Fundamentally, I’m an analyst. I look at situations, events, people, companies and countries, breaking them down into their most basic components and mechanisms. I dissect things, understand them and work out how to improve them. I’ve honed this skill through several years as a computer programmer, but now I’ve turned my eye on bigger, more abstract problems.
The medium through which I usually work is writing. I’m nearly at the end of my first book and I’ve just started a second. Otherwise, I write short articles, posted on this site and occasionally elsewhere. I also do some speaking, mainly through Bettakultcha.
To read more about me, please see my biography page. I’m available for hire as a writer, speaker and action hero.
Generally speaking, I try not to get too hung up on the individual failings of articles in the right wing press. I could spend from now until Christmas objectively criticising just one edition of the Express or Mail – and they are tame compared to their American counterparts. Every so often however, they seem to lose the plot a little bit, drop their pseudo-moderate cover and output what can only be described as textbook, blatant propoganda, the likes of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud. Every once in a while, the logical jumps made become so cavernous, that one is forced to consider the possibility that the Daily Mail is in fact a working proof of Poe’s Law; that their ranks are in fact filled with undercover liberals, pretending to hold conservative viewpoints, while deliberately presenting themselves as idiots, in order to discredit the conservative ideology.
Press editorial standards, including those supposedly upheld by the PPC, state that there should be a separation between news and opinion. That means that the DM is free, within reason, to publish its racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, xenophobic, hysterical and illogical babble, so long is it is clearly portrayed as opinion. It is also free, should it choose to make such a bold leap, to publish actual facts, about actual things, things that actually happened. What it is not free to do, is to mix the two up. Of course, this means that yesterday it went ahead and did exactly that, exploiting the death of a young man to push its anti-drugs message. Continued
Since the start of the financial crisis and the bank bailout, there has been a marked increase in public interest regarding executive pay. It’s not that executives didn’t earn ridiculous salaries before then, but because we were in a boom … Continued
David Cameron has praised the announcement by Asda that it will be creating approximately five thousand new jobs, as part of an expansion drive this year. The plans involve the opening of twenty-five new stores, three new depots and the … Continued