Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
Well, another month passes and I’ve not done as much as I would have liked. To be honest, I don’t seem to have enough time (or energy!) to do everything I want (or used to!). Even in terms of the Kropotkin anthology, I’ve not really got going on the introduction yet (although the bibliography is finished barring some new information coming my way). Still, I have some good news and some bad news.
I’ve been working on the new Kropotkin Anthology, concentrating on listing the various works by Kropotkin. This is the first draft of my activities. As will become clear, there is a significant amount of articles which have never been translated or have not been republished from Freedom.
This is a collection of some of my better pictures from the pro-choice counter demonstration at the Dail against the Youth Defence billboards which were aimed at shaming women who had abortions. This demonstration was organised through a facebook page ‘Unlike Youth Defence, I trust women to decide their lives for themselves‘ and saw as many as 350 people turning out to protest at short notice.
Pictures I took at Pride in Dublin over the weekend of June 30th and which we used to create a photogalery on the WSM web site.
Seattle City attorneys officially threw down the gauntlet with the Department of Justice last week, filing court documents which challenged the “reliability and trustworthiness” of a recent DOJ report on the Seattle Police.
A few months ago, I announced that I was starting to work on an anthology of Kropotkin’s works for AK Press (A Peter Kropotkin Anthology). This is an update – and as well as an update, I’m including a rare letter from Kropotkin to the British syndicalist paper The Voice of Labour as a taster.
Over the weekend Justice Minister Alan Shatter published a document outlining four possible positions that state may take with regards to sex work which run all the way from complete criminalization to decriminalization. Both feminists and anarchists are quite divided on the question of sex work, the publication of the report at the weekend has pushed me to blog these notes which started as comments on a discussion on Facebook a few weeks back. What follows is rather incomplete and at times incoherent – really just notes I may return to in the future then a particularly strong argument for decriminalization although its clear that is the position I lean towards.
Over the June bank hoiliday I attended the Rossport Solidarity Camp gathering, part of the ongoing struggle against Shell’s experimental gas pipeline and refined that is being imposed on the area. While there I revisited the Shell compound at Arghoose which has been massively developed since last year. The photoslide show here gives an idea of the camp, the landscape and the level of monitoring of everyone in the area being carried out by the Garda and Shell’s security company IRMS.
The Greek election which saw the ‘bailout with even more austerity’ parties win out over the ‘austerity without bailout’ parties had a fairly minimal impact on the world’s stock markets in the end. That somewhat cruel way of describing SYRIZA is a polemical poke at the international left which had put such enormous expectations in SYRIZA ahead of the elections – many seemed to truly believe their election represented a potential turning point in the struggle against the imposition of austerity across Europe. From my point of view this attitude is symptomatic of the disastrous turn to electoralism that the far left has taken – the hostile terrain it has retreated to after failing to build any meaningful popular resistance across Europe to the cuts being imposed in the worst crisis since World War II.