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Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege

Okay, so I guess I’m occasionally re-blog posts I’m likely to want to refer back to. This is good.

Sindelókë

Today I’m feeling 101-y, I guess, so let’s talk about privilege.

It’s a weird word, isn’t it? A common one in my circles, it’s one of the most basic, everyday concepts in social activism, we have lots of unhelpful snarky little phrases we like to use like “check your privilege” and a lot of our dialog conventions are built around a mutual agreement (or at least a mutual attempt at agreement) on who has privilege when and how to compensate for that. But nonetheless fairly weird, opaque even if you’ve never used it before or aren’t part of those circles. It’s also, the way we use it, very much a cultural marker – like “Tolkienesque” or “Hall-of-famer” or “heteronormative,” you can feel fairly assured that a large number of people will immediately stop listening and stop taking you seriously the moment you use it.

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Police spies out of lives

Because this is important.

through the looking glass

Most unromantic thing anyone ever said to me on a date: “You’re not a police spy are you?” He meant it too, and he was totally justified in asking*. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the “Oh, shit” look in his eyes.

There isn’t anything I can add to the coverage in the Guardian, Channel Four documentary or new book from Paul Lewis and Rob Evans other than repeat this quote below from former undercover officer Peter Francis, referred to in the most recent Guardian peice.

The lowest point I reached morally was when I was standing outside Kennington police station for the Brian Douglas justice campaign in May 1995. It was a candlelit vigil and his relatives were all there […] By me passing on all the campaign information – everything that the family was planning and organising through Youth Against Racism in Europe – I felt I…

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The Citizen’s Income

I keep referring back to this post, so I thought I might as well re-blog it…

The Earthbound Report

One of the recurring ideas that crops up in alternative economics circles is the citizen’s income. In a nutshell, it’s a universal and unconditional payment made to every adult in the country, every month. This provides everyone with a ‘guaranteed minimum income’, which is an alternative name for it.

We have it in a form in the UK already, through child benefit payments. A full scale citizens income would include adults too, with different rates for different stages of life. Everyone would receive it, and it would replace child benefit, state pensions, unemployment benefits and a host of other tax credits.

Reactions to this idea generally divide in two. The first group is ‘brilliant – free money from the government’. The second comes from those who think about it a moment longer and realise that it would be funded through taxes. Then they ask why you’d want to give benefits…

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Oolong is using WordPress.com to follow various blogs, and so forth, but doesn’t really keep a blog here. Try these instead:

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