Category Archives: Blog

Is killing the ultimate form of control?

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I recently had an enjoyable day at Lancaster House, chatting to members of the TTAC21 reading group on subjects including drone theory, armed conflict, the Prevent strategy, and the International Court of Human Rights.

As most of the participants were drawn from law departments, it was interesting as a relative ‘outsider’ to get a view on how those in the law discipline view issues such as life, death and sovereign power. One particularly interesting question that cropped up was ‘Is killing the ultimate form of control?’

Unfortunately we didn’t really have time to explore the question during the course of the day, so I thought it useful to gather a few thoughts here to open up some discussion…  Continue reading »

A sombre view of the modern world…

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I despair at the modern world in which we live. It’s not so much the sensationalism, the terrorism, the rampant consumerism; it’s more the fact that people today simply do not think.

For all its boons, social media has done more to erode modern society than it has to enhance it. People think they can explain the world’s problems in a meme, or a few characters, without ever bothering to scratch below the surface or find out more. Worse still, the ease with which ‘information’ (very definitely with inverted commas) can be found these days means people just don’t know how to do proper research and think for themselves. Got a question? Google it. Google will tell you the truth… Continue reading »

Micro-fascism, Facebook and the General Election

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There’s been a General Election on here in the UK – have you heard?

Most of my Facebook wall today is full of people rightly or wrongly basking in the failure of UKIP in the election. Now, I’m not a UKIP supporter, but there are some interesting points we can take from this that link to the work of critical theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari and Badiou among others. Continue reading »

Online grammar checkers – is Grammarly really worth it?

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“I use Grammarly’s free online grammar check because even the best writers make missed stakes.”

I recently stumbled across Grammarly, a tool that claims to be “The World’s Best Grammar Checker”.  According to the website, Grammarly is “an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach” that corrects “up to 10 times” more mistakes than many of the most popular word processor packages. Bold claims indeed, though such powers of proofreading do not come cheap. At the time of writing Grammarly is charging $29.95 per month, or $139.95 for a whole year. That’s £18.56 per month or £86.74 per year for users based in the UK.

But is the system any good? Come to that, can any automated proofreader really substitute for a bit of good old-fashioned honest toil? Continue reading »

25 reasons to hate Macs (and 3 reasons to like them)

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As a writer I’m fairly easy going when it comes to my working environment. I don’t need much: a computer with an up-to-date version of MSOffice, access to the internet, and a few very minor stationery requirements, and I am well equipped to sit and write all day.

Not too much to ask, you may think – there’s not much there that can particularly go wrong, or make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Well, that’s where you’d be wrong. You see my employer has kitted out our office with Apple Macs, the most un-helpful, un-user-friendly devices imaginable. Whereas on a simple low-spec PC I would be able to do most things a writer needs to do, such as rename files and multi-task between a few Word documents, on a Mac even these simple tasks become a chore. Continue reading »