Tag: State Power
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‘Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars’ & the Beat mythology of the supertramp
What songs sing the sorrow of homelessness from Ginsberg’s metaphoric hydrogen jukebox? Such mythology of the heavenly liberated hobo is often drawn from, for example, W.H. Davies (1871-1940) – the original supertramp. Davies, Newport, Wales-born wanderer of America, who famously settled in Gloucestershire, was frowned upon by Muse Colony of Frost (1874-1963), Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938),…
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FIELD TRIP: Kelvedon Hatch’s Nuclear Cottage
Nothing can quite prepare you for the scale of the bunker beneath, much in the same way someone who is new to the extent of post WW2 civil defence is likely to be astonished at the sheer amount of infrastructure that makes up UK Cold War architecture with its bunkers and monitoring posts numbering their…
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Why Post-modernism is Bourgeois Twaddle
It is an amorphous, wry dare to accept so many viewpoints and meanings as to be elusive and virtually meaningless. In its plurality of truths it resists a consensual truth upon which we can build knowledge, even if it requires a consensus to achieve its own existence.
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Survivors
Frankly, at the time I thought we were doomed. Borne of these are the beginnings of a political awakening that took another decade to bear fruit.
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Through a Glass Darkly
On the face of it absolutism in its rawest form doesn’t make any sense. But absolutism-lite does. The two are different and the latter is not relativism.
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The Philosophy of a Human Right
The Tintern Pub Philosophy Circle met the other night to discuss How We Might Get Human Rights. The discussion was lead by Tim Cross and covered the development of Human Rights as a concept from Hobbes, Locke, the US & French Revolutions and finally to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
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A cold deadly longing
There were tests on living creatures as well. Because pigskin is remarkably similar to human flesh, the U.S. government experimented on live pigs. Tests in 1957 exposed some twelve hundred pigs to atomic detonation.
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The Death of Grass; the death of society
In fact, in 1999, a form of stem rust appeared in African crops which quickly became an epidemic spreading from Africa to Asia and the Middle East and destroying a large amount of cereal crop with it.
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On Heidegger & the decline of Western thought
It seemed to me from what we heard about Heidegger was that, actually, Martin would’ve been more at home/peace (and perhaps enjoyed a kinder audience) had he been born 60-70 years before and entered into the circles of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts bent of British socialism as opposed to National Socialism.
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“Law will be rough and ready”
I spent a day last week trawling through the County Archives for research into a project I’m slowly working on called ‘Man Made Sun’. In it I look into why, in the 1980’s, Gloucestershire was the top-ranking rural county likely to be targeted by nuclear weapons in a Soviet attack. I qualify that observation in…