united kingdom
We the elite
Exceptions and Public Safety
13.12. There shall be no right to participate
in public policy-making, except by way of
parliamentary and other election.
(from the Democratic Audit project, via the UK’s liberal conspiracy).
The Scabs Get Bacon And Sausage Baguettes
If you’re following someone else’s strike in another industry in a foreign country, I find it’s always nice to get the juicy details. Negotiation points and arbitration be damned, pay rates and award schedules aren’t the stuff of which solidarity is made; I want to hear about—as journalists say—the personal interest.
At a certain point one of the vans went screeching out. And then, about ten minutes later, it came speeding back in again. It was driven by one of the managers who used to be a postie. You could see from the look on her face that she’d rather be outside with us.
Word came out that the van wasn’t on Royal Mail business at all. It had gone to fetch bacon and sausage baguettes.
That, there, is a slice of life.
In other news, stoush.net has apparently joined the ranks of food bloggers. Keep reading for the inevitable 1940s car sex.
Guy Debord's Ghost
Laurie Penny gets all Alinsky on Climate Camp:
We’ve set the bar for the ultimate 21st-century direct action: a protest where nobody apart from press, photographers and twitterhounds turns up at all and they all have to take pictures of each other taking pictures of each other in an infinitely recursive loop of pseudo-political voyeurism until we are all drained entirely or someone behind a camera screen somewhere stumbles across the face of justice.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.