Blog

'Politics'
Human Rights and Sovereignty
5th September 2016

The current Conservative Government wants to remove the Human Rights Act (HRA). This has been their policy for many years, reaffirmed by each new Justice Minister, though no actual proposal has yet been put forward (largely because it’s quite hard to turn nonsense into a concrete proposal). In this post, I’ll talk about two of […]

Futurology
The Future Of Cars
2nd August 2016

In this post, I muse about the future of cars – and with it, houses, cities and work. With the way things are interconnected, changing how cars function has big knock-on effects for other aspects of our societal life too. *** In the relatively immediate future – I reckon about fifteen years from now – […]

'Politics'

DNC Leaks = Lots of leaked electronic documents (emails and phone data) from the Democratic National Committee, the blue political party in the USA. Wikileaks posted a lot of them last year from an anonymous source. They haven’t been talked about much by most of the media, especially in the UK, so I thought I’d […]

Miscellaneous

I just edited a parkour video and thought I would share a few thoughts on this. Parkour and videos can be a bit messy. The summary: think carefully about your media outputs. There’s three sections: a description of the session, of the type that would usually accompany a video (though longer); then some thoughts about […]

'Politics'

The state of UK politics at the moment… not great. The EU referendum had a very strong media campaign by many media outlets based on lies and misinformation, such as portraying the EU as ‘unelected beaurocrats’ (a lie) and talking about £350m/week (another lie, plus the fraud of talking only about money out instead of […]

To many, the result of the UK’s EU Referendum might be a shock. Here, I try to explain what I think happened. This is, of course, all going to be historical interpretation by me. Everything I present as fact I believe to be so and with sound evidential basis, even if I haven’t had the […]

Note: This post is a bit raw. Usually, I would write something in draft, then come back and redraft and edit it. Usually that means some changes, making sentences smoother and the whole thing flow better. On this occasion, I wrote this whole post in one go and have published it without redrafting or editing. […]

Othering and Empathy
11th June 2016

    Instead of seeing people as humans like us, we see many as something ‘other’. They aren’t like us: they’re muslims, refugees, jews, negros, gays, homeless, whatever. This undermines the feelings we should have towards them, means that we treat them as sub-human. Don’t help them – they aren’t like us. Leave them to […]

Here’s a parkour video featuring me. An Oxfordshire media student, William Royal, posted on the Oxford Parkour facebook page asking for volunteers for a video project as part of his media course. I volunteered, and this is what he made. I didn’t have a particular message to share – usually if I make content it’s […]

'Politics'
Freedom and the Free Market
8th February 2016

This post discusses ‘Freedom’, which is actually quite complex (because there are multiple conflicting aspects to it), and then discusses how Free the (so-called) Free Market is.

It’s a fairly long post, but it’s in sections. Battle that short attention span if you think it’s worth it.

 

Freedom is Complicated

Imagine a society in which there is complete freedom. Ah. You can’t. Though you might not have realised it yet. This is because the concept of ‘freedom’ which we have is not one which can increase, as such; rather, it’s a tension between different types of freedom. It’s a bit strange really – but it is rarely properly understood in journalism.