In which I discuss some issues that I saw on the news today, Wednesday 14th October 2015..
Discussed:
In which I write about my reasons for and approach to writing. Meta, I know. Also slightly funny as I haven’t actually published anything else in 2015, and this is the first post in my restarted blogging.
Just thought put a holding post up. Now that I’m back at Oxford for my final year I don’t have as much time and am not writing up blog posts, which is why this has gone quiet. At some point in the future I’ll hopefully get back to it in some form!
“David Cameron to ‘scrap’ Human Rights Act for new ‘British Bill of Rights’” – newspaper headline.
The Conservative Party (“Tories”) said at their recent party conference that one of their election pledges is that they will introduce a “British Bill of Rights” instead of the European one. In this article I’m going to try and explain the current situation (we as, as per usual, insufficiently educated on this, woefully misinformed, and misled by politicians and some media sources – not necessarily intentionally as such, but part of media and human nature in the current day is that we want sensation and quick information, not to actually read and focus and learn).
With some short wordy bits and also a video of my mum doing parkour for the first time.
Public Misconception of Parkour
Imagine all you had ever seen of running was the 100m sprint in the Olympics.
Parkour is a non-mainstream, not-very-well-known discipline. As such, it hasn’t been understood all too well by people in society in general. The media loves spectacle and sensation, so they portray parkour as a daredevil stunt discipline. The parkour that’s made it into film, TV, and music videos is the performance aspect, where people are doing things to look impressive. Parkour videos put out onto the internet are often self-selected by people who want to show off what they’re doing, so there are many parts of parkour that don’t get shared as often. Not only do we not see all of the “behind the scenes” training of all of the people in the videos, but we don’t see anything who don’t make the cool videos, and there are many people who don’t make many videos.
This isn’t what parkour really is though, this is just one aspect of it.
“some quote about humans being meant to move” – many people in the fitness industry, evolutionary biologists, paleoanthropologists, etc. Exercise is good for you, right? (If you aren’t in agreement so far, then probably stop reading now. That’s kind of an underlying premise of this whole post.) The way we view ‘exercise’ in our society […]
The Parkour Generations (PKGen) coaching group run a weekly interview on their website, in which they ask different parkour-people some questions. They’ve been doing it for a few years now and have worked their way down the list to eventually get to me. The version on their website was the shortened version, but here’s the […]
In which I discuss jogging and the sort of thing I do instead of jogging. “Alex, you make exercising less shitty.“ “I sweat a lot more than on a normal run but come back feeling like I’ve had a great time.“ A Lengthy Introduction Read this if you want more background to what I’m about […]
This is the second post with my reflections on an incident during which I got punched in the face and had a tooth knocked out, story to be found in part one of this article. Written on August 13, 2014, so not true for how I currently feel about it! Fear after the Event Even […]
If this were a buzzfeed article, it would be called “You won’t believe why this man got chased down the street (twice!) and beaten up to steal his phone.”. But that would be a misrepresentation: I didn’t get beaten up, and it’s only unbelievable if you get stuck in the idea that the world ought […]