ps

Beth has told me that I should say something nice about Christians, and since Beth knows best, I will.

Christians are the nicest people available and my best friends are exclusively Christians. The individuals of the very highest quality are Christians and if they did not exist they would have to be invented. I just have the following issues with us:

1) Christians should stop caring about gay-marriage and abortion until we have taken care of war, poverty, injustice, and ignorance.

2) Creationism should not be snuck into classrooms under the dubious auspices of intelligent design. The world is not 6,000 years old. Sorry, it's just not.

3) Christians should not vote for a politician who a)rigs elections, b)rigs wars, and c)hurts the poor while d)helping rich people get richer, simply because he says he is a Christian.

Anyways, I love Christians, but many of them (particularly those represented by Pat Robertson and the American Right) need a hard kick in the buttocks. We should be the ones bringing warlords and robber-barons down, not the ones propping them up.

Photos!

Hi again, I was going to include this post in my last post, but the mood was too different so I figured I better separate them.

So this is the story: since Beth and I moved into this flat last June we have suffered with the worst couch and chair set that ever came out of the dark pits of hell. They were far less comfortable than simply standing or sitting on the floor, but we for some reason felt compelled to sit on them because they were there and we were in denial. Anyways, it was becoming too much so I asked Beth if she would call John, our landlord, and tell him that we needed new butt-holders. I asked Beth because she has charms to which our landlord is by no means immune. This was proven by the fact that within two-hours of her picking up the phone, our old couches were sitting beside our house in the rain, and she was sitting on a brand-new leather sofa!! DAMN, these things are comfy. I mean really comfy. Yikes!! We are so happy we don't know what to do (so we sit down). Anyhoo, I took some photos of the house, the couches, and Beth and her crocus. Enjoy!


Nice house eh? Unfortunately we only occupy the basement, although it is a large flat by crummy English standards. Our door is through the gate by the blue car and down some stairs. The bay window on the left at the bottom also belongs to us.


Here's my wife standing in our doorway.


Here's me smoking my pipe in our little front area (I have since quit pipe smoking as I hear tobacco can be addictive).

Here's my beautiful wife showing off her crocus which she planted last fall.

Here's a closeup of her crocus! Nice heh?

Here's me on the new leather couch. Aww yeah.


Here's Beth on the other couch, she is holding a copy of The Poison Wood Bible.

Here is she-who-pours-the-gravy sitting down to one of the many delicious meals she cooks for us.

My wife is excellent.

random comments

Hi, I was reading a bit of Nietzsche today - Thus Spake Zarathustra. Christians are supposed to not like Nietzsche, because Nietzsche often ridicules Christianity. I don't really mind, sometimes I agree with his criticisms, some times I don't. Somethings he says are refreshing, some mistaken. Anyways, I'll see after I read some more what I think. If nothing else he is interesting to read, although possibly not interesting enough to justify its existence (his writings).

I read something really funny today in the paper that made me laugh. You all have heard of Thomas Kinkade and seen his paintings (even if you don't know it, you have. Here's a picture of one to refresh your memory).


He calls himself the painter of light, or something like that, and his paintings can always be found in good Christian homes and even on the cover of bibles etc. Anyways, apparently he is a drunkard and a lout, with a penchant for urinating in elevators and other public spaces, as well as fondling strangers' (females') breasts. As for his motivation, he simply wants to be really, really rich. Not much in the way of artistic integrity, although he is a shining example of art as a capitalist enterprise. Here's a link to the article if you want a good laugh. Here's a quote that particularly tickled me:

"A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire. The cottages had thatched roofs, and resembled gingerbread houses. The houses were Victorian and resembled idealised bed-and-breakfasts ... "
Joan Didion

Funny stuff! Anyways, I don't have any problem with artists being bastards, what I mean is, one can often detach the art from the artist. However, I do prefer them to be slightly more honest about their bastardliness. Miles Davis was surely a bastard (woman beater, junkie, egotist, etc.), but he never marketed himself as a family-values, loves-Jesus-and-America-too pillar of virtue.

When I told Beth about Thomas Kinkade, she made the excellent observation that Christians get taken advantage of a lot. I agree: George Bush, the political Right, crummy books, crummy art, crummy music, all targeting the poor gullible Christians of North America (oddly enough, British Christians seem to often be immune to these worthless trinkets. I think it is a result of Christianity's relative unpopularity in the UK; they are not an important market.)

You might notice that I ridicule Christians a lot. This is true. I always find myself being embarrassed by the fact that secular-humanists seem to have the monopoly on common sense, rationality, and compassion. Don't agree? Go to a pentecostal church next Sunday morning.

I'm a misogynist, patriarchical bigot

I watched the movie Three Colours Blue last night. It's a French film starring Juliette Binoche (the lady from Chocolat). It categorically sucked, big time. It required a huge investment of patience and attention, and paid no dividends of coolness.

I also opened myself up to being called a sexist bastard in a seminar today because I said that pay-gap statistics were the crappiest measure possible for inequality between men and women. Let me illustrate why (although no-one understood me in class, and I merely ended up being assaulted with poorly understood, dogmatic opinions, regurgitated from comment pieces in newspapers.): The statistic we were presented with today was this - men earn 17% more than women, or the pay gap between men and women is 17%. This obviously sounds unacceptable, and rightly so. However, there are problems with statistics, and this is what I was trying to show my classmates, although they were too dumb to think for themselves.

The problem with this statistic is this: it is obtained by simply taking the average salary of all men and comparing it to the average salary of all women, which again sounds fine, but please suspend your outrage for one more second. Because in the UK the nuclear family model still prevails (heterosexual couple with a mail breadwinner), more men occupy positions of full-time employment than women, and women are more likely to work part-time menial jobs. In this type of situation a pay-gap of zero would actually indicate unequal pay towards men.

By focusing on this particular statistic, which most media studies do, the likely policy outcomes are many times facile solutions like positive-discrimination, which ends up only benefiting rich yuppie families, while poor nuclear-style families actually slip further into poverty. What we end up with is the current position where women don't merely have the chance of equal employment opportunities, they must work full-time, and their partners also, in order provide a decent life for their children.

What I think is necessary is a better solution that actually ensures women (and men for that matter) the greatest possible freedom of action and opportunity in work and family life so that if they want to work, they can achieve their career goals (and have child care provided if that's what they prefer), but if they don't want to be in the workplace, they will have sufficient means to stay home and tend to their family (if that's what they prefer.) This would involve a substantial restructuring of welfare and education, not just a simple act of positive discrimination.

For saying these things (although my voice was almost drowned by the outrage of my classmates) I was termed a sexist-bigot who wanted to chain women to stoves and roll back the clock to the stone-age. Perhaps sometimes it's better just to let people hold their cherished dogmas and avoid the holy wrath of morons.

Peace

My weekend

Sup. I had a weekend of sorts. Went to Londres on Saturday for an anti-war demo. It was pretty damn big. I've never been to London before, it was really something. Trafalgar square was a sea of people who didn't want any war.

We are tremendous bastards for destroying these countries, how will we escape judgment?

Here's some photos, including a really cool mural that was there by Ralph Steadman (famous for illustrating the novels of Hunter S. Thompson and Pink Floyd's The Wall album art).

-Peace






Here's a link to the Stop-the-war coalition if you care. It addresses the key issues and also has links to some other anti-capitalist/human rights/anti-corporate type sites. Also, here's a link to an excellent article by Robert Fisk which appeared in the Independent yesterday regarding the folly of the war, if you are going to read anything about the war in Iraq, read this. Fisk is probably the most respected middle-east correspondent who has ever lived. This guy really understands.

Funny

I had the following conversation with Beth last night which really made me laugh. It is typical and lets the reader understand better why I have so many laughs in this marriage.

Beth: "I had wheatgrass today. It's good!"
Drew: "Gross! Why?"
B: "I had it in my smoothy-"
D: "There's no reason to call it 'wheat grass', it's just grass. Like on your lawn."
B: "It doesn't taste like grass."
D: "Yes it does, besides how would you know. Have you eaten grass?"
B: "Yes, didn't you ever play sheeps and cows when you were a little girl?"

Maybe it's not funny, but I cracked up (for starters, I was never a little girl).

My day is full of funny conversations like this, I live a very surreal life. I chose wisely when it came to my female.

-drew

Nothing to report

Hi all,

Nothing much to report personally. Hence the endless movie reviews and propaganda.

I've been studying and not much else, but that is fine by me, and it certainly beats the pants of working at the call centre. Right now I'm reading The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm is a historian (just like I want to be!) and this book is the first in a series starting in 1879 (year of the French Revolution and around the start of the English Industrial Revolution) and ending in the 1990s.

I have mentioned this book for lack of anything else to write. Sorry!

-drew

Hooray for Capitalism! movie club

Greetings and salutations!

I watched two great movies today (I borrowed them off the internet). The two movies were Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana, Both starring George Clooney, and in fact I believe he produced the first one and co-produced the second.

Good night and good luck was about Ed Murro's confrontation with junior senator Joe McCarthy on his CBS show (Murro's). McCarthy was busy tossing out civil liberties and calling everyone communists. Your basic witch-hunt. Anyways, Murro and his news buddies took McCarthy to task on it and helped bring him down. It's a pretty new movie I believe, and it was likely written in response to George W.'s wonderful USA PATRIOT ACT which has just been renewed this week actually! Who needs democratic process when you can hand over all power to the most insane and dangerous executive-branch in the developed world?

Syriana was a superb movie, ostensibly based on the memoirs of some CIA guy, the book is called See No Evil, and I imagine it must be pretty interesting. The movie was directed by the same guy who did the movie Traffic. Anyways, this movie does such a good job of showing how the world works and everybody gets screwed. Again, my watching of this movie coincided hilariously with the referral of Iran to the UN Security council (the movie is largely about Iranian oil). Syriana was a good movie, damn good. So good I would actually consider paying to see it if the cinema industry hadn't priced themselves out of the market, or at least out of my market. (note: the big cinema chains all jacked up their prices long before the advent of the downloadable pirate video, although they keep trying to tell us that it happened because of pirate dvds - which apparently also lead to heroin, prostitution and murder; or so I'm told at least).

I was really surprised to learn that George Clooney was somewhat political (the good kind of political that is), especially after what I would consider one of the worst movies I have seen, ever - Ocean's Twelve; second in crappiness only to Memoirs of a Geisha (*shudder).

So anyways, I thought Syriana did a great job of showing what a fantastic mess the world is in. I'm pretty sure we're going to blow ourselves up (Israel and Iran rolled highest, so they get to go first).

Adios!

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I'’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,	5
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

What up!

Hi
I'm feeling extremely elated today, I hope it won't be followed by a period of depression.

I had a class this morning which was extremely enjoyable, then I killed time until a meeting with my lecturer who is supervising my dissertation. I was going to do my dissertation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I got sick of that issue and of the real world.

Instead, I'm going to my dissertation on...you guessed it...Anarchism! Actually, it will probably be about the anti-capitalism movement and other alternatives to capitalism ie. cooperatives, the Israeli kibbutzim (before Israel became a state and they lost their all their soul), maybe Fourier's communes, or whatever. Anyways, that will hopefully provide me with reasons to be happy and hopeful, whereas the Israeli-Palestine conflict made me depressed. Who knows what my narrow, laser-focused dissertation question will be though in the end. It will have to be something that interests me though because I have to write ten-thousand words and read a million. So far, anarchism and anti-capitalism have maintained my interest for 2 years or so, so it seems to have good staying power as far as my interests are concerned.

What else is new...hmmm...well I can't think of anything. Except that I did have such a wonderful day today. The cafeteria had this delicious beef stir-fry with rice and spring rolls...mmmm!! The whole meal-deal including drink and prawn-crackers for only £3.50 or so. And the hot sweet, which is often some delicious pudding, is only 80p! Yowza!

Happy days! Here's some more anti-capitalist propaganda (click on it to see it in all its large funniness - or rather, sadness).

Disappointing

Today in my Social Research class my lecturer reminded all the students that there would be no classes tomorrow as the teachers are striking. He explained that the strike is just for one day, and that classes will resume again on Wednesday. He also explained that after Tuesday, the lecturers will still do their work and even mark assignments, but they just won't be giving results back to University administration.

To my amazement (actually, I wasn't amazed at all - my coursemates are dum-dums), the students let out all sorts of groanings, wailings, and gnashing of teeth. John, the lecturer, explained why they were going on strike (because they make less money than even bus drivers, but need a PhD to teach), and how that would affect the students. The room instantly became hostile. I couldn't believe how selfish everyone became (the students that is).

Quite frankly, I was amazed at how much the lecturers were looking after our interests at their own expense. They continue to do all the work, except on strike pay! It was unbelievable. "How will we know our marks?!" shouted someone. "How will we know if we passed?!" etc. etc. As if not knowing your marks for a couple months changes the outcome!

Needless to say, everyone reacted in an incredibly un-radical, self-centred way. Basically, like a bunch of good little individually consuming capitalist children. I can't help but feel sorry for these lecturers: I have noticed many times how worn out their shoes are; many of them have tatty trousers - seriously! - who is so poor they have to wear tatty trousers!?! Not any of us students, that's for sure. Their clothes are all super old looking, I mean seriously, these guys look poor. And some of them have more than 10 years of post-secondary education!! Would somebody please give them a few extra pounds so they can at least put some leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets?! Yes: they actually wear old tweed jackets - poooooooooooooooor!

Anyways, people should try to be less selfish when others are striking. After all, if it wasn't for people striking our parents and ourselves would all be working 14 hours a day and living in shanties - kind of like the other half of the world.

Here's some worker's movement propaganda from the days of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).

-TTFN

elaboration...

Yes, to elaborate, I take everything back which I said last night in praise of capitalism. I will say this, it is an improvement upon earlier situations, but a better situation is certainly not inconceivable. When I think about the fact that people have to work for 14 hours a day doing imbecile labour for 2 cents an hour, and that the world was almost blown up by Russia and the USA in 1962, I take back what I said that liberal democracy is a better goal than anarchism. Anarchism is better, and at least has the ostensible aim of freeing humanity from hunger, war and oppression. Liberal democracy has the sole aim of preserving capitalism as an institution with as few concessions to the environment and humanity as are absolutely necessary. If one's goals do not include human freedom and happiness (for everyone, not just the minority) then these aims will surely not result as a side-effect (as is preached by free-market types, especially by my beloved Economist every week), will they ?

Nope, anarchism presents the best ideals, and that is certainly a good starting point. If you fail to set a target, you won't hit it. Or something like that.

Anarchy forever, capitalism never.

My wife is funny

I am lucky, for a few reasons. One of them is that my wife is such a cut-up. She's the best kind of the funny, the kind that isn't trying to be funny. That results in her often feeling that I'm laughing at her, which is true. Here's a picture I took of her that was funny.


Seriously though, she's the funniest person I know, and I would consider myself an expert on funny.

Funny.

I take it all back

I take it all back. George Bush is signing nuclear treaties with India, most of the world lives on like a dollar a day: Democracy sucks - Anarchy forever!

Two cheers for democracy

I have been plugging Anarchism a lot lately, so I feel that I should make clear its defects. They can be summed up in two points:

1) Capitalism seems to be the least worst system of economic organization. Anarchism, socialism, and communism all suck compared to the economic organization of the free-market (subject to qualifications; such as not killing people, making them miserable, or destroying the environment). This is hard to admit sometimes, but it seems true.

2) To be governed by the norms of your community (as advocated by Anarchists), rather than by laws (as advocated by everyone else) would likely be far more restrictive and oppressive, as George Orwell rightly pointed out. This is because people often seem, unfortunately, to be stupid bigots.

I think anarchism is important though because of its subversive spirit and its relentless criticism of the action of the state. Anarchism would be the best form of government if we were all perfect, but we're not. Not even me. So in the words of E.M. Forster:

"...two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three."


Buh-bye!

Happy Saturday to you

Here's what I did today:

I woke up and studied until about 1:30 and then got ready and went out. It snowed yesterday so there was about an inch and a half of snow on the ground which is quite unusual for Leeds but reminded me of Calgary. I took the bus into Headingley, which is the student neighbourhood on the opposite side of Leeds from me. I had a footlong sub for lunch, mmmm! Then, I went to my lecturer's house to get some books from him for a project I'm doing.

This is all quite boring, sorry.

Anyways, tonight I read a section in this book I have called The Essential Writings of Anarchism, the section I read was written by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910 - pictured below - wrote the book War and Peace) and was under the heading of 'Christian Anarchism'.



Tolstoy basically says that Christians shouldn't submit to military service or swear allegiance or pay taxes to a state that is violent and murderous. Mahatma Gandhi was heavily influenced by Tolstoy's writing. It's quite a moving tract. Apparently Tolstoy has written a few books on such issues. Another similar character was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862 - below), who wrote against the institution of slavery and refused to pay taxes to the US government that supported it.


Ciao!