Suppose that every industrial dispute could be signified as a threat to the economic life of the country, and therefore against the 'national interest'. Then such significations would define issues of economic and industrial conflict in terms which would consistently favour current economic strategies, supporting anything which maintains the continuity of production, whilst stigmitizing anything which breaks the continuity of production, favouring the gerneral interests of employers and shareholders who have nothing to gain from production being interrupted and lending credence to the specific policies of governments which seek to curtail the right to strike or to weaken the political power of trade unions - they are predicated on an assumption that we all live in a society where the bonds which bind labour and capital together are stronger, and more legitimate than the greivances which divide us into labour versus capital - to translate a discourse whose subject is 'workers versus empoyers' into a discourse whose subject is the collective ('we, the poeple').

Hall, Stuart; Rediscovery of Ideology

I like the way the Adidas Originals ad is telling a mass of people that they're going to be very 'original' and buy Adidas. I'm desparate not to be a sheep so I think I'll dress head-to-toe in Adidas.

So the first message I would have to peace activists is—I don’t know what that means, anyway. What does “peace” mean? You know, we may not need peace in this unjust society, because that’s a way of accepting injustice, you know? So what you need is people who are prepared to resist, but not just on a weekend, not peace but not just on the weekend. In countries like India, now just saying, “OK, we’ll march on Saturday, and maybe they’ll stop the war in Iraq.” But in countries like India, now people are really paying with their lives, with their freedom, with everything. I mean, it’s resistance with consequences now. You know, it cannot be—it cannot be something that has no consequences. You know? It may not have, but you’ve got to understand that in order to change something, you’ve got to take some risks now. You’ve got to come out and lay those dreams on the line now, because things have come to a very, very bad place there.

And from where I come from, it’s almost—you know, you think that they probably don’t even understand what they’re doing, the American government. They don’t understand what kind of ground they stand on. When you say things like “We have to wipe out the Taliban,” what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.


Iraq, the war is going on. Afghanistan, obviously, is rising up in revolt. It’s spilled into Pakistan, and from Pakistan into Kashmir and into India. So we’re seeing this superpower, in a way, caught in quicksand with a conceptual inability to understand what it’s doing, how to get out or how to stay in. It’s going to take this country down with it, for sure, you know, and I think it’s a real pity that, in a way, at least George Bush was so almost obscene in his stupidity about it, whereas here it’s smoke and mirrors, and people find it more difficult to decipher what’s going on. But, in fact, the war has expanded.

I hope this crisis re-ignites the old divisions that were more manifest in the '80's but no less real today, despite the media's obfuscation. You only need to listen to the way BA bosses talk as opposed to their trade unionist counterparts to realise this is intertwined with class inequalities.

The media are doing their utmost to depoliticize this dispute and present it as a 'moral' problem, (the poor passengers whose lives will be disrupted for all of a few days) and not a political problem. The utter depoliticisation has the effect of obscuring the real issue which is that workers and bosses have different interests which don't co-incide. They don't like presenting this transparent dialectic as it will inevitably lead to people identifying with one side or the other.

Its very unlikely that passengers are 100% with BA managers this is typical press manipulation of public opinion.

What floating voters don't understand is that there are workers on one side and bosses on the other, and these aren't the same things.

Reacting to the publication by BA of its strike-breaking flights schedule, a Unite spokesman said: "BA should enter this schedule for the Booker Prize for fiction. It is an accomplished work of fantasy."

Both Theistic and Atheistic positions have the power to explain the universe in ways which have major consequences for the way in which we behave towards each other. Neither has the power to prove that its explanation is correct. The argument must therefore be about why one or other explanation is preferable, not about who is right and who is wrong.

We were also told (by an old Etonian pal) that all that Bullingdon Club stuff wasn't really the point about David Cameron's Oxford years. What he really liked was playing Pool. Right. Of course. I look forward with interest to the photographs of David Cameron in his shellsuit, pictured alongside the other members of the Oxford University Pool and Darts Association, outside the 'Original Swan' in Cowley.

I need a look that says 'I'm a middle aged man and my tweenage daughter chose this entire outfit for me on jacamo.co.uk'

"It is understandable that hatred stills burns in the hearts of James Bulger’s immediate family. But who are these other people threatening to hunt down Venables and Thompson? How can they still be so angry over the killing more than eight years ago of someone they never knew? And what do they think gives them the righ...t to dispense their own kind of justice? Given the mentality of these people, they’d probably get it wrong and lynch Terry Venables", Richard Littlejohn (June 26, 2001)

Mark Strong and Andy Garcia = uncanny

My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.

Stein has no talent for comedy, as he demonstrates in a weird joke about scratching his back, which falls completely flat. But his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.

1. fauxhemian
Conforming to a safe, middle class lifestyle but with the superficial pretense of an alternative or Bohemian lifestyle.
People who live in Stoke Newington or read The Guardian may like to believe they maintain the values of their radical student days but the shallowness of their fauxhemian conceit would quickly be revealed if they were expected to sacrifice some aspect of their comfortable lives.

What Cameronism is, is the reversion to the cardinal principle of Tory politics, that it is their duty to be elected.

More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of them interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born-or enter involuntarily.

Otto Wells