Below is the text of a talk that I preprared for a meeting of activists in August- and the theme of this talk was around the Trade Union fight back to the imposition of the austerity measures, i.e. Cuts.

When asked to do a talk about Trade Union fight back – the running joke was that it would be a pretty short talk – so let’s work this into a short format – what better way than 17 syllables – of the Haiku.

 

We vote up to Strike.
Leaders say, steady more talk;
End with less than zero

This is the story of a dog, a dog from the streets that lives in one of the European PIGS. [The basket case economies of Europe have been grouped together neatly into this porcine gang – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.]  Our dog, the stray dog lives in Athens and for the last two years or more he has been appearing at every single protest that has been fought there.  As the World slipped into the tail spin spiral of a global recession, one dog was putting in the hours, pounding the pavements in protests, knowing which side he was on in the battles being fought.

 

The Rules – different for the rule makers

Do you remember the day when it was impossible to think about letting our banks collapse, at all costs, and those costs appear to be zooming upwards.  We didn’t even have the money to save our own banks, but we went to the European Central Bank with our peasant cap in our hands and they helped us out.

Žižek has a number of things going for him.  Like Steve Jobs who can shower his magic dust on lumps of plastic, micro-processors, glass and sell them to millions, Slavoj Žižek appears to be able to perform similar miracles in the world of  Big ideas. Secondly, he has all those Z's in his name with funny floating pronunciation helpers floating like mobiles above them, and finally he is European that old place where all the ideas men come from. 

I picked up a copy of his paperback 'Violence' last summer at a Sociology conference in San Francisco.  It was printed by Picador as part of the ‘BIG IDEAS // small books’ series.  A number of people had been talking to me about Žižek (ZZ) and he’s been making frequent appearances on my Mac screen either in Examined Life or in his Perverts guide to Cinema. Žižek has crossed over.  Just as the Apple Logo is part of street furniture of modern city life, so is the bearded hairy animated face of ZZ holding forth on whatever thought has most recently entered his head.

 

Review  of the book

ROUSSEAU'S DOG
Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
By David Edmonds and John Eidinow

 

In this book we find an account of two great thinkers of their age, when they get right down to it, behaving like children in a school yard.  Instead of David Hume extending a Scottish invitation to little crazed Jean Jacques Rosseau to meet later for a pugilistic dispute resolution, they printed articles in the papers of the day to defend and attack one another.  As the authors state “Their reasoning about reason showed that reason could get us only so far” and we enter an interesting world where they leave that reason far behind. 

 

 

‘I think it’s all going to end in revolution’ my 77 year old mother said to me without even a hint of humour in her voice. ‘I hope so Ma, I hope so.’

A good crowd gathered at the top of Grafton street at about 5.15pm on the cold dark Tuesday evening in December. We moved off towards St. Stephens green, about 25 of us heading towards Lesson street and the Greek Embassy. We went against the flow of people escaping work and rushing towards the illuminated beacon of the shopping centre.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kNpNzDoH1II&eurl=http://bravenewfilms What he says is completely true. The US democratic system is a choice between two factions of the business party, and to say that it will not make any difference is also incorrect. So what he is saying is think long and hard before you decide to vote, not to vote or even vote green (which is as good as not voting if you ask me). The people - the real ordinary people - the working stiff - according to political scientists do 'slightly' better off under the democrats. So you have to take that into account.