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Actually, I think he went to go and get a pizza. Here's another report of the talk .

Not very - I don't think listening to Ashlee Simpson really counts.

Hmm... what actually is the distinction between religion and politics? They're both forms of collective action. The obvious distinction that comes to mind is that religion relies on transendence (it's about worshipping something both other and greater) whereas politics is, or can be, immanent...

Arguably, though, this is a good thing. Pretending that you're going to get a useful discussion with politicians is a damaging illusion, IMO. Better to make it obvious that it's a load of wankers shouting at each other (see also Prime Minister's Questions and Michael Howard's hilarious 6th form...

Presumably you mean this speech. She does look like she's voting on principle there, rather than as a New Labour loyalist. OTOH, the fact that she's never voted against the government on a foreign policy matter suggests the opposite. And she voted in favour of giving the Home Secretary the...

Absolutely, and it's true on the other side, too. I've been concerned for some time about the lack of interest in theory in the British left (particularly the more-or-less self-defined 'activist' left). However, recent experience of stimulating 'theoretical' debate has persuaded me that that...

Think global, act local. As part of opposing the bid, we should be opposing the Olympics entirely as the spectacle of multinational capitalism it has become.

Largely but not entirely, and I think for Badiou that's important. Isn't this where his concept of the situation comes in? For ontological reasons, the situation can't be all-encompassing, there's always the space for an event. Of course, this brings back your problem about how we figure out...

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems bizarre that the Labour party would take that track. Is there really enough widespread anti-semitism to make it worth their while?

I quite like the track - despite the slower pace, the vocals do sound distinctive, not too hip-hoppy. But I agree with your point generally. It would really be a shame if the first few hyped grime releases made people think they were just another entry in the long line of mediocre UK hip-hop.

Heheh, me neither. I do know some people who work in computer security, though, so I might ask them about it when I next see them. I think you probably could set up a system where the shop encrypts the music individually for each customer (in fact, I think iTunes might work like that); but I...

Right, but DRM isn't the same as encryption. Artists can encrypt their tunes using open source software, but they can't usefully sell the encrypted files to anyone, because no-one else would be able to decrypt them. DRM has to let the purchaser of the file decrypt it so they can use it - but...

The problem is, open source DRM can't possibly work. DRM works by encrypting the content, then giving you the encrypted content and the key to decrypt it. If you can control the software that does the decryption, you can control what people do with the content; but if you don't control the...

I think this raises a fairly general problem with/for those groups trying present an alternative to Blairism. Traditional left types have tended to see Thatcher/New Labour as solely destructive, dismantling the welfare state, etc. Because of this, their 'alternative' is phrased defensively -...

John Peel used to make the same joke, I think. He said he liked intelligent d'n'b not because of the music but because the name implied the rest of the stuff must be stupid drum and bass.

Incidentally, while people are arguing about grime slang, can anyone let me know what MCs are saying that sounds a bit like 'all hype' or 'oldtype', and appears to mean something like 'big up'?

The irony is that one of the things the Sokal hoax showed was that Sokal didn't understand theory - he thought he was writing nonsense, when actually he was just writing mediocre theory. It's a demonstration that postmodernists are right to be hostile to judging texts by reference to authorial...

Well, this only strictly applies to unix - windows, old macs and so on may well be different. Anyway, the 32 bits just represent seconds, which gives you a range of 4 billion odd seconds, or 136 years. But half of this is used for dates before 1970, so we only have 68 years of future. Here's...

Damn, oliver, your reasonable response makes me feel ashamed of my earlier intemperateness. Yes, you're right, it's not _just_ a clash of oligarchs; I guess I really wanted to point out that it's not _just_ a popular democracy movement either.

I can't decide if you're trolling or not, but surely that's an absurdly over-simplified statement. About 50% of the population voted for a pro-Western oligarch, 50% for a pro-Russian oligarch. I don't see how you can read some kind of glorious democratic rejection of 'neo-fascist' (WTF?) Putin...