No, just looking

Mmm, thoughtcrimes

2008-05-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

Interesting to see that some psychologist has come up with a questionnaire to weed out potential terrorists out from the rest of merely pissed off mulsim citizens angry at the war in iraq and the erosion of civil liberties. Not that this could be abused, oh no. I’m sure the security services and the hysterical press won’t call for it to be made mandatory for all muslims. Never mind that its meant to pick up anyone with terrorist tendencies, because white people can’t of course be terrorists anymore. It will be interesting to see how the majority of the population would give answers that make them supposedly ‘vulnerable to terrorist indoctrination’ I think that includes anyone who mindlessly follows any ideology be it political, nationalism or football teams and would commit acts of violence because someone else tells them to.

This combined with social services saying they can tell whether people are likely to be criminals from an early age we can nicely pigeonhole everyone in concentration camps who don’t fit the criteria of the cheery and prosperous new Britain. Can’t help but feel the camps might be quite full…

Gun fun

2008-05-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

I can’t honestly believe Brown has backed teaching shooting and military training at school. Surely it must be a joke? Do I even need to show how shit an idea it is? is the fact its supported by Norman Tebbit relevent? is irony dead again, so very quickly?

The idea that if you teach a kid from a disadvantaged area how to shoot, put them around guns and tell them gun are ok, and this will stop the youth crime in urban areas is madder than voting for Boris Johnson if your not already a lord or baron. Does it even need saying that this will glorify guns more than any number of gangsta rappers? That teaching kids how to shoot each other more accurately is a good thing? Have we learned fuck all from American school killings?

Need I add as well the associated problems that come from the military lifestyle? The domestic violence, the culture of abuse at barracks and the related substance abuse? Do we really want to inculcate kids with a message that was stopped in the fifties with the end of national service?

By treating kids like they do in the army do we expect to gain their respect? By treating them scum, ordering them about, taking away their identity and expecting them to all act the same and think the same do we really expect a healthier society?

This will help nothing, it panders only to the worst of the knee jerk old right who believe that violence and punishment are the only way to deal with anything they don’t like and are thus the worst kind of example to set to any young people. I hope that just because Brown backs it the scheme will wither and die like all his other plans.

Thankfully at least a few people have seen sanity, even some of the ‘broken britain’ brigade have said that giving kids guns will not exactly help the situation where their loved ones were killed and have spoken out.

The only reasons i can think they are doing this is the same reason they play classical music outside shops. It makes it son uncool that kids don’t want to be around there. Maybe getting authority figures to say its ok to shoot guns and order people about then the kids will turn against it…

The new nationalism

2008-05-19T03:13:00.000-07:00

So Brown is trying to resuscitate the idea of Britain, good luck to him because there isn’t one. There are a hundred different ideas of Britain, the nature of how we live our lives means that we filter out everything we don’t find relevant or are uncomfortable with, we create our own communities by our own choices. By the papers we read and the films we see and the people we associate with, taking nation to mean race or common identity is a misnomer.

The fact is the modern world allows people to hermetically seal themselves off from the rest of their countrymen who might disagree with their perception of the world. Cars for instance allow the driver and passengers to take their environemtn with them, from music to smell to design and make. There are reallyb only a few palces left where people of all walks of lifea are force to merge, we can choose our pubs and our schools and our neighbourhoods, and even in these shared places people do not actually mix that much.

You can see this on those rare geographical expressions of shared identity, such as train stations or airports. The one I observe the most is the Tube, which is a greater leveler than any other kind of public transport.

There for the first and only time will you see city gents actually share space with those who clean their toilets, students stand too close to bricklayers and nurses to civil servants. Of course its not a perfect melting pot of every British person, some can afford to cruise by taxi everywhere, and the rest of britain outside London doesn’t really get a look in unless in comes to the city for a show and a chance to gawp at how rude we all are.

The main thing to notice is that nobody really shares anything beyond physical space, everyone sticks their head in a book or listens to music, all of them reinforcing cultural markers. But you can at least observe those ambassadors of the other nations, you can listen to them talk about posh things or poor things or arty things or lowbrow things. There at least you get to see the nature of Britain but the idea that we must absolutely have shared values as something of a nonsense. Just let us all have our own Britains, let us pick and choose what applies to us rather than just labeling us and restricting what is or is not britain to a popular vote or worse the decisions of politicians.

The curse of Gordon

2008-04-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

I fear for the fate of anything endorsed by Gordon brown, the man has failure and compromise written all over him. When faced with a decision he makes a compromise that satisfies no one and fails to solve the problem at hand. Whoever he endorses in anything will be tainted with its association, I fear then for Ken who’s got Brown’s backing, for the MDC in Zimbabwe and for anyone who thinks that Brown will win an election for labour. Much as he may be a competent leader in many ways, he can get things done and he has results to back him up he is just fucked by a combination of fate, inertia and his own lack of decisive charisma to be being a john major figure.

Take the credit crisis, not his fault, in as much as he oversaw the treasury for a decade and failed to prepare for a event he must have known was coming one day. As PM he gets to oversee a recession and inevitably have to bail out the city whenever they squeel for it. Which brings us to northern rock, which brown managed to fuck on his own. He did the right (Ish) thing in the end by nationalizing the fucker but ummed and ahhed for ages, looked indecisive, failed to set the agenda or defend the principle of nationalization. He also let the bank fuck off with all the good accounts and let the british taxpayer pick up the tab for the shitty debts they’d accrued.

Before that of course was the election that never happened, where for whatever reasons he lost his bottle. Fair enough if brown had seen a genuine killer crisis to come he would have battened down the hatches but it was a matter of style. He let them talk up an election then seemed to loose his nerve, a thing a PM must never do. Fact was he could have called the election and would have won fairly easily, if he waits another year or more then it gets ever likely that Cameron will ooze his way into power. He should realise by now when you are the incumbent of a long running government all that will happen during your reign no matter how good you may be is that there will always be a string of corruption scandals and sleaze that will drown out any new policies or agendas you set. Ken Livingstone has found this and he is twice the savvy politician that Brown is. For all his power play brown is just a slightly insecure control freak, like good old Blair but without the nous and pretending to be a regular guy.

Another obvious pointer to Brown’s inherent indecisive nature in power is the Olympic flame nonsense. His behaviour showed up in stark contract to Australia’s new PM Kevin Rudd who made it clear he will take no part in the flame’s journey across Australia and that he will keep on at the Chinese about their human rights record. This is more remarkable considering that Australia’s economic growth over the last few years has been funded largely by china and that Rudd has always put china at the centre of his international policies. Plus he speaks mandarin which always helps, one wonders if he does so in an aussie accent. Compare this with Brown who meekly posed for the photo op while outside there were hundreds of protesters shouting angrily and the whole farce was unfolding (helped in a small way by yours truly, in that I waved a small Tibetan flag). He somehow though that by not holding the flame itself he would not be implicated in the whole furore, which again incapsulates his whole flawed attitude. Brown always tries to find a compromise that suits everyone, to be all things to all people, to not offend the Chinese Government or the pro Tibetan protesters. The fact is he does nether, he comes across as weak, as Rudd has shown you can tell the Olympic flame to piss off and still keep favourable trade with china.

Points go to Ken Livingstone for staying the fuck away from the whole thing, if it had been any other country he would have been grinning like a lizard and reminding everyone how he’d got the Olympics for London. The fact he didn’t take that gamble so close to an election shows how savvy he was. A lesser politician would have dived in there straight away, especially if they were facing knife edge reelection and would have burnt his fingers accordingly.

There is in fact no one in the current labour party who even looks like they could lead the country, the sad thing is that though Cameron is clearly a cunt he at least looks electable. I fear the inevitability of an eventual Tory majority and a time for labour in the wilderness again; sadly now though what with Brown’s shiteness and the whole new labour plan of driving of the unions they won’t actually have a base from which to come back from. Another Brown gaff is related to exactly that, the control of the party that is so essential to the running of the governments elections. The fact that there is no general secretary for the party and that the man Brown wanted in the job can’t take it up means that it will roll rudderless for the next year or so. Perhaps in brown wasn’t so keen on central control of the party he might have let the popular choice through, but then that guy was an ex amicus man and it would never do to that sort at the controls of the party. It is that combination of blair like control freakery with an inherent indecisiveness that will be brown’s undoing, that and the fact fate is not on his side. Jimmy Callaghan and Johnny Major would sadly nod in agreement.

whiting up brixton

2008-04-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

When they first started playing classical music in tube stations and outside shops to drive off young people I was amused. I thought it a master stroke of psychology, that by accepting that classical music was inherently uncool they had found the perfect tool to bring young people into line.
"kids, pay attention at school or we get out the Debussy"
"hand in that homework or its the bach for you"
oh the hilarity that would ensue, either that or i was hoping that kids would co opt the classical music scene and hip hop groups would start adopting the mannerisms of middle class Prom lovers.
the dissonance started to hit though when they were playing Beethoven as i went down into Brixton tube, the same composer who the characters of a clockwork orange liked to fight to. This was meant to calm people? Stop them intimidating people?
Because much as i accept that kids won't hang about when you play them dead white dude music enforced listening will not make them suddenly into the ideal Daily Mail citizen (thank fuck). That was when the rationale became slightly sinister, because its all about asserting middle class white identity into areas that frighten the selfsame voters.
It has little to do with actually changing anything other than the perception of crime, which is the new big thing for the Labour government once it realised that crime rates were falling but the voters were still shit scared of each other. That is what all the anti hoodie bollocks and getting part time coppers on the beat is all about, making people feel safe. Never mind that a lot of people aren’t really encouraged by more coppers hanging about looking for an excuse to hastle anyone young looking. frankly i'm more scared of constant CCTV surveilance and the thought that the Met could get away with shooting me for no reason than by a bunch of pimply 14 year olds in hoods. who only wear them to be honest in order to hide from the world because that’s what you want to do for the most part as a 14 year old boy. Adolescence has a lot to answer for.

It is also part of the ongoing war on young people, who are assumed to be root evil of everything because they don’t respect their elders anymore. Notwithstanding the fact their elders are the worst examples of materially obsessed, broken down wankers who live in a culture where capitalist individualism is the only religion and where young people are shown no respect in any way. Respect has to be earned, as the right likes to say, and that goes double for adults. No wonder most kids hate their parents, they aren’t stupid and they question things.
So the playing of classical music in Brixton tube especially has that nasty undercurrent of racial assumption, that it will somehow better the people who live there, that the non white, non European origins of most of the people using the station are not culturally allowed. That we all must go to work under the banner of dead white men's music, to assert should we ever forget it that this country is a white, middle class homogenous daily mail reading flag saluting nation. Which of course it is not, but we have to pander to that minority who think it is because they shout the loudest.

Eurovision

2007-05-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

Eurovision is a funny old thing, viewed by most intellectual people as camp fest of horrible pop music it exerts a fascination for innumerable reasons. Not least the chance to get to look into the weird psyche of Europe, to see the pop culture melange that come from countries most people haven’t heard of. Although usually the songs follow pretty much the same mould, ballards with hint of native folk, power pop with native folk via some Wagnarian vision of Hollywood, power camp and music so utterly odd it deserves its own genre, just because there is nothing quite so weird as seeing Danish undertakers rapping about house prices or former eastern block countries getting transvestites to dance about as snowmen.
Which brings me to the real reason for writing about eurovision, namely the dominance of eastern Europe and specifically the fragmented pieces of the old Yugoslavia. What makes it incredibly interesting is that last nights winner Serbia, the most hated nation in Europe for the last fifteen years picked up most of its votes from its neighbours, the very same people who were the victims (and in some cases fellow perpetrators of) ethnic cleansing during the civil wars of the 1990’s. Why should it be that these countries vote for their neighbours regardless of the fact they clearly still hate each other, most Balkan music is still intensely nationalistic, sebia itself is more nationalistic than ever, though that is obviously more due to the fact the west is still happy to chip bits of Serbia and to routinely hold it in contempt. Germany in the 1920’s shows what happens when you do that.
The only reason I can think of why the Balkans would vote so heavily for each other against the grain of recent history is simply the context of the tournament. While it would be tempting to say its because no one takes Eurovision seriously they clearly do, in Britain you see whole groups of people shouting themselves hoarse at the TV in a manner similar to world cup behaviour.
In fact the football metaphor is the best way to explain it, the whole supporters dynamic whereby people support their home side against the illusory ever changing other. The strange change you get when one moment a Chelsea fan will hate an arsenal fan but when it is England against Germany they will sit together and shout the team on, even though it has players drawn from both clubs. They see no dissonance in this, and the same is true of eurovision. The Balkan counties see the context as being not Serbia against Croatia but the balkans against the rest of Europe, where the loyalty to each other suddenly trumps the historic neighbourly hate. Were the competition a Balkans only event with each nation pitted against each other then there would be bloodshed.
Also interesting to note is the nostalgia many feel for the old Yugoslavia, akin to much of the old eastern block yearning for old school Communism. Though perhaps more understandable in the Balkans as things were perceptively better then, in that there was no internicine bloodletting and there was an economic safety net. The fact most of the Balkans is dominated by various forms of organised crime and poorly regarded by the rest of the world would have anyone harkening back to the times of Tito.
This has an added frission as in the wider context of eastern Europe they see themselves as looked down on and dictated to by the west. For sure they all want to be part of the EU and NATO and the other fruits of western cooperation but no country wants to be treated like a junior partner and the truth is western Europe treats the east like a backwards child. The east itself is also enjoying a renaissance, both in terms of economics and in of self confidence that makes it chafe against this.
Interesting to note is that the top fifteen in Eurovision were all ex eastern block apart from turkey who is likewise treated in the same supercilious way by the west, as if its somehow not good enough and that its just a young country in need of care, regardless of its thousand odd year history of culture and civilisation.
Therefore it is perhaps the best method of national reconciliation is, rather than having an expensive commission and getting politicians involed I think when the American leave iraq the best way to get peace is to have a middle eastern eurovision, where iraq enters a single candidate from each warring group against egypt, Saudi and the rest.
Voila, instant campy pop peace. Maybe.

that crap master plan in full

2006-12-15T02:38:00.000-08:00

On Israel again

I think I see what is happening in Palestine now, other than obviously it all going to some new level of hell along with Iraq. The Israelies clearly have a strategy, the same one thee have always had of weakening the Palestinian nation as much as possible, hoping in essence to destroy it as an idea as much as a reality. In fact they used to just deny it ever existence and they were just another group of Arabs with no distinct identity. Now as they have to contend with the obvious facts of Palestinian existence they move to the age old act of divide and rule by trying to forment a civil war.

They along with Saudi are trying to get a war between Hamas and Fatah, because although saudi is on the same fundementalist level as Al Qaida Hamas leans towards hizbullah/iran, and there is much tension between them and saudi, it’s a battle to take control of the middle east between Saudi Arabia and Iran with various proxy battlegrounds. The so called cedar revolution and the continuing battles in Lebanon are between the hariri supporters backed by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf states and iran. Syria although not ruled by shia or sunni has obvious geopolitical alliances that go very well with iran’s.
But israeli action, such as cutting off money from customs revenue ($60 million a month, to a country in dire poverty, surely illegal if not obviously immoral) and generally along with the west trying to undermine the democratically elected government of Palestine will have the opposite effect. The obvious irony in this is the west who have said democracy will solve all the ills of the Arab world boycotting the only genuinely democratically elected government and doing all they can to replace it because it holds the opinion that Israel should not exist. Its not as if Hamas can actually erase Israel, what with all those nukes and tanks and everything. To make matters more hypocritical the Israelis cabinet is stuffed with men who think the Palestinian nation should not exist, and they actually are attempting to wipe it off the map.
Anyway all these actions are doing is making Hamas more popular the eyes of the people for standing up to Israel and the west, making fatah look like israel’s soldiers on the grund (which is what thy have been many times before, indeed the whole reason for israel wanting Arafat in the 90’s, is that he’d restrain the natives much better than anyone else). It also means that the only people who can get actual money through into Palestine are Iranian sources. Give it six months and you’ve created the situation in Lebanon in Gaza, if the country isn’t torn apart first by civil war, which as with Iraq will just suck in other nations.
Well done Isreal and the west, your plan is utter shite. Much like Iraq and in Somalia you make things much worse, by backing any old bastard so long as they’re against Islamic fundamentalism, not realising that just makes them more popular.

Gaza

2006-06-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

Difficult to be surprised by Isreal actions but I still am. How can they get away with such brazen disregard for the rights of others? How can they get away with completely ignoring international law. From the horse’s mouth himself –

Mr Olmert said the destruction of Gaza's only power station and three of its bridges was meant to pressure, not punish, ordinary Palestinians. "Our aim is not to mete out punishment, but to apply pressure so the soldier will be freed. We want to create a new equation - freeing the abducted soldier in return for lessening the pressure on the Palestinians."

That’s utterly and completely against all the rules of engagement, international law and the Geneva convention. You can’t collectively punish civilians, you can’t go around blowing up civilian infrastructure. Especially you can’t just cut off water supplies. Although America did similar things in Vietnam the last group pf people to happily commit such brazen acts were the third reich and stalin’s boys. Not good company to be in.
Although I suspect their justification would be that by voting for Hamas they were all complicit in the abduction, which is the kind of logic I bet US right wing pundits will use, not realising the same logic could be applied to them. In that the whole of the US could be held responsible for America’s actions abroad, which was the justification used by Al qaida on September 11th. Again, not good company to be in. Perhaps bin laden sought to pressure, not punish Americans.

The whole situation stinks, plus it will not work. Think of the blitz, did that make Londoners think they should welcome Hitler? Did 9/11 make most Americans want to join alqaida, or even pressure their leaders to be more lenient in the middle east? This will only make support for Hamas grow, and will raise the tide of fury in the middle east.

Interesting little coda to the Guardian article –

Gazans have not begun to think how they are going to get through the coming weeks and months without electricity. The wrecked plant was only fully on line for three years and it will cost about £8m to buy and install new transformers.
There may be an interim solution. Israel provides about 40% of electricity in the Gaza Strip. It used to supply it all and may do so again, meaning that Israel's electricity company could make a handsome profit from the army's destruction.
Nice to see they’re learning from the Americans.

Oh and they’ve just arrested the Palestinian cabinet. Tell me now how Hamas recognising Israel would help things? Israel wants to destroy the idea of Palestine, it wants at most a captive prison population of cheap migrant workers, at worst it would settle for Genocide and forced deportation. It has not and never will recognise a Palestinian state, though you’ll hear fuck all about that on the BBC.

correction

2006-06-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

in my previous post i referred to niall Ferguson as a prat, when he is, in fact, a cunt-

The book accompanying Ferguson's current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of the World, tells us that people "seem predisposed" to "trust members of their own race", "those who are drawn to 'the Other' may ... be atypical in their sexual predilections" and that "when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high ... that only the first child they conceive will be viable."

racist fuckwit pseudo historian, maybe if i started quoted hitlerite nonsence and Kiplingesque opinions of empire channel 4 might give me a TV series.

Review of a review

2006-06-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Annoying article in the New York review of books here - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19143 concerning America and its empire, whether they have one, whether they ever wanted one and whether they should have one. All these arguments unfortunately come from the rightist liberal branch of history, where the narrative is that America had the cold war thrust upon it, that it never asked for the imperial responsibilities and actions that it had to do, that it only ever fought to thwart the intentions of the USSR and now that this bogey man has gone there are a whole new set of reasons for America to act in an imperial manner.

The reviewer is an idiot. He genuinely seems to believe that because America does not have an Emperor, that it does not annex territory and does not call itself an empire therefore it is not. It’s the same thing with the BNP, people say they’re not fascists because they don’t call themselves it. The point is not what you call yourself, it’s the way you act that defines it.
To start at the beginning, with world war two. Where the reviewer would have us believe that America was the most innocent of parties, merely trying to spread truth and justice and democracy about whereas nasty Stalin and crafty Churchill where playing the game of empires. Much as I would like to believe Roosevelt was some Liberal hero I get the feeling he knew a bit more about realpolitik than to take Stalin at his word, perhaps he did, I don’t know, I just doubt it.
The fact is that from the end of the war onwards America did not act like the naïve republic thrust into responsibility and forced to face the evils of communism out of a sense of duty. They were happy to carve up Europe, didn’t really mind Stalin talking the east, they gave it to him at Yalta and he stuck to it religiously. He could have taken Greece but it wasn’t on the list Churchill gave him of nations he could take, so he didn’t fund the communists there. The article fails to mention this quite important point, though it does do a good job of the Stalin Hitler comparison (old hat but good facts) and their similar ideas of empire.
The simple fact is that like many nations America has been imperial since its inception. The article glosses over the conquest of the American west, an aberration it is thought of, ancient history. Never mind those same excuses that are being used now, of freedom and the rest were used to hoover up the lands of the native Americans and happily exterminate them. Once those limits were reached, after taking bits of Mexico and buying other bits from France they had to accept their borders were concrete. That just meant having to change the narrative of their expansions. The Monroe doctrine was only the most blatant expression of this, that only the US could meddle with south America, there were many other imperialist actions. The difference to what the reviewer thinks is imperial is simply that the empire was never formal, the correct comparison would be the early parts of the british empire, where trade was used as the weapon to gain control. Why expend so much effort and resources invading a nation when you can just buy off and bully the government into giving all the benefits of empire with none of the responsibilities. Think british east India company before India became a colony of the Crown.
The success of that strategy was firstly that it generates less bad press, there’s less need for overt control and it allowed America in the 19th and 20th century to pose as the liberator against Europe’s old colonialism. But the policy was that of empire, the reviewer mentions only the Philippines, again as the exception. But what about Cuba? What about Panama? What about any latin American country in the 20th century, each one faced US imperialism.
It is true it is unique, as a method of control and mixed with the permeation of American culture has meant even now people are reluctant to call the US on what it does.
But America does have other features of empires, it is denied but there are enough dynasties in American politics, Kennedy’s and Roosevelts and Bush’s. There is a careful cultural brainwashing within America with much more resonance and similarity to an empire, the whole pledging allegiance, the idea that immigrants can be US citizens if they show enough loyalty, most especially by joining the army, has echoes from Rome.
The reviewer shows more foolishness by calling the IMF and world bank colossal mistakes in the post war world for Americas power. They were part of the perfect web through which America could exert soft power on almost all nations in the world. They did not have to use arms, they could use money. The fact this stick has broken down shows that American power is waning, not improving. Once an empire has to start invading places and drawing them in then you know its on the way out, the best empires are as informal as possible.
Frankly though surely just the mention of Vietnam, of Guatemala and iran in 1953 and Iraq now would be enough to prove that America has an empire, it acts in an imperial manner and that it is self consciously imperial. The guff now about whether america should become an empire, especially from that prat Niall Ferguson, have missed the point by about 150 years. Its already there, the US ruling class is doing nicely out of it and its only failure is that through arrogance in the absence of a strong state contender they have let the mask slip, they have become so blatant, so thick that they believe they can sweep into anywhere they like and nobody can stop them. Iraq has shown them they can’t, so it interesting to see what will happen next.

Londonistan

2006-06-16T03:42:00.000-07:00

Stupid article in the guardian today. The offensive Melanie Philips interviewed by some slightly thick reporter, who gives her views far too much currency.
Basically Philips goes on about how Britain is being destroyed by Islam and the lack of values in modern society, basic daily mail stuff. Only because she used to write for the Guardian they feel the need to give credence to her, like Julie Burchill who because she used to be a bit left could get away with being outrageously racist in many of her articles. Maybe they used to do the same with Gary Bushell, after all he used to write for various socialist papers.

Anyway, back to the idiocy-

Throughout the book there are shards of evidence and penetrating questions that deserve to be at the centre of political debate. Did the security services in the 80s and 90s take a naive and complacent view of the growth of extreme Islamist cells run from London by political exiles, thinking that they wouldn't bite the hand that fed them? Have we got the right balance between protecting and promoting the rights and languages of minorities on the one hand, and the safety and culture of the majority on the other? Is the left overinfluenced by the Palestinian question, and too ready to close its eyes to the brutal realities of extreme Islamist thinking and practice?
Certainly, we should discuss these matters. We are in a country with a fast-growing and increasingly assertive Muslim minority. Relations between them and the Christian or secular majority are of huge importance, as is our security from terrorist attack. And yes, some do use anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-semitism

Is the left over influenced by the so called paelstine question? Change that the Jewish question and relate it to anytime before 1940 and you kind of get the idea why its sort of important. The airy fairy way the interviewer just dismisses Palestine, as if not to understand that that, more than anything else invites rage on behalf on anyone who knows the history of Israel and its actions against the Palestinian people.
Philips does the usual ‘anti-Semitism is growing, Muslims do it and the left love a bit of it’, casually forgetting both that considerably more mosques get attacked than synagogues and that many of the best lefties have traditionally been Jewish.

Also this, the old rightist bugbear-

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

Don’t really see that where I am, its more an attempt to ride Britan of the kind of casual and violent racism that has pervaded this culture for too long. She does the old us and them, because in her mind there really is only one British culture, and that somehow that encapsulates both mine and her worldviews, even though they are utterly different. She also forgets that islam is also based on Judeo Christian values, what with the Koran incorporating both he old and new testaments. Heaven forbid she should actually seek to understand those she can readily label and attack

She should bear in mind that tonight it will not be the jewish citizens of this country who live in fear of terror raids, of the rising BNP and being attacked on the street for looking different. Yes there is anti-Semitism and it is abhorrent but it is no worse than any other racism.

More -

It's the tactics used by Stalin to call political opponents mad. But it does have echoes of the 1930s because the Jews then tried to draw attention to what was going on in Germany, and they too were told they were hysterical and paranoid."

Yeah because the threat posed by a very small minority of militant Islamist is exactly the same as the totalitarian brutality of the worlds most evil regimes. And I like the selective use of history, not realising that there may be other historical parallels that might be more apt.

"Again, when I say that talking about Weimar and feral children is ruining her own case and that I really don't think things are that bad, she snaps: "No, I'm sure you don't. That was said to people like me in the 30s, exactly the same kind of argument from the same kind of people ... it is very resonant of Weimar and the prejudice against the Jews is very resonant of Weimar."

Doesn’t really do herself any favours, does she? We ain’t living in Weimer Germany (god I wish we were, expressionist cinema, Bauhaus, that would be great, apart for the rise of Nazism of course). And she forgets that it wasn’t just the Jews who were warning against the rise of Nazism it was those pesky, supposedly anti-Semitic lefties. She seems to forget, most tellingly that she works for the fucking Daily Mail, a newspaper whose record regarding Nazism should make them hang their heads. In the thirties they thought Hitler was the best thing since sliced bread and that anti-Semitism was grand. How can she work for a paper like that and still spout this shite. She’s not mad, she’s just thick.

And one last nugget

"They are fuelled by an ideology that itself is non-negotiable and forms a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other."

Tarring much with the same brush? Its just the old assumption that there is this big homogenous block called islam, where everyone agrees the same thing and nothing ever changes. Islam has changed, it does change. There are sects and groups and disagreements over beliefs, there is sunni and shia and sufi and as many variations of belief as there is in Christianity. It shocks me that she should be so offensively ignorant of something she chooses to blame for the ills in society. That’s when she’s not blaming us for the moral decline of the nation. Frankly a nation that has respect for other cultures and does not tolerate bigotry and hatred has more morals that the Daily Mail ever will.

Perhaps she is the Ann coulter we’ve all been looking for.

sunwatch #46,40000

2006-06-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

not content with already reporting a pack of lies the sun goes for one more, to put the boot in so to speak. they are claiming that police found £38,000 in the houses of the men arresterd in Forsest gate. firstly even if true, not actually illegal. second, considering the track record of police sources who talk to the sun its almost certainly a lie or outright exaggeration. they also say the adress was that of known criminals, in this case that the men's older brother had been an armed robber. as if that somehow gives an excuse for what the police did.

it seems the sun and the police are singing from the same thick and cruel hymn sheet, which is a tad worrying as there is actually a real terrorist threat to this country and both the Police and the Sun are only making things worse. Together they've happily destroeyd these families lives, no jsut with the bungled raid but that the taint of unanswered questions they alwasy mutter about. the same happened with the British citizens released from Gitmo, the Sun happily printed a bunch of lies fed to them by the Pentagon to smear a group of innocent men who'd alrady been tortured in the US gulag.
i should imagine the forest gate raid plus the hysteria the sun and its tabloid friends stoke up are pretty much the best tools for extremist Jihadists to use to recruit the many deeply pissed off and alienated muslims in Britain. i'm just glad we've not got Ann Coulter, we do have Julie Burchill but nobody even listens to her.

also the idea that the men who killed themselves in Gitmo might have a PR stunt and that it was an attack on america is beyond comment. it is also beyond the realms of actual belief that anyone might believe such shite.

It's all Hamas's fault

2006-06-14T04:16:00.000-07:00

its been a while, but as nobody actually read this that's ok.

anyway, back to the middle east where israel starts to feel maybe that it was a bad PR move to shell a beach full of palestinians on the muslim day of rest. they say they regret it happened, but then that isn't enough so what do they do? blame Hamas.

they say now that it was a hamas landmine that just happened to explode at the same time as Isreal was shelling the nearby area. will anybody swallow this obvious bullshit? probably, there are always those who will. anything to try and avoid the obvious conclusion that Isreal uses terror many times more deadly than Hamas to perpetrate acts of genocide on the palestinian people. it is genocide, by the way as a deliberate method to remove the people of paleastine not just from the land but also from havign any claim to nationhood. so long as there is a palestinan nation the isreali one can never feel safe. Isreal does not mind there being arabs, so long as they don't threaten the territorail integrity of isreal, which is shaky as its not really recognised in international law, the 1948 boundaries are but Israel has grown quite a bit since then.

anyway back to the current propaganda drive to combat the photos of dead children -

The military says that it fired six shells on to and around the beach where Huda Ghalia's family died, and one of them fell about 100 yards away, but by coincidence another explosion - probably a mine planted by Hamas or a buried shell - occurred in the same area at the same time. The military backed its claim with analysis of aerial photographs, shrapnel and intelligence that Hamas had mined beaches to stop Israeli forces landing, although it is not known to have used such a tactic before.
The head of the Israeli inquiry, Major General Meir Klifi, also said that shrapnel taken from two wounded Palestinians treated in Israeli hospitals was not shell fragments. "There is no chance that a shell hit this area. Absolutely no chance," he said.

"All the evidence points to the fact that it couldn't have been a mine," said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon adviser on battlefields who led the US military's battle damage assessment team in Kosovo and worked for its intelligence wing, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"You have the crater size, the shrapnel, the types of injuries, their location on the bodies. That all points to a shell dropping from the sky, not explosives under the sand," he said.

"To say you have five or six rounds in an area and coincidentally there's a land mine next to it and it goes off at the same time is asking a lot," said Mr Garlasco.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, accused the Israelis of a cover-up. "The Israelis should have admitted what they did and apologised. They know who did it and we know who did it. They want to escape responsibility because it was a severe embarrassment to the military at home and the prime minister when he is abroad. The pictures followed him to Europe," he said.

Double Standards

2006-02-01T04:18:00.000-08:00

From the BBC-

“Israeli troops have clashed with crowds of demonstrators resisting the evacuation of a Jewish settler outpost near Ramallah in the West Bank.
Settlers barricaded in nine permanent buildings due for demolition pelted police with stones. Dozens of police and protesters have been injured.
Two right-wing MPs who joined the protest were among the injured.
"They are treating people here like Arabs," Arieh Eldad of the National Union Party told Israel Radio.

So it's only an act of terror when Palestinian children pelt soldiers with stones? That and the comment about being treated like arabs- I would have loved to have been there when he said that. I would have replied ‘ no, if they treated you like they do arabs you would all have been shot and your homes bulldozed with you still inside’
Interesting to note the pernicious racism of the statement too- as if it is ok to treat arabs that way, too many echoes of previous casually genocidal regimes that normalised treating people of certain ethnic group as sub citizens

Moral Equivalence

2006-01-30T03:03:00.000-08:00

To compare:

Isrealis shoot dead two children in cold blood

10 year old girl collapses after heroin overdose

From the guardian-

“The nine-year-old girl's parents realised she was gone as they watched the election results on television. They do not know precisely what happened, but the Israeli army later said Aya was behaving in a suspicious manner reminiscent of a terrorist - she got too close to the border fence - and so a soldier fired several bullets into the child, hitting her in the neck and blowing open her stomach.
Aya was the second child killed by the Israeli army last week. Soldiers near Ramallah shot 13-year-old Munadel Abu Aaalia in the back as he walked along a road reserved for Jewish settlers with two friends. The army said the boys planned to throw rocks at Israeli cars, which the military defines as terrorism.”

And the reaction to these atrocities? The west’s response to unprovoked murder of children? Bugger all. They’re still too busy calling Hamas a terror organistion, still saying they have to renounce violence. Its things like shooting Palestinian children that ensure Hamas won’t renounce violence, because no other nation on earth would be expected to under the circumstances.
Whereas the reaction to the selling of heroin to a girl the same age the one shot dead for no reason at all is uproar. Rightly so as children really shouldn’t be given heroin, its pretty much accepted on both sides of the drug debate. But the fact that this story will get discussed endlessly, the dealers condemned and the death penalty called for whereas Israel will once again get away with murder. Worse than that it will continued to be seen as a civilised nation surrounded by the barbarism of despotic Arab regimes. No nation that can gladly shoot children can ever be called civilised. I would go as far to say it is a clear case of ethnic cleansing, what other excuse is there? It puts Israel up there with Sudan, which is also allowed to get away with mass death because it has the resources needed by greedy oil hungry nations, though in this case it is China. But at least Sudan is reviled and condemned, at least the world knows what is happening.

And also who classifies throwing stones as an act of terror? Its too fucked up for words.

Hamas

2006-01-26T03:37:00.000-08:00

So Hamas win the Palestinian elections, no great surprise there for anyone actually watching what’s been going on over there. Basically their support stems not from the Palestinians being a bunch of crazed fundamentalists intent on Hollywood villain-esque badness but from two things- firstly Hamas actually spend most of their time providing welfare for the Palestinian people, they were set up as a charity to help some of the most impoverished people around, that and the fact they are perceived as non corrupt compared to some of the Fatah command who grew fat while Palestinians waited in vain for their state to actually be created in the late nineties. The second reason is that Hamas do not compromise, they have yet to be embarrassed as Fatah and the Palestinian government has been in constantly trusting the Israelis to abide by the rules they have agreed. every time the Israelis reneged on a deal or blew up a Police station it made Fatah look weak- they could not even protect their own police, let alone the civilians of the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas in contrast strikes bake, it may not be the most ethical way to conduct a war but they really have no other choice- the only weapon they have is a ready supply of desperate young people who frankly don't care if they blew up innocent women or children so long as they are Israeli. As they have said, they would use F15's if they had them to target Israel, but as it is they use what they can get.

Whether Hamas will go the way of Fatah- initial support souring under the pressure of international isolation and Israeli attack is an interesting question. they will lose support amongst their voters if they try to turn Palestine into an Islamic state, there are still plenty secularist out there and its puritanism is not why people are voting for them.

It was inevitable that a party like Hamas would take over in Palestine, just as it was Sharon would take over in Israel. The constant friction between the two states lead inevitably to battle of extremes, as statesmen on both sides would whip up hatred to further their political agendas. It is as well fulfilling Sharon's dream of having an extremist government in Nablus, giving the Israelis carte blanche to crush completely the Palestinian people. They have the narrative now that the world swallows- that Hamas are unreconstructed terrorist, little better than Al Qaida. The logic then follows that if they are elected then the whole population are terror supporters. That makes it OK to wipe them off the map. I greatly fear that this will be the near future for palestine- that like in the 70's palestinians will be considered nothing but faceless terrorists with their own grievances ignored. I can only put my hope that labour win the next Israeli elections and that they make some serious moves towards working with whichever government is in office next door.

The thing now though it that Hamas is no longer a terrorist entity, it is a legitimate government. Therefore anything it does can no longer be terror, if a country commits an act of terror- say bombing a house in Pakistan for whatever reason it is an act of war. An attack by one state upon another is always an act of war, though many may quibble on this point. Though the face is now isreal and the US should have to deal with them as Government democratically elected by the people- which will be something of a headache to the Bush spin doctors. It also makes a mockery of Israel claim to be the only democracy in the middle east, especially considering Israel’s attempts to disenfranchise the voters of East Jerusalem.

But that is always the story- lies and injustice and lives ruined by western imperialism and Israeli intransience. The worst thing, as always, is that the truth will be distorted- you will not find Bush praising the voters of Palestine for exercising their democratic rights as he did for Iraq. As kissinger said in relation to Chile in the 1970's- they were not about to stand back and let a country be ruined by the short sightedness of its own people. In other words democracy is only acceptable if they elect the right people. Venuzualans were wrong to elect Chavez, as were Haitians to elect Aristide. You can't have it both ways though- you have to accept that if you bring democracy to a country then the people will elect who they want. In Palestine this would be the people most hated by Israel and the US- if only because of that fact.

New Thing

2006-01-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

i am now deciding to post stories here as well, because about once every six months i write a vaguelly satirical story about political stuff. I may as well put them here.

The Painting

Felendov was always going to be an artist, it didn’t matter when he was born, whatever era or place on the planet he could have entered onto he would have ended up being an artist. His talent was not immense, not something that would have had him hailed as a child prodigy, not that it ever would have mattered to him. Just to be allowed to create, that was all.
As it was he was born in a time of turmoil, at the end of long civil war finally won by a side whose rights and wrongs are immaterial, when the winner wins, they are always right. Felendov grew up in residential district of the capital, parents were factory workers, there were brothers and sisters. None of this was important, at best it was material to him, shifting planes and light, sources of ideas and compositions. He went to an art school, because the state though it was good that there was culture, and it liked to be in charge of it, because it liked to be in charge of things.
There he ignored high politics, the politics of revolt, the politics of anything except that of painting, of art and expression of what he saw around him. They liked him for that, because in highly charged political atmosphere, and when people were being exiled and shot for having differing views having none at all will always be popular. They asked him to paint great portraits of the leader, of peasants and workers and uplifting scenes. He did his best, but honesty always meant his paintings were hit and miss with party bigwigs. The ones they liked they lauded and displayed, the ones they didn’t he was told off for.
“Listen Felendov, you have to realise that art has a purpose, it’s to educate people. Its to make people learn things” the party official explained, he was broadly sympathetic as he was an art lover, but he knew which side his bread was buttered and had his career to think about “Sure, paint what you like but only expect to sell the kinds of works that artists like Palenki or Smutts do”
“They aren’t artists” said Felendov, dark hair above dark eyes “They are rose tinted cameras, varnishers of reality. They paint nothing new, nothing beautiful. Pretty at best, but not beautiful”
The official smiled, but shook his head “Whatever, just be careful, ok? Those boys are popular, not worth messing with. Just keep painting and we’ll see what we can do”
Felendov nodded, stumbled out slightly, the thoughts already on ideas of light and pose, compositions and expression.

He got into trouble agian, though, at an exhibition in the Dotsoy on Strimbolenna prospect. It was an exhibition of young painters, slightly avant garde but in a very safe way, it had been put on by a figure with a love of controversy but a very keen political senses, he wanted to make a stir but not a stink. The other artists there, though, tended to be more controversial, seeing themselves as the authentic voice of the people, or at least that of the true artist. One released from the formalism of the old order, ones who rejected the sterile landscapes and stirring battle scenes of the establishment artists. They were all there, ready to defend their painting against the obnoxious party apparatchiks who were bound to show up. Felendov had been coaxed into coming along, on the promise that the party officials had very expressive faces, definitely worth sketching. He would have preferred an evening in the studio, or in the cafes of the old quarter, where old soldiers and new students mixed in uneasy abandon, relaxed but careful not to relax too much, fear of secret police.
They had chosen one of his edgier paintings, an abstract he had painted from an image he had dreamed of while ill with fever. It was one the official had wanted him to hide away, knowing it would be seen as degenerate, and could cause trouble.
Felendov stood in a corner near his paining, a single drink in his hand as he watched the overstuffed bureaucrats and chubby press hacks turning up their noses at the paintings around him. One stopped at Felndov’s, with a pretty, thin wife in tow. The very existence of Felendov’s piece seemed to offend him, it was like a challenge, something he did not understand that he peopled with dark intent. He assumed the piece was meant to undermine people like him, the title a single number reference was to haunt him as he tried to figure it out.
Felendov heard him complaining loudly to another party official. They were both old fashioned, burly and no doubt once from the provinces. They were men clever enough to know culture when they saw it, so long as it was in plain language. They had wealth their parents hadn’t dreamed of, power they would not even have understood. They hated this art, the whole system of art schools and bourgeois edifices that had bred them. They had worked hard all their lives and saw no reason why these degenerates should be given public money to pursue their perversions and spring them on an unsuspecting populace
He started making a fuss, calling the art offensive dross, saying it was affront to the state, that it was counter revolutionary nonsense, copying bourgeois and foreign styles, aiming to subtly undermine the fine traditions of native art.
“This is all nonsense” he declared “none of this is real, none of this is beautiful or grand or inspiring. Its all portraits by people who cannot draw and shite dribbled from the arse of over privileged pederasts and mentally malformed miscreants” he waved his hand specifically at Felendov’s work. “It serves only to confuse, to degenerate the fine noble artistic principles of this state, where art is meant to serve the people not the narrow tastes of the intelligentsia. Who is the painter of this crap?”
Felndov stepped forward, intrigued by the debate. The crowd parted before him, allowing him to go forward.
“Where’s the fuss? He asked “I just paint things, I’m not exactly a threat to anyone”
“You’re undermining everything we stand for, if the common man cannot understand you, if you are not serving a purpose to the people. You emulate decadent western art, art that is politically without any meaning, that is meant to lull the working class into sleep, so as they do not wake up to the truth of their situation!”
He stared pop eyed into felendovs face, the hacks around scribbling down every word. Felendov shrugged
“If you don’t like it you don’t have to look at it. There’s many other artist more to your taste I’m sure. Smutts for instance”
There was a snigger from the avant garde artists behind Felendov, who shared his opinion on the grand battle scenes and muscular heroism of Smutt’s work. This was lost on the official, though, who merely narrowed his eyes and stalked off to persecute the other artist’ work.

The stir caused by the evening went through the art establishment like a shiver, the fact that Felendov was known as a pure artist only helped. If even he had earned the ire of the party officials then no one was safe. But Felendov had no wish to be the poster boy for the Samizdat movement, nor as a whipping boy in the popular party press. He withdrew to his studio, not answering clandestine calls and facing all official attempts to get him to recant his stance with shrugs and indifference.
The matter was thought forgotten, the press and officials had moved on to other anxieties of the regime, that of chasing writers who had been allegedly putting subversive ideas into their books. The art collective decided to put on another show, they were feeling bolder now, bolstered by international support for their work. They asked Felendov for the crowning piece of the show and he dully delivered it the very next day. It hung covered with a cloth in the gallery until the day of the opening, astutely guarded day and night by student volunteers and international observers. There was much speculation on its contents, though Felendov kept every detail secret including even the name of the piece. The brochure went to the presses and to the hands of eager culture vultures and bureaucrats alike with only a blank space next to his name. That blank space was to loom in the minds of agitated officials, what subversive work hung beneath that cloth? They did not fear out and out attacks on the regime, that would have been easy to quash, a simple accusation of subversion or of being un patriotic could have been levelled against Felendov and he would be bundled off to a far away jail.
But what if was something more subtle? The fear was that the whole regime was under attack, once one apparatchik started reading coded messages in popular fiction then you couldn’t help but see it too, the whole institution of culture could be riddled with subversion. The hysteria had now spread to popular music, with the discovery of song lyrics that could easily be interpreted as promoting ideas utterly contrary to the spirit of the party. But the fact that these messages were by their nature almost subliminal there was no way of either rooting them out or even proving to the public they existed, many party officials had been met with ridicule when trying to ban certain pop groups and the works of respected children’s authors. It was a sensitive time, the international attention on the art exhibition meant they had to tread softly lest the reputation of the regime be sulleyed.
The day of the exhibition was one of great expectation, the art students eager to bait the regime and make their own reputation internationally. If played correctly the agony of exile was easily offset by the money and publicity it generated abroad, that and the purer motive many ascribed to of truly representing the people, rather than the wishes of a single group at the top.
It was dark by the time the unveiling was to occur, crowds had gathered both inside and outside the exhibition. Many of them undercover policemen but many more of them genuinely curios to see what would happen. Member of the press were preparing to be outraged, ready to cite the decline in artistic standards. Half the articles to appear the next day had been written well in advance, minds on both sides had already been made up.
Felendov though was not at the exhibition, nor could he be found. He had simply taken himself off to safe distance ready to await the fallout from the exhibition. At the exhibition the moment had arrived, the leader of the students came forth and made a carefully non political speech, saying how glad he was that there was so much interest in the works they had created. He added they were just humble servants of the muse that moved them, and that was to whim they were accountable. With a theatrical gesture he twitched back the cover and let it fall to the flaw.
There was a predictable gasp from the audience, flash bulbs lit up its surface and necks craned from the back to get a decent view. The painting was of an average size, portrait shaped, though without a proper frame. It was simply a piece of canvas, completely black except for a ragged edge of white running the whole length of the border.
An official read the title ‘If you destroy this you destroy yourselves’ and leant back thoughtfully. The discussion raged through the crowd, the art students and their friends began to applaud loudly, several party apparatchiks tried to attack the painting, shouting loudly that it was trash, a waste of public money, a fraud. They pulled a shoes from their feet and waved it at the painting. In the ensuing riot the police had to evacuate the hall.
Soon it was only a few secret service men around the place, plainclothes and bored. The one in charge stood staring at the painting, a hand on his hip and one at his mouth. The threat loomed large from the painting, an explicit threat linking the painting’s fortunes with that of the regime. He was a man who though he understood these things, understood the subliminal, he was a man whose life was spent discerning symbols and many layers of meaning from the most innocuous things. But what could you get from just a field of black? What was there to be threatened by? Yet there it was, plainly stated in the title.
Felendov came into the gallery, he knew they would be looking for him by now, he was escorted by two security men to the man in charge.
“I’m Kalenin. Please, explain this”
Felendov simply stood there
“There’s nothing to explain, it doesn’t mean anything. It only takes on whatever meaning you ascribe to it. I would have put just a mirror there if I’d had more time, as it was black paint was the easiest way of doing it. Cheapest too”
Kalenin leaned close to the artist, coat creaking slightly and a waft of aftershave leaked out into Felendov’s face.
“Don’t fuck with me.” He said simply, the tone not threatening but menacing “and don’t think you can just do what you like. We’re on to you”
“I’m not trying anything, just that the painting is true. Truest thing I’ve ever painted. If you destroy it you destroy yourselves. Simple”
Kalenin growled and pushed past Felndov and walked up to one of his men, whispering in the man’s ear.
“Let him go. Keep him under surveillance, but don’t let anything happen to him. The whole bloody world is watching and if we touch him it could be all our arses. Play it cool for god’s sake”
So Felendov was allowed to go home, to go into his studio and lock the door, ready not to emerge unless absolutely necessary. He hoped Kalenin had understood, he seemed like a clever man. He doubted, though, that the man’s superiors would be smart though, and was prepared for whatever they might try. But he had warned them.
But the next days papers contained only denunciations of the show, condemning its lack of artistic merit, though none dared mention the painting of Felendov. The official line was to ignore it, though it was the talk of the town. Everyone knew it what been displayed, they knew the name and illicit photos of it spread around. It spread like a phantom around the country, internationally pictures of it were on every front page and every TV show talked about it. Critics raved about its brave statement, its revealing of deep truths, how the black symbolised the state and the white frayed border the artistic underground.
The gallery was open the next day as usual, though the paining had been removed to a safe place within the secret police headquarters, where it had a whole room to itself.
Time passed and the controversy grew, the regime’s silence was punctuated by random arrests, by attempts to eradicate all mention of the painting from public discourse. Any writer who dared to mention it, even obliquely in their works was arrested, the slightest inference to the painting, to black paint, to blank portraits was enough. Every pop song was carefully pored over and forcibly changed if it was considered to be championing or condoning the painting. Felendov was arrested several times, all his paintings were impounded, though he was kept in relative comfort. They claimed the arrest was for his own safety, that there were radical elements enraged by his attack on the nation that might want to do him harm.
But that could not stop the next exhibition, that although the students had not gained permission to hold one they decided to go ahead anyway. It was staged in an old market square near the Kalumshin park area, a haunt of old dissidents. The exhibition was considered suspicious as it was but when the paintings were unveiled the authorities went into overdrive. There, in the very centre of the exhibition, hung against the cheap plasterboard swaying slightly in the breeze was the painting. This caused a panic amongst the secret service men, though once they realized it was not the original but presumably a copy they calmed down a little. The idea that these scruffy dissidents could have broken into the Ministry of state security was unthinkable. The exhibition became notorious for the day it was allowed to be open, There was a tense standoff, but one where each side had to pretend that it wasn’t one, that they were cooperating. The authorities had to pretend not to be ruffled and the artists had to pretend it was not a direct challenge to the regime.
And through it all crowds thronged, drawn by the controversy, though many of them did not really feel they understood the painting, and none of them liked it for its artistic merit. Just the fact it wasn’t sanctioned by the regime, that was enough to make it worth seeing. By night fall though a decision had been reached, the exhibition was bulldozed by the security men, each work carefully destroyed. Paintings were broken in half and the protesting artists arrested. By the morning all trace of the exhibition was gone.
All this had gone against the express guidance of Kalenin, who had urged caution above all else. But he was ignored, and in the end resigned from his position, when the regime fell he reinvented himself as a poet and art critic, but that was many years later.
The sides now were drawn, the bulldozing of the exhibition had been caught on film and was played around the world, as well as in every potential dissidents flat. Copies of the paining began to surface everywhere, though it was impossible to verify any degree of authenticity. Felendov himself did not help when he said he had given the original to a friend and that the one in the gallery exhibition had been a copy.
As a mural it began to appear on concrete walls and motorway bridges, it was simple enough to do, a rectangle of black with a white border. The regime went into overdrive, arresting and charging anyone even wearing a combination of black and white in their clothing could face arrest or at least some degree of harassment if they were young or looked like an opponent of the regime.
Though with this increased paranoia it only served to make the regime look confused and garner opposition, people who would have previously written off the art movement as a bunch of pretentious and pampered students with nothing really to say suddenly felt that maybe the paining was representation of their lives. It became a symbol of the oppression they felt, a lightening rod for grievances. Though the regime was able to keep the lid on outright revolt and to the rest of the world looked as stern and monolithic as ever it was seriously damaged, it may have had an army to defeat any other in the world, and a system of spies and state security organs that could eavesdrop on every home but it had lost the confidence of its people. Even the officials who before had been happy to parrot even the bizarrest pronouncements from above if it looked like it might get them promoted lost heart. What point was there when the slightest wrong word or accidental combination might get you thrown in jail and a single paining could cause such chaos and uncertainty? It was a few years before the regime petered out and fell apart but it was a shell long before that, where everyone went hollowly through the motions.
Felendov was released into a changed world, one where nobody cared what he did. The other artists in the art school had expected that they would be the new painters of a people energised with artistic appreciation, instead they only met with apathy. This suited Felendov fine and he went back to his studio, painting constantly until the art school was shut down due to funding cuts and he had to go abroad, where copies of his one painting, dashed out in a single afternoon looked back at him. There nobody either seemed to understand what it meant and they would ascribe fantastical properties and thesis to it. He was ignored when he explained simply that it meant nothing, that only the title and the circumstances had meaning. But he had no control over it, it was part of the fabric of history and not his at all.

Pre Obituary

2006-01-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

Not to gloat but if Ariel Sharon dies of being an overweight mass murdering bastard I will not exactly be weeping. Possibly I might shed a tear he won’t ever face justice but that’s all.
However when he does shuffle wheezing off this mortal coil and into some afterlife where he and Arafat can glare at each other across some heavenly table it will be interesting to not how he is remembered. Bearing in mind when Arafat died there was plenty of kind words from the western press but a lot more condemnation, accusations of ineptitiude and terrorism. Now he wasn’t so good, as a president or a negotiator but he did more for the Palestinian people than anyone else.
Sharon however has dedicated his life to trying to annihilate them, from his early days in the Hagannah shelling refugee camps, to his commanding of the Israeli forces in Lebanon and allowing massacres of women and children by the Phalange Militia. That and his provocation that caused the Intifada in 2000, and his actions as PM which have been more about shafting the Palestinians while the world praises him for letting the Palestinians have access to a beach that they already own anyway.
Sharon is no man of peace, neither is he the big man for standing up to the settler movement, he practically created them. He always knew that they would have to give some territory back. Giving back Gaza was a no brainer, they never really wanted it anyway- however in return they will probably keep Jerusalem, the west bank and all those bits nicked from Syria. Not a bad swap.
So I shall be ignoring the glowing obituaries that gloss over his brutal role in the last fifty years of middle east politics and the fact that he was much, much worse than Arafat yet his name will be praised.

Biblical theme park in Galilee

2006-01-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1677557,00.html

When you first read that you think at last the Palestinians get themselves a theme park to exploit their rich cultural history. That maybe they’ll open up Bethlehem too, and maybe they can get together with Israel and make peace through Disneyesque quasi religious theme parks.
Then you read its being made by the Israelis, with the backing and money of the US Christian right. Made my heart sink certainly, that and the fact that this is so full of hypocrisy that it fits nicely into the history of hypocrisy and stupidity that both Israel and the Christian right in the US are famed for. I can only imagine on and aesthetic and religious level how tacky this place will be, I imagine giant plastic statues of Jesus, probably very blond ones. Having seen before some of America’s churches I can only cringe at the thought of the holy land, renowned for the beauty and aesthetic wonder of its religious places being fouled by some gaudy, muscular and bigoted church.
Once again it is noted that despite Palestine having one of the worlds oldest Christian denominations, by default really considering the location and their beleaguered status considering they can’t even use bethlehem at christmas anymore that the US christian right are giving them fuck all help. Didn’t Pat Robertson even think that maybe he should reach out the those christian brothers facing persecution and death at the hands of another religion? No, because they are arabs, and thus scum. If it had been Christian persecuted by Arabs then Roberston and his ilk would be there like a shot, unless it was Saudi Arabia, which is of course another kettle of hypocrisy. This is not to suggesting that the Christian right has lost its history of anti-Semitism and is getting friendly with the Israeli state because of inter faith cooperation or atoning for Christianity’s historic persecution of the Jews. Nope nothing actually Christian like that, just that the book of rebveltaion says that for jesus to come back there has to be a Jewish state in jereusalem and that the jews have to get with the christianity. Not that this seems to scare many in the Israeli establishment israelies, most are happy to accept the cash, as they always have been from the US. Some are obviously alarmed but then if I was Isreali citizen I would be very alarmed by many, many things my government had done.
The icing on the cake is that this land by the sea of Gallilee isn’t even properly owned by Israel, before 1967 it was part of Syria, and Syria very much wants it back. By getting a bunch of Americans to build a theme park and church there has pretty much made it sure never to go back to Syria. No wonder the Israelis aren’t charging rent for the land, even they aren’t that cheeky.
But the sadness of this is that once again the Palestinians get shafted, and irony doesn’t really get any worse than being ignored by very rich co religionists who would rather give their cash to the very people who are seeking to cleanse you from the land your people have lived on since before that bearded guy was even thought of. That and a gaudy Themepark being built on the memory of your people, while at the same time they sit back and watch you be annihilated.

CBI and TWAT*

2005-12-15T06:40:00.000-08:00

CBI and TWAT*

From the guardian-
The CBI is holding talks today with the home secretary, Charles Clarke, to press the government to stop the United States using an anti-terrorism treaty to extradite British executives for trial in America.
So the CBI suddenly gives a shi about the fate of people extradited unfairly to America under post 9/11 only when it concerns wealthy execs. Never mind that people like Babar Ahmed can be sent to Gitmo on very dodgy grounds (allegedly supporting a terrorist group, even though at the time they were not designated as such). Also Sir Digby Jones’s comments kinds sum up the nicely class/race distinctions

"This is totally unacceptable," Sir Digby said. "It might be acceptable for the bloke who wraps semtex around his body but not for a 62-year-old executive with prostate cancer. The process of justice is being abused. America is being an ignorant bully. This is just wrong".

Jones is clearly an utter wanker, if it were indeed terrorism suspects who had "wrapped Semtex around themselves" then they’d get tried in Britain, indeed if there was any evidence of actual wrongdoing then the UK would be arresting them like a shot. His sympathy for the white collar criminal also smacks of crocodile tears, how many lives were ruined by Enron? How many people have died because their pensions were raided by greedy executives? It’s not exactly bin laden levels but white collar criminals do create very real victims whose lives are fucked while executives get an extra holiday home and very fat pension.
The fact that America can just extradite who they want from Britain is one thing, but the fact we can’t do it to them is quite another-

America's decision not to make the agreement reciprocal followed pressure from the powerful Irish-American lobby, which feared that Britain might try to extradite republican sympathisers.

Hypocrisy overload there. The fact that the UK would be wanting to extradite actual terrorist who are responsible for the deaths of British citizens and to prevent possible further acts of terror is utterly ignored. They have the gall to be completely two faced, to go tell us to fuck ourselves because we are chasing the wrong kinds of terrorist. The War on Terror is obviously not actually a war on terror, just terror committed by people who don’t have a large influential lobby in the US.

*The War Against Terror

get happy

2005-10-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

it is with joy, a sense of cosmic revenge and simple final justice that i view the Bush administrations meltdown. To watch as Delay is indicted, rove looks to be, cheney's fallen out with bush and is keeping an even lower profile than normal, the right lashes out t his choice of next supreme court judge and Bush's ratings plummet as America finally realises he has made them so unsafe they can't actually defend themselves against their own weather is so godd. i have winged to everyone, been despondent tese lst few years as the casualties piled up in Iraq, as international law and common sense were ignored, as the US became a beacon fro all that was negatiove. finally the tide is turning, these bastards are actually, at last, with a bit of luck going to get what's coming to them. of curse going to prison or even just being exp[osed as corrupt and incompetnat are not exactly adeqaute payback for the most destructive five years in living memeory, and i'm sure the realtives of those killed by Bush's wars would not really see this as much of a cause for celebration but i now actually have a glimmer of optimism about the future. if bush is seen as the cunt he really is i hope this extends to his stupid ideas, about climate change, about war, about religion in schools and not giving enough condoms to africa and everything involving corporate america. i hope his ideology lies in tatters about him, as damned and hated in america as it is in the rest of the world. perhaps i'm being a bit premature but we can hope a little, the only thing may be its already too late and the damage has been done.

haliburton

2005-09-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

I have not needed to post on new orleans because simply enough everybody has seen what a cosmic fuck up it has been. even i was shocked though top see bush has the arropgance to award the bvery first reconstruction contascts to haliburton. haliburton for fucks sake! the same compnay that was found guilty of defrauding the US government in iraq, the sanme company that is in clear conflict of interest with the vice president because he used to run the copmpany. the same haliburton that was criticised for winning no bid contrracts for the work in iraq and has performed exceptionally poorly in rebuil;ding anything in iraq. i though the bush administration might have woken up to the fact they fucked up mightily in responding to hurricane katrina and do all they could to spin their way out of it. Giving haliburton the contract wikll only full further the accusations of cronyism and add to the critiscism that apointing a man to head FEMA whose only qualification was that he was mates with the Bush campaign manager. becauase of these actions peiople have died, and now it is not just iraqis, who can be hidden easily from the US population by a complient media and military willing to shoot journalists, but americans themselves. its going to take a lot of spinning for bush to get himself out of this, infact he might actually have to take some real action but i severely doubt his people have the brains or compassion to do anything but accuse their criticvs of anythin from "playing the blame game" to "hurting america!". i only hjope as the media has realised they were being played for suckers by wankers like Rove, a man who with any luck could br facing jail for leaking the name of a CIA undercover agent, they will actually do their jobs and hold the goverment to account.

Between terrorists and the Met

2005-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Perturbed by todays tabloid headlines accusing the family of the brazilian killed by police on the tube of hogging the headlines, that they got more help form the Met than the families of those killed by the terrorist bombing.
All i can say is its not a bloody competition, nobody is denying the families sufered horribly in losing loved ones but the fact is the Met shot a man dead then lied about it- there needs to be a thorough investigation, its not like we're ignoring the catching of terrorists. so in britan now we get to be afraid of not only terror bombings but also that we might be shot dead for no reason than we share a postcode with a terror suspect.

although on the bright side it shows the Met are not as racist as we thought, they will shoot anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

the tabloids also shrieked that 1 in 7 terror suspects are asylum seekers, omitting the fact that most terror arrests have in fact not resulted in any actual charges. they frankly would love to sccream that all asylum seekers are potential terrorists as there nothing the tabloids love better than to kick those who have escaped persecution and threats of death in another country. in fact why britan is still considered a safe haven when we have an overtly hostile environment where several asylum seekers have been murdered in cold blood and many of the others locked in detention centres is beyond me. i am probably more ashamed of that than anything else my country has done in recent years, apart obviously from the fucking of Iraq.

also read today of a US christian broadcaster who called for the assasination of chavez in venuzuala, calling hima dictator who was impoverishing his country and that the coup the US supporeted was popular, even though chavez was democratically elected, the coup ended when the people refused to support it and he has made great strides in the eradication of poverty. the fact that the accusation could be more easily aimed at his country was obviously lost on him, as was the fact that if someone in venuzuala had said that about bush the US probably would have
invaded before he finished the sentence.

2005-08-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Interesting thoughts about the long relationship between india and china. what with them being the likely superpowers of the 21st century, given their size, population and long history of civilisation (far longer than Europe's or North America's) they are always worth looking at. The i thing is that their relationship now is very similar to what it has been throughout history. i remember reading somewhere accounts of chinese scholars going to india in the early part of the first millenium in order to gain knowledge. They had acquired from india, not only the religion of buddhism but also information on medicine and other important ideas. that journey mirrors todays relationship, of china sending students to India's silicon valley in order to learn more about software design. though china is wealthier and more powerful than india at present it lacks valuable knowledge, it is a major producer of computer hardware, but in software terms lags far behind india.
culturally too it will be interesting to see how global culture is changed by the increasing consumer voice of India and china. while in britan now we end of consuming almost anything american, even when it has no relevence to us and is culturally alien. the best case of this is films which cover things like baseball or american football, they mean bugger all to us. i can see a situation where asian culture becomes the major one exported to us, the fact that i am sure in the next few years software programs will be able to easily dub films into any language without any trouble. it can already be seen in the way the influence culturally of japan has changed the cultural climate in europe and america, not only in the huge demand for Manga comics and films but in terms of japanese films, which are being remade by hollywood, theough rarely with any great degree of success but featuring a list hollywood actors.
It has to be understood that the West is no longer the cultuarl powerhouse it was only a few years ago. i am sure the US will be able to dominate culturally for a few years yet but asia is comiong up swiftly behind.

orientalism

2005-08-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

have been thinking recently of the West's changing view of the Muslim world- from the Orientalism outlined by Edward Said to the current situation. while the opinions of the west have changed in many ways the underpinning assumptions have not. the arab world is still largely viewed as a static monolithic thing, forinstance it is referred to as the Middle east, the Muslim world or the arab world when those are overlapping but in many ways very different entities- for uinstance pakistanis and Kurds are not arabs yet they are Muslim, lebanon is arab yet largely christian. How the middle east is viewed has become particulalry focused in recent years and opinion very polarised-there is a widespread belief that the Muslim world is a single creature,a monolithic other consisting of repressed burkha clad women, bearded fundementalists and ageing despotic regimes.
it is most intersting however that despite this continuity of misunderstanding there has been some change in how the muslim world is viewed in the west. where it once considered a overly sensuous place, where the peopple had no use of reason or the finer thoughts of post enlightenbment Europe it has now been de sexualised. There is no talk anymore of harems of dancing girls or opium dens. that projection of repressed european desires is no longer necessary, we have enough of our own dancing girls. The fact is though that muslim women are not allowed any agency of their own, it is assumed they simply accept cultural opression, that they are forced to cover themselves- not that they might have cultural values of their own that are not that of the Talbian but neither are they exactly Western. As was witnessed in the debate over headscarves in France it is a massive culutalr misunderstanding on the wests behalf. They do not see to realsie that it a realtive issue- that wearing of clothes is dependant of cultural climate. we would not expect English children going to school in africa to be foreced to go naked because it was the local custom. The fact as well that even our own grandmothers used to cover their heads, and that for a very long time men uniformly wore hats.
the essence of orientalism is the lack of viewing ones own culture from an impartial standpoint, that it attempts to frame the other in terms with no comaprisons with western culture. the constant misunderstanding is due to a lack of questioning of our own cultural values, a lack of awareness that culture is fluid.
the fact that the debate in britan at the moment revolves areound whether Muslims should accept british values without the thought that british culture is constantly changing. the british values of a tory minister would not be the same as mine, neither would it be the same of a tory miniser of the 1950's- we as a country are constantly assimilating new ideas- we all eat curries, watch american films and TV series, drink tea or coffee- none of these origianlly british asnd all of them relativly new. we would frankly not recognise the britain of the past, culture is an ever chganging dialogue and one that is utterly individual.
We should too assume that in the Muslim world the same is true, that the return to fundementalism is much the same as the idea of the return to old fahioned values. they too believe as our tory ministers and cheerleaders in the press do that culture is static, that everything is either right or wrong and that there can be only one unchanging and unchallengable perspective.

Iran, Iraq and the Kurds

2005-08-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

Its prediction time again and what with the recent sending of Iranian troops to put down popular Kurdish demonstrations on the Iraqi border, patterns become apparent. Firstly the cosy relationship between the new shiite leaders of iraq and the Government of Iran. Fact is bush and co shot themselves in the foot by allowing to be elected a shiite govt that would obvioulsy end up being pro Iranian. What is likely to happen is as the Sunni shia civil war escalates Iran will either be dragged in or drag itself in on the side of the Shia south. Whether america will simply cut its losses and bugger off, reach an agreement with iran or try to soldier on as it has already is open to question, though either way there is little they can actually do about it. The most likely thing is that unfortunately and against the wishes of most Iraqis Iraq will be split into the three main ethnic states, with the northern Kurdish part and te southern shia part being the most important. Obviously this only heightens the potential to conflict as there are many border areas, such as Kirkuk which is disputed largely because of its oil fields.
This weeks events though mark a trend that is increasingly disturbing, that is the spectre of agression against the kurds. Despite their staues as downtrodden minorities in the states of iran and turkey the Kurds in iraq are very powerful, they practically run their own state their, they have the ear of the Americans, and also their military training and most importantly trust. They have been involved with the Israelis and not seeing themselves as arabs means they do not have that great an attachment to the concerns of the other middle eartern states, which is understandable considering a hitsory of oppression by them. as the Iraqi kurds get more powerful and more vocal it may get to the point where the states of Iran Turkey and whatever is left of Iraq decide to do what they have always done to the Kurds and invade. This could easily happen alongside and iraqi civil war as instability breeds instability.
The fact that america in order to try and preserve short term goals will stoke these fires, by sabre rattling against Iran and by using Kurdish Militias against the insurgency and by execerbating the Sunni Shia split will only make things worse.

Interesting case too of the Baghdad sniper, who has been claiming US soldiers for months, some extracts from a guardian article-
"Juba is the nickname given by American forces to an insurgent sniper operating in southern Baghdad. They do not know his appearance, nationality or real name, but they know and fear his skill.
There is never a follow-up shot, never a chance for US forces to identify the origin, to make the hunter the hunted. He fires once and vanishes.
Some worry that Juba is on his way to becoming a resistance hero, acclaimed by those Iraqis who distinguish between "good" insurgents, who target only Americans, and "bad" insurgents who harm civilians.
"
I heard about this before, and generally think, are you sure its just one guy?
But it is interesting that Iraqi get at least one good hero, in that he kills cleanly and boosts Iraqi national p[ride. There is a lot of psychology in this, the US has always relied on technological superiority and supposedly better training. With this sniper they are being outskilled, he is simply better than them and they have had drilled into them since birth that the US military is the best in the world, that alone is enough to make them sloppy. They do not realise that technology and big muscles are not always going to make tem better than everyone else.
I also like this quote-
"We are professionals. There is a line between a maniac with a gun and a sniper," said Mike, 31, a corporal with a reconnaissance sniper platoon who did not want to his surname to be used.
He spoke during a 24-hour mission on a roof during which his team ate junk food and urinated into a bottle. During daylight they lay on the ground, immobile, to avoid being seen. "It's not a glamorous life," he said.
Interesting because A. I don’t see a difference and those who get shot probably don’t really either and B. the fact soldiers eat junk food. Shouldn’t they be all ultra health conscious, especially as a high sugar diet, especially combined with heat, is going to really fuck with their much vaunted skills? Also, just one bottle to piss into?

I also read that most US soldiers in Iraq spend their days in Saddam’s old gyms working out. Bearing in mind putting US soldiers in Saddam’s old palaces was a stupid idea anyway because it leads Iraqis to certain conclusions. They also spend most of their time there injecting steroids, which feeds into that Army belief that in order to be a good soldier you have to look a bit like the Governor of California. Because as we know big muscles not only stop bullets but make you quicker too. Of course steroids are banned but US soldiers get cheap mail deliveries that are obviously not properly checked. Interesting to know what other banned things they get up to, such as drinking and drug taking, shooting random things and people and getting with prostitutes.

Todays depression inducing news

2005-06-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

Guardian, 15th June-
"The 15-year-olds from Emmanuel College in Gateshead, a privately-backed city technology college which hit the headlines over accusations it teaches creationism alongside evolution, were sitting their GCSEs a year early and had been predicted to get A and A* grades. It was discovered at the eleventh hour that they had spent the past year learning the wrong first world war poems."

"Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.
The American company is helping censors remove "freedom" and "democracy" from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.
The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of "human rights", are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.
A Microsoft spokesman said the restrictions were the price the company had to pay to spread the positive benefits of blogs and online messaging.
"Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here," Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN, told the Associated Press news agency. "

But its not the company that is paying the price, it will be the thousands of innocent Chinese computer users who want to have the same basic rights enjoyed by californian software devvelopers. Bunch of cunts.

Robomen

2005-06-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

"Workers in warehouses across Britain are being "electronically tagged" by being asked to wear small computers to cut costs and increase the efficient delivery of goods and food to supermarkets.
New US satellite- and radio-based computer technology is turning some workplaces into "battery farms" and creating conditions similar to "prison surveillance", according to a report from Michael Blakemore, professor of geography at Durham University.
The technology, introduced six months ago, is spreading rapidly, with up to 10,000 employees using it to supply household names such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Boots and Marks & Spencer.
There is also concern that the new technology might create new industrial injuries because of the need for workers to make repetitive movements with their arms and wrists, similar to repetitive strain injuries caused by overusing computers.
One firm, Peacock Retail Group, claims workers like the system. The company, which has a modern centre in Nantgarw, south Wales, where employees have 28 wearable computers and six mounted on trucks, says the system has a positive impact on team morale. "Everybody likes the wearables because they are comfortable and easy to use. The result is the team finds it easier to do the job," it says on the company website.
A spokeswoman for Tesco last night insisted that the company was not using the technology to monitor the staff and said it was making employees' work easier and reducing the need for paper.
But at the GMB's annual conference in Newcastle yesterday one of the union's national officers, Paul Campbell, said: "We are having reports of people walking out of jobs after a few days' work, in some cases just a few hours. They are all saying that they don't like the job because they have no input. They just followed a computer's instructions."
"The supermarkets that rely on just-in-time shelf-filling rather than holding buffer stocks are incredibly profitable companies. They can well afford to operate a humanised supply team."
Other monitoring devices are being developed in the US, including ones that can check on the productivity of secretaries by measuring the number of key strokes on their word processors; satellite technology is also being developed to monitor productivity in manufacturing jobs.
Two London firms are considering using satellites to direct sandwich board holders, making sure they are not shirking and moving them to areas with more people."
(Guardian, 7th June)

So much evil involved in this it is difficult to believe. Firstly the whole nature of control, you are basically saying "we don’t trust our staff, they are morons, thieves and have to be told everything". Secondly it is as they say creating a battery farm out of work, the fact that they will try to introduce it into all other spheres of work is also disturbing. I bet it will go first to the call centres where they already monitor how much time you spend on each call, your breaks down to the very minute and listen in to increase "efficiency".
I don’t think they system will be very efficient, it will utterly fuck morale because who wants to be watched all the time? Why wants to work in a place where they are not trusted. I bet the directors of fucking Tesco will never have their efficiency monitored, only the lower echelons have to walk around with a computer tied to them. it is genuinely ridiculous but unfortunately the logical extension of the past hundred odd years of attempts to control workers behaviour, to enforce efficiency because value for money is more important than employees welfare.
I cry bullshit on the claim of the company in Wales that the employees like them. Nobody likes being watched, and nobody likes being treated like a fucking machine
As for the sandwich board men, surely there are better things to do with that technology? Is this the future then, all the technology in the world used just to save a few pennies by screwing over the workers?
Plus it will probably not reduce theft, any system can be circumvented by the people who know how to use it. And despite the massive surveillance in Britain we still have a shit load of crimes. This and outlawing hoodies will not make us a better society.

Egypt and New Alliances

2005-04-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

Very interesting interviews in the Egyptian paper Al Ahram with the President of Brazil, and the PM of Venuzuala. I had missed completely the ongoing diversification of the developing world, going from relying on help from the EU and USA to actually trading amongst themselves. I was aware of the G20, all the biggest developing nations, and their role in the WTO talks in Mexico, basically scuppering attempts by the North to get its agenda through. It seems things have moved on since then, that there is a nexus building between South America, mainly Brazil and Venuzuala linking themselves with the Arab world, most specifically Egypt. A great many interesting things have come to light, firstly that there is a significant Arab population in South America, something I was utterly ignorant of. According to the slightly dubious talk of the Venuzualan PM they are fully intergrated into the culture of south America and there is general harmony all round. Of course I will look into this with my usual degree of scepticism but it certainly is something I was not aware even existed.
Secondly it is interesting that revolutionary South American leaders are in Egypt at the very same time as a large number of protests happen across Cairo. I hope of course Silva and the Venuzualan dude give their full support to the enough movement, they really should. I hope too their trade and left leaning political influence on the Middle East will grow, though that could just be the dreams of revolutionary Leftie. It would be too an interesting side affect of the recent colour-coded revolutions if their influence would be felt in Egypt, especially as this long term ally of the US has had almost no criticism about its appalling human rights record and limited democracy. There have been rumblings in Egypt for several years now, the anti globalisation Cairo conferences have extended to cover trade justice, Arab liberation and Anti Occupation, most specifically Iraq and Palestine and establishing proper democracy. It would only be natural for the newly minted "Enough" (Kefaya) movement to link in with the older anti globalisation and anti war movements, who have their base in South America, and Brazil which hosts the World Social forum every year.
Also the hopeful formation of new trade blocks within the developing world could actually mark the turning point in the new century. No longer will the nations of the south have to rely on handouts from the north or loans or bust their economies trying to cater for what the multinationals want or say the markets demand. They quite sensibly want to trade with countries on the same level of development as themselves, the incentive is there then to be fair, to help each other get ahead. Rather than the interests of the wealthy nations who act merely as loan sharks, giving out money and aid only as a lever of control. The problems with this being there is still room for discord and that the US and EU will do all they can to destabilise it, figuring quite rightly that it is a threat to their own economic and political hegemony. It could be another OPEC, or as the Venuzualan PM warns they could be another Allende
If Mubarek does indeed get toppled by the new movement and is succeeded by someone slightly less authoritarian then it will help seal an axis stretching from South America to the Middle east. An alliance of developing and ex colonial nations able to act as equals and protective of their own interests, that will truly be a positive development in international relations

Telling America to Fuck Off

2005-04-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

So today Ariel Sharon again tells the US to fuck off when politely asked to maybe ease off on stealing the land of other people and not piss off the very people Bush is trying to woo as part of the war on stuff. Not that unusual for Sharon to do that as Israel is the only country that can really stick two fingers up at the US and still receive a large amount of military aid. Though saudi Arabia can both suck up to the US and in its schools and mosques slag off the US and Western Everything. Now India get in on the act, refusing a US offer of Arms becasue they sold F16's to pakistan. They would not have done that a few years ago, if the US offers you arms its a good idea to take them else you might find them being pointed at you in amuch less friendly way. The fact that India has the power to do this is largely due to the fact it is being wooed by both the US and China. the US to encircle China and china to alienate the US. Of course it might as well be due to the slow erosion of US influence, Europe may still amke polite noises to stay friends woth the US but most countries realise that now maybe they don't have too, plus it usually goes down better with the electorate to be seen as giving the US the finger. A far cry from the days we stood shoulder to shoulder with them, and that was only three and a half years ago.

As 9/11 was to George Bush, he is to the World

2005-04-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

In years to come George w Bush will be regarded as the greatest American President the left ever had. There could not have been a better caricature of a US president, one whose mix of evil and incompetence shattered forever the superpower status and international respectability of the US. He has run up a deficit greater than the US has ever known, alienated virtually every country in the world and launched a culture war in the US not seen since the 1950’s. He has ensured the US can no longer extend its political and economic grip on the world by tying down his troops and erasing its international credibility in the sands of Iraq.
While in the short term Bush has showered down upon us on the left insult after defeat and seemingly suffered no ill effects from the constant scandal and corruption that has mired his administration. Indeed he emerged strengthened after his re-election, the last place he could have been stopped. For the progressive left he has felt like the worst thing that could have happened, like a combination of the corruption of Nixon and the messianic stupidity of Reagan. Someone who has no regard for the environment, workers rights, international co-operation, scientific rationalism or indeed anything except power and wealth in its most naked form.
Yet by being so shamelessly amoral he has ripped the mask that Clinton so expertly placed over the true face of the US, if someone like Gore or even Kerry had been elected this would have gone on. The WTO and Nafta and all the other tentacles of soft power would have been extended. US hegemony would be slowly but surely rolled out, subtly crushing dissent, waging wars by proxy, building alliances to benefit only the US. Instead we have a world that has now realised the reality and have started to gang up on the US, they see no reason why they should bankroll the US deficit any more. Nor why we all should have to pay for their reckless use of the Earth’s finite resources, and then their denial that there even is Global Warming . New power blocks have emerged, nothing unites so well as something to unite against. Despite its fawning acceptance of Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, Europe has finally found its voice. China has become rich in its feeding of the voracious US consumer, but also it realises its own power, that they and a few other Asian states are all that is keeping the US from collapsing into a mountain of its own unpaid debt.
And as the US focuses its attention on the Middle East it loses sight of things closer to home. That Canada is no longer the friend t can always rely on, when they are slapping on import duties on US goods because the US won’t play fair, that and the ever present spectre of dissent over Iraq. But south America is truly the area where Bush has made sure America has lost control. Though they may still make noises about Cuba to please the Miami exiles they seem to have missed the whole protest movement that has swept the lower continent over the last few years. That every head of state except Fox in Mexico and thingy in Colombia that where pro US have either been removed or are gravely weakened should have acted as a wake up call to the US. That the plan of an American free trade Zone stretching from Alasks to Tierra del Fuego that seemed unstoppable in 2000 is now utterly dead is due largely to Bush’s incompetence, not helped by the fact that laissez faire capitalism screwed the south. A more subtle leader would surely have brought them back in, not funded a half hearted coup against Chavez in Venuzuala, then when it failed and made him stronger than he was before just sniped at him from the safety of the US media. With any luck south America will be lost to the US for a generation, and that they will form their own progressive trade block, signs for that are already there, as they increasingly look to china and the EU for investment.
Bin Laden definitely chose a good president to launch attacks against, knowing he would turn the Middle East into a bloody quagmire that would only increase support for Alqaida. He reckoned on a new Christian crusade and he was right. It was rumoured that most of Alqaida favoured a Bush re-election, arguing that Kerry would do the same as Bush only go about it in a more subtle way. Bush’s obviousness, his incompetence and arrogance in trying to forcibly export Us culture onto the unwilling majority in the Middle East has ensured a hatred for all thing Yankee. They have just had to sit back while the US launched an unwinnable war against the wrong enemy in Iraq. This war will only benefit Iran and the various fundamentalists. Though we can hope perhaps that the dead end nature of fundamentalism, its political bankruptcy in Iran and the growth of a pan Arab liberation movement in Egypt will in the end make the Middle East not a bloody, oily hole in the ground.
The only downside is of course that Bush could still shift the domestic US landscape permanently to the right. As the Democrats look incapable of launching any kind of new ideology to recapture the progressive parts of the US. At the present rate they may win back the Presidency but only as a protest to the war in Iraq. They are loosing the battle of ideas as the US mind becomes more entrenched, more embattled and conservative. This will only get worse as their much vaunted superpower is exposed as a sham. When prices rise and they get humiliated internationally more and more they will turn inward, cursing the rest of the world as they did over Iraq. They are a nation that have been told they will inherit the earth and shape it in their own image, they do not take kindly to being told they cannot. They will elect more like bush, more right wing money makers buttressed by Cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism. The only hope lies unfortunately in the democrats somehow recapturing some ground in the battle for ideas. They are hamstrung by their lack of media control and the fact they are part of US society too, and suffer the same blinkers and prejudices.
And while it makes me feel glad that in the long term Bush is responsible for the death of American power I fear that it will be replaced by another nation with much the same mission, who will be as blind to human rights, the environment and progressive cultural ideas. It is said that China will be the next superpower but will it exercise that power for good? For all its faults the US at least gave lip service to freedom and human rights, it may have rarely stuck to them but it was a battle cry that inspired many, from the French Revolution to the fall of communism. The next superpower will not come close, I might hope that they will shout the joys of an ideology of Socialism from the rooftops but I very much doubt it. Though China will be balanced for now by the US, which is resembling more and more one of those great European empires that could boast that it had the biggest army, though it could barely afford to clothe them.
Is there a chance or the US to mend its ways? To resort to those heady days of the early nineties where it was fashionable to care about the world? Where a new world order was something to be dreamed about, not a nightmare of global conspiracy. Perhaps US culture has permanently rejected the world, to resort only to crass materialism, to almost Fin de Siecle conspicuous consumption, all too aware that this may be the last chance it has before the bankers close in and the overdraft has to be repaid.
Maybe they will elect another Clintonite, who will reunite them with the world and whose soft words will woo back those who in the hearts want to believe the US is a beacon for liberty and decent entertainment. It seems so very unlikely, and perhaps impossible that even if it happened that they would have any measure of success.
There is a good essay on this theme by George Monbiot in today’s Guardian, where it focus’s on Wolfowitz and the World Bank, describing how the Neo Cons should have just continued the post WWII multilateral system as that was rigged to put the US permanently on top. It is only the greed of the Neo Cons that they will not share even the crumbs

The Death Of Europe

2005-04-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

There are increasing apocalyptic fears about the imminent demise of Europe, though not from some kind of quick death like war or terrorism but from the simple fact that Europeans are not breeding enough. The demography is clear, as Europe has developed people are having less children. People live for longer so there are more elderly, it is a "problem" of the developed world, as if living longer and not overpopulating the earth was actually a problem rather than in fact a goal but there we go. The problem in the eyes of those who see it is rather that as Europeans get less those pesky immigrants become more. Those selfsame reactionary tabloid types are of course the first to employ cheap foreign labour but resent it when they actually dare to hang around here and try to vote or have children, or most heinously retain any of their native culture. In Europe you can be any culture you want, as long as its not too Foreign.
The fear is simply that these hordes of Islamic types are coming over here, breeding a lot, refusing to assimilate totally into Western culture and slowly outnumbering "us", in a few years we will be the Caliphate of Europe and they will murder us all in our beds.
Now this is a thesis very popular with anyone from your common racist to nationalists, tabloid editors and military planners. The fear is largely unfounded, or at least in some way mistaken as it just assumes immigrant are a monolithic block intent on cultural colonisation. The fact is that Europe is not one culture, it is a culture made of immigration, some parts have been here longer so they seem familiar. All these new people with ways we have not seen before are a bit scary, especially when they are all ghettoed together. Which is of course directly the fault of selfsame right wingers who insisted they be all housed in areas in the rotting inner cities or on estates nobody wanted to live in. Blair’s attempts to institute faith schools and a strong background racism mean that the cultures are artificially separated and just glower at each other over a wall of mutual superstition. Yet they don’t, after a while the cultures mix, and not a one way process as those on the right fear, especially for the second generation- those born into Europe and knowing no other home. They will speak almost certainly the language of the country, and will usually have the regional accent too. They will for the most part consider themselves both European and Muslim/African/Asian. What is forgotten in the debate is that this has happened before, the fear of the other who may have some shadowy allegiance to something other that the nation they reside in, or who wants to change the nation they have entered into in their own image. Its been said against Jews, Gypsies and most especially in Britain Catholics. There are still laws I believe preventing Catholics from taking the throne. So the fear is simply the old fashioned xenophobia, with a healthy dollop of ignorance, in not actually bothering to talk to the generations of migrants who have come to Europe. They are not intent on cultural jihad, though the Muslim community especially has been backward on a whole range of Rights. They are a lot of them pissed of that they get lumped in with terrorists and that they face a large degree of discrimination while at the same time propping up the economy of Europe by working for less than their white counterparts. It is interesting o consider that Catholics, mostly old Ratzinburger are afraid they will be swept away by a tide of Muslims who consider their loss to Charlemagne in the eighth century merely a temporary setback on the road to domination of Europe. Considering that’s how Catholics were thought of I most of Northern Europe for a great deal of time they would have looked at the logs in their eyes for a bit.
It may come to pass that Europe is dominated by a Muslim majority but it is unlikely. Firstly Europe really needs immigrants, what with the whole getting old and having no kids thing so we really should be a bit more welcoming. Also as immigrant become more settled, more absorbed into the country they become part of the nation. As with America the massive influx of immigrants didn’t really alter that much of the cultural landscape. The lingua franca has remained English, most of the festivals and religion solidly the same, even both the contenders for the 2004 presidency could trace ancestry back to the people who sailed over on the Mayflower. The US for all its other faults does not have so much fear of the immigrant, though it too has had its doomsayers over the years, and has imposed heinous restrictions on them in its time. Europe will not die anytime soon. As time goes on the immigrants will speak more of the language of their host nation, their children will celebrate Christmas a most Europeans do- without any reference to Christianity whatsoever. It becomes obvious to that to immigrants in order to get ahead they have to start speaking the language, to assimilate a little, though it is easily possible to do that without compromising your identity whatsoever.
It is the same as the experience of any of the large scale immigrations of the past, in Britain we has waves of Irish and Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. The same fears were raised by scaremongers of the time but now there are still communities proud to be Jewish or Irish but playing a full part in the national life, and considered as British as anyone else. The fear then now is based almost solely on skin colour, though that too I hope will fade.