J.g. ballard

Thursday

Sam Kriss

In defence of country-pop

I am aware that the music I enjoy is widely considered to be the worst ever produced in human history. Worse than a roomful of children with recorders, cymbals and malice; worse than a poultry abattoir. Every so often, someone will ask me what I listen to, and I’m forced to tell them the truth. ‘These days,’ I’ll say, ‘it’s mostly country.’ Their nose will wrinkle, as if I’ve just let out a stealthy fart in their direction. ‘But old country, right?’ they’ll say, almost pleading. ‘Classic country?’ No, not classic country.

Thursday

Sam Leith

How do you enforce anarchy?

From our US edition

I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so we started from a position of, at least in some respects, presumed sympathy. I asked him how on earth a large society could hope to run itself without rules or institutions at all (this may have been a slight under-reading of this distinguished political philosophy, but he didn’t correct me). Anyway, he got jolly cross and did a lot of shouting about how the post office was anarchosyndicalism in action. But what about pedophiles, I yelled (we’d had a lot of cider). How does the post office deal with them, eh? There was some answer to do with communal social exclusion as an alternative to the industro-carceral complex.

anarchy