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Jane Eyre at the Rosemary Branch
From The Alligator Superblog, 3rd May 2013
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Why bother? Why would you even try to adapt Jane Eyre into a dramatic production? The novel is an almost perfect period piece preserving the architecture of a specific moment in English prose, whose effect largely depends on the possibilities of the first person narrator’s voice and the unimaginable ugliness of its two central characters. You may as well adapt it into a milkshake.But still directors try, drawn in by the sheer gravitational force of the plot and the protagonists. You can see ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 16th April 2013
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The hang is not a drum. It is a hang. Do not call it a drum. This misnomer creates "a ripple effect of misinformation that leads to damaged instruments, physical injury and mental and emotional turbulence," according to the Hangbauhaus of Berne. It might look to your untutored eyes like a steel drum with a semi-sentient dustbin somewhere in its recent genealogy, but this could not be less accurate. The hang, plural hanghang , was born with the 21st century in Switzerland, and derives ...
The DRC Elections: Raising more questions than answers?
From The Alligator Superblog, 11th February 2012
Kabila’s loss of legitimacy may well lead to a destabilisation of the periphery of the Congo
The DRC made the headlines at the end of last year for electoral malpractice and violence and was treated with weary cynicism by the majority of newspapers. Joseph Kabila had as predicted been returned to the presidency, a position he had held since the assassination of his father during the brutal 2nd Congo War (1998-2003). Kabila had been faced by a divided opposition, hamstrung by internal divisions and tenuously lead by Etienne Tshisekedi. Yet this was an election which, rather than providi ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 11th February 2012
the “graduate premium” is estimated at around £100 000 across a lifetime, well above the new cost of £27 000
Politics has often obscured economics in the raucous debate on tuition fees, perhaps rightly so given the plausible case that to model education as a good at all is a flawed approach to the issue. But if opponents of the increase wanted to fight fire with fire the field of information economics provides an argument that undermines a major part of the coalition’s case. The argument is an application of a classic paper by Michael Spence, in which he investigates the role of signalling in allev ...
The War on Terror is far from won
From The Alligator Superblog, 11th February 2012
The failure of Al Qaeda –and indeed, any extremist Islamic group – to gain footholds in the ongoing revolutionary movements across the Middle East was an indication that their influence was fading
In the past week the headlines have looked like the stuff of fairy tales: Cinderella has got her Prince, and the bad guy is dead. Am I the only one who’s uneasy about this? The reaction to Bin Laden’s assassination has been terrifying. Thousands of people gathered outside the White House with face paint and flags chanting “USA! USA!”: you’d be forgiven for thinking it was July 4th. It’s cathartic, sure. It’s been a long time coming. Bin Laden’s evasiveness over the past deca ...
Moldova’s 2011 Local Elections will confirm its European Orientation
From The Alligator Superblog, 11th February 2012
it looks like Moldova’s path to membership may still take several decades
Moldova remains stuck in a state of political upheaval initiated by the inability of the Communists to win the constitutionally required 61 seats to elect a President in the April 2009 parliamentary elections. The two years since then have seen several additional early votes – the last in November – but while the three-party coalition that forms the ruling Alliance for European Integration (AIE) has gained a few more MP’s each time, they still have only 59, and so are unable to elect one ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 20th December 2010
Communications have devolved to partisan blogs and cable news networks, which reinforce prejudice rather than informing readers
Bruce Ackerman’s most recent book, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Harvard 2010), reflects his dual academic identity. As a political scientist interested in historical institutionalism (including its rational choice perspective), he identifies weaknesses in the United States government’s structures; as a lawyer, he attempts to find solutions. He carefully qualifies his project at the outset, saying that he is not interested in the US's status as a world power, which may co ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 19th December 2010
Making the desert bloom has always been difficult but in the Gulf a young, modern-minded government has spent the best part of a decade changing the economic and legal structure of the region, allowing the conditions for 'seeds' of business and investment to root in the politically unstable, continually changing sands of the desert. People wanting to see how to set up an entirely new centre of finance and business (and how to avoid the pitfalls along the way), should head for the desert city of ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 19th December 2010
Armed with the three and a half hours (and even less, for some of my compatriots) of dead, alcohol-fuelled sleep, we made our way across Magdalen Bridge as the grog and weariness lingered stubbornly in our bodies. That awful feeling, that sense of piercing, vacuum-like emptiness in one’s stomach - that was the prominent sensation I had. It was a distinctly unpromising morning, suffused with the smell of weak rain; all activity occurred against a backdrop of large, impenetrable grey clouds. I d ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 19th December 2010
The sun is burning overhead, white-hot in the unforgiving emptiness of the sky. Its relentless heat scorches the stones on which I am sitting and turns the dry earth into cloying red dust that cakes my tired feet. My limbs feel limp and lifeless, my energy evaporating like water to vanish in the blinding light. Above me, the crumbling walls of the citadel cast their feeble shade on my burning body. What I wouldn't give for a cold drink. “Chai?” With true Syrian hospitality (and more than a ...
Question Time: Was the BNP worth the wait?
From The Alligator Superblog, 1st November 2009
while Le Pen has been capable of some truly compelling oratory in his time, Griffin has all the demagogic appeal of a teaspoon
It seems, then, that the BNP’s appearance on Question Time (22 October) failed to incite the nationalistic fervour which had some critics biting their nails. The closest we seemed to get to some decent violence came, ironically enough, from the anti-fascist demonstrators outside the BBC London studio. The whole furore has been, quite frankly, a huge anticlimax. What was all the fuss about? It’s not like this was Nick (or ‘Dick’, as one audience wit dubbed him) Griffin’s debut on tele ...
Why calling it extremism is not enough
From The Alligator Superblog, 9th November 2009
the development of strong ethnic enclaves, such as those emerging in northern towns, cannot be allowed to become the cracks which break the skin of national identity
On Saturday 10th October there was a story on Reuters UK which was not to be found in any major newspaper. This was a demonstration in which “around 2,000 rival protesters congregated in the Piccadilly Gardens area [of Manchester].” Skirmishes erupted between the English Defence League, a far right group, protesting against what they called "radical Islam" and campaigners from Unite Against Fascism. 48 people were arrested. This article will not deal with overt racists and woul ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 25th October 2009
when all else fails, 'law and order' can be dragged from the doldrums to give some meat to otherwise shaky electoral platforms
Holding true to the maxim of ‘medium voter theory,’ by which an appeal to the rhetoric of ‘tough love’ and ‘zero tolerance’ strikes a much-needed chord with the public, the already-endemic problem of substance in British politics has been further glossed over with a coat of social conservatism and a noticeable side dish of hang em’ and flog em.’ Whether it’s in Gordon Brown’s plan to incarcerate teenage single mothers in a state-run remake of the Magdalen Sisters’ laundri ...
The problem of the 50p tax rate
From The Alligator Superblog, 18th September 2009
If you make the rich hurt enough to leave the country, the poor will hurt harder for it. The only way to stop it without lowering taxes would be to forcibly stop people from leaving the country
The problem with the increase of the highest tier of income tax is that it will not result in more revenue being raised from the wealthiest in society. Though this may sound counter-intuitive, it is true; it has been shown that by taxing the highest earners less, revenue raised from them is increased. This tax is not intended to improve the public finances, and is simply a way of punishing those in society who make more money than the rest, taxing the relatively wealthy until those pips squeak. ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 4th June 2009
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
Franz Kafka once wrote: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” Angela Merkel, however, has preferred caution, even though nations with similar recessions have unveiled huge stimulus packages. Her finance minister Peer Steinbruck recently warned of a “crisis after the crisis” led by inflation from excessive government debt. Germany has offered some emergency stimulus measures, in total 1.5% of GDP in 2009 and another 2.0% in 2010, just meeting the IMF’s November rec ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 16th May 2009
I think someone needs to make the case that it wouldn’t cost any more to halve the number of MPs and pay the survivors the difference.
The US Congress comprises 435 congressmen and 100 senators. Congressmen serve districts of, on average, 693,000 residents. With Senators this clearly varies by state size, but the mean state population was roughly 6m in 2008. Hence the cost of the $174,000 (about £115,000) that both congressmen and senators get is minimal - 25 cents (16p) and 3 cents (2p) per year per citizen respectively. This is the base salary and excludes staff and expenses, as Oliver Harvey points out. The average constit ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 12th May 2009
In approaching their roles for Mathias’ production, they even considered swapping roles on a nightly basis
Can there really be occasion to go and see Sean Mathias’ production of Waiting for Godot? For most, the play infamously described as a piece ‘in which nothing happens, twice’ needs only to be watched just the once, its drawn out pauses and circular dialogue creating an exercise in waiting for the end. Yet this is a play that has famously reinvented itself in a variety of different settings – apartheid South Africa, San Quentin prison, in New Orleans suffering post-Katrina and as Susan ...
Out (even further) in the wilderness
From The Alligator Superblog, 4th May 2009
If they do not want to spend the next decade in the wilderness, Republicans must stop kowtowing to Rush Limbaugh, tell Dick Cheney to shut up for good, and start offering some practical solutions to America’s problems.
Senator Arlen Spector’s (D – PA) surprise announcement that he was to become only the 21st Senator in the United States’ history to switch parties came as a shock to many people both inside and outside the beltway. It has the potential to change the course of American politics for a decade or more. Spector’s decision to leave the GOP makes him the 57th Democratic Senator in a Congress in which two Independent Senators also caucus with them. When Al Franken of Minnesota is finally seated ...
Exploding Political Platitudes
From The Alligator Superblog, 4th May 2009
Ministerial expense fiddling, changes to the Bank Charter Act, and Daniel Hannan's momentous blasting of the Prime Minister; knowledge of all of this was gleaned not from the mainstream media, but from these bloggers.
If anybody was still under the impression that the blogosphere was but an entertaining sideshow to political life, the events of 11 April 2009 have conclusively established that internet activism has finally matured in this country. Paul Staines, aka. Guido Fawkes of Order-Order, in his orchestration of the downfall of Labour spinner Damien McBride over particularly insidious e-mailed plans for an anti-Tory sleaze campaign, has shown how one man, a keyboard, and a bit of noise can accomplish g ...
Green's troubling attitude to democracy
From The Alligator Superblog, 30th March 2009
This week Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, declared that opposing windfarms should become viewed as ‘socially irresponsible’
James Macadam is right to point out that climate change campaigners must revise their sanctimonious rhetoric if they want popular appeal in a time of belt-tightening and penny-counting. However, the ill-informed ramblings of climate camp enthusiasts, the footsoldiers of the movement, are relatively harmless. Far more worrying is the language emanating from the government itself, which has taken on dizzying heights of aloofness and abstraction. This week Ed Miliband, the climate change secretar ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 21st January 2009
Editorials and Banners that paint Israelis as evil-occupiers or saintly democrats say nothing meaningful about them. Their rap-songs and cars however can tell us what the BBC and the Guardian have been missing – how do these Jews think? Israeli suburbia is as boring as anywhere else, would it not be for the politics. Flags hang from porches, somebody occasionally comes outside to ‘do a bit of clipping’ and very occasionally, a stray-cat will get run over, giving everyone something to ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 23rd January 2009
Lebanese rap lets us feel Arab - and teaches us this feels nothing like the outdated stereotypes the UK media is satisfied with. Wars colour the nations involved in the fatigue-shades of their frontline participants, and nowhere is this truer than in the story of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The rolling-news channels and the plebeian levels of opinion this information overload has led to stick to their stereotypes. There’s an unwillingness to think past the sensation, to cast aside the scrip ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 5th January 2009
Obama has diligently joined the ranks of Washington politicians who have chosen to reinvent reality in Palestine for reasons utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary person.
Barack Obama has not taken long to disappoint. With a vacuum of world leadership over the tragedy in Gaza and a nauseating deference being displayed by the outgoing administration to Israel, the time was perfect for Obama to start the change in American politics he had so long and robustly advertised. The Israeli government, determined to take the pulse of the new administration, was listening intently to the transitional offices in Chicago for word or prayer. They might as well not have bother ...
Alligators and economic crises
From The Alligator Superblog, 4th January 2009
Public confidence in the banking system is derisory. If the banks continue to show contempt for the wider public, it will feed into the hands of a resurgent left and a polarising politics, which will do them serious harm.
2008 was a good year for news. The credit crunch, which was initially very good bad news because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with human beings, quickly turned sour as collapsing house prices in America and Europe began to feed a nasty recession. By March the American elections had changed into a stage show of such astonishingly high calibre that it maintained the attention of the world for the rest of the year. Meanwhile the two major world conflicts turned corners – in Iraq one o ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 20th February 2009
There is no doubt that Italy's economic situation is deteriorating, but revolution is in the air. The economic downturn is forcing complacent Italian politicians to consider reform.
Italy has been faced with a number of economic, political, and social challenges (the Naples rubbish crisis and the collapse of Alitalia to name but two) with most of its European allies turning their back. Now the United States, Italy’s strongest bilateral ally, has elected a president who left Italian’s insulted by leaving Rome out of his tour of key allied capitals. Leaders around the world would do well to remember that although it is no longer the case that all roads lead to Rome, much ...
From The Alligator Superblog, 25th December 2008
Google's voice search interpreted a Scotsman's query for 'iPhone' as 'sex' then 'sledding', and a Welshman's as 'gorillas' and 'kitchen sink'. That aside, the technology is nearing perfection.
1. People will discover the 'Remove from Friends' button on Facebook Some Oxford students who aren't Union hacks will see the number of their Facebook friends climb into the 1000s. They will decide it's time to say goodbye to all the people they've never met, those friends of friends they met once at a party, and anybody with more than seventeen applications on their profile. 2. Smartphone apps will explode... ...making some people very rich. Since Apple's App store opened in July iPho ...