Giving thing away for free, the Grateful Dead, hippies, the Electron Club and the Open Source.
(Recorded around 2014 still valid)
There was no copyright infringement using Grateful Dead music on this podcast. Its Free!
What is our politics?
I was leafleting in Govan for Save the Docks campaign public consultation and a young guy from a few meters away asked what it was about. Before I gave him the leaflet, he said. “I fuckin hate Govan, I used to love it, but not any more. I fucking hate it.” There wasn’t really any malice in his voice, more like regret and a kind of loss of hope. I chatted to him for a bit but he might have been too far down in the groove that our conversation would have made any difference.
He seemed like the kind of guy with a bit of support would be useful to his community. I have known other activist, people, in Govan with exactly the same attitude. Folk who were once good leaders but worn out by so much disapproval, distrust and repeatedly climbing the same hill of petty slights, and personality politics. With too much negativity to endure, too little aspiration to bear and too little agenda to adopt. This is not just a Govan phenomenon, you can find it all over. Why? well maybe.
Continue reading
Israeli Ethnic Cleansing And US Backed Atrocities In Gaza
Israeli Ethnic Cleansing And US Backed Atrocities In Gaza
Murderers, pathological liars, psychopaths, war stenographers, racists, zionists and their apologists, criminals, bent politicians, ignorance and a whole bunch of the worst elements of humanity make up the cast and reasoning for the tragedy Gaza is suffering.
According to Save The Children, nearly half of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza today are children. These children have grown up knowing nothing but war while watching their family members and friends being murdered on a daily basis.
Now on the Israeli side we see an incident in proportion to the many that are met out to Palestinians daily that involve death and tragic consequences to families and loved ones and as human beings we sympathise. But as human beings we also need to quantify, that all violent death is tragic. Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general, expresses the barbarity and criminal logic of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. When he says. “What do people think happens when a half ton bomb lands on a building in Gaza. What do people think is underneath the rubble, a terrorist?”
The corporate press spread lies about 40 Israeli babied being beheaded. The story is then retracted as false, after everyone has heard it. At the same time we watch bombed buildings collapse on how many Palestinian families, children, mother’s father’s, son’s daughters? Not once but constantly over years we watch the buildings fall and our governments move on and say nothing. How many babies have been beheaded by Israeli bombs. Well we don’t know because sometimes they are never found again, as they are blown apart and remain in the rubble.
Netanyahu’s Israel has been shaken by the events of Saturday, October 7. Israel’s so called impenetrable defence system was breached by a daring Palestinian military campaign who practically walked into Israel unchallenged. Many of these fighters were made up of the same youth who have grown up under the Israeli occupation and are related to the countless families who have died under the occupation. Continue reading
City Geographer videos
“We created GalGael as a vehicle to take forward what we’d learned and to move from being about what we didn’t want to what we did want.”
The articles or podcasts in this series are meant to be a stepping stone, or dipping a toe in the water kind of approach in helping to encourage ordinary people to think a bit more about public life.
City Geographer podcast
It pays to be in a union
Hi bob —
While Europe sees two of its hottest months on record and we continue to tip further
into the climatecrisis, companies such as British Gas have raked in nearly a billion
in profit. All that when we’re worrying about paying our energy bills.
And it is not just temperatures that have been climbing, across Scotland rents have
continued to skyrocket with new rents in Edinburgh and Glasgow having the top three
sharpest rent increases in the UK over the last year. Though the rent freeze has
been extended until March 2024, rents are already too high and we need proper
government action to bring them down.
With this as a backdrop, the need for organising to gain power in our communities is
clear. And in these last two months, members have been doing just that.
Houses, homes and repressive housing policies. Where is it leading us?
“The housing crises is an active agent of repression and as been since Thatchers time. Where the working class activities that couldn’t be suppressed were commercialised.” Stefan Szczelkum.
Part of that he is talking about is the present obsession of owning a house. And the entrenchment of many in the working classes to become a cog in the commercialisation process. Rather than becoming part of a movement working to curb Thatchers neoliberal legacy. Instead many are inadvertently working to maintain it. By placing their future and trust in the hands of banks.
When people lived in council houses with controlled rent. One of the lesser things they worried about was being evicted or being made homeless. How many can say that today, particularly when they are paying a mortgage in a housing market that’s prices have gone through the roof.
Back in the day your secured tenancy in a council home was much the same as everyone else’s. Your problems were much the same as your neighbours. That is until the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberal project. Which basically meant. Forget your solidarity, and sticking together. Now we live, she could have suggested under the neoliberal motto of. “Everything is for us and nothing for you.” Continue reading
Sitting here on our computers at the end of 2022
The algorithm can offer some facts and reviews but it can’t show you what it feels like to matter.
You can go on google and Facebook and find where places are. But you don’t get to talk to the people in these places. The internet can give simple information but it can not give the deeper knowledge of a place than actually going there can. The algorithm can offer facts and a review of different places, but it can not hear the rhythm or the feel of the folk who live there. Continue reading
The Glasgow User Manual – An Almanac and Peoples Guide To the city
A 2023 project to research and publish:
A city hand book for the discerning citizen, traveller and reader.
The Glasgow user Manual – A peoples guid to the city
The Project, will be a one year long survey for setting up process and ideas for collecting information for a peoples guide to the city. A publication and website that will manage information and data for a long term portal to allow access to a wide range of city data, infrastructure and aspects in the public interest. This year long project will be the first phase in organising and creating the content for a publication with a work title of: The Glasgow user manual A peoples guide to the city. Continue reading
Drifting towards dictatorship
At the time of his death in 2006, Augusto Pinochet had been implicated in over 300 criminal charges for human rights violations. The charges included 194 counts of killings Spanish citizens. He was arrested in London and held on house arrest in comfortable rented accommodation for a year and a half before being released by the British government. During that time he was visited by Margaret Thatcher to pay her respects.
Who was Pinochet?
Pinochet was the Chilean dictator who took power in Chile in 1973 after a US backed coup that ousted President Allende the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, which lead to a brutal right wing dictatorship, led by Pinochet.
“Pinochet’s newly formed junta locked hundreds of thousands of people in detention centres, “disappeared” (killed) at least 2,279 for political reasons and tortured another 31,947. Pinochet took power by military force and used military force to maintain his regime.” libcom Continue reading