Three Monkeys Online has always had a problem in terms of categorising, and nowhere is this more evident than with our current affairs section. Originally, way back in 2004, it was termed ‘politics’, then it moved to ‘current affairs’ for wont of a more inclusive term – but here you’ll find articles and interviews on politics, economics, human rights, feminism, church and state relations, philosophy, and protest. There’s a healthy dose of essays and opinion pieces focused in particular on Irish, Italian, and Spanish politics – as TMO started out as a magazine based in Ireland, Italy, and Spain – but as the magazine has grown, so has our writing base. So, whether you want to call it ‘current affairs’, ‘politics’, ‘alternative culture’ or some other term, we hope you’ll find plenty to interest you here.
Sins of the Flesh: The Mislabeling of Surf and Turf
“The flesh is the surface of the unknown.” – Victor Hugo On January 15th, The Food Safety Authority of Ireland announced the discovery of horse meat tainted beef being produced, packed, and shipped from slaughterhouses in the UK and Ireland. ABP Food Group, the company deemed responsible, suspended production in its Co. Monaghan plant. As [...]
Free Ride – Robert Levine on copyright, piracy, and culture
It’s an extremely cold (but not, we insist rainy) day in Dublin and I am sitting down in Hodges Figgis Bookshop on Dawson St. I am not alone. There are a couple of other likely and some unlikely audience candidates dotting the seats which have been set up for tonight’s main event- a talk by [...]
The Port Huron Statement – Fifty Years On
As we wait for the definitive manifesto of Occupy Movement to be written – if that is possible given the diverse range of opinions and voices that are associated with it – this is arguably an opportune moment to look back 50 years at another radical grouping , which did succeed in putting together and [...]
Che Guevara & Ireland’s Quisling Capitalism
The controversy over Galway City Council’s proposal to erect a statue to Che Guevara to commemorate his family links to the city (his mother Anna Elizabeth was a Lynch and born in the city), is indicative of a wider discourse in Irish society. There is already a controversial – and popular – Che Guevara Festival in [...]
Poland’s Recipe for Wealth: Work till you Drop
“That pension systems are unable to finance the retirement of ever increasing numbers of longer-lived pensioners nobody in aging Europe doubts,” writes Joanna Solska in Poland’s biggest selling, influential current affairs magazine Polityka1. Meanwhile Prime Minister Tusk insists that, “the aim of the pensions bill is to bring pleasure.” The proposed bill raises the retirement [...]
5 Things You Can Do To Honour International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is at once a problematic and worthy idea; Shoe-horning half the world’s population into a day on the UN’s calendar, along with other hard-pressed categories like migratory birds (14-15 May) and world intellectual property (26th of April) should make you more than a little uneasy, as should the fact that more than [...]
Women Under Siege – the use of rape as a weapon of war
The International Criminal Court made legal history in February 2002, when it ruled in what has become known as the’rape camp‘ case that the systematic rape of women in the town of Foca constituted a crime against humanity. In Slavenka Drakulić’s book They Would Never Hurt a Fly – War Criminals on Trial in the [...]
Writing the Riots – Paul Goodman and Growing up Absurd
In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is [...]
Translating Egypt’s Revolution
As is so often the way with beginnings, I was looking for someone and something else completely when I stumbled on the class Samia Mehrez is teaching. Professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, she came up with the idea of Translating the Revolution and organised its schedule within weeks of Mubarak’s [...]
The Global Minotaur – Economist Yanis Varoufakis in interview
Have you had the suspicion that simple narratives about subprime mortgages, last minute bail-outs, and sweaty-palmed bankers fail to adequately explain what has happened to the global economy since 2008? If so, then I can heartily recommend you pick up a copy of Yanis Varoufakis‘s The Global Minotaur – America, Europe and the Future of [...]
Religion for Atheists – Alain de Botton Interview
When religion and atheisim collide, at least in the columns of most newspapers and magazines, the arguments usually boil down to the essentials of faith vs reason; to whether religious belief has a place in secular society; to the supposed intolerance of the ‘new atheism’ or to whether atheism is in itself merely a sophisticated [...]
Changing The Public Discourse – The Greek and French Elections
William Wall argues that election results in France and Greece puts the left/right discourse firmly back on the map, after thirty years of right-wing hegemony. What is happening is the radicalisation of public discourse, a possibility that terrifies those who benefit most from the status quo. The Eighth of May was the Fête de la Victoire in France. [...]
This shameful sacrifice of Greece to the gods of the market
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity. The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running [...]
Ireland and Italy propose SOPA like legislation
While Irish and Italian citizens participated in the protests against the US SOPA / PIPA bills, it seems that their own Governments are in the process of introducing very similar measures – perhaps even harsher. The Irish government is acting in the wake of a court case (EMI and Others Vs UPC) where record companies [...]
WordPress joins the protest against Protect IP / SOPA
WordPress has mushroomed in size over the last couple of years, and its estimated that 22 in every 100 new domains registered in the States are running wordpress. And it’s not only small bloggers and internet marketers running the software – they claim that 14.7% of the top million websites are using their free open [...]
And Now for the Tyrants in Our Heads – How Nasr Abu Zayd might have read the Arab Uprisings
I attended the talk one evening last June, upstairs in a second-hand bookshop a short walk from my home. The journalist had reported in the past from Iran and Iraq and was now just back from Libya, the outcome of the war there still uncertain. During the discussion which followed a human rights lawyer who [...]
European Economic Crisis: A dividing response.
Much has been written on the similarities between the current economic crisis and the infamous one of September 1929.Simplistically, an economic crisis implies the forgetting of others, fostering a state of nature of all against all. During a crisis people, as nations seek their own interest, which in the short run is divergent from the [...]
