impact on changing their behaviour. A friend who is looking to change their job said it’s a good sign if you get excited by the prospect of doing the job - the fact I asked two people for contact details and am thinking of how I can do something on this in my masters has to be a sign of excitement (I am an accountant after all).

being ill

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:56:28 +0000

I’ve been ill quite a lot in my life. You’d think I’d be used to it, yet I still don’t think I’m ‘good’ at it. No-one wants to be ill, but pretending we can go on as normal seems a sure fire way to ensure it lasts longer than it would otherwise.

I used to see an advert for some flu remedy on the way to work every day that showed someone getting on with things despite being ill and I hated it. I thought the guy was an idiot - really what does a few days being ill matter in the grand scheme of things. Yesterday I was one of those idiots - not in the buying some hyped brand to be able to continue (no I stuck to lemons and honey*) but the going to work when I should have known I was not well enough and an extra day at home would have done me good, after all that is where I’ve ended up today (and feeling worse than I probably would have done otherwise). I was that person at work spreading the germs to other people.

I felt like I had a kind of epiphany when I was awake at 4am making a lemony drink. Why am I so unkind to myself when I’m ill? Why is it that the moment I’m ill I suddenly want to put into action all the plans that had been sitting on the shelf for ages while I was well?

The answer to the first is probably more complicated than this, but it feels like another case of wanting to resist things that are out of my control. My body is not behaving in the manner that I want it to and I am angry. It’s the same sort of reaction I have to ‘having’ to get up early for travelling for work, when I can get up even earlier to go sit zazen - because it’s my choice. How ridiculous! When things are going ‘my way’ I don’t really think about whether they’re in my control (hint: they generally aren’t), I just react that way. This is about how I respond to situations. I read an excellent book this week (although maybe forget she uses Angel cards, watch this video instead). I liked her way of looking at responsibility. Response-ability; we have the power to decide how we will respond to situations. I want to work on that.

The second point (about the plans) reminds me of some Sartre I’ve been looking at; our fear of freedom. We want it to be someone else that makes choices for us as we are afraid of the magnificence of our own freedom. In this case, ‘o look I would do all these things at exactly this time if the illness hadn’t taken the choice away from me’. Convenient that, just ignore that those plans have been on the back-burner for quite a while and I’ve found plenty of other things to do.

I see the link between these two as a recognition that we are absolutely free to decide how to respond to things. It means that we can’t just complain about shit that happens to us. That complaining is really just going to make things worse (the second dart).

As I seem to do this a lot on here this will come as no surprise, but there is a lot more I could say about this, but I’m still feeling pretty poorly and I’m going to be kind, get myself a drink and have a rest.

*There is some controversy over vegans using honey (well so I’m told), I figure there are worse things to use when you’re ill.

Michael Albert on whether the ‘free market’ is...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:23:45 +0000

Michael Albert on whether the ‘free market’ is really part of ‘human nature’. Love this video, short, simple and to the point

Hubert Selby Jr

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:59:18 +0000

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.” - Hubert Selby Jr.

the illusion of ease

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:20:35 +0000

This follows on a bit from my last post, I’m still thinking about ease. Recently I saw a facebook photo of a tattoo that says ‘nothing is easy’. I think this is one of those areas that’s ‘easy’ to get confused about. Maybe it’s something I’m confused about, but here is the way I see it right now.

if you’ve got it easy maybe that’s because someone else is doing the hard work

I feel like I’m not exposed to as much advertising as I used to be so maybe this is way off, but the message that I seem to remember is that you should have an easy life. For instance, you want a ready meal you just pop into the microwave. To have these things means someone else is doing the work of cooking for you.

I don’t want to get all ‘protestant’ about it ( just to confirm I mean work-ethic wise, not religious wise), but I think there is truth in the idea that you don’t really appreciate what you haven’t worked for. Now I know that to have ‘things’ a lot of people do really tedious, boring, pointless work (and the fact that so much paid work is alienating is a whole other issue) I can see you might want some ease after that. To ‘just’ put something in the microwave, but that’s missing the pleasure of creating something from scratch. From being able to say ‘I made this’.

You see work, in terms of effort (i.e. not the thing we call ‘work’ that we get paid for) can be pleasant, exciting, creative, satisfying and so on. If we don’t ever put the effort in we’re missing out on that.

if you take the easy route now things may be more difficult later

If we always take the easy route we don’t give ourselves the chance to develop, to grow, to change. I think there’s a danger that we can trap ourselves this way. If we haven’t the experience or built confidence we won’t be able to tackle new situations. We’ll hide ourselves away (not that I’m talking from experience, of course!)

More importantly, the consequences of what appears to be ease may not be borne by those that have enjoyed the ease. Here I’m thinking of climate change. For example, the ease we car owners might experience in being to travel to our own timetable and schedule is adding to the problem. The consequences of climate change are overwhelmingly going to be borne by those that have had the least to do with the causes.

don’t confuse ease with simplicity

My thesaurus may have ‘simple’ as a synonym for easy, but having things easy is not the same as making things simple. ‘Easy’ ready meals are actually incredibly complex if you get into it. The collection of the raw ingredients, their cooking on an industrial scale, the packaging, distribution, sale - all that requires coordination on a massive scale. Now what is more simple, a person buying local ingredients and cooking with them or a person buying a ready meal. It looks to me like we have made buying local ingredients and cooking look more difficult than buying a pre-packaged ready meal because we forget about the incredibly complex networks required to deliver the pre-packaged meal.

So when we’re trapping ourselves in our ‘easy’ ways, maybe we’re making everything more complicated than it needs to be?

normality and comfort

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:58:11 +0000

I was really pleased to see that one of my favourite blogs has a new post for the first time in ages. It’s about not wanting some things going on right now (restrictions of civil liberties, persecution based on sexual orientation…) to become the new normal. That however exhausting and imperfect, our attempts at changing course are important.

It’s definitely something on my mind right now. I’m uncomfortable with the world I live in. I don’t like that only things that have monetary values attached seem to be deemed important. That I am part of a society where we get the message that we can’t afford to protect the environment - you know, the complex web of life that sustains us (not that that should be the only reason to stop our damaging profligate ways).

‘It is not your fault that we live in a world where some of humanity’s best traits are out of fashion because they might get in the way of what corporations want from workers - that is, to compete with their fellow men and women to the point of not being able to see them or care for them’ Lynne Henderson

If I’m going to be totally honest I’m finding it quite exhausting to just be in this society right now. Getting angry and frustrated about what I see going on around me is tiring me out. And that is where something else that I’ve been struggling with comes in. When I’m finding everything tiring, feeling powerless, I tend to retreat. I want to feel comfortable, for things to be easy; but I don’t think that’s a good way to be. I think that being uncomfortable provides the impetus to do the hard work of contributing to change. The ideas of David Foster Wallace have really helped shape my thinking in this area and I have so many thoughts jumbled in my head about it I don’t feel ready to write about just yet so for now I’ll just end with this:

‘I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy’ DFW

In addition to seeing this moving clip yesterday I read a piece...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:45:05 +0000

In addition to seeing this moving clip yesterday I read a piece on fairness and gay rights by John Draeger in Philosophy Now with this very relevant section:

“I invite you to think back to your childhood and consider the most loving and nurturing person in your early life. When you were a child, there were many things you presumably did not know about this person. It is possible that they were a closeted homosexual. But none of this would matter from the point of view of a child oblivious to her caregiver’s sexual activities. Rather, the question is, ‘Was I loved?’ If the answer is affirmative, then it doesn’t matter what caregivers were doing after hours with other consenting adults. If the answer is negative, then the child had a legitimate complaint; but the complaint is that the guardian failed to give the child proper love and attention. Either way, the caregiver’s sexual orientation isn’t morally relevant.”

When I hear people saying philosophy isn’t important, it’s things like this that come to mind. Where a society chooses to draw lines about what is legally acceptable has real impacts. As Zach says in the video, it’s not about changing their family, but how it is viewed. It’s not like this is a new idea to me, but it’s something that became very explicit in my last OU course on political philosophy; philosophy can help us identify where and why we’re dividing things up and help us assess the consequences of doing so. Now, there’s a whole other question as to how useful an analytical approach is compared to a holistic approach….

Rebellious Media Conference (Part 2)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:29:00 +0000

I spent quite a lot of time at the conference in various sessions run by Michael Albert. I was attracted by the participatory economics approach and the idea that our organizations need to embody our radical ideas. We need to plant the seeds of the future now and only by doing this can we address the problems we face now.

Parecon and class The point that came across most clearly for me is about power and class. Although alternative media organizations may be free from ownership they are often not free of hierarchy, with some empowered at the expense of others. Without the profit motive, alternative media is not tied into that view and can suggest alternatives, but hierarchy within the same organizations means that they can’t adequately address issues of class and power in society. We can rightly be accused of hypocrisy.

Albert focused on a division between an empowered coordinator class and a working class. Where we might agree that people shouldn’t have more say because they have more money or a degree or know the right people, the hierarchies in our organizations say otherwise. Some jobs are empowering, allowing those holding them to dominate discussion. To remedy this, says Albert, we should have balanced job complexes. Genuine worker self-management. Empowering those at the bottom to challenge the structure.

class and communication We need to make our communication clear and understandable, not deliberately obtuse. “If you’re serious you’re not going to write in hieroglyphics”. You’ll write accessibly so that those you want to reach can understand it. People who don’t have a lot of time to decipher it. If you do otherwise, you risk orientating to coordinator class values. Don’t pander to the media.

In this context Albert mentioned that Greek and Spanish protesters he had spoken to described how new speakers at the assemblies had brought passion and emotion to their speeches rather than the sophisticated analysis old-time activists tend to bring. People don’t want to listen to a lecture.

back to - what can we do? Many ideas were discussed over the weekend, but I’d just like to concentrate on what seemed most important to me:

planting the seeds of the future now

Participatory economic institutions are one way of doing this, but others were also suggested. We need to show how alternatives are better, how people can work to really achieve something.

We’re good at criticising what’s already in existence. We’re good at that, but (as mentioned in the first post) this can essentially be dismissed as the system is doing what it’s intended to do.

So our time would be better spend building alternatives, thinking and working on something new. The reasons we don’t do this? We’re good at criticising; we don’t want to take the risk of explaining how things might be better because we might be wrong. We’ve been trained to obey so we don’t practice communicating what we want, developing the skills we really need to make a difference.

Along with habitual assumptions that are difficult to overcome we have the issue of identity. Part of the reason we’re not brave enough about our ideas is that we make our beliefs part of our identity. We take attacks on our beliefs as personal attacks. So when we fear being wrong, it’s not just a fear about our ideas but also our identities.

We need to change this. To try and understand why other people’s circumstances are different. To work together.

Our organizations may claim to be alternative, but we still mirror the competition of wider society and mainstream media. We need to be willing to change, to cooperate, to share; to stop being atomistic and see ourselves as part of a broader mass movement. If people were really working on building a new world they would work together instead of preserving their own organizations. We need mutual aid, to stop competing with one another and support each other more.

conclusions What a packed weekend it was! As I mentioned I spent a lot of time in sessions run by Michael Albert as I was very interested in his ideas and I was not disappointed. A lot of what I’ve summarised here came from those sessions. As I was writing up the notes I’d made I felt like I’d had some sort of epiphany. Now as I’m typing this there isn’t quite that level of excitement, but I still see connections. The problems highlighted towards the end of my notes, identity and separateness, seem to be at the centre of so many things. I don’t really have any conclusions on this, just a willingness to try and work on these issues in my own life.

Rebellious Media Conference (Part 1)

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:03:35 +0000

Right, first off I’d best say this is going to be a long, possibly rambly, post. Four weeks ago I went to the Rebellious Media conference in London. I may well be one of those that snapped up the tickets before the proper journalists got a look in. Maybe I wasn’t there for the right reasons, but I was interested in learning and this is a summary of what I took in from that busy weekend.

the way things are An important point that came up again and again over the weekend is that fundamentally the existing media institutions and corporations do what they are intended to do.

Chomsky spoke of it directly, arguing that calling corporations greedy is a pointless kind of criticism; that is exactly what they are meant to be. For example potential destruction of the species through climate change is an externality to these economic organizations. In this context mainstream media does its job well, its job being to maintain the current system.

Ruth Potts (from the new economics foundation) talked about it in terms of economic reporting. The way that growth is reported as unquestionably good. Individual stories may be told about the problems of growth (usually when things go wrong), but the pieces don’t get joined up. For instance there was outrage about the BP oil spill, but their day-to-day damaging practices go unreported.

The mainstream profit-seeking media is never going to cover the problems with capitalism adequately (if at all) because it has a stake in that view. City analysts and business representatives get unparalleled privileged access to this media.

For example in terms of the options for dealing with the economic downturn. The media present the option we’re given by capitalist government. Michael Albert put it in the following terms: Say we need to reduce output by 20%, the option we’re presented with is that we need to reduce the workplace numbers by 20% rather than say, reducing the workload for everyone and the highest paid taking a pay cut. Firing 20% of the workers means that the owners get to keep all their wealth; it strengthens their position.

We’re told “we’re all in this together”, but we know it isn’t true.

Albert suggested it’s the sentiment that there is no alternative that’s holding current society together. It’s important to remember that coverage of alternatives is not censored, it’s not even thought of. Some of the coverage of the Occupy movement I’ve heard on Radio 4 seems to fit this line; incredulous that someone could think there might be a better, different way of organizing ourselves. At the same time trying to argue that protesters who have a bank account (i.e. take any part in the way the world is now) are undermining their arguments. This links to some of the brain plasticity books I’ve been reading; culture also shapes our brain, preventing us from seeing alternatives.

so what do we do? We need to show how an alternative is better. That there is a point in working to achieve change and that it really can be done.

I’ve realised this is quite long so I’m going to do a separate post on Michael Albert’s ideas about Parecon, but for now there are two points I want to highlight.

First of all Albert raised an interesting point about reform. Asking how many people are anti-reformist almost everyone in the room put their hands up - we want genuine change after all! Albert pointed out that we’re failing to recognise that reforms make people’s lives better now. Reforms are not bad in themselves, it’s only a problem if we stop once we’ve achieved reform.

Secondly, we need to work on making our institutions consistent with our beliefs. It will make our lives better now, ensure we can address issues of inequality adequately and provide a visible example of how an alternative way of doing things can work better for those involved. Albert’s model for this is Parecon, which I’ll post about next time.

change

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:21:00 +0100

I’m not so good at getting up early, but lately I’ve made the effort quite a few times. Seeing I’m capable of it when I have to I decided to have a go at choosing to.

I’ve now made it to 7am zazen a couple of times. Today is one of those days and yes I’m tired, but there is something thrilling about being out and about at that time of the morning because I choose to be, not because I have to go to work. Something about the sound of my bike tyres on the wet streets at half past six in the morning because I want to be there.

I’m having a bit of difficulty remembering now, but I think the first time I managed this feat Maddie talked about impermanence, constant change. How we kid ourselves that we can create something stable and secure amongst this change and eventually become trapped by it.

It really resonated with me. I’d been listening to this new Fellow Project record and the lyrics had been going around and around in the back of my head. ‘And only from the inside are you not tricked by the magic of a stable life, And only from the inside are you still trapped by the clutches of a stable life’.

I see the truth of this in my own work. I’ve got myself a nice comfy stable little niche, but I’m bored. My work has allowed me to surround myself with comfortable way of life that I’m pretty attached to. I’m not tricked by the magic of a stable job but I trapped by it.

I’ve also been reading a book about neuroplasticity, our brains can change themselves. The things we do, the culture we live in can have an impact on the very structure of our brains. This allows amazing recoveries from strokes and accidents that were not facilitated by the treatment provided when it was widely believed that the structure of our brain was fixed.

It also makes it really important what we choose to do with our brains; we’re training them for our futures. The book points out that while competitive plasticity can have great benefits (like a different part of the brain taking up the functions of a damaged part) it also has a down-side. The habits we create become like grooves, difficult to get out of, ruts. If we keep doing the same things we wire our brain to repeat them in the future. We make it harder to change. Cultivating flexibility therefore seems to be the most valuable thing to do.

Earlier this year I wrote a piece for a zine that ended ‘I can live with doubt and uncertainty’. While I truly think this on an intellectual level, I watch myself resist change again and again. I want to live closer to my ideals and this idea of flexibility on the level of our neurons serves both as a warning about the dangers of this and inspiration that it’s not too late.