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Call to the Bar

Both readers of this blog will have noticed that posting has slowed in recent months. Only three additions in all of 2022! A decade ago I would easily post that many in a week.

The reason for this has been a major distraction: I’ve been studying for a Bar Practice LLM. This year I conceived of myself as living in a movie study montage, with a singular focus on the work required for upcoming seminars. Resisting the urge to distract myself with a 2,000 word blog-rant about free speech or the Bill of Rights (et cetera) has been difficult but necessary. And I haven’t read a novel in months.

But the sacrifice paid off. I was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in July. Here’s the proof:

Of course, the demands on my time have not been alleviated. I’m now doing advocacy work and seeking pupillage, so logging my thoughts on current affairs is still a lower priority, and the paucity of posts will be prolonged.

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Cory Doctorow and the Memex Method

Cory Doctorow, China Mieville and Robert Sharp

Cory Doctorow has been blogging for 20 years. In this marvellous post he reflects on how the process has helped his writing and thinking. A blog can be a commonplace book, an ‘annotated web history,’ nucleation, and a memex or brain-extension.

I’m sixteen years a blogger. Back when I started, meta-blogging (i.e. blogging about blogging) was a big chunk of the discourse, with everyone trying to justify their hobby to themselves, to other bloggers and, perhaps most importantly, to the naysayers who mocked us as freaks in pyjamas bashing away at our keyboards.

Continue reading “Cory Doctorow and the Memex Method”
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Employment Tribunals: The New Free Speech Front Line

Back in February I wrote a post on the judgment of the Employment Tribunal in Seyi Omooba v Michael Garret Associates Ltd. The main conclusion: Employment Tribunals have become the free speech front line.

Last week I went to look for the post in order to tweet it at Sean Jones QC (see above), only to discover I had never actually published it!

I have now made it live and it appears further down this blog’s timeline. You can read it here.

Continue reading “Employment Tribunals: The New Free Speech Front Line”
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Blogging as a Mode of Thinking

I’ve updated my WordPress blog software to version 4.9 and in doing so thought I would try their latest default theme. So the website looks a little different but all the content is the same as it was last week.
While doing the update I messed up something with the server permissions and everyone was locked out. This is something of a test post to check we’re back to normal.
Over on another eponymous blog, Austin Kleon writes about his experiment in daily blogging. This observation feels true to me:

I had forgotten how wonderful blogging is as a mode of thinking. Blogging is, for me, more about discovering what I have to say, and tweeting more about having a thought, then saying it the right way.

Indeed. Blogging is iterative writing. Continue reading “Blogging as a Mode of Thinking”

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Nazi Punching

In a recent post, I listed the titles of all 53 of my unpublished blog drafts. This obviously prompted me to go back and look at some of them.
Among those still languishing in ‘blog purgatory’ was a post ‘On Punching White Supremacists’ and was written in January, when the dos and don’ts of Nazi Punching became a hot topic of conversation after a particular proto-Nazi was punched live on TV.
The post appeared to be a complete thing, and I am unsure why I did not publish it at the time. Perhaps I forgot. Perhaps I felt I should not be ‘on record’ as being either for or against Nazi Punching—Both positions are morally perilous, as the post itself explains.
Or perhaps I felt that the world simply did not need another ‘hot take’ on Nazi Punching.
Anyway, it seemed silly to keep the thing in limbo. The arguments for and against are a useful aide memoir, even if my conclusions are ambiguous. So I published it.
You can read the post here. Continue reading “Nazi Punching”