Degrowth | Pierre Smith Khanna

RTICLES

Usually related to education, philosophy or society, I write these to give form to some of things I grapple with. If they can spur on debate and reflection so much the better.

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Russell Brand & the Swiss Referendum

I wrote a post about Russell Brand’s second Paxman interview a few weeks ago, and made the elementary bloggers mistake of not reading other bloggers responses to it. I had done my own research and was quite happy with what I thought was a tame article. Low and behold the naive incredulity on my face when friends drew my attention to some other responses to Brand’s call to revolution - which tore it apart. They all started off on the same footing “let’s be generous and take Brand’s idea seriously - oh wait, look, it’s fraught with problems - it’s incredibly vague, full of fantastic words and ultimately meaningless”. Paxman himself wasn’t sure of Brand’s call to “not bother voting” - the singl

The Twit Review

Each and every film poster you see nowadays will invariably quote the words "brilliant", "wonderful" and "amazing", above or under a row of five neat, golden stars. When confronted with them (as you are, generally when on the tube) I would always make sure to check where the quote was pulled from - being under the belief that words from The Times would be somewhat more meaningful than those of The Daily Star. Yet it doesn't take long to realise how easy it would be to pull quotes out of context - more likely, the reviewer said it was "brilliant" as a script but the acting and production were poor. I haven't tested this theory out on each and every film poster out there, but you get the idea