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Fabulous piece in the Standard on Tuesday which found that, to no surprise of those of us who do like to walk in the city, walking was actually quicker than the tube for seven common London routes. Unlike the forms of exercise favoured by Kapitalism (quick energy burns in the gym so that you...

But not believing in it and doing it any way is ideology in itself. Which is why postmodern ironic distanciation is one of kapital's great wheezes of the past two decades.

The point that Badiou and Zizek have forcefully made, using numerous examples, is that the only way that emancipatory politics can be articulated is through a concept of the universal... no nations, no ethnicities, no sexualities.... So that, incredibly, St Paul becomes the key figure for a...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_economy/142998.stm 'Because of family circumstances (or more precisely lack thereof) the gay community tends to have much more disposable income to spend.' http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/features2.cfm?ID=9 'The acronym ad men like using for gays is...

Dave's right --- the 'pink pound' is something economists have discussed for a while now; ppl who DON'T have kids obv have more not less disposable income.... As for Oedipus being an ancient Greek myth, I've dealt with this above. Point is that what Oedipus is for us is something very...

Something else occurred to me relevant to this last night while watching c4's shockingly exploitative Wed night line-up (the pre-Desperate Housewives line-up, natch, DH is brilliant obv). You are What you Eat, 10 Years Younger and Wifeswap are near relentless assaults on working class...

It's interesting to bring Anti-Oedipus in here; after all, the question D/G repeatedly pose there is: to what extent is Oedipus universal? Their answer: only to the extent that capitalism is. Only in capitalism can all bonds of alliance and filiation be reduced to mummy-daddy-me. This...

I wouldn't in principle resist this move, but 'cultural difference' cannot be seen as YET ANOTHER form of classification alongside class antagonism - maybe we need new or at least modified vocabulary here, and it would be better to talk about classification rather than class. The whole point of...

Thanks Jenks... that surely is why this kind of space need not be about idle chit chat... Surely, as the two Johns show on this thread, there is no intrinsic reason why having kids should have a political effect one way or another. Sadly, though, kids are often used as an excuse for political...

I only have 'Lost Control'. Does anyone know anything else?

Yes, that's absolutely right. Atm, within the ideological framework, alternatives to the Family are not lived and therefore are unthinkable, are not thinkable and are therefore not liveable. But when other structures become thinkable they become liveable, and when they are lived they become...

Yes, but isn't this just taking celebration one level up; instead of celebrating carribbean cake, we're now celebrating 'uneasiness', 'inconsistency' etc? Obviously I enthusiastically endorse Gilroy's argument about the randomness of taxonomies; obviously I agree that the Real is artificial...

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the w/c has no racist tendencies; they live with the impact of immigration, in a way that the m/c don't (it's pretty much all benefits for the middle mass, as Cohen said today; cheaper servants! who of course live miles and miles away....) At the same...

Well, it's certainly not a phenonemon of the <i>black</i> middle classes, now is it? I presume from what you have said that you DO think that the working classes are basically, fundamentally and in their very nature phobic racists then?

I take yr point John, but I think it is welfare, not immigration, that requires reform. I say abandon all immigration controls, let the (labour) market sort it out! Any economic problems would arise only if the govt was suddenly required to dole out welfare to dependents. The other issue, as...

I don't think eradication is the way forward. I mean, speaking from my own case, readers of k-punk will be well aware that I spent Christmas with my parents, so if I were advocating total extirpation of all familial links I would be blatantly inconsistent, if not to say hypocritical. But a...

I think the Zizekian move is to say, what is the difference between facile multiculturalism and sophisticated attention to cultural difference? Politically speaking I mean. Intellectually, there's a world of difference but politically, the Cult Diff lobby's 'openness to the Other' is piety in...

Jesus, I mean, this was still a seriously discussed issue twenty years ago... When people still talked idealistically about things like Kibbutzim, communes etc... You are kind of proving my point that the family HAS clearly become an unthought presupposition, a 'fact of life'. But this is at an...

Surely you can see that this is ideology in itself, this move - a particular, contingent social institution being equated with a force of nature - that is as pure a statement of ideology as you can get. It is not as if it is on any level true either. As everything from single parent families to...

Absolutely. And if you take any sort of stance against management, they will automatically interpellate you as an Old Left stick-in-the-mud who has yet to attune her or himself to economic 'reality'. Again, this is part of rendering any real opposition to capitalism literally unthinkable. And...