Masculinity, toxic and otherwise

This post compares two thinkers on the topic of masculinity and whether it is, to coin a phrase, toxic or not. They are Will Storr and Richard Wrangham.

Celebrating Colchester's City Status

Jumbo on the Hill

The people of Colchester are so proud of their one and only hill that they have named it four times: from the south it is Headgate, from the west, Balkerne Hill and, from the other two compass points, it is North Hill and East Hill.

Moonage Daydream of gender-bending David Bowie

Moonage Daydream is a brilliant audio-visual collage of David Bowie’s life and art, mainly his life as a performer from Ziggy Stardust to Let's Dance: the 1970s to 1980s, that is. Directed by Brett Morgen, it showcases Bowie's many talents besides being a singer-songwriter with mercurial and chameleon-like charisma: his dancing and mime and painting skills and all-round creativity.

I should declare that my sister’s best school-friend’s mum was good friends with David Bowie’s mum in Boring Beckenham where we grew up together - not Cool Brixton, as Bowie claims (yet again) in this film - so I practically knew the guy!

Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman

Tuned in today to "Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman - chaired by Lily Cole - Humankind: A Hopeful History"

Human Tide by Paul Morland

"The Human Tide, How Population Shaped the Modern World" by Paul Morland: the Intro and Chapter 2, The Weight of Numbers, are on Google preview pages - around 50 pages in all.

It is my book group's current choice and I am not impressed. As I wrote on Goodreads:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Next Book Group choice (by BB) is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011).

intentional communities - why most fail

Good essay at aeon.co looking at why, like most start-ups, most intentional communities fail. Conclusion is that:

Accidental Anarchist film

Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government is a rare instance of TV putting anarchism in a favourable light. You can see the trailer at www.accidentalanarchist.net. Produced by BBC Scotland and shown on BBC4 Storyville on Sunday 23 July 2017 at 21:50, the one-hour film tells how:

Carne Ross was a career diplomat who believed western democracy could save us all. But after the Iraq war he became disillusioned and resigned. This film traces Carne's worldwide quest to find a better way of doing things - from a farming collective in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street to Rojava in war-torn Syria - as he makes the epic journey from government insider to anarchist.

Marx's Capital

Critisticuffs has a Capital Reading Group on the first six chapters of Volume 1.

Great Man Theory of History

The Great Man Theory of History is that history can be largely explained by the impact of "great men" and the occasional "great woman". Examples would be that Hitler caused the Second World War and that Rosa Parks sparked off the Civil Rights movement by sitting on a bus.

Ethics - book recommendations

Book recommendations (by my friend DB).

• Alasdair MacIntyre - history of ethics - very good on the Greeks. 
• Phillipa Foot - good on how our philosophical concepts of morality are governed by a very Protestant Christian assumption that it's all about actions. And that the actions are somehow objectively right or wrong (God ordained, or, in the absence of God, still somehow not determined by humanity, timeless) rather than flowing from humans. 
• Bernard Williams and Geoffrey Warnock - very good on utilitarianism. (Bernard Williams was married to Shirley Williams for a while - possibly one of the brightest philosophers ever.)

The needless destruction of Dresden on 13-14 February 1945

With the Second World War effectively won, an estimated 135,000 German people were killed for no military purpose on the orders of Winston Churchill and Bomber Harris. There is a statue of Churchill in Parliament Square and one of Bomber Harris on the Strand in central London. 

Riots Rebellions and Protests – A Walk around Colchester town

The walk on Sat 2 May 2015, 2pm-4pm, was led by Dorian Kelly and started at Slack Space, Old Police Station, 35 Queen Street, Colchester CO1 2PQ. It was part of janeswalk.org 2015, which is hosted locally by Walk Colchester.  It featured the High Street (Castle Park Memorial end, scene of the Poll Tax riots in 1990) and a speech by John Ball and a song about him (both now on my Youtube channel) and much more. Here is the ad for the walk:

Twentieth century history

Thanks to Mark Goacher for introducing me to two major twentieth century historians: Geoffrey Roberts and John Lewis Gaddis.