Happy International Women's Day

Sorry this blog has been slow again of late people. I'd do a proper post today signifying International Women's Day (I was thinking of either an appraisal of This I Cannot Forget, the fascinating memoirs of Anna Larina, Nikolai Bukharin's wife, or possibly Cathy Porter's biography of Alexandra Kollantai that I picked up from Oxfam this week), but am suffering from a cold and so unable to muster the energy just now. Also in the pipeline for putting up on this blog are my thoughts on the relationship between 'Marxism and Anarchism', but I may wait until I have read Ian Birchall's reply to Paul Blackledge's article on that subject in the recent ISJ has appeared. If readers have any order of preference for these forthcoming posts then feel free to let me know.

Still, while I am here, I will link to the latest Charlie Brooker piece, if only because it notes astutely that the 'haunted elephant' Gordon Brown has 'slowly come to resemble a lumbering, doomy Mr Snuffaluffagus with all the carefree joie de vivre of the Kursk submarine disaster.' Which is true.

On David Cameron, Brooker is also astute. 'He's a replicant; an Auton; a humanoid; a piece of adaptive software that's learned to appeal to your likes and dislikes – "customers who bought Tony Blair also bought the following"...'

This is important information to bear in mind, not least because both Brown and Cameron have tried to make the forthcoming British general election all about their 'character' and 'personality' as much as matters of policy, and the two politicians 'characters' and 'personalities' are going to be even harder to avoid than usual because of the American style TV debates between the main party leaders we are all going to be subjected to.

Brooker has also penned an amusing article about passwords recently, while the two other random articles I came across recently was a polemic about the film Avatar by the comedian Slavoj Zizek, and a critical analysis of family history by the eminent Marxist philosopher Jeremy Hardy.