Category Archives: History

Game theory rules (sic)

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Saw the BBC2 programme on game theory last night which was amusing to see on a number of levels. The great mathematician John Nash expounding a theory about people’s selfish when he was mentally ‘ill’; R D Laing walking around in a cravat; the BBC in sonorous tones telling us when/how/why ‘we’ were being manipulated. But for me the best was seeing Margaret Thatcher talking about freedom in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall (garden wall?:-). And so obviously now seeing on her face the lack of real comprehension as to what she was talking about – freedom that is. Ah well, it’s tough being an agent of history.

PS: See my own small contribution to the anti-psychiatry movement at the Foucault Tribunal back in 1998; was fun at the time hanging out in east Berlin; chatting to Kate Millett in the workers’ canteen, and mentioning to her that James Earl Ray had just died.

The History (4) Boys

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Diane caught up with Leicester radical historian Ned Newitt the other day and bemoaned the fact that I wasn’t ‘doing history’ any more. OK, that’s partly just another common mum type theme about sons not doing what their mothers want. But I confess since ‘Uni’ (1987) I haven’t entirely been quiet. After all I did help the 30th anniversary campaign (1998) with Dr Coby Smith to re-try the real killers of Dr Martin Luther King, re-writing history in the process. But that’s mothers for you. Never happy.

PS: Looking forward to unveiling of the MLK scuplture in Washington DC next year, April 2008, also a US election year I believe? I’m sure these connections are not lost on Rev Al Sharpton, from what he was saying about the lasting legacy of slavery on the Daily Show. Funny thing is how going to Brazil I found out more slaves went there than the US; maybe that’s why Snoop did his video from there? The connections are there to be discovered, that’s history. (Funny, didn’t I hear earlier this month that the study of slavery is going to be part of the National Curriculum in the UK, as part of the study of the British Empire?).