there  could  be  snakes  in  here

Politics Total terrorism death toll 70% . Total malarial death toll > 350,000. 90% . Total malarial death toll 80% . No terrorist attack causes >100 deaths in the developed world (HDI > 0.8): 80% No terrorist attack causes >500 deaths in the less developed world: 70%. No terrorist attack outside of Iraq and Syria causes >300 deaths: 55%. No country will leave the Eurozone. 80% Fewer refugees admitted to European countries in 2017 than 2016. 80% Front National will gain 30+ seats in the French legislative election. 80% Le Pen will lose the presidential election. 55% Front National will not end up in power. 80% Partij voor de Vrijheid will gain 5+ seats in the Dutch election. 70% PVV will not end up in power. 80% . Alternative für Deutschland will gain 40+ seats in the German election. 70% AfD will not end up in power 70% . No second Scottish independence referendum announced. 80% There will be no formal agreement on UK membership of the common market, p...

(c) Honoré Daumier (1865) 'Crispin and Scapin' I can only suggest that he would combat false consciousness to awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the people snore . - Erving Goffman All interesting theories accuse us of being brainwashed: "You lack information; now, open your eyes": Tectonics (on solid ground) the unconscious mind (you're so unconscious you don't know you've a massive unconscious) Relativity (space-and-time is squishy; no space without objects; no one thing can move ) the Everett interpretation (all possible things actually happen) the germ theory of disease (the world's so dirty you've no idea how dirty) Radical feminism (you're so oppressed you don't know you're oppressed, and/or you're so sexist you don't know you're sexist) Or more generally Critical theory (you're...

"[ x ] started using Causes . Causes strives to empower people from all walks of life to have a positive impact on the world in which they live. We allow Facebook users to organize into communities of action focused upon specific issues or nonprofit organizations ." - Facebook Causes " Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it ." - George Monbiot's blog motto I recently wrote in defence of protesting against diffuse, complex, faceless social issues. (I concluded that, yes, it's silly, but so's everything else.) We are subjecting activism to a lot of sneering and scepticism of late. And so we should. Anything this vulnerable to tokenism and ignorant "Yeah! What she said!" posture deserves the scrutiny. What about delusory, guilt-displacing, one-click " slacktivism "? What good does raising consciousness do against: what happened to Stephen Lawrence...

" Jokes are risky; they are a game of percentages. That is why jokes are best left to professional jokesters. Certainly they are too dangerous for politicians to play with. Any joke that doesn't offend at least a few people is unlikely to be funny ... The professional politician, by contrast, lives to avoid giving offense ." - Michael Kinsley Liberal politicians are invariably a bit shit at comedy . Compared to their authoritarian counterparts, the stakes are always lower when Dennis Skinner or Al Franken slips a quip in. Safe despots can afford levity; the desperate menace of a despot cracking a joke even underwrites their effect. (Nervous laughter is the loudest kind.) " Am I a pure democrat? Of course I am, absolutely. But do you know what the problem is? Not even a problem but a real tragedy? The problem is that I'm all alone, the only one of my kind in the whole wide world . [...] There is no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died ." - Putin Medvedev...

A friend said he wished to improve the world. Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world . - Wittgenstein vs Is [existing] not an act of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? … I fear for all the violence and murder my existing might generate. I fear occupying someone's place . - Levinas Observation statement #1 : The Shanghai district government is offering postgraduate scholarships to foreigners (even philosophers). Observation statement #2: I am relatively poor and want to know Chinese. Observation statement #3: The Chinese government publically -but- secretly executes about 6000 people a year, putting to shame the rest of the world, who are only unspeakable 2000 times a year put together. Observation statement #4 : The Chinese government covertly tortures lots (illegally, even by their own fucking law ). Observation statement #5 : There is in place, in this "Communism", a hereditary class order (rural/urban) rem...

(c) Elizabeth Parker Hats " We exist in a state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little blue ?" - Dave Hickey Look at this reverse image search thing! God, isn't it worth social atomisation and massively lower attention spans? Particularly when taken in tandem with this lovely thing . And this . And this . And this . And this . And this , this , this and this . And all that . And this . And this . And this . And this . And this . And this (alt) . And this . And these . And this . (Prostate exam of justice.) They've all got downsides. (Ok, not Child'sPlay) But that's built into the idea of "technology". Wikileaks in particular is a time-traveller from some future place where people actually control their governments . But in this spacetime manifold, it's fucking dangerous . (Regarding that future "actual democracy", the Ch...

Avatar (2010) We think that fun is radical and revolutionary fun actually was becoming quite subversive fun was very important it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race. bakhtin saw the carnival as a popular expression of subversion a “world turned inside out” in which people could make fun of the systems the system of power that structured their everyday existence maan Matrix 2 (2004) "To dance is to rebel." the performance principle denies people’s desire for “mindless pleasures”—sexual, playful, and nonproductive (or nonreproductive)—in order to promote labor that becomes ever more alienated from its products The role of the father is taken by “the Man” who “has a branch office in each of our brains” Fuck the rich! Fuck the cops! Everyone to the streets on Saturday November 20! We will party in Parliament Square and if the cops try and stop us w...

Now academized here . Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself. - John Searle Sometimes the obvious is the enemy of the true . - Gabriel Stolzenberg I'm away to go study Derrida, mostly because I really want to know if he's the most brilliant comedian to ever work in academic philosophy. But the first thing about him one has to face is not his rejection of power; not his work in developing structuralism; nor even that he was continually demonized as a nihilist: no, the first thing about him is that he could not (or would not) write well. And, bizarrely, this foible is at the heart of the most popular dismissal of the unsettling work that Derrida and other postmodernist theorists have flung at us. Taking Searle's maxim (above), the critique goes: they're obscure, therefore they're all speaking shite. It is suggested that there is a subculture ...

Let us reorder this world around us. - Tony Blair, 2001 A regime review. When attaching responsibility for a social situation to an administration, the question is: how do we distinguish policy effects from bland luck? One can't really place the recession (2007-9) against New Labour; why should they claim credit for. Ecclestone thorny crown. Furthermore, economies are such wildly complex things that one should resist giving anyone much credit for good times - which is not to say that crashes and mismanagement are not the fault of their core financialization. MERITS 1. Credible drive towards cultural equality Acknowledgement of institutional racism post-Stephen Lawrence inquiry (1999) Age of homosexual consent equalized (2000) & introduced one for lesbians. LGBT adoption (2005; Scotland 2009) Civil partnerships (2005) Equality Bill (2009); public breastfeeding, magistrates to take up pay discrimination cases Various maligned positive discrimination processes. ...