Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar

In/credible

2007-03-16T17:26:00.000Z

As various commentators at Lenin’s Tomb point out, given that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to being responsible for everything, and more, does this mean that the War on Terror is at an end?

If that question is a little adolescent, here is one that is utterly adult; why has our press been reporting Khalid Sheikh Mohemmed’s confessions as anything other than the incredible product of much more credible accounts of rendition and torture?

There really is no pleasing some people

2007-01-25T12:39:00.000Z

BUSH: We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqis express that.

---------------

RIMMER: Rejoice! We conquer! Victory on Waxworld! It's VW day!

LISTER: So you took the HQ Wiped them all out.

RIMMER: To a droid.

KRYTEN: It's true, all melted.

LISTER: What about Arnie's army?

CAT: Yeah, how many of them made it back?

RIMMER: There are always casualties in war, gentlemen. Otherwise it wouldn't be war, just be a rather nasty argument with a lot of pushing and shoving.

LISTER: So how many survived?

RIMMER: Well we haven't had time to make a full official estimate, but at a rough guess, and obviously this is subject to alteration pending information updates, roundabout none of them.

LISTER: So you wiped out the entire population of this planet.

RIMMER: You make it sound so negative, Lister. Don't you see, the deranged menace that once threatened this world is vanquished!

LISTER: No it isn't, pal. You're still here.

RIMMER: I brought about peace. Peace, freedom and democracy.

LISTER: Yeah, Rimmer. Right. Absolutely. Now all the corpses that litter that battlefield can just lie there safe under the knowledge that they snuffed it under a flag of peace and can now happily decompose in a land of freedom. Ya smeg head.

RIMMER: There really is no pleasing some people, is there?

---------------

From Red Dwarf IV: Meltdown [script via Silicon Hell]

The fantasy of Christmas

2006-12-08T19:47:00.000Z

After the fantasistic front pages of the Sun [1, 2, 3, 4], the fascistic rants of Melanie Phillips [here are the 2001 and the 2004 rants – I would bet a fiver that she comes up with something similar, though perhaps more extreme, this year] and the plaigiaristic hackery of Janet Street-Porter, the great contemporary myth of Christmas is stripped bare in newsprint. Despite what you might read for the first twenty four days of December in papers from across the political spectrum – at least the spectrum as defined by the mass market newspapers – Christmas is not under attack. It is not being banned. And these things that are not happening are not being done by foreigners, ethnic minorities, migrants, asylum seekers, or any other poxy proxy phrase behind which the tabloids hide their racism.

Thanks to Oliver Burkeman and The Guardian for doing what The Independent should have done. And it might well have done, if it were not for the fact the The Independent was lumbered with an editor-at-large who cannot see dangerous bigoted nonsense for what it is. And it was hardly very well disguised bigoted nonsense. It was on the front page of The Sun. It may as well as come in a box labelled ‘bigoted nonsense’. Mind you, Street-Porter once chose to work with the ‘award-winning’ Kelvin MacKenzie.

In other news, Jack Straw wants to talk to an imaginary person. And he wants to do so on behalf of an imaginary person. I would have had some respect for him if this imaginary person were Santa Claus. At least there is some evidence for Santa’s existence. Children do in fact receive presents, even if the distribution of such gifts is contrary to Santa’s mythic mission statement. The resulting inequalities are just a small part of the persuasive argument for the non-existence of Santa. But at least there is a speck of an empirical case. By contrast, there is no material evidence that anyone is ‘banning’ Christmas. It is not just, as Jack Straw acknowledges, that there are no ‘people of other faiths’ calling for Christmas to be banned on the grounds of offence. But there are no ‘PC’ ‘do-gooders’ who are “second-guess[ing] how they think others will or may react, without even asking them”.

So Straw wants to speak to a fictional character invented by The Sun on behalf of the Archangel Gabriel in order to have a 'big conversation' about something that is not happening. Straw was Home Secretary (responsible for the release of Pinochet - perhaps Straw can petition Gabriel to ease the dictator's entry to Heaven) and Foreign Secretary. No wonder he has some problems dealing with the actually existing world, a world where, in fact, Iraq had no WMDs, and a world where, in fact, the advocates and administrators of the invasion were notorious human-rights violators.

Plagiarist

2006-12-07T19:48:00.000Z

Perhaps not. But Janet Street-Porter is, at best, a lazy columnist.

The column bearing her by-line that was printed today in The Independent is, for a large part, a faithful copy of the ‘Foreigners Are Stealing Christmas’ story printed in The Sun on Wednesday. The JS-P article is not a simple restatement of independently gathered facts, but bears the rhetorical imprinteur of the article in The Sun. JS-P repeats the dishonest trick that has been developed by The Sun to aid the fabrication of xenophobic propaganda. The Sun and JS-P both open their articles by describing how ‘Christmas is being banned to avoid offending ethnic minorities’. They both then support this statement of how the world is by citing examples of something Christamassy being altered for reasons that are categorically unrelated to ‘avoiding offending ethnic minorities’.

Why would JS-P attempt to forge an image of the world in which ethnic minorities are a cause of events that are rolled into one laughable title; ‘the banning of Christmas’?

Five Chinese Crackers is providing a public service by digesting the tide of hate-filled bullshit that is rising in the British press. FCC has, as usual, a superb takedown of relevant article in The Sun. The comprehensive shredding of the fabricated image of the world presented by The Sun would equally apply to the JS-P column, printed in a supposedly quality paper. I write ‘would’ because the JS-P column is a second-hand impressionistic reproduction of the tabloid story and as such has an even looser association with ‘evidence’. The Sun article, in comparison, is rigorous, balanced journalism. In fact The Sun article is bullshit. And that leaves the JS-P article as a diarrheic stain on a page.

Of course, JS-P might not have copied her column from The Sun. She might be an independent bigot.

Redundancy

2006-11-20T15:39:00.000Z

Too slow for the interweb?
To keep up in the world of blogging you have to move fast. A day or so of deliberation and you are left trailing in the wake of writers who operate a little closer to the edge of current affairs.

Two stories that it now seems redundant to spend too long commenting on are ‘the chicken time bomb scenario’ – I have, quite brazenly, stolen this title from Chicken Yoghurt, on the basis that it was too good not to – and ‘electrifying student profiling’.

The Chicken Time Bomb Scenario
The best coverage of the controversy revolving around Halal chicken being served at a school Christmas dinner are offered at Chicken Yogurt, Five Chinese Crackers and Not Saussure.

As far as my own thoughts go, I will say, without equivocation, that the objection is nothing more than racism. Show me another explanation. If the parents are objecting on the basis of animal cruelty, then I hope that they are rejecting the vast majority of meat. But they are not, are they? The industrial farming and butchery practices that deliver non-Halal chickens to our plate are uncontroversial. If the parents are objecting on the basis that, as ‘Christians’*, they have a theological objection, then I challenge them to make this case. But they have not, and they will be unable to without stepping well beyond the boundaries of the modern, mainstream Christian churches. And if the parents step so far outside the mainstream, then how does their claim to be defending ‘our’ heritage hold water? And if the parents are serious about preserving ‘our’ cultural heritage, then I ask them; what on Earth are you talking about? Is it the eating of chicken that is contrary to our cultural heritage? If so, why not concentrate on the choice of fowl rather than the method of butchery? If butchery is the issue, are these parents really saying that industrially managed farms and slaughterhouses are a key component of ‘our’ heritage?

The answer is none of these. The most generous answer is that there is a BNP provocateur at work, whipping unreflective xenophobia into a racist response. The least generous answer is that in our current climate, produced by the Express, the Mail, the Sun, New Labour, the Conservative Party and the rest, Muslims are inherently threatening, and that the parents of Oakwood are a racist reflection of this. Denis MacShane ought to be ashamed of himself for pandering to the bigoted politics at work here.

I challenge anyone to give me one good reason why serving Halal chicken should be in any way controversial for a ‘Christian’ happy to eat industrially produced meat.

Electrifying Student Profiling
The story of the Iranian-American student being singled out for an ID check at a UCLA library and, when he objects, being repeatedly tasered by campus security is offered at Lenin’s Tomb. All I can add is an edited round-up of the comments I left at Europhobia.

UCLA is, remember, an elite university. Imagine how American security forces treat the underprivileged – and in court, underrepresented – sections of the United States citizenry. Imagine how they treat foreigners. Imagine how they treat foreigners abroad, out of the sight of camera phones and off the radar of well-motivated and well-rewarded lawyers.

I could not see the porters at any UK university that I have been to behaving in this way. For one thing they do not have tasers.

This is not a facetious point. I have never been happy with the enthusiasm shown by some liberals for ‘non-lethal’ weapons. This unease has nothing to do with the actual lethality of these weapons, and everything to do with the way that non-lethal, but still coercive and forceful options for paramilitary control can change the ‘mind’ of the state. Given ‘non-lethal’ weapons, is it not reasonable to expect our security services to become incautious and immoderate in their use of force?

There is a big difference between making the decision to disperse a crowd by firing into it, and making the decision to disperse a crowd by the deployment of non-lethal weapons. If the non-lethal weapons are as good as their advocates would have us believe, the latter option is just as certain and coercive a means of control. But the decision is far easier to take. And it pleases the technological-fix fetishes of the ‘modernity’ crowd.

A police state that only has guns can kill people, but it loses its legitimacy very quickly. A police state that has non-lethal means of paramilitary control can tell itself, quite convincingly, that it is not a police state after all. Remember the mantra that works a fascistic charm; if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. At least until you have a close encounter with a policeman. Or any other real, human authority figure.

Redundancy?
Ah. It seems that in the world of blogging, coming second appears to be no bar to holding forth.

*I know from personal experience, and we all know from the evidence of evolving rhetoric of the BNP, that the word ‘Christian’ is used as a politically disguised placeholder for ‘white’. At the time of the last census I worked in an office staffed by reasonably educated people. For a lunch break or two, discussion in the office revolved around the question of what religion people would claim. The consensus appeared to be that people in the office were ‘Christian’ because we were white and therefore unlike a variously defined ‘them’. No one claimed to go to church, read the Bible or actually believe in God. It therefore infuriated me when my census response – the census response of thousands of others – to claim to be a ‘Jedi’ was declared invalid. This was a claim that was no more or less fake than the claim made by my colleagues, and was, patently, a response made with a greater degree of reflection and consideration.

Foreign bodies

2006-11-16T22:55:00.000Z

The Daily Express is… fascinating. If you want to know the particular brand of xenophobia currently animating the neurones of little, closed minds, scan the front page. If you do not have the time, or the hard headed detachment required, Five Chinese Crackers performs an estimable survey of the Express and her ideological sister rags.

And hard headed detachment is something I am lacking. Faced with page after page, in both newsprint and pixels, of racism and xenophobia, I feel like giving up the battle. So kudos to those who keep on exposing the lies and the half-truths that are finding fertile fields in imaginations that range from the far-right to the decent left.

I can, however, still be shocked by the absurdity of some of the headlines that the Express editors deem to be the most important news items of the day. Normally, these concern the threat that one or another group of foreigners – or sometimes British ‘aliens’ – pose to the Bulldog Nation. Lately the editor of the Express has directed his readers’ ire towards inanimate objects. ‘Foreign’ objects, of course.

On November the 2nd the Express front page was wailing at the disrespect shown to our glorious war dead by a ‘Muslim scarf’. The headline was:

“She [Camilla] IS wearing one [a poppy] but you can’t see it under Muslim scarf”

And today, on November the 16th, the Express front page played the role of doom monger. Foreign bodies were bringing disease into Britain. Yes, we have heard that story before. But this time it was not ‘immigrants’, but eggs. The headline read:

“Danger in millions of eggs from abroad”

The self styled “World’s Greatest Newspaper” is beginning to read like the sort of parody published in Viz.

I know that this is a spoof of the Daily Mail. The Mail is but a Siamese twin of the Express. And the two are joined at the head, and the gut.

I think it might be a good thing that their anti-foreign rants have become so unhinged. Perhaps their purchase on the British imagination might loosen, if only a little.

The Chingford Paradox

2006-11-08T17:29:00.000Z

Norman Tebbit blames the unemployed for their state, offering the advice that they should get on their bike and look for work. Norman Tebbit despises those who get on their bike and look for work, vehemently opposing immigration to Britain.

Oaxaca

2006-11-07T16:01:00.000Z

Many news stories slip from the headlines. BNP members are apparently caught with the material requirements for explosive terrorism, but it is the utterly impossible plans of a fantasist that seizes the headlines. Who can say why this is?

One story that seems to have more or less fallen completely from the journalistic field of vision is the upheavals taking place in Oaxaca. Mexican politics does not seem to figure highly in the British media consciousness; witness the difference in the tone and intensity of the reporting of post-disputed election Mexico with that enjoyed by the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. And now there is barely a noise made on a labour dispute that has escalated into a popular and largely peaceful act of mass dissent, even rebellion. Who can say why this is?

Socialist Worker carried an article on Oaxaca, while Through The Scary Door [One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six] has been watching the coverage of Britain’s more ‘reputable’ news providers with some care.

Who can say why this is? Why are the ‘decents’ reluctant to tackle the free press, apart from the racist slur of prefixing news providers with the appellation ‘al’? Perhaps the ‘free press’ is a similar entity to ‘terrorism’, the operation of which must be subject to analysis or explanation, except in terms of the foibles of ‘great men’.

Billy Bragg sang:
If this does not reflect your view you should understand
That those who own the papers also own this land
[…]
When you wake up to the fact
That your paper is Tory
Just remember, there are two sides to every story

But there is more than that, Billy, in the operation of the capitalist press. It does not work merely by providing a one-sided view of stories, but by making some stories prominent and by concealing others. Not as part of a conspiracy, but simply as the product of a world-view, the ideology of the capitalist press. And note that while the ‘decents’ will wail and scream over ‘Muslim censorship’ of British and European newspapers – something that simply does not happen given the simple fact that Muslims neither own major newspapers nor hold political power in Britain and Europe – they remain utterly silent over the everyday controls and constraints the shape the content and tone of the ‘free’ – read capitalist – press.

But I will close with a claim made in the spirit of Dhiren Barot. I plan to build a super-powerful laser by hoarding second-hand DVD players. I will then use Google Earth and my ‘Children’s Guide to the Planets’ to aim the laser, with devastating effect, at any point on the surface of the Earth. Of course, as we have seen from the ‘red mercury’ case, the fact that a terrorist plot is utterly implausible is no defence for the plotters once in court. So, while I might be interned due to my laser-based plans for world domination, you should all to remember that, at least on the evidence of these ‘plans’ I am not a danger to the future of civilisation.

A bad guy

2006-11-06T17:33:00.000Z

The Guardian is not a paper of the left. It a soft-liberal, pro-capitalist, reasonably intelligent and humane paper. But it is not a paper of the left.

The Guardian has been holding its nose when writing about the election in progress in Nicaragua. In the political imagination of the editorial staff Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas and the front-runner in the presidential race, reeks. In a nominative slip that exposes the rank vision of the Latin American world, The Guardian writes:

“Analysts have said Mr Noriega stands less chance of winning a runoff as various opponents are likely to unite behind a single candidate.”

There is no ‘Mr Noriega’ in the Nicaraguan Presidential race. It was Mr Ortega who was meant to be the subject of this sentence. But Mr Noriega, erstwhile dictator of Panama, is a ‘bad guy’. Notwithstanding the support he received from a George H.W. Bush headed CIA, as a drug-smuggling, anti-Communist friend of America, in popular memory he is the strongman, the jefe removed from power in operation ‘Just Cause’. He is a ‘bad guy’.

And so is Daniel Ortega, it seems. How easily The Guardian buys into this line. For The Guardian, the Contras are an ambiguous organisation, their history in doubt and open for debate, being only “accused of waging of a brutal campaign of intimidation” [emphasis added]. And while the US-supported candidate is quoted, there is not a word from the likely winner.

The Guardian is a ‘decent’ paper. Despite the racialised slur of ‘al-Guardian’ that the ‘decents’ sometimes toss that way of the newspaper, much of the editorial line is perfectly in-line with that of the ‘decents’. Sure, there have been disagreements over quite how many wars of occupation can be supported at any one time and the competency of those planning and executing these wars. But the political line is one that supports the interests of capital, so long as it comes with a polished veneer of liberalism. Of course, this veneer can be dazzling, leading to a confusion over just what liberalism. Being decent, these days, seems to involve supporting war and occupation, the demonisation of a vulnerable minority group and the use of torture.

Wonderland!

2006-10-19T22:31:00.000+01:00

Unless you have managed to avoid the news entirely for the past week or so, you will know that the most pressing political issue in Britain is whether a tiny minority of a minority group – a population of a few hundred – should be able to wear veils. This in itself is an absurd arrangement of political priorities.

This story does not exist in isolation, but comes on the back of a series of news stories highlighting the special wickedness of Muslims. Even when they are the victims of mob-handed attack, Muslims are still the instigators, corrupters of the morals of the usually tolerant ‘white’, ‘English’, ‘British’ or ‘host’ (delete depending on your preferred brand of othering) population, prompting them into spasms of verbal abuse and sometimes even violence. This approach to understanding modern British society is given weight and legitimacy by the opinions of the great and good. Muslims, it seems, want to live in ghettos and are responsible for their alleged estrangement from the rest of society.

This analysis must be true. After all, I have heard it used before, to great effect. As I understand it there once was another minority group in Europe that was especially wicked, unEuropean, pre-modern, anti-democratic, a group who were uniquely responsible for they own discrimination and persecution and gathered together in alien ghettos that needed to be ‘broken up’. Yes, we have heard this all before.

But this most recent round of demonisation combines three great selling points of the tabloid press. First, a spot of reader-pleasing xenophobia, second a threat to children, and third, wrap it all up in an individualised human interest story. The first two, presumably, are why we do not know the names of the women who have been sworn at, spat at and attacked in the name of integration, tolerance and, well, women’s rights. The first, especially. It does little to engender a feeling of satisfying own group-superiority when the xenophobia in the story is not the listing of the failings of the other.

I am writing, of course of the popular and much commented upon story of Aishah Azmi, the twenty-four year old teaching assistant who has become the symbol of the evil in our midst. Over at Osama Saeed’s blog I left a comment on this subject. Here is an edited version.

The most disgusting thing about the whole, manufactured Azmi affair is that this story is being understood in an entirely arse-backward fashion. This was the case of a young woman integrating into society. Azmi was working at a school of a different faith to her own, teaching English to bilingual children. She is, or rather was, the very model of an integrated – as I have said before, assimilation is an entirely different, and much more dangerous, word - young person.

With authorities leaping on the back of a wave of ignorance and xenophobic disgust of the other, she is suspended. A Labour - Labour! mark you, the party of working people, the party that ought oppose sackings, never mind those inspired by popular prejudice - minister announces that she ought to be sacked. Aishah Azmi, a twenty-four year old woman, integrated into British society, has been transformed by journalistic sleight-of-word into a villain, a symbol of segregation and apart-ness, a process of Wonderland-logic that would be fascinating if it were not so appalling.

So integration and cross-faith education are segregation, to be condemned by members of this government, even to the point when the words used verge on a breach of employment law - and remember this is Labour! – all the while this same government welcomes proposals for semi-privatised single-faith schools government policy? If a government minister wants to condemn anything, if such a person wanted to call for sackings in the name of integration, that person should be calling for the entire journalistic and editorial staffs of the mass market papers to be made redundant.

I am no fan of the veil, and do think that it objectively works to prevent the equality of the sexes. But I am no brute. I do not think that the course of action to be taken upon coming to this conclusion is to destroy the lives of women who have chosen to wear the veil. To do so seems to be the practice of some kind of pseudo-feminism, and the question is; what lies behind this 'liberal' front?

After trading blows with some at Harry's Place, I decided that there is a category of thought that we ought to call national feminism. Five Chinese Crackers has a good post exposing Melanie Phillips madness, while The F-Word discusses how to approach the ‘problem’ posed by the veil.

This is...

2006-10-16T13:52:00.000+01:00

This is a day when The Express is reporting on a ‘purge’ of medical staff wearing a veil and The Guardian is reporting that the Government plans to ask lecturers to spy on their ‘Asian looking’ students.

This is the week after a ‘Labour’ minister brashly supports the sacking of a person wearing the veil. This would be bad enough if it were the actions of a Tory, merely a breach of proper employment procedure. But this is a break with the tradition within the labour movement of resisting all sackings. Never mind those that ride a wave of public aggression against a threatened minority group.

This is the week after David Davis talked of ‘voluntary’ apartheid, a nifty linguistic trick that transfers responsibility from those who, morally, must bear it, the powerful, to those who cannot, the weak.

This is a time when integration is bandied about by people who have no sense of its meaning; integration is the bringing together of separate elements to create a whole unit. It is not the same as assimilation, but is a process in which the people and peoples who are the separate elements contribute to the character of a whole. Demands for assimilation, of course, who be met with less than full-blooded approval by those with a sense of history. Or a sense of shame.

A demand for a sense of history would, funnily enough, exclude those defenders of ‘reason’ and ‘Enlightenment’ around whom dangerous middle-class and ‘intellectual’ anti-Muslim sentiment is coalescing. These wannabe Volatires use words such as Enlightenment as fetishes, as magic utterances, to cast them in the glow of ‘Civilisation’. But while they act the buffoon, invoking the legitimacy of historical eras of which they have only the passing acquaintance, they are dangerous. Dangerous, because it is through this polity of the middle-class, with their access to the levers of power and persuasion, that laws are passed, cultural moods are changed and street violence is given its head.

This is an autumn of firebombed dairies, attacks on veiled women in the street and the stabbings of young men with the ‘wrong’ colour skin. These events cannot be neatly divorced from the pronouncements of those with tremendous cultural power, or from the actions of those who launch wars abroad and stoke fear and suspicion at home.

So, at this time, it is nice to hear a line that disembowels the bloated, slothful thinking of the pseudo-scholars and phony-humanitarians* who seem to dominate the Anglophone world of letters:

"Veiled Muslim women are caricatured as oppressed victims who need rescuing from their controlling men, while at the same time accused of being threatening creatures who really should stop intimidating the (overly tolerant) majority."

Salam Yaqoob, via TTSD.

*I have tackled the worthless imagination of Martin Amis before [One, Two]. I plan to address the error of Salman Rushdie next.

Leak and spin

2006-10-05T10:01:00.000+01:00

The news sources are full of the story that a ‘Muslim’ officer was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I have two questions.

First, who leaked this story to the press, and what effect did they hope to produce?

Second, why are news sources concentrating on the fact that the officer was a Muslim?

It seems to me that the important feature of this officer’s identity was not that he was a Muslim, as did not ask to be excused from guarding the Israeli embassy prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and once the Israeli bombing of Lebanon ceased he returned to full duties. He was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon because his wife is Lebanese.

This is perfectly sensible. Indeed, one would expect that the officers responsible for assigning duties within the diplomatic protection group would have a full, in depth file on each of their officers. It astounds me that a police officer was asked to guard the embassy of a nation that is bombing and invading the nation to which his wife belongs. This has nothing to do with the officer being Muslim, but rather that his personal, familial connection to the conflict ought to have resulted in the officer being ruled out of guarding the embassy, just as an officer would be ruled out of investigating a crime in which he had an unusually personal stake. He should not have had to ask to be excused. The officer should have been given other duties for operational reasons.

The only way that, in this story, his Muslim identity trumps his Lebanese familial connection is that, as a Muslim guarding the Israeli embassy during the time concerned is that he and his family may have been especially at risk from attack by violent Islamist groups. If this is the case, then being excused from this particular duty on welfare grounds is perfectly reasonable.

Of course, this all brings us back round to my first question. And we may now reframe it. The questions of who and why can be combined into a single question. Who is determined to paint Muslims as disloyal, unBritish, and subject to preferential treatment? Well, that sounds like the standard Melanie Phillips line, in other words, the line of the rabid anti-Muslim racist, unreflexively redeploying the standard anti-Semitic arguments but replacing the subject of their hateful stories with the modern bogey religio-ethnic group.

Someone within the police, presumably occupying a senior position, is an anti-Muslim racist. This person is presumably riding on a significant amount of support from police officers who are either stupid dupes or fellow anti-Muslim racists. Is it really that unreasonable for Muslims to withdraw from co-operating with the police?

Or even withdraw from co-operating with the British state on a much wider basis. When John Reid delivered his ‘grass up your kids’ speech in East London he was heckled by Abu Izzadine. This heckling was seized on by news sources and John Reid himself to demonstrate the inherent violence and unreasonableness of Muslim opponents to current British government policy. And this painting has worked. Abu Izzadine’s interjection prompted a rash of letters to newspapers. Taking The Mirror as an example, the October 4th edition included the phrase ‘an evil cancer spreading in this country’ and calls for deportations. This kind of rhetoric has been seen before.

But the point is that this story is almost certainly not what it seems, unless it seems to you that this story was a carefully stage managed event. As George Galloway points out, Abu Izzadine is a well know violent Islamic extremist. The security services will have known all about this man. How did this man get within a few feet of the Home Secretary and take a place among in a small, controlled audience? The only reasonable explanation, excepting such fantastic levels of incompetence that we should all withdraw from co-operating with the police and certainly should oppose any increase in police powers, is that Abu Izzadine was allowed into the meeting in the knowledge that he was very likely to aggressively heckle John Reid.

In other words, someone was keen to paint Muslims opposed to current government policies as aggressive and unreasonable. In other words, someone is stage managing speeches by government speakers in such a way that the result aids the anti-Muslim racists.

That this kind of propaganda also helps John Reid to cement his political ambitions is, I am sure, entirely co-incidental.

My name is Al

2006-09-21T12:49:00.000+01:00

Al-Guardian, Al-Reuters, Al-BBC. You see all of these names used across right-wing and pro-war discourse. And they are use derogatorily. In other words, suggesting that an organisation is a ‘bit Arab’, as the prefix Al- is used, is to be taken as an insult, as a means of undermining integrity.

Why do we accept this without comment? Indeed, why do we accept this without outrage? If a writer were to make the name of a political opponent sound stereotypically Jewish in order to insult, we would see that writer as a straightforward anti-Semite. If we heard a speaker rework the name of an organisation in order to make it appear to his listeners to be, say, African, or Oriental, in the expectation this would damage the credibility of that organisation, we would mark that speaker as a straightforward racist.

Why do we allow the same sort of rhetorical defamation to be visited upon Arabs? Why do we even entertain the opinions of writers and speakers who use such formulations? Is anti-Arab racism perfectly acceptable?

+++++

Occupation works much more smoothly if the people who you dominate can be thought of as inferior, as barbarians, as dispensable. So, while my name might be Al, can we ask how a man with the name Corporal Payne was allowed to run interrogations?

That is a poor joke. I am not really a fan of nominative determinism. I don’t follow the logic of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Unbreakable, when he says; “I should have known from the beginning what my purpose was. Do you know how I know David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr. Glass.”

What I do believe is that invasion and occupation was always going to result in murder, rape, and torture. Not because man like Corporal Payne are in any way special, but because they are not. Not because the British Army, or the US Marines are especially bad, but because they are armed forces that exist as part of social, economic and political structures that differ little from those that organised imperialism and domination in previous, and not distant, generations.

The laughable pro-war left thought that this invasion, this occupation, could be different, not because they have altered the structure of British society, but through disempowered goodwill and cheerleading, all while the men and institutions with real power are the heirs (where they are not identical) to those that conducted bloody murder and oppression across the globe.

Reinstate Robin Sivapalan

2006-09-13T22:55:00.000+01:00

Robin Sivapalan is a teaching assistant at Quintin Kynaston School (QK) in North London. QK was the site of last Thursday’s school visit by Tony Blair, ostensibly to announce the first wave of Trust Schools – state schools managed by private interests – of which QK set to be a part of.

Robin Sivapalan was part of a protest that greeted – or at least would have had not the protest been pushed largely out of sight – Tony Blair’s visit. A report of the protest can be found HERE. He was subsequently suspended from his job at QK for ‘insubordination’ and ‘breaching confidentiality’ [see HERE and HERE].

The head of QK, Jo Shuter, e-mailed the Morning Star to set out her version of events. She closed the e-mail:

“I personally remain a big supporter of Tony Blair whose policies I value and who I personally feel is a man of integrity and honesty.”

However, despite this bald statement of political orientation, Shuter is not describing her own behaviour, or that of Tony Blair’s press team, when she writes:

“… the role played by these activists was cleverly orchestrated and the children were merely fodder for a political campaign.”

No, here she was describing the ‘rabble rousing’ of people such as Robin Sivapalan. If the charge of insubordination results from engaging in political activity, then a far more serious charge should be levelled against Shuter. Sivapalan, we should remember, was protesting outside a school that had been already been appropriated – site, staff and children – as political capital to serve the interests of its head.

The second charge, of ‘breaching confidentiality’, is also suspect. Presumably Blair’s visit was not top secret – this is not an issue of national security – else the staff would not have been made aware, the children drafted in to present the obedient face of QK would not have known to attend and the media would not have been present en masse. Blair’s visit might not have been public knowledge, but it was hardly a secret. The only importance of keeping prior knowledge of the visit restricted is if what is at stake is the prevention of legitimate protest. If each of Blair’s perfectly normal public visits are kept secret until after the event, then it becomes impossible, excepting cases where someone is brave enough to ‘breach confidentiality’, to protest. If ‘breaching confidentiality’ is an issue in this case then the issue is of the right to engage in democratic speech and action.

As a first step in the defence of Robin Sivapalan sign the electronic petition at “robin [at] free-education.org.uk”.

More Amis

2006-09-13T11:07:00.000+01:00

Someone called Conventrian has pasted my post dealing with the telepathic powers of Martin Amis into the comments of Inayat Bunglawala’s latest Comment is Free piece.

There, DaveD responds directly to me, calling me a twit. Martin Amis is not a social scientist, he argues, so why should he have a materialist understanding of history? Because, I reply, in his essay he is pretending to be just that, a social scientist of some kind. He is not writing fiction. He is not writing literary criticism. Amis’ essay is an attempt to understand aspects of society from a pseudo-rational perspective.

I use the term pseudo-rational because that is exactly what the essay is. Rather perform the hard graft of finding evidence Amis speculates from prejudice. As DaveD patronises: “I'm not sure if you read much, but extrapolation from outward appearances to inward psychology is a common literary device, designed to dramatise and add interest. In effect, as you say, it tells us more about the imaginer than the imaginee--but that's quite often the purpose of it.”

Quite. But Amis was not writing a piece that claimed to expose what he felt about Muslims and Islam, but one that claimed to offer insight into the minds and motivations of others. His use of the omniscient authorial mind in this case is not a fictionalisation of a truth – in the manner of a non-fiction novel – derived from evidence gathered; say a generalisation based on a collection of interviews. No. His mind-reading act with the gatekeeper of the Dome of the Rock is invention from start to finish.

Invention matters not in itself, but because of what this essay claims to be, and what so many others are reading it as; a dissection of the modern Muslim mind. It claims to be a rational enquiry. It asks to be taken as a piece of writing with a claim on the truth. This way of understanding the world is in contrast to Amis’ imagined Other. Amis writes:

“No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.”

Again Amis exposes only himself. No doubt? Where can we find the rational enquiry in Amis’ own sentence? Does Amis have any evidence for differential degrees of ‘impulse towards rational enquiry’ between cultural and gender-based groupings? Or is he pulling ‘facts’ from his… imagination with the same degree of unreflexive arrogance that led him to demand special exemption from the rules when visiting Jerusalem?

Blair buries socialism

2006-09-12T10:58:00.000+01:00

Apart from the childish retort of, ‘you can’t resign, you’re fired’, the most depressing aspect of Tony Blair’s response to the resignation of Tom Watson was this assertion:

“There is no fundamental ideological divide in the Labour party for the first time in 100 years of history.”

As Dave Osler observes; “Probably the prime minister intends that remark to mean that socialism is finished inside what was once the mass party of the working class.”

Why did Tony Blair ever join the Labour Party?

Exclusive: Mind-reading Martin Amis confounds world

2006-09-11T15:33:00.000+01:00

At least, that is the most generous interpretation of the passage in his recent essay [parts ONE, TWO and THREE] that reads:

“I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.”

Would Amis have read mass-murderous intent in the facial expression of, say, a porter of an Oxbridge college, if he had received a similarly frosty response – a response in that most ambiguous language, body-language – after having suggested that rules of visiting hours ought not apply in his case? If Amis would have done so, then he must live his life in fear of all the people who have assumed possession of personally granted death warrants for the family Amis.

Because the expression on the gatekeeper’s face most likely betrayed his understanding of what kind of man Amis had demonstrated that he was. He had been an arrogant prick, riding the privileges of wealth, passport and class, who had come to the conclusion that local rules and customs were an irrelevance. Unless he is only a prick when demanding entry to Muslim holy sites Amis will have seen this expression before. So what is special about this occasion? Nothing but the results of the imagined telepathy of Martin Amis, a paranormal talent that reveals nothing of the mind of the gatekeeper but does expose the inner life of Amis.

Given the benefit of this volunteered mind-mirror we now know what ‘mask’ to adopt on being unfortunate enough to see, hear or read Martin Amis. Not simply a ‘mask’ that communicates, ‘you arrogant prick’, but one that, with the benefit of evidence* spells out, ‘you arrogant, racist prick’.

*Evidence is something that the Amis essay lacks in other places. Whether it is his claims to telepathy, his absurd generalisation of ‘the Palestinian mother’ or his abandonment of materialist historical understanding, the essay is peppered with holes where evidence ought to go. And I thought the argument ran that is was people falling on my side of many of the fences in the War on Terror fences who are guilty of betraying the Enlightenment.

New post at The Sharpener

2006-08-15T17:44:00.000+01:00

I have a new post, Anti-hagiography, at The Sharpener:

Sometimes our ‘saints’ need to be disrobed.

Gunter Grass, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, has recently admitted to serving in the Waffen-SS during the last days of World War Two. This story is being dressed up as exposing Grass as a hypocrite. I argue that the story is does nothing of the sort. But it does contain the spectacle of another, similarly moustachioed Central European 20th Century living ‘saint’ inadvertently flashing the gallery the some of the more vulgar parts of his character. This post is not about the revelations volunteered by Grass, but the reaction of Lech Walesa to this stone being ploughed to the surface.

Read the rest of Anti-hagiography.

Peace and Socialism

2006-08-14T00:18:00.000+01:00

John Reid has declared that the War on Terror is at an end!

He said that it was a “dreadful misjudgement if they believe that the foreign policy of this country should be shaped in part or in whole under the threat of terrorist activity”.

Oh, hang on. He only meant that we will not stop acts of war and occupation in the Middle East as part of a response to threats of terror. This is despite the fact that the principal justification for the shape of our modern foreign policy is that it is, categorically, a response to terrorism. Foreign policy would not be what it is, we are asked to assume, if it were not for terrorism. We would not have soldiers in oil-rich states if it were not for the temporally prior acts of terrorism.

Please remember, and get this straight; our foreign policy is nothing more than a response to terrorism combined with a deepest concern to spread democratic freedom. Do not dare to suggest that our foreign policy is anything but a complete break with the past. Now, without any sort of change in the structure or institutions of our society, we have miraculously reached a point where foreign policy does not serve the material interests of national elites. Marvellous!

But, if our foreign policy is of this categorically new and noble design, part of the War on Terror rather than a struggle for power at home and abroad, then it is surely designed to reduce the incidence of terrorism. If we fight a War on Terror with methods that result only in a greater incidence of terrorism, then it will be a war without end. And no-one would want that. Not in a world in which our political elites, the Great Men that they are, have transcended the structural and institutional drivers that have constrained all corresponding elites prior to 1997. Would they?

Of course not. And to understand just how deep, despite the lack of any structural or institutional change in society, this break in historical continuity runs, we only have to quote John Reid once again.

“That is not the British way, it is antithetical to our very central values. We decide things in this country by democracy, not under the threat of terrorism.”

That is right. Writing a letter to the government asking for a change in our foreign policy is antithetical the British way*. Indeed, it is antidemocratic. Labour used to stand for Peace and Socialism. Now it proudly flies the banner ‘Shut Up and Die’.

*Incidentally, what on Earth is that? Is it a crude transatlantic reworking of that all-purpose patriotic rallying cry, ‘the American way’? How very British, eh?

Update: Roy Hattersley has a column in the Guardian addressing this subject. As his editors summarise, it argues “oppose British policy on its merits - not because it makes us a target”. Which is all well and good, until we understand that, as our foreign policy is being sold to us as being a means to make us safer, the merits of the policies cannot be disentangled from whether or not these policies make us a target. There are other ways of justifying our foreign policy, of course, but if we take democracy seriously then we must take the argument that is the basis of the consent of the polity to that policy to be of great importance.

Update Two: Kim Howells has exposed government policy as an imperialistic and authoritarian scam for which terrorism is nothing but a handy pretext. According to BBC News Online, he argues that, “"no government" formulates policy based on a perceived risk from terrorists.”

Necessarily proportional

2006-08-12T20:01:00.000+01:00

On Thursday a Labour councillor wrote, regarding the ‘liquid bomb plot’:

The Government is right to take whatever action is necessary to ensure the security of its citizen and I find it hard to fathom that some believe it is an overreaction given the events that have happened overnight.

[found via Perfect]

Is this deliberate unreason deployed in the cause of party loyalty? I am not sure. I lean to believing that Martin Whelton finds many things ‘hard to fathom’. Perhaps someone could do our democracy a service and explain to Whelton that the only ‘events that happened overnight’ were the [over?]reaction of the security services and the Government.

Whelton cannot therefore, in good faith, justify the reaction of the security services and the Government by reference to that same reaction of the security services and the Government, no matter that Whelton dresses up this one event as two in order to use it as yardstick against itself. When measured on this scale, everything is proportional.

It's the way they tell 'em

2006-08-11T12:45:00.000+01:00

And in that, timing is everything.

The answer, apparently, to the question; “if senior politicians and the security services knew about this plot for days, weeks or months in advance, why was the ‘threat level’ only raised yesterday?” is; “because to raise the threat level before the plotters were arrested then the plotters would have been tipped off.” Obviously.

But this raises a further question; “just what are the threat levels for?” If the threat level can only be raised after a plot has been foiled, just what are threat levels meant to warn us about? If they cannot be raised, or lowered, on the basis of specific evidence, lest this advantage the subjects of that evidence, then threat levels can only be determined by the impressionistic judgement of politicians. In that, they can be little more than this.

So, let us say that this was a real plot. This was not Forest Gate. This was not Jean Charles de Menezes. And let us say that there actually was some evidence. This was not the [no] ricin plot. And let us say that this was not a security services operation from start to finish, with government provocateurs inciting alienated young men to carry out terrorist attacks and then arranging for them to be supplied with explosives. Britain is not like Canada or Florida, after all. This still leaves the question; “why are these men arrested at this moment?” This has, after all the effect of pushing the actually existing atrocities in Lebanon off the front pages and validating the recent, and frankly childish, ‘Islamic fascist’ speeches of Bush, Blair and Reid. “And why the imposition of draconian security procedures on the 10th of August, specifically, we are told, to deal with a threat that was in existence, if at any time, before the 10th of August?” This was a threat that was known about, and, if the security services can be trusted to have arrested the right men, then on the 10th of August the threat was reduced dramatically. This will, after all, have the effect of ramming the threat of Islamic fascism home to thousands of ordinary people, ensuring that, in John Reid’s words, they ‘get it’. “And why was the non-specific threat level raised and the possibility of an attack described as imminent as a result of developments that can only have decreased the threat level?” This, after all… oh, you get it.

In the exploitation of terrorism for political ends, timing is everything.

P.s. what on Earth has happened to the language of our politicians? ‘Islamic fascists’ is a singularly stupid phrase, one that has spread from hate sites like Little Green Footballs to those sites that help foster hate in more polite company such as Harry’s Place. It was only a few weeks ago that Gene of Harry’s Place attempted to cast Hezbollah as a fascist organisation on the basis that they have a militaristic mythology and that they give the Roman salute. Nothing more, no analysis, just a diagnosis by stylistic epiphenomena. And saying that people ‘don’t get it’ has for some time been the rhetorical refuge of the internet warmonger. What we do not get is that Muslims are going to Eurabise us, impose Sharia Law, and that they plan to conquer the Earth. And that, having got this, we need to cast aside our qualms and start fighting them right now. Islamic fascists? I do not know about that. What I do know is that the people who expound their views using the kind of language our political leaders have been using recently are fascists. People like Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray are syndeological heirs to those who identified a dangerously decadent tolerance in European civilisation, the backwardness of other societies, the need to use force to order society at home and re-order societies abroad, and the threats from within and without posed by a particular ethno-religious grouping.

They would be frightening clowns, offensive comedians, if they did not seem to have their timing lockstep with the sophisticated comics that hold political power.

Lies, lies, lies

2006-08-03T17:21:00.000+01:00

When an organisation with deadly powers has been caught lying, time after time after time, is it wrong to suggest that people ought to withdraw their co-operation? Or does it seem far more unreasonable to suggest that we ought to give that organisation our full support? Well, as The Man said, 101% support, which is 9% less than most people with a liberal attitude towards numbers, and 1% more than ought be possible. So again, The Man manages the frankly astounding feat of finding a ‘Third Way’ that is utterly objectionable and numb-headed.

Jean Charles de Menezes was not a suicide bomber. He was not challenged outside Stockwell tube station. He did not vault the ticket barrier. He was not chased onto the tube train. He was not wearing a bulky jacket. He was not wearing bomb belt with protruding wires. He did not act erratically as a result of cocaine in his system. He was not a rapist. These were lies.

These lies and smears and no-one is to be prosecuted? No-one is to be sacked?

Mohammed Abdul Kohar and Abul Koyair did not have a chemical weapon. Abul Koyair did not shoot his brother. These were lies.

So after the ‘benefit’ of having seen the lie ‘Jean Charles de Menezes was a rapist’ planted in the press as a post-hoc justification for his murder after the exposure of the other police lies, what credibility can be given to ‘shot Forest Gate man is a computer paedophile’? None. Absolutely none.

Some suggest that post-modernists have destroyed the idea of truth. Perhaps Truth, but not truth. To do that it seems that you need a state empowered by the voluntary adoption of a state of war. The production of truth is necessarily a social process, that is all ‘post-modernists’ argue, though it should be noted that it seems most people who declare their opposition to ‘post-modernism’ appear to be basing this stance on a consideration of the front covers of books that they have not read. The adage that runs that the first casualty of war is truth does not simply mean that in war, people lie, but that in a state of war the normative structures of the social institutions that produce truth are eroded, leaving the production of anything accepted as truth impossible.

Given the role that sections of the Met Police have had in destroying truth, and even if these people cannot be prosecuted for the lies surrounding the shooting of de Menezes and the shooting of Kohar, then what ought to happen is that the new Kohar case should be declared void, a mistrial if it comes to that, and the members of the Met Police ought to face trial for obstructing justice. Thanks to their hard work to destroying the social institutions that produce truth, they are guilty of this regardless of whatever is the Truth of the Kohar case.

Figurehead

2006-07-23T12:18:00.000+01:00

I approach the question of the Monarchy from the following position; [1] if the Queen has no power, then, when we adopt a republican political system there is no pressing constitutional need to replace her. Or; [2] if the Queen has power, then our primary democratic duty is to republicanise Britain.

I am angled to incline towards [1] being the case. And for me, under the conditions of [1], I still feel the need to remove the powerless Queen.

Read the rest of my new post at The Sharpener.

Fear by decree

2006-07-10T20:39:00.000+01:00

The Government, via John Reid, has announced that the manipulation of public fear for political ends will have a new, more clearly defined medium.

This act of terrorism has been brought to you by b3ta redirected through the comments boxes at Chicken Yoghurt.

For the sake of argument

2006-07-03T22:05:00.000+01:00

Let us say that Bjorn Lomborg is right. Let us say that the putative $50bn expense of battling climate change would be better spent alleviating ills such as hunger, disease and war. Let us say that he is right on that.

He is still wrong. He is either a deluded utopian or a vicious, wicked propagandist.

Does he really believe that the $50bn that might be drummed up to combat climate change will stay in a charity pot to be spent elsewhere? The idea is nonsense. This money was not forthcoming before the shadow of climate change fell over the first world, so why ought it after Lomborg and his right-wing American chums have dispelled that shadow?

And here is the point. What is Lomborg’s political hinterland? From where will he draw the resources in his ‘campaign’ to boost social spending across the world? From the American right, apparently. So he kills concern with climate change by offering a greater prize, a prize that was never on the table. He is a stooge, a Trojan horse, trundling forwards to win the hearts of political influential progressives across the world, but his programme contains only a bellyful of villains.

Blair urges open debate

2006-06-29T22:33:00.000+01:00

No, not really. Any contrary suggestions are merely rhetorical flourishes.

The world has changed, he says. We are buffeted by forces beyond democratic control. That this changes and forces seem to benefit those who have is entirely coincidental. On opposition to globalization – or, more accurately, the usurping of democracy by transnational capital – Blair has written:

“There are, I notice, no such debates in China.”

All too often Blair demonstrates his frustration with law, with democracy, with opposition. Was there ever a quote that better summed up the tragic masquerade that is Blair’s ‘democrat’ costume?

Thanks go to ChrisD at The Sharpener for pointing out this quote.

Fan Freundschaft!

2006-06-25T13:37:00.000+01:00

On a World Cup morning after the reporting of England fans being involved in trouble, and on the morning before the next World Cup game involving England, I think it is time to write a little on my experience of Germany 2006.

And the theme is; Fan Freundschaft! Which translated means; fan friendship.

I spent a week travelling across Germany with a couple of friends; a trip centred on the Brazil v. Australia match in Munich. This journey was a perfect antidote to the miserable antagonism that accompanies so much football. The bright sunshine on seas of yellow shirted fans provided the perfect lighting for a football party, with Brazilians mixing with Americans mixing with Italians mixing with Dutch mixing with Australians. Oh, and one Ghanaian-Zimbabwean-American who, alone, converted a whole Bier Garten of mixed nationalities, a big Bier Garten at that, into a united Ghanaians crowd, at least for the duration of a famous victory over the Czechs. And perhaps for the rest of Ghana’s World Cup run. Ghana! Ghana! Ghana! It might have been Dutchmen who carried the Ghanaian around the Munich square for a shoulder-high lap of cheer around the Munich square. Perhaps his bearers were Australian, or even a couple of elusive Germans. In Munich there were surprisingly few German fans, in what seemed to have become an international city of football.

Later that night we were outraged in sympathy with the Americans. Their team had an upset of similar proportions as the one achieved by Ghana stolen from them by a referee with a keen sense of balance, who evened up the game to ensure that the Italians were not disadvantaged for their violent play or their relative lack of drive. Shouting “Fix!” at a television screen might have been fuelled by Augustiner, and might have been a little aggressive, but where else but in an atmosphere of fan friendship would have I have been found cheering on a team from the United States? I even nearly began to chant U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A. Nearly.

All this football, all the beer, all those schnitzels, all that wurst and all this Freundschaft did not come cheap. Sleeping in a tent, we paid with our health. A six o’clock return to a tent affords little sleep when the sun bakes you out of your polyfibre dome by nine. But the campsite itself was a centre of Fan Freundschaft, with tents pitched on neighbouring plots housing fans of nations in and outside of the World Cup.

The night of the Brazil-Australia game the streets were packed with fans from all nations. And Steve McManaman. Having been out all day, spending the time between matches with a kickabout in the Englischer Garten we were carrying a cheap football. Once one person had asked to borrow it to demonstrate their keepy-uppy skills there was no way that the ball would see Ramsgate again. Inside half an hour the street had become a thousand person game of keepy-uppy. The police smiled as they looked on and the policeman who caught the ball to a chorus of boos received the biggest cheers of the night when he used the ball to demonstrate his own keepy-uppy skills before giving the ball back to the crowd.

The World Cup slogan is A Time To Make Friends. And from what I saw this principle is being put into action with well-organised enthusiasm. Forget the news, feeding you an unrepresentative picture of the events and atmosphere of Germany 2006. Fan Freundschaft!

Computer sez sorry

2006-06-24T21:23:00.000+01:00

As I travelled by train today it was pointed out to me that the announcements of delays were computer-composed from a series of pre-recorded words. Nothing startling there, you say? And certainly not, this is a perfectly adequate system when announcing the next arrival on platform ten. But when there is a delay the voice says; “I am sorry for the delay…” I am sorry? There is no I here. This is a mindless computer-generated arrangement of sounds. There is no person that is sorry, that can apologise.

So what is my problem? It is that these announcements, like so many corporate communications, are utterly dishonest. They are a perfect example of the lie of the modern corporation; that they have feelings, that they care, that they are a person. That they are a person that you ought to like, to have loyalty towards, that you ought behave towards in the manner of interpersonal interaction, rather than as a rational market actor. For a democratic socialist, they are a lie in the service of profit, disguising exploitative relationships. For a market fundamentalist, these lies act to reduce the efficiency of the market by confusing consumers, misrepresenting their market position and reducing the rationality of their market actions.

And more than that, worse than the lie, is that when a computer says sorry it demeans and degrades all the human-made apologies of genuinely felt regret.

Empire and away

2006-06-14T19:15:00.000+01:00

Preparing for the long road trip from Cardiff to Munich, and back again, I will restrict myself to a post built from links. If I paraphrased the content of these links then I could describe them as references and this as some form of scholarly activity, not merely an appropriation of the work of others. Especially Lenin, whose recent excellent form I have neglected to comment on or link to.

Lets concentrate on ‘Empire’, back in the discourse of the commentariat thanks to Ken Loach, Niall ‘I don’t like the blacks, except when they were my servants’ Ferguson, and The Continuing Adventures Of Bush and Blair. The first two are both attempts to use the past to comment on the present.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley, the Palme D’Or winner from Ken Loach, presents us with a view of the Irish War of Independence, draws, apparently, unashamed analogies with the current War in Iraq and the perils of imperialism. I have not seen the film. Neither, as George Monbiot points out, had many of the film’s most vicious critics before they found themselves able to comment on the film. That did not stop their pompous condemnations, likening to, among other things, Mein Kampf.

While Loach does his best to remind us that Empire is a morally bankrupt arrangement of human affairs, Niall Ferguson does his unlevel best to legitimate Empire, to convince the influential middle of the US and UK populations that Empire is not only a positive, laudable feature of British history, but that, in the 21st Century, we should support American imperialism as a necessary replacement. Ferguson’s experience of Empire is a ‘magical’ childhood in Kenya. Magic, of course, is always a trick, often involving the willing ignorance of the audience. The magic of Ferguson’s childhood was built on the backs of black servants, governed by white supremacist tyranny. Ferguson recalls the magic, collaborating in the trick, the sleight of hand that justifies the servitude of the majority for the pleasures of a ruling caste. And he is not in the slightest way a reconstructed imperialist. Though he may some reassuring make noises with regard to the American Empire’s democratic rhetoric, at heart he is a racial supremacist. If he believes his justification for past and future imperialism, that; “Human beings do seem predisposed to trust members of their own race as traditionally defined”, and that it is the ethnicity in itself, rather than as an artefact of imperialism, ideology or economics, that is the driving force behind the tragedies and troubles of the past century, then his new American Empire will not be the spreading of an inclusive American democracy, but a Empire of shadow democracies, of vassal states, bound to the domination of a ruling white caste of Americans.

Men like Niall Ferguson are far, far more dangerous than Osama bin Laden, or whichever other terrorist bogeyman are threatening ‘Civilisation’, ‘The West’, or whatever we are today. Bin Laden can kill many people, that is for sure, when those deaths are measured as the work of one man. But he will never rule the world. He will never be a global power. He is not an Empire. He is merely a fulcrum, on which men like Niall Ferguson, or men like Douglas Murray, will attempt to force a system that will kill millions and destroy democratic hopes.

I will post on my experience of the world cup when I return. In the meantime, I have left a deposit here.

Pay rises

2006-06-07T13:07:00.000+01:00

I think that it is worth mentioning a few things that are always missed, or misrepresented, when the media, of all stripes, covers pay disputes.

First. A 5% a year pay rise is not the same as a 15% pay rise over three years. If I am paid £100, then a 15% over three years settlement will result in me being paid £115 at the end of that three year period. If, over those three years, I had received a 5% per year pay rise then, after the first year I would be paid £105, after the second £110.25, and after the third £115.76. This might seem small, but then the figures of £100 and 5% was chosen for its simplicity, not for their correspondence with that which is actually existing.

Second. We must remember that when an employer is describing the offered pay settlement they will use a linguistic formulation that makes this settlement appear as generous as possible. Sometimes this will be bald lies. Sometimes this will be sleight of tongue, encouraging a belief in the equivalence between, say, 5% a year and 15% over three years. This sleight of tongue can be seen when the employer describes a deal as taking place over ‘over X years’. In these cases, the employer appears most generous when it manages to make X as small as possible. But a deal over three years is a deal over three years, is it not? Well, both the number, size and the timing of the instalments of the pay increase can be varied. Let us, for the sake of argument, agree that there will be three pay increases, of less than 5% remember, in the pay settlement in question. The workers would be best served by an immediate instalment, a second after twelve months and a third after a further twelve months. This is three annual instalments. But if it were so, do you not think that the employers would describe it as being ‘over two years’, as there is only twenty four months between the first instalment and the last? So, what does ‘three years’ mean to an employer when settling a pay dispute? Most likely it means something close to 3 years and 364 days before the full 15% is settled.

Third. A 15% pay rise is not a 15% pay rise. At least, what I mean to say is that ‘equal’ pay rises lead to increasing inequality. If I earn £1000 and you earn £100 – and a ten-fold difference in wages in the same organisation is hardly unknown – then I am paid £900 more than you when measured in the fluid absolute that is called money. If we both receive a 15% pay rise, and what can be more egalitarian than that, then I will be paid £1150 and you will be paid £115, which is a difference of £1035. There is still a ten-fold difference, true, but if this is a real wage increase, i.e. unless price inflation is also 15%, then the inequality of these two positions has grown. In as that gap increases from £900 to £1035 the gap in spending power, owning power, and in a capitalist society, social, cultural and political power, increases. This, of course, is not a description of the way that wage increases actually happen. No, because in a great number of cases the wage/income increases enjoyed by the wealthiest are far greater, in terms of yearly percentages, than those won by the poorest. This needs to be reversed; we need to see more ‘income freezing’ of chief executives and more massive wage increases for the poorest. For a democracy to be worthy of the name, the political actors need to be as equal as possible, else it is simply a masquerade behind which the powerful can hide their operations.

Work ethics

2006-06-04T01:32:00.000+01:00

My first post at The Sharpener is now up, entitled Work ethics: efficiency.

A law unto themselves

2006-05-31T11:34:00.000+01:00

On my recent travels it was my good fortune to read a copy of the Sunday Express. I need not tell anyone reading this that the Express is not only a right-wing rag, but a stupid right-wing rag. However not since I read a leader column blaming political correctness for the closure of rural post offices have I read anything as stupid as the quotation approvingly cited by Julia Hartley Brewer this last Sunday.

A source close to Home Office ministers, i.e. a Home Office minister, is quoted as saying – and, lacking access to Lexis-Nexus at the moment, I paraphrase accurately – that civil servants, disparagingly referred to as bureaucrats, stick to the letter of human rights law. This mode of operation is described as the bureaucrats behaving as ‘a law unto themselves’.

First. Bureaucrats are an indispensable part of any complex, metropolitan civilisation. To use the term as an insult betrays a deep stupidity. This is the usage employed by, most likely, a Government minister.

Second. People obeying the letter of the law are not, by definition, a law unto themselves, unless they are also law makers. If civil servants did not stick to the letter of human rights law then it would be perfectly possible to describe them as behaving as a law unto themselves. What this probable Government minister is actually describing is a state of affairs in which he or she, and the Government he or she represents, a frustrated in their desires to act as a law unto themselves. Indeed, this is precisely the political philosophy of Tony Blair; making no secret of his frustration by law, whether on detaining people, deporting people, or instigating military action, this is a Government that sees the law as nothing but restraints.

National Feminists

2006-05-22T18:07:00.000+01:00

There is a movement to dress up modern racism in the clothes of progressivism. This is nothing new, in form. Racism, at least, successful racism, has rarely built its rationale on blatant hate. Rather, the demonisation of minorities and immigrants has been conducted via what were, at the time, apparently reasonable, rational grounds; concerns with the intelligence of the nation, with the biological health of the populace, with the maintenance of the indigenous culture, and so on. And why? Because in order to successfully build a modern racist society the support of middle-classes and the intelligentsia needs be won. We can see this happening now, when attacks on Muslims are dressed up as assertions of ‘Enlightenment values’, as defences of ‘free speech’, as efforts to safeguard ‘superior’ European culture. I have written [here and here] about two of the recruiting pamphlets in this campaign.

Despite knowing this, I rarely fail to be surprised by those who dress their attacks on Muslims up as blows for feminism. It is one thing to point out that Islam can be practised in ways that repress women. But when this is used to legitimate calls for restrictions on the immigration of Muslims, the true face of those dancing in this ‘progressive masquerade’ is revealed. If one is concerned for the welfare of Muslim women, one would welcome their immigration to the West, where, according to the unspoken contradictions in the narrative of these racists, these repressed women will find opportunities for liberation that they could not find in their homelands. So do those who make calls for restricting the immigration of Muslims have the welfare of women at heart? Some do, and have been recruited, in their good-natured but slapdash liberalism, by racists. Some are plain racists. And the rest? The rest we might describe as ‘National Feminists’ as, yes, they care about the welfare of women, just so long as these women are of their own kind. It is these National Feminists who, rather than demanding the establishment of women’s refuges and multi-lingual support services, call for restrictions on the movement to women to the West and for the burkha to be banned.

How would that be managed, anyhow? Would the police strip women in the street, or merely toss them in riot vans for the way in which they dress. Do either of those options sound like a liberal society to you? And yes, I have some sympathy for the argument that the burkha is an objective symbol of oppression. But to enact a repressive policy to liberate women that takes no notice of the subjective understandings of women who wear the burkha will get you nowhere but oppressive authoritarianism. To adorn a law with the language of liberation when, in practise, it would lead to harassment, embarrassment, insult and arrest for those women whom lounge bar legislators feign concern for is to perform a grotesque act of doublespeak. Social analyses using the language of false consciousness are all well and good; indeed, we must all believe in the existence of false consciousnesses to some degree if we are to make sense of human beings with different value and belief systems to our own. But it does not a democracy make to legislate in all but the most egregious cases, which, for liberty’s sake, ought be limited to those cases that psychologists, not rabid islamophobic racists, describe as mental illness.

The first post

2006-05-16T18:34:00.000+01:00

I have a new post, Constructing new men, up at The Fluffy Economist. Expect a post on work ‘ethics’ there soon.

Pour this fuel on the bonfire of the liberties

2006-05-11T04:21:00.000+01:00

1. Hijacking the asylum system

No, not the nine Afghan men who escaped the Taliban on a hijacked plane, but successive Home Office ministers, who refused these men asylum. And they did so, expressly in order to demonstrate how hard, rather than how decent and reasonable, this Government is capable of being.

Now, call me stupid, but I would have thought that a regime that our Government found so repulsive and dangerous it was worth going to war with the aim of securing that regime’s removal, is just the kind of regime that one would forgive almost any broken laws in the achievement of escape.

That the judiciary, that unwholesome bastion of the old establishment and privilege, is the institution that, once again, succeeds in making the correct and decent decision ought to shame a ‘Labour’ Government.

+++++

2. Making political capital from murder

BBC News 24 allows the partner of a victim of murder to repeat, every half hour, the comment below, presumably to nods of agreement across the country.

“We don’t know who’s going to be killed or stabbed or raped next.”

As opposed to that nightmare era when we were killed, stabbed and raped according to orderly rotas?

The offender in question had served 16 years in jail. That is, regardless of what anyone says, is a seriously long time. 16 years is a decent proportion of an adult life and in that time the world is utterly changed. I do not want to see a draconian system of mass, long term incarceration. To have a humane, rehabilitative system we need a system that allows people to, eventually, be released, excepting the most terrible of crimes or the most dangerous of the mentally ill. And to do this we need a robust probation service. Unfortunately, this demands an increase in the number of ‘do-gooders’ employed by the state, so it unlikely to win the backing of those who claim to be most concerned by crime.

+++++

3. Exploiting anecdotes

Both this story and the story of the Afghan hijackers have provided ammunition for those who want to roll back human rights in Britain. But whatever problems these stories present have nothing at all to do with human rights. In the case of probation, the problem is not that people have human rights but one of chronic understaffing. The guff about human rights is retrospective wisdom. If “the [probation] board had received “over optimistic” reports of Rice's progress under treatment and did not have a full picture of his previous crimes” then it was not so much that the board “gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his risk of harm to others”, but that the board made exactly the right decision according to the information that they were presented with. There is no need to cut away our human rights, but a need to ensure more diligent and intensive reporting on the rehabilitation of prisoners.

In the case of the Afghan men we either owe those nine men asylum or we are faced with the pressing need to imprison the Government as self-declared war criminals. It cannot be the case that, simultaneously, the Taliban are, in themselves, a causus belli, and that people fleeing the regime by stealing an aeroplane are ‘international terrorists’. I wonder if Home Office minister who described them so understood that the reciprocal damning that he heaped upon his New Labour colleagues. Probably he did, but knew that the atomised worldview of Doublethink that he presents to the electorate would not be ripped apart by the historically and conceptually incontinent media.

Further, the problem, in the case of the Afghan men, was the arrogant failure of the Home Office to follow legal procedure. Mark this when you next have a New Labour minister complain about ‘technicalities obstructing justice’. ‘Technicalities’ are the signifier of wrong-doing by those who hold power. ‘Technicality’, like ‘red tape’ is a dog-whistle word, bringing unreflective assistance running to back causes that, if considered, damage the interests of the mass of the supporters. They, like human rights, obstruct the contemptuous, arrogant fulfilment of the ambitions of the powerful.

The Ornamental Prescott of Westminster

2006-05-10T12:56:00.000+01:00

Harry Hutton has a good post on the Ornamental Prescott of Westminster. He points out that “using a government office for having sex with his secretary was far less ruinous for Britain than how he might otherwise have been using it. While Prescott was harmlessly fucking his secretary, the rest of the cabinet were probably hatching schemes to make us all line up and be fingerprinted.” Read the rest.

I did enjoy the comment on Harry’s post from Tommy C:

“You are overlooking the point of a Prescott, Harry. Which is: to symbolize to the north that Labour is still workin' clarse, thus buying their votes and shutting them up. Witness their refusal of a Northern Assembly: more Prescott genius. Little does the north realise that he spends his time chained up in a London office, like King Kong in a New York theatre, being thrown bananas and secretaries, uncomprehending of the laughter from the rows of suits.”

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport

2006-05-08T20:56:00.000+01:00

The little Culture that I have to offer is a reflection on non-English language cinema. Discussing the film Princess Mononoke, it was agreed that subtitles are part of the plus points of these films. Not simply, or hopefully at all, for the snob value*. Nor simply, though this cannot be discounted, because it prevents me from having to listen to bad voice acting. Or, at least, bad voice acting that I find comprehensible. Nor, further, is subtitling preferable because dialogue that might be perfectly workable in Japanese, in Russian or in French cinema appears to be particularly artless scripting when translated into English. No, the subtitling of a film is a plus point because it forces creative and imaginative engagement. It cannot rescue the film from its unrelenting, unreflective pace – a book, by contrast, can be consumed at the pace set by the imagination of the reader – but subtitles do demand that the viewer follow every line of dialogue, using their imagination to give the lines a life that mirror the emotional expression of the otherwise unintelligible actors. When watching a subtitled film we are forced to give them a far greater space within our inner worlds then that demanded by a film in our native language.

*That said, I was astounded when buying a ticket to watch Night Watch in the cinema the teller leaned across and warned me that it was ‘in foreign’. When I laughed, she told me that people had asked for their money back. It cannot have been a bad as when I went to see Dogville; more than half the admittedly small audience got up and left as soon as they realised, I presume, that this was not ‘a Nicole Kidman’ movie.

In Media, I am a new writer over at The Sharpener. I do, though, have two problems; I have not yet decided when to publish my first post, nor have I decided what subject/s to discuss. Suggestions that answer my latter problem are welcome. I have also agreed to write the occasional post over at The Fluffy Economist; watch that space for more of me.

And so finally to Sport, and it can only be England’s twenty three. Fantastic! And I mean that. For my money, Eriksson has made the correct response to the loss of Rooney and has signalled that he will change the system to allow our two remaining world-class players, Gerrard and Lampard, as the main attacking force supporting a lone striker. All the controversy has been centred on Walcott, but taking a twenty-third player of, apparently, considerable talent, for the experience is perfectly laudable. Admirable, even, given that the ‘resigning’ Eriksson will not reap the rewards of this decision. As for Lennon, well, surely he had to be the choice over the bench-bound Shaun Wright-Phillips. And no-one is mentioning Downing, a brave pick who offers to play the role of dangerous ball-player on the left complementary to that Beckham plays on the right. With both of those pinging them off the head of Crouch, knocking the ball down to Gerrard and Lampard (and Cole) surging forwards we might have a system that accommodates the payers that England do have available, not the players that England wish that they had.

Being Labour

2006-05-03T13:18:00.000+01:00

Phil Edwards reflects on what it means to be Labour. He suggests that the ruling clique of MPs and special advisors is now not only to the political right of the activists, the membership and the wider union base, but also, and importantly, this clique is now to the right of Labour voters.

Phil describes his father’s reaction to the rise of Blair:

“he saw Labour take power, and he saw what they did with it - and he was convinced that the "New Labour" turn was a stratagem adopted to gain power, and that Blair would eventually steer back to the Left. "He's going to surprise us all," he used to say.”

Not too strangely, this is exactly what I remember my grandfather saying, when we would argue in his kitchen over the path of Labour at the end of the Nineties. The kind of statements Blair made [see here] were just cover to make Labour electable, and that the political ideas of the traditional Labour supporters would not be taken for granted.

But, for people across the other side of the Severn, tomorrow is an election day. One of the few opportunities for people to express their political will, albeit through the crude and uncommunicative mechanism of marking ‘X’. So, once again, who to vote for [regarding the same problem in 2005, see here and here]? As I have said before, Labour is the party that I want to vote for, but could I do so now? I could not do so last May. The problem, more than anything, is the ludicrous doublethink practised by Labour campaigners; on May 4th 2005 the plea was ‘vote Labour, it doesn’t mean that you support the war, the authoritarianism or the privatisation. No, it merely means that you stand with the traditional party of the left against the much bigger enemies on the right’. By May 6th the 2006 this had mutated into ‘this election win is a mandate for Blair, for war, for authoritarianism, for privatisation.’

And so, the problem really is that the Labour Party is no longer a truly democratic party. It no longer derives, or even pretends to derive, the party position and direction from vigorous internal debate, from the result of consulting a party of mass membership. It is a party of which the ruling clique disdains the unions, the political force by which non-millionaires can drive democracy, most especially on issues of work and, yes, labour, the state at which most of us spend a tremendous amount of our waking life.

And, in my opinion, it is in unions, and only in unions, where we can reclaim and build democracy. Where else, and how else, can ordinary people build a voice loud enough, and powerful enough, to counter the interests of the tiny minority of people who possess disproportionate and undemocratic power through wealth and ownership?

Right now, though, I would be tempted to follow the advice of José Saramango and cast a blank vote of utter dissatisfaction. Given the standard slate of candidates, it would bend the imagination completely out of shape to suggest that blank votes were not, in the majority, the crude, democratic expression of people who are Labour.

Once, Labour had a strapline that read; For Peace and Socialism. You do not see that much anymore, do you?

May Day

2006-05-01T17:46:00.000+01:00

Tony Blair in the Times, 1997, when still leader of the opposition:

“The changes that we do propose would leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world.”

Why did Blair join the Labour Party? And why did Labour let him?

I return

2006-04-26T13:45:00.000+01:00

I return from my travels, fresh and ready to post, revived by visits to Hamburg, London, Amsterdam and, er, Cambridge.

Even though these trips were for just a few days each, each time I arrived home I felt that I had been away for months. None more so that when I read Blair describe his vision of a future justice system for Britain – a system of guilt by accusation – and Clarke then round on the critics of this system by accusing them of being ‘poisonous’. Had something happened while I was away, had some terrible, unprecedented crime occurred that warranted the reordering of our legal system? Granted, my wallet had been stolen, but given the geography of that event it ought, if anything, send the Dutch into reactionary spasms. Not London politicians.

So, if Blair gets his way we will have a system where those accused of criminal behaviour, but not found guilty, will have a range of legal sanctions imposed on them by the state. And it is ‘poisonous’ to describe this as authoritarian? Well, I suppose that it is a step up on ASBOs, where those accused of non-criminal behaviours have imposed on them a range of legal sanctions.

There is, of course, an element of the press that is poisonous. But it is not the Guardian, the Independent and the Observer. You might think that they are soft and misguided, but poisonous? Not when they sit alongside the Sun, which calls for a war on gypsies and accuses MPs of being ‘traitors’. Not when they sit alongside the Daily Mail and the Daily Express with their xenophobic obsessions. It is telling when a Labour minister rails not against the enemies of equality, of social justice, of intelligent, reasoned democratic discourse, but against newspapers who hold true to these values. And why? Well, the fact is that this Labour government is not left. It is not even liberal. It is at worst authoritarian and sinister. At best, it panders to the empty-headed easy populism of the right-wing tabloids. Pure poison.

Simon Jenkins has a good article in the Guardian where he challenges the Government to meet the standards they demand from the liberal media. Ahistorical hyperbolic comparisons? Inflation and misrepresentation? These are not sins of the media alone, and Clarke ought be taken to task for levelling accusations of wrongdoing by which his colleagues will also be found guilty. Poison? Well by Clarke’s measurement there are plainly poisoners in Government. Unless his ruler is one-eyed.

But at heart this seems like a childish outburst. ‘How dare you call us authoritarian!’ Clarke squeals. Well then, tell us how we should describe the position and policies of the Government on law and order, tell us just how ASBOs fit into a decent, reasonable justice system, tell us why we need ID cards, tell us why terrorism is at once both the most heinous of acts, demanding wholesale revision of the justice system, yet at the same time includes acts and activities so broad as to catch almost any extra-legal demonstration. Tell us why ministers need to power to rewrite legislation ex-democracy, tell us why those found not guilty need to be punished in a modern state.

Or, no, please do not. Clarke is a child, squealing that people are against him. And he is a bully, accusing those who call him on his authoritarianism of being ‘poisonous’. It seems that he wants to import the vicious anti-left, anti-liberal politics of the United States. Labour, throwing the country to the right. And worst of all, Clarke appears to be either a compulsive liar or a minister with no grasp of the affairs of his office. Poisonous.

The demographic threat

2006-03-29T15:09:00.000+01:00

I promised, in the comments of the previous post, to provide an argument that the majority of modern anti-Muslim sentiment is, in fact, racist. Not simply in the minds of critics who might be ‘liberals’ or of the ‘left’. But in the imaginations of those who are anti-Muslim themselves. This is a simple argument, demonstrated whenever an anti-Muslim commentator uses arguments that include the idea of there being a ‘demographic threat’.

Once a ‘critic’ of Islam introduces ‘demography’ to the argument, he or she is not simply attacking the ideas, the ideology, as one might deal with say, fascism, to borrow a piece of their nasty rhetoric. The very idea that a threat is ‘demographic’ places that threat in the people themselves, a defined subgroup of the population that passes its character from generation to generation. People who have an intergenerational continuum, quite unlike the incidental, uneven and irregular intergenerationality of say, fascism. The rhetoric of ‘demographic threat’ is never taken seriously when discussing responses to political ideologies. The deployment of such rhetoric is racist, a fact that the proponents of such ideas tacitly admit, necessarily so in order for their rhetoric to make any sense.

This is true whether it is voiced by the well dressed and ultra-modern neo-Nazi, whether it is voiced by an Israeli Jewish-ethnocentric, or simply a fat racist Welsh dwarf.

Prince Charles meets the demographic threat

And this is where those who speak of a ‘demographic threat’ must bite the bullet. They must admit that the sight of little brown children frightens them, that, at the very least that they wish that they would go away. If this is not their response, then to declare that we face a ‘demographic threat’ is simply, disgustingly, dishonest. And if it is their response, what is that other than pure, simple, racism?

Bragging

2006-03-28T12:58:00.000+01:00

Billy Bragg has written a song about Rachel Corrie. As you might expect, this has drawn a welter of criticism. The range of purported political position of these critics is, well, depressingly illuminating.

One the one hand we have the extremely popular US blog populated by eliminationist racists; Little Green Footballs. There we find comments celebrating, in the most foul manner, the death of Rachel Corrie. Do not worry, the link does not take you to that hate site, but to the much needed work of LGF Watch.

On the other hand we have the ‘leftists’ of sites such as Harry’s Place, who, as far as I can make out take the right-wing line on pretty much every issue of import; Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Islam, free trade, security laws and so on. They support all these lines from a ‘leftist’ perspective, of course. This perspective, though, seems to be justifying their support of these lines by attacking other ‘leftists’. The targets of these pro-war ‘leftists’ share the quality of being of the left almost without exception; this supposed ‘self’ criticism has moved on only a little from the bragging and braying that presented opponents of the Iraq War as belonging in the ‘dustbin of history’ and as ‘objectively pro-Saddam’ . The exception is made, of course, when the targets are Muslims.

I would have thought that a ‘leftist’ support for any of these right-wing lines of thought and action would be one tempered by a vociferous criticism of the rightists holding the power to act. But these ‘muscular liberals’ and ‘decent leftists’ just do not seem to realise that, while the right holds the power to shape the outcome of these actions, their rhetoric does nothing but lend ‘humanitarian’ legitimation to whatever nightmares are dreamt by Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of the former butchers of Latin America, and their heirs and sycophants [and worse], while denying the possibility of effective opposition.

Double taxation, double nonsense

2006-03-21T09:24:00.000Z

Arguing against inheritance tax, many people take the rhetorical line of asking why, if people have already paid tax on their wealth as they earn it, should they pay tax again when they die? Dupes.

If I were to hire my son to work for me, he would have to pay tax on his income. But I have already paid tax on the money that I am paying him with. More, this is earned income, not, as with inheritance, an unearned windfall. Should we end this case of double taxation and reward the far more worthy wealth accrual of the employed son?

Of course, anyone receiving a taxable income from any source is a victim of double taxation. Hang on, no. As there are an endless number of links in this chain of income and taxation everyone is the victim of INFINITY taxation. Alert the Daily Mail!

What of the argument; ‘it is my money, I ought to be able to do with it as I wish’? Well, the same problems apply. If you are an Ayn Randian zero-taxer, then all power to you. But, if you believe that there should be any form of tax, you will inevitably arrive at a point where it is possible to claim ‘double taxation’, and, after a moment’s reflection, ‘taxation to infinity’.

Or, how about; ‘I’ve earned my money, so…’ – let me stop that one right there. You have earned your money. The beneficiaries of your will have not. If you justify your own wealth by means of the workings of some kind of meritocratic economy, then you have laid the first planks of an argument against you children receiving a windfall of unearned wealth.

Finally, what if you were to say; ‘okay the Daily Mail arguments are just nonsense. But wouldn’t it be better to scrap inheritance tax and put more on income tax’? This is incredibly regressive. Inheritance tax is not simply a means to raise funds for state spending, but a means to prevent the incremental concentration of wealth through generations, a problem made even worse as family size shrinks. Imagine, say, this situation. Person A has an identical character, personality, education and subsequent career to that of Person B. Despite their class differences, the wonderful meritocratic economy ensures that these largely identical people receive identical careers and earned income. But Person A inherits a large house at, say, 40. Person B inherits nothing. Given that most people have not paid off their mortgage at 40, Person B is, in an instant more than twice as wealthy as person A. As Person A and Person B are of identical worth in the terms of this perfectly meritocratic economy, Person A will never be as wealthy as Person B. If we add in the perfectly reasonable assumption that wealth begets wealth, through, say, investment in property and exploitation of the superior market position of the wealthy, this disparity between our two people of equal worth, according to market-derived moral justifications of inequality, then this disparity will increase as we pass through the similarly identical subsequent generations of A1, B1 and A2, B2. Somewhere down the line Bn is the landlord and employer of An.

The only escape from this is to deny that earned wealth is morally deserved, in which case you undercut the ideology that accepts economic inequality in the first place. So long as we, or at least, society at large, accept this ideology, then inheritance tax, set high, is a moral necessity.

Misunderstanding rights

2006-03-20T14:23:00.001Z

Current right-wing Labour politics appears to misunderstand just what ‘rights’ are, and more importantly, what ‘rights’ are for. We hear members of the Government arguing that the various new legal constructs that they propose that will restrict civil liberties are protections of our ‘Human Rights’ from ‘the terrorists’. But this thinking is not only muddled, it is completely the wrong way round.

Human Rights exist to place a check on the activities of legitimate powers; governmental, institutional, corporate or otherwise. Legitimate powers are those actors that are able to act within the law to shape the lives of individuals. Human Rights are inventions that allow us to restrict the effects of these legitimate powers on individuals without necessarily having to make each possible form of action individually illegal. If a government uses its legal powers to interrupt my Human Rights, it is though these legal devices that I seek redress. If, say, my employers, a legitimate power, sought to use their power to restrict my Right to Free Expression, I would use the language of Human Rights to defend my freedoms in court.

On the other hand, when illegitimate powers act, redress is sought through straightforward criminal laws. If, say, I receive threatening letters telling me to ‘shut up, or else…’, then this is a criminal case of the standard, well-established kind. Criminal acts may well restrict my freedoms, but it is a mistake to talk about this situation as an offence against my Human Rights. Not just legally, but politically. When Government spokesmen cloak their affronts to Human Rights by describing them in the rhetorically popular language of protecting Human Rights – when what they mean* is that these changes are ‘strengthening’ of criminal law – they cut away the very foundation of the legal constructs that are one of the key principles of the protection of the citizen in a liberal, capitalist state dominated by legitimate, but not necessarily benevolent, powers.

*When I say ‘mean’ I am offering my most generous interpretation of the rhetoric of the Government; that there pronouncements involve little thinking and reflection. Of course, I could be that the case that when the authoritarians in Government are chortling and their wonderful strategy of using the language of Human Rights to undermine their power to work effectively in pursuit of their correct purpose. It would, after all, be such a hilariously ironic way to persuade people to back authoritarianism.

Round-a-bout, I get to a particular misunderstanding of ‘rights’; that of Nick Cohen in The Observer. Of the ‘March for Free Expression’, he wrote; “I think it's fair to say that previous generations would be astonished that their descendants would have to take to the streets to demand such a basic right, but after the death threats against cartoonists, it seems we do.” Can you see what Cohen’s problem is yet? Well, let us begin with his ahistoricism. Is he really saying that ‘previous generations’ enjoyed more extensive rights to free expression than we, in 2006? That is, simply, nonsense. Which previous generations enjoyed the glory days of free expression and would look on the situation facing us, their descendents, as one of, comparably, freedom threatened? Those living in the Victorian Era? The peasants of Medieval England? When? This ahistorical nonsense is a real problem for the pro-War ‘left’; they do not understand that ‘universal Human Rights’ are a political assertion, a statement of how we would like the world to be. They are not a description of how the would is. We can see how insensible the pro-War ‘left’ has become when Jack Straw, a Government Minister, says that ‘a desire for democracy burns in the heart of every person’. Democracy is an invention. It is a good invention. But is clearly does not burn in the heart of every person. We might want it to, but to manage an aggressive foreign policy of the basis that it actually does is madness.

On from ahistoricism and the corollary misunderstanding of universalism, we reach Nick Cohen’s misunderstanding of rights. Our ‘basic right’ to free expression has not been threatened by death threats. Death threats are the actions of illegitimate powers. The individual cartoonists are protected by the workings of criminal laws that prohibit the making of death threats. Cohen might be arguing that it is not individual rights that are the issue, but our collective rights. The problem here is that if we take the death threats to individuals to be a threat the right of all of us to free expression, then there are far bigger fish to fry. The obstruction of a Right is an affront to the idea of Human Rights even if, or more accurately specifically when, the obstructing actor is legitimate. Over the past few weeks we have seen two straightforward offences against free expression; the New York run of My Name is Rachel Corrie was cancelled and the statue of Winston Churchill in a straight-jacket removed. The Danish cartoons, by contrast, were reprinted across the world. There was no obstruction of free expression, but there was a criminal offence. Will the March for Free Expression carry banners demanding that the play is run after all, and placards urging the erection of the statue?

No, they will not, because the whole cartoon affair has been an exercise in racism from the very start. Free expression is obstructed every day. In the case of the Danish cartoons, popular racist expressions were not obstructed. In fact, the cartoons were seen around the world. So why, as Nick Cohen does, suggest that the threat to free speech comes from the dangerous brown people? And that this threat is new, and special? It is not, it is ahistorical to suggest that it is new, and it demands a perhaps unconscious acceptance of a racist ideology to believe that it is special. I do not think that Nick Cohen is a racist. But I do think that he is buying into the very clever racist rhetoric that presents itself, pace Pim Fortuyn, as a defence of liberalism and tolerance.

Neo-Conservatism? Neo-Nazism would be far more apt

2006-03-16T20:02:00.000Z

Douglas Murray author of 'Neo-Conseravtism: Why we need it" and a stablemate of the contemptible Oliver Kamm at the Social Affairs Unit (SAU), presented a lecture titled “What Are We To Do About Islam?” That this was a speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference On Europe And Islam ought provide us with a hint to the bigotry that we will find in the text of the lecture.

Here are the highlights:

He invokes the Second World War to rally white people, sorry, Europeans, to his standard, which I expect is red and black and has some dramatically simple wheel-like symbol at the centre. Oh, you think that is hyperbole? Please, read on: He bangs on about ‘dhimmitude’ a hell of a lot. If you di“In their efforts to avoid war, Europeans are once again choosing dishonour. They refuse to cut back their welfare budgets or significantly increase their defence spending, and they still refuse to enforce the measures required to cease or reverse the disastrous effects of mass immigration… Yet in their effort to avoid confrontation now, Europeans are making a worse confrontation down the line more likely: in their effort to pretend-away the risk, the risk is swelling. The word for dishonour this time is Dhimmitude.” He bangs on about ‘dhimmitude’ a hell of a lot. If you didn’t know, this term, in the hands of writers like Murray, means any kind of accommodation with or sensitivity to Muslims and Islam.

“On the battlefield this enemy is defeated every time… It does not mean that they cannot win the battle of ideas… If you doubt this, then just think back on the so-called "defeats" which we are meant to have suffered since 9/11. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, 100,000 civilians alleged to be dead by a fanciful survey courtesy of The Lancet magazine. What did our enemy do to win these victories? Absolutely nothing. It all came from within.” The ‘within’ that furnish these ‘defeats’ are not the brute military machine or even the ‘rotten apples’, but those who complain at these egregious offences against what we hope are ‘Civilised values’. As he writes; “it’s guaranteed that modern Europeans will finish the job much better than any two-bit thug or terrorist could have done.”

In order to persuade us that European decency and tolerance – and, indeed, socialism – is cowardice he offers up a laughable analysis of the Spanish election in 2004. He suggests that spinelessness on the part of the Spanish people led to elect “a sympathetic socialist who has spent his time in office so far offering up concessions to Islam” rather than an ideological descendent of Franco. This analysis can only be maintained by a studied ignorance. It is a fact that Aznar led his nation to war against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population. It is a fact that Aznar’s ministers insisted that the Madrid bombs were the work of ETA. They did not merely suggest, they insisted that ETA were responsible and that this truth could not be questioned. Unless these ministers are so stupid that they insist on improbable truths in the knowledge that they are ignorant of any evidence to support these truths, then Aznar’s government compounded acting against the wishes of the people with lying to the people. Murray is wrong, and he knows it. But he is keen to grasp at any opportunity to paint decent people, tolerant people as cowards.

But, what to do with Islam, eh? “Militarily, this is relatively easy to deal with, and in foreign lands there is a solution to the problem.” But “our societies in Western Europe are too weak-willed, tired and degenerate to act decisively.” It is a shame that our ‘weakness’ does not stretch to significant moral qualms at the mass killing of brown foreigners. But ‘degeneracy’ at home? I think that I have heard that call before, a call which Murray, and we, will return to.

He continues along the lines of his historical antecedents when he quotes the biological metaphor of Mark Steyn; “Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off.” Of course, ‘radical Islam’ may be this, it may be that. But Murray’s thesis does not deal with 'radical' Islam. It is a thesis that attacks Muslims.

“[I]n the current war the enemy is, as a demographic and political fact, massed not just on foreign shores, but within the gates of our cities. The collision of forceful Islam with European spinelessness and dhimmitude is fatal for our free societies.” ‘Gates of our cities’ in this context is a reference to the ‘Gates of Vienna’, where brave Christians repelled the Musselman horde. This a mythic rallying point for the militant Muslim-haters. And we have seen this careful building of a historical narrative in the service of ousting degeneracy and the building of a strong ‘culture’ before.

“The first thing to do is to address the problem at home unsparingly. It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop… [and] Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled”. Why not send them all to Madagascar, Murray? Just in case they do not know their place in society; “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”. And what measures does that include, and where do they stop?

Advocating a new round of wars on variously Islamic and secular Muslim states he writes; “We must remind the malignant that this war and this era will be dictated on our terms - on the terms of the strong and the right, not the weak and the wrong.” I mean, come on, is this a fucking satire, or is he just plagiarising fascism here?

Well, perhaps he is. For, as well as the Semitic enemy population within that needs solving through a battle of demographics, and a round of threatening, but weak enemies abroad to act as foci of proud, brave aggression, the real battle is with the ‘degeneracy’ within the Volk, sorry, body politic.

“[T]the reason why the war at home is not working as well as it should is because of the underlying disease of the West. We could decide with our immune system low that we should simply cut off all contacts with the outside world, try desperately to ensure that no malicious viruses – however small – get through to us. We can go some of the way to doing that, but there is a much better option. That option is to strengthen our societal immune system, to re-energise and build-up ourselves as a society”.

“And we must become absolutist – absolutist in defence of our societies, our traditions, our heritage, culture, freedoms and democracies. There is only one way to destroy relativism, and there is only one way to conquer the rise of Islamic militancy and that is to be uncompromising and absolutist. If people want certainty then let us give it to them here. Ignorant people will still say, "Ah, but I'm not sure what European culture is". Well that's their fault, not the fault of European culture.”

Well, I know what ‘European culture’ is. Or I know what ‘European culture’ is when the excreta spills from Murray’s gob. And it had its heyday between 1933 and 1945.

Teaching creationism in schools?

2006-03-13T20:15:00.000Z

Both the BBC and the Guardian carried the news that creationism is going to be taught in science classes. Both the BBC and the Guardian have got the story wrong.

The headlines and thrust of the stories, and their choice of interviewees, suggest that the plan is to adopt some kind of principle of ‘equal time’, or to teach evolution as if it were a current scientific controversy.

It is nothing of the sort. The plan is to devote a handful of lessons to teaching how knowledge, as a product of human social action, emerges from a historical, social and economic context. Should this be in a science class, rather than a history or sociology class? Perhaps not, but teaching this is no less science than lessons devoted to the social and historical impacts, rather than constitution, of scientific knowledge.

Presenting the teaching of the historical, social and economic contexts of science as if it were the teaching of creationism is akin to arguing that teaching children about the emergence of Nazism is, in actual fact, teaching them Nazism. At best it terrible journalism. Worse, it is a scare-mongering lie that will keep an insightful analysis of science and knowledge off the curriculum. And at worst it is obscurantism masquerading as a defence of rationalism.

If the press would like to look at a real threat to a decent, open-minded education, they would identify our Government's anti-democratic obsession with handing power over education to those with capital as the villain.

Two to watch

2006-03-09T13:10:00.000Z

Watch more teevee! Or at least, watch these television programmes. It is not all mind rot.

BBC2 – 7pm The Culture Show. Includes a very rare interview with Alan Moore, my personal cultural hero and writer of works such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and my favourite graphic novel (though he disdains the abasement before a cultural heirachy that is implicit in the appropriation of the word ‘novel’) From Hell. Jonathan Ross and Iain Sinclair are among those discussing his work.

Channel 4 – 9pm The Road to Guantanamo. A factual drama directed by the award-winning Michael Winterbottom. Combining interviews and dramatised footage, The Road to Guantanamo tells the story of four British teenagers who were to be branded the ‘Tipton Taliban’, three of whom were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Returned to the UK amid much hysteria, no evidence has been presented that any of these men were in any way connected with al Qaeda. Without acknowledging the irony, the British police detained and questioned the actors who had played the ‘Tipton Taliban’ on their return from the Berlin Film Festival where they had won the Silver Bear.

Island of Tyranny

2006-03-08T20:12:00.000Z

George W. Bush, I will let you have that phrase for free. Claim it for your own and use it in your next State of the Union address.

The island of Sark has recently decided against instituting democracy, instead opting for a feudal political system that reserves much power for the landowners. This decision, of course, was made by an unrepresentative body, the Chief Pleas.

Looking at this situation, if you are of a like mind with the rhetoric of men like Blair and Bush then there is only one morally acceptable option here. Invasion! Despite the exclamation mark I am serious. If, as Jack Straw asserted, a ‘desire for democracy burns in the heart of every human being’, then the people of Sark are being denied their political freedom. What can be done? Well, if a bloody invasion and murderous occupation is an acceptable means of spreading democracy, then the relatively bloodless knocking over of a few tin-pot landowners and liberating the people of Sark would be a perfectly acceptable means to a democratic end. What is more, it would be comparatively easy, and a perfect laboratory on which to test the principles of democratisation through invasion. The methodology can be refined on the islands of tyranny close to home, before being deployed on larger ‘outposts of evil’.

Come on Hitchens, Cohen, Aaronovitch and all your various hangers on in the First Fighting Keyboarders, this IS one that you can do this in person. You could be the liberal liberators, a post-Left ‘Dogs of War’. Go and bring ‘modernity’ and ‘enlightenment’ to the people of Sark.

Crème Eggs; or, How do you eat your Britishness?

2006-03-06T15:27:00.001Z

In a moment of sudden reflection, it seemed utterly odd. Crème Eggs are sold as icons of Britishness, their sale and consumption an annual event that unites people across Britain and nowhere else. Odd, both on the basis of that bare fact, and the simple truth that follows; Crème Eggs are more a symbol of any special Britishness than football or cricket, trade unionism or free markets, binge drinking or non-conformist temperance, democracy or the monarchy. These are all found elsewhere, and find their equally British contradictory conditions. But Crème Eggs, well, their manufacture, and characteristically British uncodified but nevertheless ritual consumption is contained within the boundaries of Britain, and there is no antagonistic and yet equally British tradition.

So, if we must engage in the absurd debate on ‘Britishness’ (see here and here), then dump the wishful thinking that suggests that a particular ideological or political tradition is peculiarly British. They are patently not, and exercises which seek to make them so are nationalistic exercises in exclusion by definition of the other as foreign. If we must, let us celebrate those little things which are British, which do not exclude, and, despite being a little too sweet for many palates, are enjoyable treats on an annual basis.

Humourless

2006-02-18T11:09:00.000Z

According to the Guardian, Condoleeza “Rice told the Senate foreign affairs committee that Iranian leaders "have now crossed a point where they are in open defiance of the international community"”.

Did she say that with a straight face?

Where are those free speech defenders?

2006-02-16T08:24:00.000Z

I have written before about the shameful new law prohibiting the ‘glorification of terror’. As I wrote before; “I cannot think of any wording of a modern, just law which would criminalise the imam who argues that a suicide bomber is a martyr and[, at the same time,] would leave a right-wing newspaper columnist free after he calls for the use of torture or supports the use of extra-judicial death squads. But these laws will not be used to imprison Gary Bushell or Richard Littlejohn, I will promise you.”

Today, the Guardian writes; “Claims that the clause will be used to arrest Irish people celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising are alarmist nonsense.” Perhaps, but such a sop both illustrates the true nature of these laws and is, at the same time, a gross misrepresentation of the argument against these laws. It is not that they will lead to the arrest of someone praising a distant historical event. It is that it will only be used to counter praise of terror resulting from the apparently inscrutable Orient. Western-inflicted terror and its supporters will write their columns evermore, glorifying in human destruction. For this law to work it will necessarily have to be unevenly enforced, on a political basis. That is no basis for just laws.

Phil, at Actually Existing, pointed out just what is included in this Government’s definition of terrorism – the legislative definition – which makes terrorism akin to ‘disorderly political conduct’. In other words, anything from threats to commit disruptive protest and direct action on up. If the anti-terrorism laws were to be applied consistently, they would now be able to net not only those who blockade a company headquarters in protest at its actions, but also those who say that these actions are, in whatever way, good. Of course, we are assured, anti-terrorism laws will not be used in this way, and we are saved from a police state that uses ‘terrorism’ as a means of crushing grass roots political activism. But then we are left with the spectre of the politically motivated enforcement of bad law, and this is unjust.

Where are the ‘free speech fundamentalists’ here? Where are those who circulated racist, hateful cartoons as an act of solidarity with ‘Enlightenment values’, republishing speech which had not, in any way, been censored? Will they now offer their pages and bandwidth to republish, as an act of solidarity, the sort of glorifications of terrorism that will be outlawed by this legislation? Or, will they bollocks?

Update: Phil has pointed out that he quotes the legislation here. Nevertheless, the post I link to above is also a good one.

Free speech and expensive audiences

2006-02-05T19:26:00.000Z

The editor of France Soir was sacked after republishing the Danish cartoons. And what is wrong with that? Why should the owner of a media outlet not determine who it is that works at it? And here we arrive at the crux of the problem; speech is free but access to an audience is expensive.

These cartoons have NOT been censored. They are quite possibly the most seen cartoons in living history. They have been reprinted in newspaper after newspaper, in country after country, reaching an audience far beyond that which might be expected for such crude cartoons.

This is not about freedom of speech. Where were the campaigns to defend George Michael’s single ‘Shoot the Dog’? This single was not released in the US because it was controversially critical of US and UK foreign policy. Where were the right-wingers defending the right of George Michael to an audience, despite their opposition to what he had to say? Where were the demands that radio stations played the Dixie Chicks? Where were the websites that, to offer an analogous argument to that used by those who claim that they are not racist yet aid in the circulation of these cartoons, swore that they supported Bush but demanded that people listen to these records? If capital has the right to shape speech in these ways, then there is a far more pressing problem for freedom of speech then the actions of an angry, largely powerless minority.

But it is clear. An owner only has the right to determine the content of his or her media outlet if he or she is not a Muslim. The only expression worth circulating as if it were a liberatory samizdat are crudely racist cartoons. This is about demonising Muslims, but the racists have got a clever strategy. By presenting this issue as one of freedom of speech, which it is either demonstrably not, or is simply a minor episode in comparison to the much more restrictive interests of capital, they recruit stupid liberals by pressing their hot button, directing liberal ire at a demonised minority group. It is an attempt to recruit the tolerant to march with the racists.

Bushitler? And cartoons and free speech

2006-02-03T09:44:00.000Z

Those who were, and are against the US-led war on terror are regularly accused of spouting inanities like Bush=Hitler. These charges often miss the point. When you are not a government spokesman or a newspaper columnists the closest you can get to mass communication is a placard a demonstration*. The demands of space, and the imperative to be eye-catching, forces the hand, and voice, of the demonstrator. A placard cannot contain a reasoned exposition on the brutalising nature of war, the problems of imposing democracy by force, the demonstrated wickedness and contempt for democracy and human rights of some of the senior figures in the White House. Hell, even that single sentence would not fit onto a placard. But if Bush=Hitler, even in the context described above, is sufficient grounds for writing off the anti-war movement, then what are we to make of a recent statement made by Don Rumsfeld, a man resolutely pro-fascist throughout the 1980s, at least where the people of the developing world were concerned. Rumsfeld said that Hugo Chavez was ‘worrisome’. “You’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money”; “He’s a person who was elected legally just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally”. Now, he is not a protester restricted by a lack of access to channels of mass communication. This man is one of the most powerful political figures in the world. What odds on a new round of fascist coups in Latin America to deal with the worrying left-wing democracies of Venezuela, Bolivia and others. In men like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Negroponte, Poindexter, North, well, there is plenty of expertise around Washington these days. Anti-Americanism? Must be some sort of irrational brain-fever of these latins; it cannot possibly have any basis in a bloody, brutal history of imperialistic domination, can it?

*This is where free-speech fundamentalists must put up or, appropriately enough, shut up. They must recognise that while we can all have the right to say anything we want to our friends and neighbours, only a tiny elite have access to audiences of any size. This political right is reserved for capital and its friends. Access to an audience is not free, it is not universal, it is not yet a human right. If free-speech fundamentalists really believe what they say, let us see them demand a reform of the capitalist system of ownership of the media, rather than making the simple, stupid demand that newspapers publish a handful of cartoons that play into the hands of political Islamists AND Islamophobes. Access to the machinery of mass communication is already restricted, but this, most egregious restriction of free-speech appears not to trouble the ‘decent’ left. Again, what we see is an attempt by the right to recruit the left to their xenophobic reactionary cause by wailing about assaults on ‘liberalism’. And again, we must resist lining up with these bigots, as theirs in no defence of liberalism, only of their own reactionary primitivism. We can defend left-wing liberalism without the help of racists. And if we really care about liberalising speech, is the most pressing demand that of a bunch of sub- Goebbels Danish ethnocentrics to paint Muslims as a danger to civilisation, or it is by breaking the grip of men like Murdoch over our ‘free’ media? I say; smash his fingers if we need to. Free speech for all!

Work makes you free

2006-01-24T16:19:00.000Z

So, the government is going to put all the useless eaters to work, is it? As I have written before, the Government's rhetoric simply does not make sense. I thought that I would spell it out in simple steps. It runs like this:

1. People on Incapacity Benefit (IB) are living in poverty. Their lives are miserable.

2. As humanitarians, we want to improve their lives, and the best way to do that is get them off IB and into rewarding economic activity.

So far, so good(ish). But...

3. People on IB are disincentivised as work often is materially less advantageous than remaining on IB.

4. Therefore we must cut IB to incentivise them to enter into economic activity.

1 and 2 are consistent. 3 and 4 are consistent. 1, 2, 3 and 4 are utterly inconsistent, as if this reasoning is followed it will result in the former IB claimants entering employment that leaves them in worse straits economically. This runs against 1 and 2, the planks of the case derived from imperatives of welfare cited by Government.

And this is before we ask [a] if the jobs are there, [b] what an influx of low-skilled labour will do to pay and conditions and [c] how work will affect the health of IB claimants.

My suggestion is that 3 and 4 are consistent and are the sum of the genuinely held government position. 1 and 2 are merely well worked moral cover, the ‘humanitarian’ case for the imposition of neo-liberal dogma.

I commented on the post at Lenin’s Tomb, and said that I could not understand why someone has not torn this rhetoric to pieces when interviewing a junior minister live on TV. Which is an example of naivety on my part.

Our 'radicals' are reactionaries

2006-01-19T09:14:00.000Z

I have heard people talk of the twin vices of ‘benefit dependency’ and poverty. Such rhetoric is used when promoting ‘reform’ [the cutting] of incapacity benefit. Apparently without a trace of humour, politicians and right-wing commentators make the argument that people on incapacity benefit live in poverty AND that they are better off than if they were in work.

To any humane person, this would suggest that incapacity benefit needs to be raised. People should not be bound to live in poverty because they are ill. We can make more sense of the concept of being ‘trapped’ on incapacity benefit if, rather than the language of dis/incentives (for the poor, remember, the ‘incentive’ is the avoidance of utter destitution), we remember that incapacity benefit involves a person who is already ill being cast into a state of material deprivation.

Further, if people who are living in poverty are better off than people in work, then our wages system needs to be examined. Perhaps the minimum wage needs to be raised. Perhaps aspects of the social wage need to be improved. A fair day’s pay ought never to be a poverty wage. If your free market ideology leads you to accepting that a portion of the population must be reduced to a state of deprivation, then you are the follower of a wicked ideology.

The idea that a benefit that leaves people in poverty needs reform is a good one. The idea that it needs to be cut to push people into work that further reduces people’s material conditions is a reactionary notion. The radicals in our politics are those who seek to dismantle the great leaps of the past century; our welfare state, our universal health and education systems, our tolerance, our opposition to imperialism. Reactionaries all.

Deliberate intent

2006-01-16T10:56:00.000Z

It seems that a US missile strike carried out by an unmanned drone has killed 18 people. I use such cautious language as ‘it seems’ as to state it definitively is controversial, though I recognise that my choice of words might endorse the sort of ambiguity used to defend the murderous policies of the US. Nevertheless, as best we know, 18 people have been killed. None of these people were the target of the missile; Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Some might say that, as the missile was not intended to kill these 18 people, only a different person who, it turned out, was not there, to describe this action as ‘murderous’ is simply wrong. Or more, that I am guilty of ‘moral equivalence’; that denouncing US forces as murderous is somehow a statement to the effect that US forces are morally identical to an al-Qaeda terrorist. This is, plainly, not what I am writing, and such a meaning can only be inferred by a reader with a world view of absolutes, where, as al-Qaeda are utterly bad, no action taken in combating them can possibly be other than good. Such a world view is both relentlessly partisan and totalitarian. And mindlessly stupid. But regardless, explore the blogosphere and you will find it unselfconsciously pumped forth by people who style themselves as defenders of freedom.

The actions of the US are, in this instance, murderous. Just as with the policy used in Iraq, where houses, and homes, are destroyed by overwhelming firepower when a suspected insurgent is suspected of taking refuge inside, this involves a political and military calculation. Please note the two uses of the word suspected in the previous sentence; this is a reflection of the degree of uncertainty that is accepted when committing military force to a path of action that will, almost certainly, result in civilian casualties. The people who made the decision to fire the missile in Pakistan knew, at least as certainly as anything can be known in conflict, that their actions would cause civilian deaths. They knew this to a higher degree of certainty than they knew that they would cause the death of al-Zawahiri. They accepted this and deliberately proceeded down a course of action that resulted in these civilian deaths.

Now, some have argued that the US does not make the killing of civilians the purpose of its military action. As we shall see, some justifications for this action suggest that not all supporters of the US-led War on Terror seem to think this is important. But first, what group does make the killing of civilians the purpose of its military action. The answer to this question is; only serial killers and genocideers. This does not, automatically, include terrorists, even those who target civilians in their attacks. Terrorist actions, like all military(-like) actions, have a political goal. In the case of, say, the IRA, this goal was a united Ireland. Outside of a tiny minority of truly swivel-eyed loons, the killing of British civilians was a means to this end. The US missile strike in Pakistan was an attempt to assassinate a ‘leader’ of al-Qaeda, and the killing of innocent civilians was an integral part of the means chosen to pursue this end. It is not so easy to paint a difference between those who intentionally kill civilians in the pursuit of political goals, and those who deliberately kill civilians in the pursuit of political goals. The US action, quite clearly, falls into the latter camp.

Some have attempted to justify the action by arguing that, given that some people in northern Pakistan have given refuge to al-Qeada members in the past, and that some might be sympathise with the goals of al-Qeada, this strike will work to ensure that people think twice before 'associating' with al-Qeada again. Regardless of a discussion of the morality of providing hospitality to al-Qaeda members in rural Pakistan, this line of reasoning is patently a justification for terrorism, and an argument that dissolves any division between the US deliberately killing civilians as opposed to it intentionally killing civilians. It is the application of military force to terrorise a population into obedience. In fact, this goes some way beyond ‘normal’ terrorism. A bomb delivered by the IRA or al-Qeada requires huge organisational commitment. These cannot be delivered ‘at will’. The terror they impart depends on illusion; in truth they are weak groups that cannot strike anywhere, anytime. A US missile strike, in comparison, is capable of being far more terrifying, as they can be delivered almost anywhere in the world at the organisational commitment of only a tiny fraction of US military resources. Thus, they are repeatable ad terreo, a demonstration of the genuine power by the terrorising forces.

Others arguments have blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, for providing faulty intelligence designed to undermine Musharraf. The tension between Musharraf and the ISI must be known to US military planners, as must the intimacy of the ISI and radical Islamist groups. If, knowing this, these planners proceed to launch missiles into houses on the chance that their unreliable and disreputable allies are feeding them genuine, copper-bottomed intelligence, then their deliberate acceptance of civilian casualties in the pursuit of political ends is not diminished. It grows further. The planners are more murderous, not less.

There are other arguments, some springing from American exceptionalism, some plain old racist, but I have dealt with the most reasonable cases in defence of this action. I will not bother with either of these, if only because a challenge to either of these essentially unreasonable points of view is futile; if brown people are worth less than others, then discussion of paths of action that produce their deaths take on a whole different light, one that it is impossible for even soft-egalitarians to engage with; and if America is exceptional, then its actions are utterly incomparable to those of other nations and groups and thus reasonable discussion of its actions are pointless.

After all that seriousness, now for something completely different; a humorous observation on the storm raging over George Galloway. New Labour is basing much of its Galloway-bashing propaganda on the fact that he was not in Parliament at the time of a debate over the proposed Crossrail link that will, it is suggested, have a negative effect on the lives of his constituents. But; [1] the debate Galloway missed was a select committee debate to which he was never able to be a participant, and [2] the powers that are determining the route of Crossrail are those of a New Labour government.

Over at Lenin’s Tomb, Dylan writes:

“So New Labour says GG is irresponsible because he isn't around to stop them from hurting his constituents... that’s beautiful. It reminds me of Sideshow Bob’s campaign ad on The Simpsons: “Mayor Quimby even released Sideshow Bob – a man twice convicted of attempted murder. Can you trust a man like Mayor Quimby? Vote Sideshow Bob for mayor.”

If you are going to smear, smear well. This is something that the opponents of Galloway never seem to manage, though they do try very hard. I mean, forged documents? You have to go back to Arthur Scargill to find the a similarly uniform, and similarly false, media smear campaign. It is interesting to note that, in The Enemy Within by Seamus Milne, Galloway is quoted as saying, as soon as the Scargill smears began, that those would prove to be false. And they did.

A previous post on deliberate killing.

[At the recommendation of TimP in the comments I have tried to correct some typos in this post.]

More on electoral legitimacy

2006-01-10T00:38:00.000Z

Red Deathy, at Harry’s Place*, drags up a little piece of evidence.

1983 - longest suicide note in History - 8,456,934
2005 - Blairite third term triumph - 9,562,122

This illustrates that under our present first-post-the-post system a democratic mandate that, assuming party unity, promises a dictatorship incapable of defeat in the Common’s, is only a wafer thin margin from total defeat. Why ought eight and half million voters have next to no legislative power wielded in their name, while just nine and a half million voters can have near total legislative power?

These figures are also testament to public disengagement with Parliamentary politics which represents a serious threat to democracy, but dangerously, not government. With little chance of Galloway actually achieving anything in the Commons, a fact resulting from its structure rather than his talents, seen in this light his foray into Big Brother can be seen as an experiment in engagement. Which is not to say that it is a clever move; whether or not it is a failure is yet to be seen.

*The writers at Harry’s Place proclaim that they are of the left. Much of their output consists of attacking anti-war figures, especially Galloway, and Muslims. They argue that the left must criticise itself in order to improve. Of course. But if that is all you do, while providing a humanitarian cover for the right-wing all that is actually being performed is an assassination of the left.

Johan Hari teeters on the ledge of deligitimation

2006-01-09T16:50:00.000Z

In his efforts to smash George Galloway, Johan Hari has overbalanced and it is only a matter of time before he falls from the ledge of deligitimation. He writes; “he was rejected at the ballot box by 64 percent of the people who live here [Bethnal Green and Bow] in May – but nonetheless became our MP because of our ridiculous electoral system.” Fine. Would is be churlish to point out that Saint Oona was rejected by 66 percent of the people of Bethnal Green and Bow, despite sophisticatedly dishonest campaigning?*

Johan Hari puts himself on pretty shaky ground from which to defend the actions of the current government as being democratic, never mind the mandate of any particular MP. Even MPs with a majority in their constituencies are the beneficiaries of our ‘ridiculous electoral system’, as evidence by Labour campaign message; vote for us or you will get a Tory. This keeps left-wing voters within the Labour fold, despite differences on the Iraq War, on civil liberties, on the idolisation of the market and the adoration of capital. When even such left-wingers as Billy Bragg turn up to campaign for Oona King on a ‘keep the Tories out’ justification, the fact that Galloway, a representative of a party outside the two (three?) main parties won the seat at all tells the story of a tremendous political triumph. If he wants to delegitimate Galloway’s mandate, then, in doing so, he delegitimates all MPs and this current government. This is dangerous ground to tread, and the fact that Hari makes no comment on the territory that he has entered speaks volumes of his honesty. This charge is being levelled against Galloway because he is Galloway (or, more importantly, because he is anti-war); it is not a real indictment of the democratic legitimacy of all our elected representatives.

Incidentally, Hari’s column is absolute pap. Comparison with my own writing is not a valid rebuttal, as I am not being paid thousands to produce drivel. It pours forth freely.

*By the way trolls, not even Saint Oona runs with the claim that Galloway won by appealing to racism. And you certainly do not want to even put a tiptoe onto this ledge of deligitimation given that Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems all made opportunistic use of anti-immigrant sentiment.

[10,000 hits passed sometime this weekend]

Is this a pigeon?

2006-01-06T18:09:00.000Z

Because it certainly is a right-wing coup.

Charles Kennedy seems to have found himself in an untenable position. He has lost the support of the majority of senior Liberal Democrat MPs. It seems reasonable to suggest that a leader cannot continue when the Parliamentary party is openly against him. However, it is strongly suggested, and little disputed, that Charles Kennedy retains the support of the majority of the Liberal Democrat party as a whole. But Kennedy cannot rely on this to keep him leader. As long as his MPs are in open revolt, he credibility is destroyed, regardless of his support from the largely voiceless membership.

So, we have a situation where the left-leaning liberals – the beard and sandals brigade – who make up the body of the Liberal Democrats are having their chosen leader ousted by a handful of ambitious professional politicians – the Orange Book neo-liberals. Using the party as a vehicle for their ambitions, these plotters of a coup d’partie reduce politics to a game played only by a professionalised political class. The membership is a mere resource to be exploited to boost the career progression of uniformly neo-liberal politicians. This is a distinctly anti-democratic trend in British politics, but, like the Liberal Democrat membership, ‘whatchagonnado?’ They cannot back Charlie Kennedy, not with so many knives still protruding from his spine. They cannot dismiss their MPs, en masse, without killing the Liberal Democrat party. So the party is in their hands. Coup.

This seems to be a familiar pattern, seen before in British politics; the seizure of a party and its infrastructure by a handful of unrepresentative neo-liberal professional politicians. I do not doubt their consummate political skill, I merely point out the democratic deficit that accompanies their rise. Witness New Labour, and the relationship between Parliamentary party and conference, and NEC*. The membership is presented with a simple choice; shut up or ship out. And, like the Labour membership, ship out they will, I predict.

*The relationship between New Labour and their heartland voters is similarly cynical. At the last General Election the New Labour line was that, regardless of voters’ positions on the Iraq War, on PFI or on the erosion of civil liberties, votes had to be cast for New Labour or else the Tories would sneak back into power. Mere days after the election, the [minority of] voters that voted New Labour back into government were being used as an argument that there was a democratic imperative for the Iraq War, for PFI and for the erosion of civil liberties.

The destruction of Western Civilisation

2006-01-05T11:34:00.000Z

Anthony Browne believes that civilisation is being destroyed by ‘Political Correctness’. First things first. There has always been political correctness in some form or other; some subjects have always been taboo, some policy prescriptions have been proscribed and debates have been couched in the acceptable language of the time.

Now, as for Browne’s ‘thesis’ (I must confess that, having read a good portion of the pamphlet, I saved the .pdf to my desktop under the title ‘Browne’s thought turd’, it really is that awful), I suggest that you go to The Virtual Stoa, which has eleven short posts dissecting this piece of garbage. I do wish that my thesis could be produced with so little consideration of evidence, or indeed, evidence of consideration.

One of my favourite quotes is; “No country has yet been destroyed by political correctness – although the Netherlands has come close...”

This piece of ridiculous hyperbole, and please remember that Browne couches his argument as a return to reason (he also borrows the mantle of science to legitimate his attack on PC), prompted a wonderful to reply from Alex in the comments boxes:

“…only someone who has very little clue about the conditions under which most people in the world live could imagine that the Netherlands has come "close" to being “destroyed”. War? Terrorism? Not a sausage. Disease? Economic depression? Hyperinflation? Hunger? Infrastructural failure? // To be more accurate, one mad Islamist (presumably not PC, given that they believe women should wear bags on their heads) stabbed a mad film director who specialised in insulting other people's religions (which is hardly PC), and a mad veggie fundamentalist (not very PC either) shot a mad fascist (fascists not being very PC the last time I checked). That's it. That's like saying the United States were “close to being destroyed” by Mark Chapman.”

Presumably, what distresses Browne about ‘political correctness’ is that is associated with liberal societies. Like Melanie Phillips and her counterpart rant-bot Paul Johnson, I suspect that Browne’s major concern is that we now live in what is a permissive and tolerant society. This is the ‘destruction’ that Browne refers to, and why he chose the Netherlands as his example. He wants you, I suggest, to think of the headline grabbing assassinations, and concur. But as Alex points out, only if reason has retreated completely are these the ‘near destruction’ of a society. For a reactionary social conservative, however, the permissive model of Netherlands is in itself the destruction of society. Do not be fooled; he seeks to recruit liberals to social conservatism by presenting an illusion of a world in which their liberal values are under threat. This is a successful tactic, witness, for example, how the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association has bought the ‘racism as defence of liberalism’ line*. Melanie Phillips, another social conservative who likes to present herself as a defender of Western Civilisation, provided that it is not permissive or tolerant, has this to say on Browne’s brain spasm:

“Browne is one of the few who very clearly understands that ‘political correctness’ is not some ludicrous absurdity that can be laughed away, as it is so often depicted. It is instead a terrifying, totalitarian and in Britain wholly successful putsch against truth itself, the weapon of subversion of a moral, political and social order.”

I wish that we could dismiss Phillips (and Browne) as a ‘ludicrous absurdity’. But we cannot. For while there has been, apparently, a ‘wholly successful putsch’ of a ‘terrifying, totalitarian’ belief system (can you see where she is going here; a wine bar putsch anyone?), people holding views like those of Phillips still seem to find work as commentators, columnists, broadcasters. Indeed, I would suggest that they do all this while holding large portions of the wealth and power of this country. This attack on PC – something that Browne almost admits is an invention of the American right wing, at least in so far as it is any sort of coherent entity – is reactionary in its most simple and straightforward sense; it seeks to reverse the social progress, the increase in tolerance and permissiveness that has occurred over the past half century. This is a threat to it far more dangerous than a few violent Islamists. The best they can do is blow up some stuff and kill a few people. Harold Shipman, a middle class white professional, holds the post-War British All-Comers record for this kind of action. When comparatively politically powerful, persuasive actors such as Browne and Phillips get to work, they actually can effect change. There views are no defence of liberal, tolerant civilisation, but an active rejection of it.

*Lenin, who, among with others has been busy publicising Craig Murray’s torture memos, has just posted up a nice little piece on the depressingly predictable response to the new 50 Cent film.

Kong it!

2006-01-04T13:44:00.000Z

The Phylotopian reports that on the Burger King adverts encouraging us to ‘Kong our Whoppers’ – as I have already done – there is a disclaimer stating that; ‘Actual burger not size shown’. Given that the burger is over 6 foot tall, this ought be assumed. This does, however, raise questions of the content and role of advertising*; those who avoid the consequences of accepting arguments that advertising ‘creates markets and creates desires’ need to fall back on the argument that advertising is information, but to use this defence we must produce advertising that is merely informational. As soon as it contains overtly pursuasive elements beyond that necessarily resulting from the supply of information then we are in the grounds of creating desires. And as soon as we do that, we are responsible for the desires that we create, and when they are efforts to persuade us to eat unhealthily, we can have bigger complaints over the form, content and intent of advertising than merely that a ‘Konged’ Whopper is not, as we might have been led to believe, over 6 foot tall.

However, this blog post then went on to discuss disclaimers in general, leading to the comment from Martin that:

“It's the price of living in a nanny state, where all personal responsibility and common sense are being taken away by health and safety, insurance companies and government bodies. It is the right ... or rather the stupidity of the individual to once again ruin it all for the rest of us!”

And then on people injured at work and resorting to ‘no win, no fee’ compensation lawyers:

“I say if these people are such dyspraxic, incapable F**kwits, perhaps they shouldn't be in the jobs in the first place.”

I had to bite such bait.

If you are injured at work, or any other place, then there needs to be compensation. Now, a decent state (a 'nanny' state?) would have comprehensive health and disability cover, and to receive this blame need not be assigned, merely injury and incapacity demonstrated. In Britain we do not have this; this fact is demonstrated by the arguments FOR incapacity benefit reform. If people on incapacity benefit are suffering from deprivation, as the government argues, then incapacity benefits are plainly too low, and neither can they act as an economic disincentive on any large scale. Unless see the world as a member of the CBI does, and dream of a nation where wage levels motivate by their meagreness with the devil of want always at our backs.

Aside from compensation and material support, there is still the need to improve conditions in unsafe workplaces, and prevent other workplaces falling to the similarly dangerous levels. Now I favour the state support for the injured and criminal corporate law to deal with negligent employers. But, given that we have neither tough, enforceable criminal legislation, nor decent state compensation and support for the sick and incapacitated, we NEED ambulance-chasing lawyers. They act as a necessary band-aid to our sick system. If we consider that the symptoms that are so often complained about are far more extreme in the USA, we note that this culture of litigation has emerged in a country with almost no safety net, no real comprehensive health cover and pathetically weak worker protection. And this we see the choice; we either opt for a proper 'nanny' state or allow a 'sue' state to emerge and all that entails. The pathologies of both are far less serious – as we see from the tabloid press this mostly consisting of the farce of disclaimers and training days rather than serious material effects on the lives of people – than the consequences of rejecting these systems; rejection of both these systems tosses the vast mass of people to the wolves, pack animals that pick off the sick and injured.

*Unrelated advertising story. In the days after the Royal Marine naked initiation ‘ceremony’ news story broke, I could not help but spot a bus carrying a recruitment poster encouraging people to ‘Go Commando’. Persuasive.

A first view of Metropole

2005-12-30T18:40:00.000Z

Page 10 of The Song of Wayland, a long-form comic book inspired by the Saxon story of Weyland the Smith. Jorge Munoz, a Mexican artist, has provided me with a great Christmas present by polishing off the art for the first chapter. Once the first 12 pages are lettered they will be submitted to potential publishers in a publication pack including a short treatment, full script and concept art.

Empirical Majesty #1 – reviewed at Silver Bullet Comics

2005-12-14T15:47:00.000Z

The ever busy people at Silver Bullet Comics have reviewed Empirical Majesty chapter one. Please visit their site and read the review HERE. Apparently the comic is “a very British and, in places, very learned volume” that “bounds along with considerable energy”.

Silver Bullet Comics also reviewed Tales of the Contrary, which they called “[q]uite serious and thought provoking stuff”.

Both comics are available to buy at £2.50 inc. p&p for the pair. Payment by cheque or PayPal (inc. credit cards) to aj_bartlett1977[at]yahoo.co.uk.*

Or you could try and blag them, but your success cannot be guaranteed.

*[update 29th December: anyone who tried to but my comics using the e-mail address I gave in the orginal blogpost will have failed. Sorry. aj_bartlett1977@yahoo.co.uk is the correct address.]

The joke may be on us

2005-12-13T17:58:00.000Z

Space Cadets just might be a proper hoax after all.

As the wits on the dispersed group of friends that make up the Tendolla e-mail list have observed:

“Surely Space Cadets is all faked… and the joke is on the audience.” (W)

“Aside from obvious logistical points (is anybody that gullible? etc), I have noticed that one of the "cadets" not initially described as an actor is in fact consistently appearing in the blood donor adverts which segment the show as an aide to Gordon Ramsay's existence. // Also, as stupid as people are from the South West, the guy who is currently "in space" is using his West Country accent a little too effectively for this purpose I feel.” (S)

This analysis would put a different spin on the quote I stole from Nick at The Sharpener and placed in the comments box of my first post on Space Cadets:

It’s the sort of Rabblemock HaHa Time programme that TV Go Home used to create before it metamorphosised into Zeppotron TV…who are the producers of Space Cadets. Satire just ate itself, and we’re left to watch the detritus as a horde of executives pat themselves on the back at finding people even more stupid and self-obsessed than themselves and trying to persuade them that they’re going to go into space.

Charlie Brooker, of TV Go Home, Screen Burn and Nathan Barley, is on the Zeppotron TV board. Far from satire eating itself, the joke may well be on us. In which case Space Cadets is a hoax, a tremendous spoofing of our gullibility and acceptance of ‘reality’ TV. Well, your gullibility anyway, as I am not watching it.

Just as a postscript, though I ought to share the further thoughts of Tendolla:

“I think it would be best if the actor guy was the one who was being fooled, and in fact they really are going into space. // "I want two hundred grand not to blow the whole thing," he quietlyjoked to the cameras. // "Well, f*** you, we're leaving you in space," would be a witty retort.” (W)

“Especially funny would be the bit where he leaps out of the airlock thinking he is off to the ‘green room’ only to find himself in the cold vacuum of outer orbit. // har har har.” (P)

Bartlett recommends

2005-12-11T18:38:00.000Z

Are you stuck for presents this Christmas? Well, in the first instance I recommend consumables. Alcohol, chocolate, savoury delicacies; you know that these will be used and enjoyed, unlike many other presents which will barely leave their boxes.

But, if you still need something to buy, and the object of your generosity is not a person for whom consumables will be adequate, then I always recommend books. Books are capable of being more than entertaining and enlightening, they can communicate something of the giver. Now, to communicate something of yourself you need to choose the book accordingly, and you really ought to have read it through. But, if you lack the imagination to do this for yourself, or if you wish to buy yourself a present from me, then I suggest one of the following four books (or: alternatives):

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. This graphic novel exploring the Jack the Ripper murders is, for me, Alan Moore’s masterpiece. It appears, in form, to be a thriller, a whodunit, but it is, in effect, a meditation on the poverty, misery and violent exploitation that gave birth to the 20th century. (or: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, for a superficially more straightforward comic book, in that it is in colour and features super-heroes, that is equally intelligent and literate.)

GB84 by David Peace. A novel set amid the 1984 miners’ strike that shares many features that make From Hell such an important book. While at first glance it appears to be a political thriller it uses defined historical events, and, by incorporating what I have taken to calling ‘occult realism’, builds a picture of how social and economic structures corrupt and warp lives. (or: The Enemy Within by Seamus Milne, for a sober dissection of the co-ordinated smear campaign against Arthur Scargill and the NUM.)

Q by Luther Blisset. Another novel that is, at first appearances, a thriller, as the Catholic secret agent Q tracks Thomas Müntzer, who we would now call an activist, across Europe subverting each cause and sect to whom Müntzer lends his support. Set during the turmoil of the Reformation, it examines the power of ideas to undermine authority and power, and the extremes both to which authority will be reasserted and to which ideas can degenerate. (or: 54 by Wu Ming, the second novel from the collective of writers previously known as Luther Blisset, this time set in 1954 and examining the roots of consumerism.)

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr. Vonnegut’s novel, a rapid read of short paragraphs interspersed with crude illustrations, is a reflection on free will. Dwayne Hoover, one of the central characters of the book, sees the world as a mechanistic arrangement, but without an understanding of the awareness at the heart of each person is drawn to inhumane conclusions. Okay, it is a lot more than that, so read it. (or: Slaughterhouse 5, the story of Billy Pilgrim, American soldier, prisoner of war in Dresden and a man unstuck in time. So it goes.)

Advert: polymaths required

2005-12-06T10:31:00.000Z

The work of a CIA agent is both rewarding and varied. When not kidnapping people from the streets of friendly nations, you might be flying by private jet to deliver captives to torturers trained under Ceausescu. On occasion, you will be called on to perform forcible interrogations in person, slotting into the grand tradition of the School of the Americas. If you are of a creative bent, and if this bent is not of the twisted, warped kind that allows you to think outside the cell when extinguishing cigarettes on detainee’s skin, there are opportunities for imaginative writing. Whether fabricating first person accounts of the lives of glorious American soldiers, or producing utopian reports of life in post-invasion Iraq, the CIA will ensure that your writing receives the widest possible audience. We have a long association with various magazines, including Reader’s Digest, and the recent upsurge in our fortune have led to productive partnership with newspapers across Free Iraq. If your duplicitous imagination runs to the more artistic, and you are not interested in the cinematic expression of American heroism, there are opportunities for you to emulate the Great War Poets, though conscience and sacrifice are not required. Nor is talent, as the example below, inserted into school textbooks in Pakistan, demonstrates:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to meet every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.
Isn't afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn't conform to the usual mould,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won't do,
Never backs down when he sees what is true,
Tells it all straight, and means it all too.

Going forward and knowing he's right,
Even when doubted for why he would fight,
Over and over he makes his case clear,
Reaching to touch the ones who won't hear.
Growing in strength he won't be unnerved,
Ever assuring he'll stand by his word.

Wanting the world to join his firm stand,

Bracing for war, but praying for peace,
Using his power so evil will cease,
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must.

[A thank you to Arran for pointing this out]

More 'comedy'

2005-11-27T20:56:00.000Z

Channel 4 will soon enter a new competitor into the ‘reality’ TV arena. Space Cadets. What can I say? Only that, given that the ‘candidates’ for the show were systematically selected for their gullibility and lack of knowledge and then exposed to a training course that deliberately filled the gaps in these people’s knowledge with lies, the claim that this show will be a tremendous hoax is pretty weak. Indeed, it is not a hoax at all. A hoax fools people who ought to know better – such as people in authority for whom there is a duty to know better – or whole, undifferentiated populations. Space Cadets is not a hoax, rather, it shares more in common with a deception, a con. It is the television equivalent of the people who convince, against any responsible judgement, old ladies that they need to pay thousands of pounds to update their burglar alarms or fuse-boxes. Masters of capitalism, I call these people, with their highly effective exploitation of a niche market, but our law calls them con-men. Why, given the MO of the programme, did the programme makers not select a group of mentally disabled people and play practical jokes on them? Or even give up of the idea of fooling the intellectually weak and simple go for slapstick involving the physically weak? Let us push over old people and obstacles in the path of the blind. Why would the makers of Space Cadets not make these programmes? Because those would be immoral, they might claim. But the truth, given their lack of scruples in exploiting the weak, is that they do not make these programmes because the television audience retains enough sense of decency to reject these. For now. I hope. But we ought to reject Space Cadets, or at least hope that it ends the careers of all the ‘professionals’ involved.

Exploitation entertainment; from X-Factor, a programme that has built its success on exposing and ridiculing the tragic ambitions of people who lack any sense of personal affirmation without celebrity (ensuring its own survival by feeding this pathology) to Space Cadets. From the standard theme of modern porn (no longer hiding the exploitation of women behind plot and glamour, but celebrating it) to Bum Fight, a successful American programme in which the destitute are paid measly amounts of money in exchange for them engaging in their own mutilation for the entertainment of people higher up the economic order.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that capitalism leaves as the only “nexus between man and man… [that of] naked self-interest… callous ‘cash payment’”. Everything is swept aside leaving only “egotistical calculation”. “[P]ersonal worth [is transformed] into exchange value” and freedoms are replaced by Free Trade. Veiled exploitation is substituted by “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”. They predicted (and hoped) that this process would lead to an awakening of revolutionary consciousness. Rather, we buy naked exploitation as entertainment with as easy a conscience as we purchase our sweat-shopped clothes.

I piped music

2005-11-24T14:48:00.000Z

Music affects our moods. Music affects our thoughts. So what is the effect of walking around all day with music being piped into our ears? Might it not encourage some sort of disconnect between a person and their sensory experience of the world. More than no sound, a person listening to music through headphones hears carefully composed and arranged sound that has no connection with events in the rest of his or her experience.

Just a thought. I am certainly not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. A little otherworldliness can be a good thing.

[this post was composed under the influence iPod piped Demon Days by Gorillaz]

Democracy and war

2005-11-23T20:23:00.000Z

First, let me say this. That the democratic polis of one nation decides, or acquiesces, to the instigation of a war does not, in itself, give that war the barest of justification when people outside that polis are considered. Consider the analogy; an internally democratic revolutionary party agrees after several debates and a series of votes to begin a programme of terrorism to bring about its political goals. This process is entirely democratic – in so far as consideration of the members of the parties goes. It is not democratic externally, as indeed no decisions can be. For people outside the polis (of the party, or the nation) any programme of action (whether war or not) need be justified by reference to features of the action other than the democratic nature of the decision making of the instigators.

Now, let me move on the idea that democracy produces a pacific world. Norman Geras, the resident academic of the ‘decent left’, asks:

“Is it now the case that the Western democracies cannot fight wars unless these are short and very sparing of the lives of their own soldiers? That any war that becomes too long and too costly in these terms will quickly lose support within an electorate whose impulses become more self-centred (in the national sense) the more badly the war goes?”

As I understood it, this was the very principle on which the idea of democratisation as security policy stood; the democratic nations do not go to war easily. If Norm seriously laments this feature of democracies, then is he abandoning this part, this plank central to the ‘project’ of liberal bombing? Or is the idea of democracy bringing peace based on unelucidated mythic thinking?

Norm, it seems, would like to see more bloodthirsty democracies, and in this he hopes to see democracies that would shatter the very principle for which, in public at least, Iraqi lives and bodies have been smashed, splintered and shattered.

In the post from Norm that I have linked to above he argues that there can be no exit from Iraq. I have already pointed out how much of the discourse on this subject is a reheating of the rhetoric of the dog days of colonialism. Even Ann Clwyd – a woman who cries for victims of torture, so long at they were the victims of Saddam, while taking tea with the butchers of Central America – has resorted to this; we must teach Iraqis about human rights. We are, it seems, bringing civilisation to ‘the darkies’ by the force of the gun. All over again.

“Getting behind it - in the sense of actively debating how that battle can now best be fought, previous errors best be corrected and remedied, the expertise and resources of other members of the community of nations most effectively be drawn on, and so forth. A common discourse, in other words, across those who supported and those who opposed the war, and for the sake of common liberal and democratic objectives in Iraq. That would be quite something, no?”

It would, yes. But how can we correct the errors when the errors are inherent in the project. First, we have the problems inherent in the notion of an invasion for democracy. But more, what fool liberal or leftist thought that he or she could unproblematically harness the power of the American state, a state in the hands of people who murdered their way through the Cold War in the name of American power, and put it to work on a humanitarian project? The leftists and liberals held no power but the power of anointment; to legitimate whatever project these right-wing thugs decided upon. The track record of the men the ‘decent left’ ran ‘humanitarian’ cover for should have disbarred them from heading any mission for human rights, much less one operating on the basis of overwhelming firepower. But lo! and behold, one of the worst of a bad lot is appointed to run Iraq, the ‘Salvador Option’ is touted as a solution and imprisonment and torture are facts of life. Couple this with bans of Iraqi trade unions and the privatisation of the wealth of Iraq, and the pressing problem of a people resisting military governance by a pair of foreign powers and I ask, what did a ‘decent leftist’ imagine would happen.

So what previous errors need be corrected, Norm? Well, given that we have launched a multi-billion dollar war that has damaged democracies at home and shattered lives by the hundred thousand in Iraq, all in the name of the crimes of Saddam Hussein, the first thing that we could do is arrange for a squad car to pull up outside the houses of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Negroponte (at the very least) and put these men on trial for their crimes against humanity. No need for war, just a squad car. But that will not happen, will it? This is why Norm’s call for unity is nothing more than another smokescreen cast to cover the crimes of those he supported and the mistakes he made in legitimating them.

Finally, a little more on democracy and war; while the democracy involved in a decision to prosecute war cannot legitimate that action beyond the boundaries of the polis, the lack of democracy in the decision can certainly make such an action illegitimate from the perspective of those within the polis.

The joke has curdled and become poisonous

2005-11-22T18:54:00.000Z

I have to say that I am coming to agree with Johan Hari. At least on one thing. His piece on Little Britain is very persuasive. Faced with the sort of criticisms levelled at the show by Hari, I have heard someone moan; “So who can we laugh at?” I think that this sums up Little Britain’s misanthropy. The ‘who’ in that moan refers not to an individual character, to a complex empathetic human being, but to classes and categories of people. ‘Who’ can we laugh at? You can laugh at whoever you want, but I prefer that my comedy is not built on appeals to my misanthropy by making whole groups of people seem alien, foolish or wicked.

Some will say; “But it is just entertainment – it is free speech!” To which I would reply; “Entertainment? That is debatable. And seriously? Speech has power, which is the basis on which we demand the right to free speech. But some people have louder voices than others, and in this case a couple of men have a much louder say than the millions of people who are the object of their ridicule. If they defend it by saying that it has no impact, then that ought be taken as a damning condemnation of the use to which they have put their privileged position. More, to defend ‘speech’ by arguing that it has no impact is to undermine the very foundations of free speech; why do we need the right to something that is no longer the foundation of political, social and civic freedom, but rather a mere economic (and show-business, no more) activity? But that is wrong; speech is powerful, speech is special. And the onus is always on the speaker to consider the effect that their words, magnified by the volume of their voices and refracted through the imaginations of their listeners, might have.”

My suggestion: watch Phoenix Nights for some comedy built on genuine empathy for the characters and the people they represent.

Arming the police: rapid response

2005-11-18T22:43:00.000Z

There have been just a few hours since the shooting of a police officer in Bradford and we have already had calls for the police to be armed. On the 10 O’clock News tonight the BBC presented a set of misleading figures. They provided us with the number of police officers killed on duty over the past few years. In the context of the instant debate that was already underway, the presentation of these figures contained the implied suggestion that had the police been armed these deaths would not have occurred, or their numbers would have been reduced. Is this the case?

Having a gun does not stop you being shot, stabbed or run down by a car. And this is part of the problem with presenting those statistics. How would a gun save the life of police officers killed when their car is rammed? How would they protect the police officer killed when an arrested suspect slips free and stabs the officer at close quarters? Is it the case that simply inserting a holstered gun into these scenarios and running them as counterfactuals would have saved any of these officers? I doubt that, considered on the basis of these scenarios, armed police would, in themselves, change the existing outcomes.

But any argument that suggests that by giving all our police officers guns we will reduce the rate of police deaths is not, if it is serious, an argument that suggests the outcome of existing individual scenarios would have been altered. If it is serious it is an argument that by arming the police aspects of our policing and public culture will change. And realising this we should be wary of those who use the example of individual cases as emotive ammunition to load the guns of the police.

Being called to a robbery in which there was no prior knowledge on the part of the police that the robbers were armed, how would armed police have prevented the death of the police officer tonight? Presumably, the police would have approached with guns drawn. So far so good, in so much as we are only considering this existing individual scenario. But that is quite simply the wrong approach. What of all the scenarios where the police are called to other events and occurrences? Shall the police approach all their calls with guns drawn? How ready should they be to shoot? If they do not have their weapons in hand are not ready to shoot on suspicion then it is difficult to see how many of these tragic cases could have been avoided. More, we know that even when the only police officers to be armed are extremely well-trained, when they are specifically chosen for the role and when the order to fire passes through a highly regulated chain of command terrible mistakes (at best) are made with alarming regularity.

But that is not all. Not only will we have the police shooting people without the oversight that accompanies the discharge of firearms in contemporary Britain; an effective extra-judicial death penalty distributed on ‘sus’. Perhaps well-founded ‘sus’, but ‘sus’ all the same. No, there is more. There may well be a ramping up of the level of armed criminals. And then what? Are the police safer? Are we all safer?

Abel, in Iain Banks’ A Song of Stone says; “guns have many uses, multifarious effects. Perhaps they alter minds as well as anatomies… Do they determine more than those who fire them?”

Why do you hate America?

2005-11-17T13:43:00.000Z

That question is directed at Bill O’Reilly (via Larry of the amusingly nauseating blog name).

Bill O’Reilly, who is, depending on your perspective, either a ‘lying liar’ or is ‘fair and balanced’, responded to a democratically enacted measure to prohibit military recruiters from operating on the campuses of public high schools and colleges by spewing:

“…if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Why does he hate America? Is it because they are free?

[The citation for that line goes to the futuristically monikered 01-811-8055 in Larry’s comments boxes.]

Little white [phosphorus] lies

2005-11-15T22:30:00.000Z

Lies, eh? How the Orwell-quoting ‘decent-left’ love them. Have they misunderstood the point of Orwell, his place in our intellectual heritage? When we say that something is ‘Orwellian’, we are not commending it for truthfulness. But, all the while people are killed and tortured at the command of men who have no interest in democracy (as anything other than a veneer of justification rather than a radical empowerment of the populace), the ‘decent left’ appropriate Orwell’s name to legitimate their position as cheerleaders for muscular capitalism. And not just in Iraq, but also in South America and, even, here at home.

So it makes you laugh, with tears in your eyes, when, on the same day that the Independent publishes a letter from the American ambassador to Britain stating, categorically, that the US does not use white phosphorus as a weapon, the US military are forced to admit that it does. This, after a determined process of vigorously rejecting any claims that they have done so. Now, no doubt, the PRopaganda tack will switch to arguing that there is nothing wrong in using white phosphorus as a weapon. But that no longer matters, at least, even if the US successfully defends its use of white phosphorus there is another non-trivial matter. This being that, once again, the cabal of security, military and industrial interests involved in prosecuting and profiting from the ‘War on Terror’ (now that is Orwellian) have lied. Lies damage democracy, they poison it. Yet lies, the most anti-democratic of crimes, seem to carry no consequences, at least for the teller. Regardless of the justice of any of these actions; the war, the carve up of Iraq’s (or Britain’s) national wealth, detention, torture, the use of white phosphorus, the operation of a shoot-to-kill policy; every democrat should be horrified at the interplay of secrets, misinformation and lies that have been used to justify these actions and absolve those responsible, and, under the cover of defending democracy, poison its very lifeblood – an informed decision-making polis.

Perhaps the ‘decent left’ can take on one aspect of Orwell’s intellectual programme, rather than simply wrap themselves, and hide themselves, in the cloak offered by an emotive name. Mind you, this will not stop the ‘decent left’; war for peace my boys, capitalism for equality. Hurrah!

In them we must trust

2005-11-09T12:51:00.000Z

We must trust the police, says Tony Blair. If the police say that they need new powers, then we must give them those powers. They are professionals, and thus they know best. Therefore, we must give the police the power to detain people for 90 days.

I could use this post to damn the politicians who counter accusations of there being a lack of democratic argument by saying, “if you had seen the dossier I have seen…”, or “if you were at the meeting that I was at…”. I saw Hazel Blears, I think, say to a journalist, “you obviously weren’t at the meeting we had with the security services…”. No, Hazel, obviously not. And when decisions are made out of sight they are not democratic decisions. They might be made in the interests of the people, but we cannot assess whether this is the case, nor even if we accept that a decision has been made in the interests of the people that it was a good decision. But that is as much damning of that aspect of the case for control orders.

Now, I could use this thread to list miscarriages of justice. I need not separate between mistakes and malign conspiracy, as both of these sources of injustice would find new outlets with new powers. And such an argumentative move, though persuasive, would hold for any new powers the government might propose. But it does need to be borne in mind, for the issue here is government by trust.

The first aspect of this is that we must trust the police and give them the powers that they ask for. Is that really the case? Can Tony Blair or any of his cheerleaders imagine a scenario where they would act against the advice of the police? I am not asking for whacked-out scenarios, but rather ones consistent with the society and history we inhabit. If they cannot imagine a scenario where a government would, or ought to, act against the advice of the police, then not only are our governing politicians hopelessly naïve, we already have a police state. It might be benign, but if the police get what they want – whether through unworldly trust, misinformation or through fear – then they are ultimately the governing class.

But this is not the case, merely the logical end of Blair’s argument that decisions made in secret by people with great power must be accepted on trust. Of course, granting Blair and his supporters some measure of normal human intelligence and accepting that they are not delusional, I must expect that, were they honest, they would be able to point out occasions where they [would] have gone against the advice of the police. They would, if they were honest, accept that trust is simply not enough, it cannot be, and there must also be argument. But the argument is not made. Rather, we are asked to trust professionals (note that this government is not so happy to trust teachers or doctors or lawyers) who have a collective interest in the increase of their powers. Democracy indeed.

The second aspect of this rhetorical demand for trust in the police is that it undermines the safeguards we are promised, or mollified by, in the revised versions of this legislation. A judge will oversee the detention every 7 days. There are several problems with this. We will skip over the fact that the evidence the police will be presenting will necessarily be short of the quality that would be required in order to press charges, and we will not ask just how a judge is meant to assess the need for detention based on such scanty evidence. We will not spend any space discussing the fact that the detained (most definitely not ‘the accused’) has no opportunity to challenge his justification for detention. No, the problem here is that the demand explicit in this legislation is that the police must be trusted. How could any judge refuse a request from the police for a person to be held detention?

They must accept it, don’t you ‘get it’? The world has changed. Our security services are the brave men and women protecting us from evil as we sleep. They must be trusted implicitly. Oversight? Impossible in an atmosphere for trust.

By all means trust them. I suggest that we all trust Ian ‘destroy the brain, utterly, instantly’ Blair. A proven, professional liar. Now suggesting that he needs to power to detain people without charge, without the right to challenge the ‘evidence’ against them not for 90 days but for 4 months.

In transit

2005-11-04T12:55:00.000Z

Ken MacLeod has an excellent little piece on our Western ‘enlightened’ governments’ complicity in torture. Click on the link below to read the whole piece.

“The jet has finished refuelling. The hoses are disconnected. Through the seat, a man feels the vibration as the engines start. Through silent headphones the rising sound comes through, like a scream. He's on his way.”

It is necessary, don’tcha know, to protect democracy. Why is it necessary? Oh, that is secret.

Decadent, obscene Rome

2005-11-02T08:03:00.000Z

The BBC mini-series Rome begins tonight on BBC Two. I doubt that I will have time to watch it. What I do find the time to watch is the morning news, and this morning the BBC used their Breakfast programme to run an extended newsvertisment plugging Rome. This series has already been shown in America, where it has been well received. It was, apparently, a little controversial. What could be the source of this controversy? Perhaps the BBC News could tell us. Well, it did not, at least not directly. Perhaps it was the relatively rough English and Scottish accents that these BBC Romans possessed? No, probably not. In the course of this newsvertisment we were shown men being stabbed, slashed and whipped. This did not raise a comment. But then we see a clip of a woman in a bath. She stands, and her body is censored by a post-production blur. We presume that she is naked. This, apparently, is the controversy.

Did you know that people were naked under their clothes during the first century BC? Did you know that people in both the crumbling Roman Republic and, subsequently, the Roman Empire, enjoyed having sex? Controversial, I know.

Murder and torture are palatable it seems, compatible with the entertainment tastes of America and Britain. Nakedness and sexual pleasure are shameful, obscenities to be censored. The latter are both beautiful and part of, we hope, our lives; joyful and affirmative. The former involve the destruction and degradation of life; negations of our humanity.

In my cruellest moments, I wish that all those people who have complained about the nudity and the sex in programmes that are otherwise packed with murder and torture were subjected to a whipping. They could keep their shirts on, of course.

Tales of the Contrary reviewed at Silver Bullet Comics

2005-11-01T18:27:00.000Z

Back from Mega City One I find that Tales of the Contrary has received a very favourable review over at Silver Bullet Comics. At least, that is how it reads to me. Go and read it on their site – and check out the rest of their reviews too – it would be bad form indeed for me to reproduce it here.

I have plenty to say on the domestic news over the time that I was away. Well, I say NEWs, but I thought that I had dealt with Tory idiocy over self-defence here and here. I hope to address the apparently intoxicated reasoning involved in Labour plans to legislate against drink/ing on public transport soon.

8 days around the world

2005-10-21T12:36:00.000+01:00

A quick post before I travel the other side of the planet and back.

Identity cards are going to become law very soon. Chris Lightfoot has a letter in the Guardian today(one of his fellow letter writers appears unable to understand that even if there were no fee for an identity card it would still have to be paid for*) pointing out that the Government are, at best, pushing a confusing mix of misinformation as their argument against objections to ID cards. His blog post deals with the Government’s plans to siphon funding from public services on the dubious basis of expected savings. In other words, identity cards will be used to deny people access to for example, health care. “Fine”, you might say, “I don’t want to some foreigners getting a free ride.” You might, if you suffered from delusions that this country has been overrun by foreigners taking advantage of us. Or if you read the Daily Mail, which is much the same thing. The point of these arguments is that the people who will bear the brunt of demands to produce their ID will be British people who are not white. They will be asked, over and over again, to demonstrate that they have a right to be here. This will be a procedure more about denying health care than saving money, as much of the saved money will have been spent on ensuring the most marginal people in Britain are kept on those dangerous margins. “Are you legal?”, will be the refrain.

Mind you, one of the most ludicrous justifications for identity cards came in the comments section of Tim Worstall’s blog. Soru argued that that it would be a benefit to the disadvantaged and to the minority communities of Britain as they would be less likely to find themselves the victims of human rights abuses as the legal ones would be able to prove their identity. Quite aside from Tim’s reply that the rate of false-positives would lead to greater numbers of these people being arrested (to which I would add that our technophilia would ensure that this technology was trusted beyond the degree that reason would suggest advisable), this is clearly not an attempt to deal with the institutions that dole out the human rights abuses that these people might face. Rather than change these institutions, it is the people who are the possible victims who are being asked to submit to surveillance technologies as a part of a continual demonstration of innocence.

I attempted to address the fact that identity cards would a retrogressive redistribution of wealth here, and that these kinds of technological fixes were attempts to make people fit the machine, a totalitarian solution, rather than a humanitarian re-egnieering of the machine.

While I am away, why not trawl the archives. Oh, and buy my comics.

Nobel Pinter

2005-10-16T20:25:00.000+01:00

Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, drawing predictable condemnation. I am not, for today at least, linking to the over-influential rantings of Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin or Christopher Hitchens. If you ever find your arguments being condemned because they ‘objectively’ position you alongside some pretty nasty people, point out that this tactic, being thoroughly dishonest, is capable of being spun to discredit any position. Here is a selection of responses.

Much of this seems to use his poem American Football as a launch-pad, missing the point that the Literature Prize is not awarded for any particular piece of work, and to choose a political poem as representative of Pinter’s work is a sure sign, being generous, of remarkable ignorance. Regardless, I cannot say that I dislike his aggressive poem. Undoubtedly, but unconsciously, influenced by that poem I wrote this on the eve of the Iraq War:

+++++

Collateral Damage to the English Language (2002)

The machine gun fires; the bullets spit
And human beings are turned to shit

Cities to rubble, forests to muck
Our leaders they don’t give a fuck

A billion dollars in armaments
These people are such stupid cunts

Propaganda, lies and dirty tricks
For bragging rights to the biggest pricks

+++++

“We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their aeroplane because it's obscene.” (Kurtz, Apocalypse Now!)

More obscenity: beheading videos are obscene. But their consumption by, and distribution between, Americans in the same manner as are clips of grotesque pornography, crimes, accidents and injuries makes it seem inevitable that the whole process was brought in-house: US soldiers have been taking celebratory pictures of dead Iraqis, sharing them as if they were holiday snaps, and more, trading them for access to porn. Homemade murder pics are equivalent to Readers’ Wives. But then, this crude branch of American culture appears to be centred upon the degradation of other people; in their porn, their war, their prisons and their economics.

Shameless?

2005-10-13T13:16:00.000+01:00

Seamus Milne has a good comment piece in the Guardian today. In it he quotes Charles Clarke as saying that he could not think of any situation in the world where "violence would be justified to bring about change".

Of course, he means, except for state violence. More specifically, he means Western state violence or the violence committed by their proxies. Outsourced, legitimated violence.

That was the first piece of unreflexive idiocy from the Government for today. The second came on Newsnight last night.

Jack Straw said that a desire for democracy burns in the heart of every human being. This is utter twaddle, and more than that, dangerously wrong. Look, Jack and I might agree that democracy is the best form of government, but the nature of our opinions on this matter differ in an important respect. No, not simply that I have a functional mind.

You see, I have noticed that my belief in democracy is a product of my historical and social position. Had I been born in the 17th century I doubt that I would have a desire for democracy. Democracy is a human invention, and its development and acceptance as the pre-eminent form of government is a product of history. It is not some essential part of ‘human nature’. We are not born with a desire for democracy. Very many people around the world do desire democracy because they live in the 21st century and are the recipients of several centuries of Western thought. But this is not destined to remain the same forever, it is not some kind of ‘end of history’. Since its invention, people have, to greater or lesser degrees, rejected democracy; from the 1930s in Germany, through the support for strongmen in Asia and Latin America, to the reaction against the most democratic British decade, the 1970s.

He say that he is not an ahistoricist. He might argue that he acknowledges that the belief in democracy as the best form of government, a belief that we both share, is the result of historical, social and political ‘development’, and our contingent position within this. He might, though, argue that democracy is not simply the best form we have now, but the absolute best, the best that we will ever achieve, the pinnacle of human political development. I would say that to argue this is as similarly ahistorical, being nothing more than the fool’s defence of the ‘now’ that has been made since there first was a ‘then’ to look back upon.

Norman Mailer has written, “democracy… is the noblest form of government that we have yet evolved” and warns that is demands constant protection and promotion. I agree with him, and I think democracy should be worked for, argued for and promoted, as I do socialism. But I do not think that it is some essential part of human nature. Seeing it so is not just the mark of a man too dim to be in government, but is a recipe for the imposition of democratic ‘forms’ of government (not democracy, which by its very nature results from active participation) at the barrel of a gun. If you believe that democracy burns in the heart of every human being, it is an impossibility that some people might choose to reject democracy. Those who do so will cause confusion that can only be met with force. You cannot persuade them of the merits of democracy, you cannot build the institutions of civil society that support democracy. You cannot do either of these as to do these makes no sense; democracy burns in the heart of every human being – it needs nothing but the removal of tyrants. Nonsense, and from government, deadly nonsense.

[This was post #100 at BBB]

Com’n Leeds

2005-10-12T13:37:00.000+01:00

Born in Bradford, you would expect me to be hoping for a Bulls victory in the Super League Grand Final on Saturday. But a little nugget has got me rooting for Bradford’s wealthier, trendier and more ‘cosmopolitan’ sibling, Leeds.

The Guardian carried a profile article on Kevin Sinfield, the Leeds captain. On being dropped from the Great Britain squad, he says:

“I only needed to watch the news on TV to see that my disappointment was nothing compared to real tragedies in the outside world. It's always important, as a sportsman, to take that reality check. What does being dropped matter compared to famine, disease and war?"

He then describes how his mother and father are committed socialists, their theory springing from the Cuban Revolution and the writings of Che Guevara in particular. Sinfield says:

“I've got the same belief that socialism is better than anything. It's not something I usually talk about because it must sound hypocritical - me sitting here as a well-paid professional sportsmen. But playing rugby league doesn't stop me holding on to my ideals.”

At least I can still cheer for a Yorkshire club.

Com’n Leeds.

Criminal elections

2005-10-07T10:31:00.000+01:00

After yesterday’s laudable judgement of the European Court of Human Rights I thought that it would be appropriate for me to revive a column that I wrote for the website Moodspins in May this year.

*

No, this column will not be about the victory of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the recent elections in Zimbabwe. Nor will it be about the “massive, systematic and organised fraud” that returned six Labour councillors during last year’s local elections in Birmingham. Nor will it be about Dame Shirley Porter and her gerrymandering and continued evasion of justice. Hell, it won’t even be about George W Bush, Jeb Bush, hanging chads or Diebold™ electronic voting machines. This column is about convicted criminals voting in elections, not running, competing in, and winning elections.

In America there has been, of course, some controversy over the right of convicted criminals to vote. In some states criminals permanently lose their rights to vote, while in others regaining the right to vote is costly and difficult to regain. Human Rights Watch had this to say in 2001:

“An estimated 3.9 million U.S. citizens were disenfranchised, including over one million who had fully completed their sentences. Black Americans were particularly hard hit by disenfranchisement laws: 13 percent of black men-1.4 million-were disenfranchised; in two states, almost one in three black men was unable to vote because of a felony conviction.”

An important point regarding the American situation, aside from the boast to be the world’s beacon of democracy – the Shining City on the Hill that disenfranchises a greater proportion of its population than any other industrialised democratic nation – is the classification of drug convictions in many American states. It seems to me to be somewhat suspicious that a conviction for marijuana will, in many states, be a felony conviction. Now, the severity of the sentence itself might be relatively humane, but the categorisation of the offence as a felony not only has the double whammy of making the offender almost unemployable and ineligible for welfare, but also removes the right of the offender to vote. This disproportionately effects the poor, and to argue this we need not make any link between poverty and crime in general, we need simply point out that the drugs that poor people have access to are illegal, while the wealthier people are able to effectively self-prescribe themselves painkillers, anti-depressants etc. in America’s for-profit marketised health-care system. But before we trail off the point and begin discussing the lunacy of drug laws in a nation of self-medicators we can say this; people convicted of crimes are denied the right to participate in a democratic political system, and the democratic political system determines what acts are criminal, and which demand disenfranchisement. Before anyone argues that as the decision was taken democratically then the result of that decision is democracy, may I point out that this is the babble of an electorophile. Even if an overwhelming majority vote to do away with democracy, what we then have is patently not democracy. And disenfranchisement is the reduction of democracy, and the case for such a policy must be well-reasoned, not simply the maintenance of a retributive tradition – or indeed, insidious racism.

But let us bring the argument closer to home, and discuss the situation with regards to UK elections, given that the general election is this Thursday. The Liberal Democrats have suggested that prisoners should be allowed to vote. The Liberal Democrats are supporting a campaign coordinated by the Prison Reform Trust titled ‘Barred from Voting’ (see the pun – you always need a pun), a campaign backed by politicians drawn from all three of the major political parties. Nevertheless, both Labour and the Conservatives have used Charles Kennedy’s support of the campaign as evidence that he, and the Liberal Democrats (conveniently ignoring the cross-party support this campaign has received) is soft on crime. This is, I am convinced, utter nonsense. This conviction (see) springs from three lines of argument – though I have no doubt that there are others that will occur to me moments after I post this piece.

First is the argument of rationality and responsibility for behaviour: for a democracy to disenfranchise members of its voting population an overwhelmingly persuasive argument in needed. The franchise should be extended to all those capable of making a reasoned decision. Given that criminals are found guilty on the basis that they are rational actors – not children or the insane; we no longer submit inanimate objects to trial either – then the argument that they are inherently unable to democratically express their will must exist with the corollary argument that these same criminals should not be in jail receiving punishment, but should rather be receiving the treatment suitable to non-rational, non-responsible persons. Of course, those seeking to deny prisoners the right to vote do not acknowledge the necessary conclusion of their denial of prisoners voting rights. Because their arguments are utter nonsense.

The second is the two part democratic demand: the first part of which simply demands that all members of a community take part in shaping the future political governance of that community. The second demand is somewhat more complex and specific to the case of the convicted criminal. What is categorised as criminal is a decision for the democratic process. It is decidedly anti-democratic to categorise people as criminals and then deny them the formal means with which express their democratic opinion on the law that categorised them so. We may think that we have reached a plateau of criminal law; that everything currently criminal ought forever stay so, and that everything currently legal will always be permitted. But I am sure that as much a people thinks this today, people also thought this when homosexuality was illegal, when heroin was legal, when abortion was illegal and when it was legal to hit your wife and legally impossible to rape her. We might not be able to see the flaws in our categorisation of acts, as indeed majorities could not during our recent history. That does not mean that we are right, and our very idea of democracy demands that we allow people we categorise as criminals and lock up in jail are given the right to argue for their freedom. Not only on the basis that they are innocent of the crime that they have been convicted of, a claim that can be dealt with by the criminal justice system. But on the basis that the act which they committed should not be categorised as criminal, or even that the criminal justice system we employ is not the system that ought to be employed. This argument does not ask us to believe that these people are right, but simply that, in a democracy, they should be allowed the freedom to make their arguments – and in a democracy the simplest, most fundamental form of expression is the vote.

Third is the argument of numbers: despite having a relatively high number of people in jail compared to our European neighbours, the proportion of our population in jail at any one time is pifflingly small. Even if prisoners were to vote in the constituency in which they serve their prison time they could not, in themselves, affect the overall result of any but the most marginal of marginal seats. But most prisoners would not want to vote for the MP of a constituency of which their only experience is the inside of a jail. They will want to vote in their home communities – the communities in which they have a future. Given that the presence of prisoners on the electoral roll would not make up a significant demographic shift in our democracy, the question must be asked – why not give these people a right considered to be among the most precious of those granted by our civilisation? Of course, the counter argument asks us to imagine a future in which crime is so rampant the great numbers of people disenfranchised would in fact make a difference to the outcome of our democracy (see the case of the USA and the black Floridians). In which case we say that such a shift in numbers should tell us that there is something seriously wrong with our society; perhaps the acts classified as being disenfranchising crimes are too inclusive, and thus the democracy is too exclusive to hold onto that title. Perhaps society has broken down to such an extent that crime is an unfocused replacement for revolution, and thus democracy has failed great numbers of the people. Or perhaps this is merely a fantasy that exists only in the head of right-wing science-fiction writers.

Eugene Debs was wrong on one thing – he was a better man than I am:

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the Earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” (1918)

Prisoner voting rights: world views [BBC]

Howard's End

2005-10-06T12:48:00.000+01:00

Who would have thought that I would use such a poor pun? Well, I have.

I have just watched Michael Howard’s speech on BBC News 24, and I have a couple of points to make.

First; Howard railed against the rise of individual rights, bemoaning the Human Rights Act. I will not concentrate on the sinister undertones of a speech that places all of society’s ills at the door of ‘human rights’, except to say that such an argument seems to be a root to popular authoritarianism. What I will say is that such a complaint is pretty rich, certainly so when we consider that he did not acknowledge the reason that individual rights are ‘turbo-charged’. There was once a party whose leader insisted that there was ‘no such thing as society’. There was a party that deliberately and persistently fostered the ideology that all that there is, and all that there ought to be, are individuals in competition, selfishly pursuing their own ends. There was a party that denied society and solidarity parts in its political ontology.

Have the Conservatives changed? If they have, they should be honest and acknowledge the wrong turn that the party pursued as deliberate, celebrated policy. But they have not changed. This talk of the negative consequences of individual rights is really about the rights of certain people, and certain groups of people. As always, the Conservative ideology, whatever the mask it currently wears, is about the rights of capital and the capitalised classes and the responsibilities and duties of those whose labour is bought by, and who pay rent to, these classes.

But, if I am wrong, let us hear a real statement of their philosophy. How do they see society working? What objects exist in society, and what are the obligations of government?

Second; Howard banged on about ‘human nature’. Human nature means nothing, and if it is possible for a statement to mean less than nothing it is the assertion that human nature is the equivalent to Conservative values. The use of ‘human nature’ is a sure sign of either intellectual poverty or an orator determined to mislead. It ignores the role of society is determining our character, our desires, our goals and our capabilities. And this was marvellously illustrates when Michael Howard tried to make a joke. After insisting that we are each born the capabilities to do more or less than other people, he said; “Sandra [his wife] was always more likely to succeed as a model than me.” Whoah, knock down example. Who could argue with that, eh?

Except that this statement, pretending to be an argument for the biological determination of our capabilities to achieve in society, concentrates on the first part – the biological – and ignores the second part – the social. Sure, in the West during the 20th Century Sandra Howard was more likely to be a model than Michael Howard. But if this were the West during the Renaissance then we could say that this situation would be reversed. As uncomfortable as it is to imagine, Michael Howard would have been more likely to be a model – posing for painters rather than photographers – possibly standing in as a substitute for nude women.

What we can say is this; Michael Howard was always more likely to be leader of a political party than Sandra Howard. If you want to argue that this likelihood is a result of biology [alone] then I am afraid that you are a fool; for one thing, political parties are social constructs and the rules that govern them are likewise. Government must concentrate on the social – attempts to change the biological are inevitably repressive and anti-democratic.

By concentrating on the biological rather than the social Howard expresses his disdain for society as an object of concern. A concentration on the biological is the ideological ally for rampant individualism. So why does he do it? Because he is a fool? Or because he is a misleading orator? He can decide, if he wishes.

As he could have done in this instance, a previous rejection of society. Pity that he did not respond to that, but then he does have a history of illogical argument hiding a nasty ideology.

Uncle Tom Tory

2005-10-06T09:29:00.000+01:00

David Davies is a Westminster MP and Welsh Assembly Member for Monmouth. Unlike others, I do not think that he is a racist. I think that he is exceptionally thick; a man whose mind is so shallow any idea larger than a Sun editorial is unable to find accommodation.

David Davies main gripe appears to be the idea of protecting the rights and interests of minorities. On his blog, for example he applauds the Australian university that has “appointed a “heterosexual rights officer” whose job will be to “promote the welfare of heterosexuals.”” Davies comments; “Ridiculous? Of course it is. But Mr Dave Allen, the holder of the post, knows that it is no more ludicrous than appointing "rights officers" for every other kind of racial and sexual group.”

His first comment is perfectly valid. It is ridiculous. But he is wrong when he asserts that “it is no more ludicrous than appointing “rights officers”” for other minority groups. Does David Davies deny that in both Britain and Australia positions of power are dominated by white, heterosexual men? Does he deny that in the past this domination has lead to the subjugation of and discrimination against other racial and sexual groups?

If David Davies denies either of these then his claim to find it ludicrous that minorities need their rights protecting can be taken as an statement made in good faith. But if he does deny either of these we must classify him as an ignorant fool. Given that this is the most generous explanation of his apparently diarrheic utterances, this is how I will judge him.

David Davies has played two recent ‘pranks’. First, after finding that Monmouth Council planned to make a video to explain the traditions of the travelling community to schoolchildren, he applied for funding to make a video explaining the traditions of the settled community to traveller children. Now, the first reason why this is ridiculous is the simple fact that our media is dominated by images of the settled community. Living in Britain one cannot help but receive an impression of the settled community. Here, again, we see that David Davies misses the key fact included in the description “minority”. That is, those in the groups that are in the minority do not predominate, they do not (in Britain at least) hold positions of power and influence. But secondly, his film proposal described the traditions of the settled community as “their rigid adherence to an ancient code which they refer to as ‘planning regulations’ and the time-honoured custom of clearing up one’s rubbish”. In other words, he was using this as a device with which to demonise travellers, while pretending that literally speaking he did no such thing.

Of course, he does not (we must hope) believe his own defence, but he does hope that the apparent logic of it will convince those already predisposed to seeing travellers as a threat. But, of course, the apparent logic of defending utterances on the basis of narrow literality is an error of Duff-like proportions. Utterances (and words) are given meaning through their context; who utters, where do they utter, what are the histories of the words and phrases they utter. He clearly, despite the defence offered by that odious goon Rod Liddle, is using ‘humour’ to demonise travellers.

David Davies second prank is to declare himself a traveller. Under CRE guidelines ethnicity is self-declared. David Davies appears to feel that this is wrong. He says; “the rules on self-definition are very stupid and this will also draw attention to that”. Well, the rule of self-definition may throw up occasional stupidities (and David Davies is such a stupidity vomited forth), but a rule like this is a damn sight less stupid than a system in which officials decide on the ethnicity of others. Would he rather have this system? Can he not see the dangers of this system? Perhaps we use the tradition of measuring noses?

He could, I concede, be in possession of a syphilitically damaged brain, ala the promiscuous Rod Liddle. Liddle writes, in his defence of Davies; “The vast majority of those who live a peripatetic lifestyle in Britain are not, racially, any different from the rest of us — the Roma aside. It is the act of travelling that defines them as different, not their genes.” Does Liddle think that genes make race? Does he not understand that our ethnic divisions are cultural constructions, an understanding that does not deny their very real social effects? In some cases these cultural constructions may rely on genetically determined characteristics such as skin colour, but even in those cases the divisions are built by our actions as social actors, not by biology. Consider our definition of ‘black’. Someone is black if they have the slightest discernable black ancestry. The child of black-white parentage is normally described as black and is never described white. This, plainly, is a social construction of category, and this is also the (apparently) most clear-cut of cases for the biological racists. We have not even considered the existence of ethnic categories within what we might call a single skin colour.

Davies thinks that his reclassification of himself as a traveller will mean that it is now impossible for him to make a racist statement. This is plainly untrue. Members of minority groups are patently capable of making statements and holding opinions that are discriminatory, that engage in the cultural construction of their own inferiority. Do you want an example? Consider the sort of statements that some women have made, statements that denigrate their own abilities and the abilities of women as a group, offering sex as an explanation (rather than the more nuanced explanation of their gender position in the existing structures of society). People are perfectly able of serving as ‘Uncle Toms’ against their own groups. This is the role that David Davies has now adopted. If he does not see this he is a fool; if he is aware of this then he is a wicked dissembler.

David Davies has been referred to the Standards Board for racism. Perhaps he is a racist. Really, he ought to be referred to the Standards Board for being mentally incompetent.

In releated news, The Sun continues its campaign to Stamp on the Camps. This time they have a council worker describing how “special treatment [was] given to travellers “that ordinary taxpayers could only dream of””. What on earth is it that ordinary taxpayers dream of? Having a tabloid run a campaign against them, denying them the right to any sites, legal or otherwise? Do they dream of being barred, as a group, from pubs and shops? Do they dream of being used as colloquial shorthand for criminal, as synonymous with ‘scum’? Do they dream of being regarded with such hostility that campaigns against them are seen as a vote-winner by the major political parties? Do they dream of having their children spat on and beaten at school?

Some dreams. We can only hope that now David Davies has voluntarily changed his ethnicity he will experience the full range of discrimination and hostility that his fellow gypsies ‘enjoy’ and ordinary taxpayers can only ‘dream of’.

Logical disconnection; the Littlejohn pathology

2005-09-28T08:46:00.000+01:00

This morning on BBC News 24 Sylvia Hardy, the jailed and now released Council Tax protestor, was asked about her time in jail. She says that she was treated well, cites the support of the inmates, but then laments that the prison was under-funded. While Council Tax does not directly support the upkeep of prison, it is part of the collective public revenue. If Council Tax were abolished, as Sylvia Hardy is demanding, where would the extra public money come from? Not a single reporter has asked her this question, or the related question; what public spending would you cut.

No doubt some of my regular readers would be happy to see public spending cut, but they should at least be honest enough to admit that if Sylvia Hardy were campaigning to cut spending, not just tax, she would receive a great deal less public support.

This seems to be a mild case of the Littlejohn pathology. Richard Littlejohn hates speed cameras. He argues that they are a means for the police to gather revenue. He also argues that they allow the police to abdicate their responsibility to police the roads in person, where human judgement could be applied. But, and he never grapples with this problem, his call to do away with speed cameras would reduce the resources available to the police, while, if the roads are to be properly policed and his diagnosis is correct, increasing the cost of policing. Would he raise taxes? Would he cut services? He never argues either way. Why? Well, if we were being generous, we would say that his logical disconnect is a result of his simple-mindedness. This would be a just description, as Littlejohn’s views on speed cameras are not casual observations where inconsistency is acceptable and expectable. But if he is not a simple-mind, a more realistic understanding of the pathology would be that Littlejohn is engaging in the malicious exploitation of his readers, hoping that they will not be bright enough, not skilled in the task of critical reading, to cut through his illusion of argument and see the bad faith at the heart. Littlejohn hates Sun readers, else he would do them a better service.

Council Tax may be unfair. But the person who has been adopted as the figurehead of a movement to abolish a tax is forced to realise and reflect on the under-funding of a tax-funded service and does not address this apparent inconsistency. We must, therefore, conclude that she is either a simple-minded fool or that this logical disconnection is more or less knowing front for an attack on the financial basis for public services. She is no hero. At best she is an exploited stooge.

Intelligent Design? More like Inelegant Contraptionism

2005-09-23T10:36:00.000+01:00

I am, I declare here, a contraptionist.

Proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) see nature differently to most people; what others understand to be the products of evolution are, in fact, too complex and intricate to be the products of anything other than an intelligent designer. While remaining wedded to my evolutionary world-view, I did concede the persuasiveness of that argument, particularly among the more ‘casual’ observers of the natural world.

This persuasiveness can, however, be undermined. Not through recourse to popular scientistic evolutionism, which those tempted by ID have already rejected or ignored. Rather, we can turn the mechanismal metaphors of ID against anti-evolutionism.

William Paley, in Natural Theology, used the watchmaker analogy as an argument for the existence of a divine creator and designer of nature. Simply put, the argument runs; “If we find a watch when walking on the moors, and investigate its workings, we will find that it is too complex to be an assemblage of parts ordered by a natural process, we must therefore assume that there is (or was) a watchmaker who was responsible for its creation.” Seductive, is it not, at least to the untutored.

So let us examine the complex machines that are our own bodies. Do they run like machines designed by an intelligent engineer? The answer to this can only be: no. We are a mass of inefficiencies, or redundancies and antagonistic systems. What sort of designer would design into his machines the ability to be incapacitated by pain at the very times when action is of the essence? What sort of designer would build a taste for the sweet and fatty into machinery clogged into terminal seizure by these fuels? It is no defense to argue that the designer could not anticipate the environment his machines would operate in, for this designer is the Designer, the maker of nature in toto. What sort of designer would build an immune system that overreacts to otherwise the harmless plant and animal matter that are also the products of His Design?

Considering these features of the human body as the features of a machine, we must think, for a moment, of the source of our popular fascination with machines. What sort of machines fascinate and excite our imaginations? Compare, for example, a smooth, efficient, superbly designed Volvo, with a home made jalopy, a Scrap Heap Challenge vehicle, a jerry-rigged machine built from parts intended for use elsewhere. We are, at least in the majority, fascinated by the contraption, the machine built inexpertly and inefficiently from found components. These machines are inelegant, their parts in contest almost as often as they are in co-operation.

Considered as mechanisms, human beings, bodies, plants, animals, ecosystems and indeed the whole of nature are, at best, inelegant contraptions. We marvel at them, and the instinct of the untutored in our technological, mechanistic age is to presume that there is a designer. But, what we must conclude about this Designer is either; that He works with parts that are not of His own design, that he finds in a nature not of His making, or, that He made the parts but can neither take a role in the combination of these parts or anticipate the use to which they will be put. Both of these effectively reduce Him to an irrelevant rump, either casting Him into the pre-Universal, as creator but not actor, or transforming Him from creator in impotent tinker.

Of course, I would rather that the proponents of ID simply tossed aside their belief in Him, the Designer. But I will settle, here, for pointing out that nature is not a smooth running machine but an inelegant contraption, and that if they must cling to Him, this necessarily transforms the (often unstated but implied Christian) nature of the Him they invoke as their Deus ex Machina.

What is this Mesopotamian farce?

2005-09-21T00:34:00.000+01:00

Really, on seeing two dodgy ‘Arabs’ (who must surely even further along the current physiognomic scale of evil than a Brazilian with ‘Mongolian eyes’), I would have thought that the appropriate police reaction should have been to ‘destroy the brain, instantly, utterly’. Even more so when these dodgy ‘Arabs’ are prowling round the streets in a car with a boot full of killing equipment. Even more so when this occurs in a city plagued, not by a single, atypical terrorist attack, but by daily bombings. Even more so when these dodgy ‘Arabs’ have shot a policeman and a civilian. There would be no need to spin lies about non-existent bomb-belts, bulky jackets or ‘terrorist-like’ behaviour. If there was ever a case of legitimate recourse to the sort of language used in zombie movies in order to justify a extra-judicial execution, this was that case.

This farce reminds me of the scene in Team America where Gary, the actor, is (badly) disguised as an Arab. Or, indeed, of old British colonial efforts at intelligence gathering, mostly involving a liberal use of boot polish. “Durka durka, Mohammed jihad!” Indeed, low comedy.

So, our SAS ‘boys’ must thank their good fortune that they were merely held prisoner. And, perhaps, our own government ought to be a little more humble when condemning an Iraqi civilian authority who refused to release men accused of murderous actions taking place in a situation not unlike that of a terrorist ‘event’.

Of course, we have heard that they were ‘undercover soldiers’? I have to say that I had thought that the modern term for this was ‘illegal combatants’. I had understood that our disgust at these tactics was based on the fact that if the ‘baddies’ do not do the decent thing and wear uniforms then the trigger-happy USMC cannot be blamed when they make Swiss cheese out of perfectly innocent civilians.

I had thought that the Iraqis were celebrating democracy. I thought that those purple fingers symbolised a return of political power to Iraqi people. But evidently not. It is evident that this is an occupation. All the news agencies are concentrating on the infiltration of the police by ‘militant organisations’, composed of Iraqis, you will understand. Everyone is asking why these SAS men were not release when the order came from Baghdad. Why is there no person asking what these SAS men were doing? Why is no one asking why these SAS men appear to be above the law of ‘free’ Iraq?

The very people who have argued that we have murdered Iraqis for the sake of giving Iraqis their freedom, are now argue that we must murder more in an effort to prevent Iraqis from governing Iraq. I would pretend to be confused. But I am not. This is a colonial game, pure and simple. It is dressed up as bringing freedom, civilisation, removing a tyrant, or self-defence. Such games always are; they always have been. Take a look at the political and intellectual heritage of the men involved in planning and running this war and this occupation. They are not Christopher Hitchens, for all his faults. They are not men of progressive politics. They are not men who have demonstrated a respect for democracy and human rights. The men with power, and here we must separate them from their cheerleaders on the left, hearts full of wishful thinking, are men who have support death squads, torture camps and dictators.

This is a colonial game, and it will continue until Iraq has been destructed and reconstructed according to the wishes of these men; not the wishes of Iraqis. This process of civil disorder, of infiltration, allows – no, demands – that occupying troops remain in Iraq indefinitely. When the Iraqis next have ‘power’, the structures of economic and political control will be in place.

Talking terrorism

2005-09-20T09:59:00.000+01:00

The blogger at Blood and Treasure, a self proclaimed ‘top public intellectual’, has given us a rundown of what we can only be described as ‘articulated jihad’. That’s right, under our current anti-terrorist legislation the fuel protestors can, without any misrepresentation, be categorised as terrorists.

Now, I am not a fan of the fuel protestors, so I look forward to those glorifiers of terrorism, Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson being ‘detained’ in Belmarsh. Seriously, this exposes the utter stupidity of the laws being proposed to criminalise the ‘glorification’ of terrorism. Now, I have a feeling that these are a political ploy, a tactic of extreme proposals that has characterised the Home Office in recent years. This tactic involves setting out a hard-right authoritarian policy, and then pulling back to a merely right-wing authoritarian policy under pressure from opposition groups. By doing so, the government can pass nasty, illiberal (and often plain bad) legislation while appearing to be engaging in discourse and dialogue. Of course, by controlling the debate so well, they get everything they wanted, even when they have pulled the worst of the bad lot off the table.

Crooked Timber has a good piece on the absurdity of criminalisation of the glorification of terrorism.

In this case, I expect the criminalisation of the glorification of terrorism to be withdrawn from the new legislation, leaving us with the equally absurd prospect of people being jailed for ‘indirect incitement to acts of terrorism’. What, exactly, is indirect incitement? No, don’t tell me a story of someone who could be prosecuted under the law that prohibits incitement. Yes, you can tell me that it will make convictions easier to secure, but that only tells us of the poverty of your charge that the cited speech actually incites terrorism. Indirect incitement sounds, in practice, like nothing more than ‘glorification’, except it adopts the rhetorical strategy of making a tenuous causal connection between the speech and acts of terrorism.

With a definition of terrorism so broad that it could include any disruptive form of protest, in other words, any effective form of protest, offences of glorification and indirect incitement have a serious possibility to shut down speech. And this is before we consider the ability of this definition to restrict legitimate participatory political action. One defence the government can make is that the law will be applied arbitrarily. And when that is a defence of legislation, the government ought to be replaced.

But, paradoxically, while the definition of terrorism that Britain uses is so broad we have to be thankful that Blair did not manage to force to UN to adopt it, it is not broad enough to prevent people demanding war, sanctions or airstrikes. It is not enough to detain people who propose stripping away our civil liberties, or deport those who see little moral problem in torture. No, and here we see the terrorism laws for what they are. Rather than prohibiting all means of human destruction and all methods of increasing suffering, or at the very least demanding that such actions have to pass through the most rigorous process of democratic accountability, we support arms fairs, deal with dictators, launch wars and strip away human rights. We allow the apologists for such actions to occupy positions of power and influence. The use of force remains the domain of the state and their mercenary proxies (what better expression of the third-way is there than outsourcing warfare to multi-national corporations killing for profit?), barely qualified by concerns over human rights, dignity or welfare. There is, it seems, no moral problem is being an agent of human destruction when pursuing the political designs of an extant state. By contrast, the use of force by non-state actors, excepting those who murder for money, is thoroughly criminalised, without regard for the justice of the cause. Indeed, the cause is irrelevant. Death and destruction are evils in themselves, there can be “no excuse, no justification for terrorism of any kind”. When we have a situation in which those who attempt to articulate the legitimacy or justifications of such actions are detained, deported and shut out of debate we have a recipe for repressive authoritarian sclerosis, with violence certainly not removed from the human condition, merely moved into being a monopoly of state and capital the globe over.

Iraq the honeypot

2005-09-19T09:35:00.000+01:00

There are two options. The majority of the insurgents in Iraq are Iraqis. In which case their insurgency is granted a degree of legitimacy by virtue of it being a liberation movement. This does not mean that it is something to be supported, something to be praised. But would certainly call both the narrative promulgated by the occupying forces and the occupation itself into question.

The other option we have is that the majority of the insurgents are ‘foreign fighters’. In which case the invasion of Iraq is a tremendous moral mistake. Right-wing US commentators were cheerleading for the war, arguing that Iraq could be used as a ‘honeypot’. ‘Terrorists’ would be drawn to the carefully chosen battlefield where they could be killed with a minimum loss of US (non-military) life. Of course, this is at a terrible cost to the Iraqi people, who were not (even if we consider Saddam Hussein to have been representative of the Iraqi people) guilty of attacking the USA.

As President Bush says; “we were attacked, and we are responding to this attack”. Does being attacked legitimate retributions against people unconnected in that attack? Does it allow you to turn the home of 25 million people into a convenient battle ground to allow you to fight wars quite unconnected with them a safe distance from your own people? To say ‘yes’, is to legitmate whatever horrors have ever been or are to come. To argue against this general, amoral principle requires a belief in American exceptionalism. And that belief makes you an enemy of every single person who is not American.

What manner of games are these?

2005-09-14T23:22:00.000+01:00

Game number one: the Israeli Parliament votes to leave standing synagogues in the former settlements in Gaza. These are settlements in which every house has been effectively demolished and all civic buildings reduced to mere shells. So why leave the synagogue buildings intact?

Well, one can understand why a Jewish state would hesitate when faced with the task of demolishing sites of worship. However, what future did they imagine for these buildings? These are not simply religious buildings, to be respected by people of all faiths. They are the symbols of an illegal military occupation, a land grab legitimated before the fact by theology and after the fact by the presence of militarised settlements on the ground. The synagogue buildings were always going to be destroyed as the Israeli Army withdrew, so why did the Israeli Parliament vote to leave them standing?

Well, it allows them to avoid the necessary, but unpopular task, and to then to paint the Palestinians as barbarians. Okay, we get the message. These people are barbarians, worthy of collective punishment. Oh, yes, and the wider ethic and religious groupings to which they belong are the enemy within and blah, blah, blah. I wish these sentiments were confined to the further reaches of the US blogosphere, but unfortunately, what once was extreme is slipping closer to mainstream thought. And, as it becomes mainstream, we do not think it extreme.

Game number two: In a week when Tony Blair is at the UN pressing for non-proliferation, John Reid defends the upgrading of Britain’s (non-independent) nuclear arsenal, an act which is, let us not beat around the bush, proliferation. We are increasing our capability to cause nuclear destruction. But, despite this, what shocks me (okay, it does not shock me; it ought to, but we live in a political climate of ‘utterly destroyed brains’) is the justification for this breach of the spirit of the NPT. He argues that we will continue to need a nuclear arsenal and develop new weapons as other nations have, or will develop nuclear weapons. Well, if I have heard a better argument for the proliferation of nuclear weapons it is hidden in a bank vault someway. MAD here we come, again. With the logic of John Reid*, who can dispute the very necessity of nuclear weapons for every single nation on earth? MAD will keep the peace, surely?

Of course, all this doublethink on the proliferation of the machinery of human destruction takes place in a week when Britain hosts one of the world’s largest arms fairs selling to all manner of nations, few of which could be described as bastions of freedom, democracy and/or human rights. An arms fair policed at public cost suppressing protest through use of ‘emergency anti-terrorist measures’, for an arms industry has its research (into the question; ‘how can we kill more people, more quickly for less money?’) funded by the public purse, that corrupts the governments of the developing world using subsidy granted from the public purse.

What games are these? I tell you what. These are not cricket, though they will all end in piles of ash.

*An early version of this post levelled the charge of MADness at Charles Clarke. I was confused, it seems, between authoritarian, right-wing New Labour bruisers.

Legislating against the sun

2005-09-12T12:45:00.000+01:00

I wish I were writing about proposals to limit the effect of The Sun on British public life.

Sadly not. This is about the now rejected proposals to include solar radiation in EU health and safety at work legislation. I have very little to say about this, except to point out the tenor of the arguments used to defeat this legislation for worker protection.

First, most reports (as with the Yahoo! News item linked to) presented it as applying to a group of workers unwilling or undeserving of legislative protection, rather than being applied to bosses who expose their workers to a damaging environment. The harm is presented as trivial, being a ‘tan ban’ with pictures of bare barmaids bosoms and builders bums, rather than pictures of malignant melanomas.

Yes, I would rather see a picture of a busty barmaid, or even a builder’s backside, but that you haven’t seen a single picture like this in the news* demands this picture appear.

No where are there comments from union leaders, or doctors specialising in skin cancers. The comments from outraged bosses and conservative politicians far outweigh the voices of those arguing for the inclusion of exposure to solar radiation at work being included in the aspects of the work environment that bosses have a duty to their workers to offer them protection. Indeed, unless we are thinking hard, we would not even see that this is what the proposed legislation meant. It did not mean ‘legislating against the sun’, as one Liberal Democrat MEP on BBC News 24 idiotically asserted, any more than the provision of safety harnesses in work at height as mandated by health and safety legislation involves legislation against gravity. Indeed, this Lib Dem then argued that the legislation would leave bosses faces compensation claims when workers developed skin cancers, asking ‘how could we tell if the cancer was the result of work or sunbathing on holiday?’ I recall the same sort of argument used against all manner of work-related illnesses. She is part of an ignoble tradition, and I am so glad that I was a member of the Lib Dems for only a very brief spell. A decent society would firstly install legislation to protect workers at work and then ensure that the healthcare and welfare services ensured that all who suffer illness and disability are provided for whether blame can be apportioned in court or not. But no, we will hurtle towards an American model where, with a private, pay-for healthcare system and welfare provision that is the disgrace of the civilised world, lawsuit compensation is a societal necessity.

We have laws that demand that bosses protect their workers from harmful environments. The sun is a source of cancer, the risk it poses will increase, and, given that we spend most of our daylight hours in the workplace, it is in the workplace where we face the greatest cumulative risk. Setting out the boss’ obligation to his or her workforce is conditions where the workforce will be exposed to direct sunlight is not ‘barmy’. It is entirely within the tradition of health and safety regulation which recognises the disparity in social and economic power between the boss and the employee, and works to protect the latter where he or she may be unable to do so themselves.

Of course, you may be of the mind that there should be no such thing as health and safety regulations. As Irish conservative Avril Doyle is quoted as saying, invoking common sense; “If ultimately I get skin cancer through irresponsible choices despite all the health warnings, should my employers be left to carry the can?” Nicely missing the point of the proposed legislation, displaying remarkably adeptness is the political skill of misrepresentation, she switches this into an issue of ‘personal responsibility’. Would she use the same argument against all health and safety legislation? My guess is that she would, at least in her private conversations. But it this legislation is not about that, not at all. It asks the question, “as an employer, am I responsible for assessing the dangers posed by the working conditions that I demand my employees labour in? Am I responsible for putting in place reasonable measures to protect my employees where there is some level of danger?”

Within our European tradition, the answer is emphatically ‘yes’. You might want to change this, and adopting the tactic of deceptively painting the risk posed by sunlight as unlike other workplace risks might be a way of sliding the thin edge of the wedge under our hard-won and labour-politics built institution of employee safety enshrined in law. But you will be deceptive, and you will be my enemy. Though, I will concede, the Lib Dem MEP who I quoted above may simply be dim.

*You may have seen this picture in the context of consumer news, suggesting that we cover up with regards to our consumption of holiday (products), or, perhaps more sinisterly when we consider the grossly misleading ‘personal responsibilities’ gang are in the political ascendancy, with regard to our consumption of healthcare (products). You will not have seen this picture in the context of industrial news – the vastly more important setting that governs the majority of our waking day (never mind our hours of daylight). And they say that the media is left-wing? Bollocks, it is old-style liberal, and those who make accusations of ‘socialism’ either make fools of themselves or hide a very nasty right-wing agenda.

Computer sez no

2005-09-07T13:45:00.000+01:00

From next week an application for a British passport will automatically fail if the photographs submitted depict the applicant smiling. Why? Because the technology used finds it very difficult to recognise smiling faces. In other words, the technology is significantly inferior to a human being in performing the task of passport controller. But we accept the new rules nevertheless.

Why? In part, no doubt, because as with so many other IT-fixes to complex public sector problems, handing millions to a labour-light company offering a technological fix allows politically connected cronies to concentrate vast amounts of public wealth that was held in common in a small-number of private pockets.

But more than that, where technology is concerned we have a collective blindness. We struggle to see the way in which technology*, rather than existing to serve our purposes, reshapes us in order to better fit its demands. And, of course, these demands do not spring from the machinery itself, but from the concerns and agendas of the designers and owners of these technologies, whether these concerns and agendas are consciously held or not.

Technology, particularly the new, shiny and computerised kind, offers us an apparently clinically clean division between our interactions with it, and our interactions with the designers and owners of this technology.

Would we, for example, accept the level of surveillance involved in most CCTV schemes if, rather than cameras, we had the presence of the CCTV operators, viewers and reviewers present as we went about our business? If the police followed us down a street with a camcorder, would we not feel that our privacy was vastly more infringed?

Of course, the separation of people and their interests from the technologies deployed in their interests is not the only driver towards a future (and futuristic) society built on the order demanded by apparently (and only apparently) impersonal technologies. We also have the spectacle of terrorism thrust in front of the faces of any objectors. And, in some cases this is done is a ludicrously illogical, and damnably unchallenged, manner.

Yesterday Charles Clarke asked the EU to hold mobile phone records. Imagine that a record detailing every telephone call that you made were entered into a ledger by hand, listing who you telephoned, how long the call lasted and where you both were at the time of the call. Would you feel so comfortable? I would guess not. But I imagine that the disconnect between the technology of record collection and the very real existence of human record keepers and viewers prevents you seeing, at least without the application of imaginative effort, this scenario as analogous with that proposed by Clarke. More fool you. And me, as I am the victim of the same disconnect, which is why the slip towards technological authoritarianism will be so hard to avoid.

But back to Clarke’s bad argument. He spoke of hard-won freedoms, and among these listed the right to free-speech. He said that this was now under very real threat. He is, strictly speaking, correct. But he was implying that this threat was posed by terrorists, which is plainly nonsensical. Terrorists (to use the phrase so enjoyed by our ruling classes, fond as they are of drawing all manner of threats to their order, motivated by any and all kinds of ideologies, into a single, undeniably evil, category) might want to take away my freedom of speech. But what chance do they have? Could any of those people who seem to be arguing that we face an existential threat from terrorism – that the rules of the game have changed – please tell me in what sort of scenario ‘terrorists’ would be able to reduce my freedoms? Give me your stories, and we can all laugh out loud at their Melanie Phillips levels of anti-Muslim paranoia. Though you will hear a nervous warble in our chortles as we watch the same rhetorical devices being used that were deployed against the Jews.

No, the only people who can take away our freedoms are those with power. We all have the power to kill and terrorise our fellow human beings. It is not against these threats to our freedoms that human rights were devised. It is against the threats posed by the power of state (or quasi-state) actors that human rights are orientated. All those who glibly trot out the line; ‘the most fundamental human right is the right to life’, while justifying further roll-back of our freedoms should be put in a protective coma and placed in mechanised intensive-care behind the walls of a vault. That would satisfy their idiotically reductionist view of human freedom(s), and act as a further safeguard for the rest of ours too.

So, when you are told not to smile when you renew (or apply for your first) British passport, remember why that is. It is part of a process that encourages you to acquiesce to authoritarian (petty, in this case, perhaps) measures in the ‘neutral’ name of technology and with the persuasive force of a threat from the alien other. When you do for those passport mugshots, imagine that the demands for a particular expression are being made by policeman. And remember, just as in the policeman scenario, those demands are backed up by the force of the state.

*This goes for social technologies such as ‘the corporation’, for example, too.

Why I have been off-line

2005-09-06T14:48:00.000+01:00

A brief diaristic interlude – the kind of blogging that I have little time for – normal service will be restored soon.

Reason one: Last week I moved house. The granny bungalow (it is not quite sheltered accomadation) in which I now live is piled high with boxes and in one of them is my Wanadoo broadband modem.

Reason two: Last week I organised a 3-day postgraduate conference. Not having a staff to delegate duties registering attendees or sorting out a potentially crtically disruptive shortage of coffee meant that these were my tasks, as were all others between locking up seminar rooms and introducing the plenary speakers, and, of course, socialising with the attendees. Actually, I did have one colleague in this adventure, who, despite being ill, did a fair load of work. The conference ran fairly smoothly and was enjoyed by those attending.

Reason three: Last week I gave an academic paper at the conference that I organised. Given that I have spent much of the summer organising a house move and a postgraduate conference, much of the meat of this paper was written over the few free days of the past fortnight. I think that the paper that I presented was fairly well-received, though it was not as successful as the conference itself.

Postscript: Mentally shattered*, I played in the preliminary round of the Welsh Cup on Saturday. I was completely off the pace and was substituted at half-time. We lost.

*Or perhaps I am just crap at rugby.

Digby Jones, and more

2005-08-26T11:50:00.000+01:00

Digby Jones is leader of the bosses’ organisation the CBI. I find him an utterly odious man, and I have written about him before. Yesterday he was a guest on BBC One’s Breakfast programme. He was there to talk about exam results. But, like so many commentators on education, he only proved himself to be a fool. Discussing the rise in the pass rate, he said (and I paraphrase but I do not misrepresent):

“Employers are not concerned with the grade on a piece of paper. They want to know, ‘does this person have the necessary skills?’”

Almost without a breath he then said:

“In light of these exam results, employers are very concerned.”

So which is it? Are employers interested in the grades on pieces of paper? Or aren’t they? I know what he is trying to argue, but this is not a great argument for his position. And bad arguments corrupt thinking. Corrupt thinking leads to corrupted democracy. I say deport Digby Jones – he is a danger to our society. He obviously hates ‘the West’, why else would he mock the virtues of the Enlightenment so?

It reminds me of the anti-piracy advert currently running in cinemas. One of the reasons given for why it is better to watch a film in a cinema rather on a pirate copy is that, when watching a pirate copy you have the screen blocked by anyone who needs the toilet. Well, d’uh! That is because the pirate copy was filmed in a cinema. There are arguments against watching films on pirate copies, and there are arguments in favour of ‘the cinema experience’. But when a bunch of millionaires ask us to protect their profits, using stupid, damaging arguments to persuade us, I have to say I have little sympathy when Fantastic Four loses its makers money.

Spinning De Menezes in his grave

2005-08-24T17:46:00.000+01:00

That Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on the tube is in itself a tragedy that demands the reappraisal of the procedures of armed policing. But this alone is not the source of my anger. Rather, it is the fact that, after de Menezes was killed, what can only be described as a pack of lies was told about him, his actions and those of the police involved. This pack of lies undermines democracy, as do all secrets and lies, and especially the secrets and lies of those in power, by inhibiting our ability to act as citizen politicians. To govern ourselves.

The shooting Jean Charles de Menezes was a crime against a person that has implications for all us. The lies that followed were crimes against us all.

Of course, the defenders of the police have been pushed into a difficult position. They can no longer defend the actions of the police, not during the shooting and certainly not after the shooting. So, rather than do this, to engage in an argument that they would surely lose, they have begun to spin the corpse of Jean Charles de Menezes.

We have, over the past few days, seen attacks on the credibility of the experienced campaigners who have joined Justice4Jean. These attacks ought to be seen as incompetent by anyone with a dash of intelligence. That they have not is a sign of how depoliticised we have been become, how we have been inculturated to see our status quo as unproblematically the natural state of affairs. How else could a Tory politician condemn the campaigners for Justice4Jean as ‘having an agenda’? Does he not have an agenda of his own? Is he some kind of political tabula rasa? Of course not, as such a state of mind could only be possessed by a person of terrible mental incapacity. Okay, he is a Tory politician, but still. Lenin’s Tomb, an ever-improving blog, has some more details on his own nasty and narrow-minded agenda. As Meaders, the author of that post writes:

“Thank heavens for Brian Coleman. The last thing any Londoner would want is for those murdered by our brave defenders of the British way of life to be represented by competent or experienced campaigners, pushing their sinister "extreme left-wing agenda" of holding the police to account.”

But the spins moves on. Now, complaining about the conduct of the police is, in itself, ‘a bad thing’, no matter what your ‘agenda’ might be. We had version one of this where the supernaturally stupid argument ran, ‘The police have made a monumental cock-up, at the very least. We accept that. But, in order to keep Britain safe, we must back these people 100%. Never mind that they are utterly incompetent, in the most generous explanation of events.’ For examples of this argument, see the defences of Ian Blair in any British paper.

Version two is much nastier. Version two involves dragging out relatives of people who were killed in the July 7th bombings to up the grief stakes. Ian Blair himself attempted to use this argument when he suggested that we should not get too upset about one death in fifty-three. He actually tried to slip this number up to fifty-seven, including the four bombers. Presumably he reasoned that the more deaths he could place on the other side of the scales from de Menezes, the more insignificant his death would seem. But now we have the relatives of the bomb victims arguing that asking for the police to be accountable undermines their ability to fight terror. Never mind that this is the way to a police state. Is anyone questioning their agenda? The agenda of the people that have put them in touch with journalists? The agenda of the journalists? You ought not get a free ticket simply as the result of personal tragedy, nor does your mind become a political tabula rasa. The concentration on the agendas of one side of this ‘argument’ (and argument that ought to be pretty straightforward; the police lied, or the police, who investigate allegations of crime to arrive at ‘truth’, are so incapable of telling truth from convenient falsehood that they ought to be sacked) betrays the agenda of a tremendous block of power.

Corrupted power, defending those who used their power to shoot an innocent man and then lie about it.

Police Lie

2005-08-16T22:51:00.000+01:00

Is that a big surprise? To some people, I guess that it is. “If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” I hear people say. What planet are they living on? Plainly, one in which perfectly designed robots are invested with the power of the state, not fallible human beings. Human beings who are capable of being hateful and prejudiced, stupid and corrupt. Human beings who are also capable of being good, even great people. That said, we cannot dismiss out-of-hand the suggestion that the police service, and other institutions that grant their members great power, both attract a greater proportion of shits and shape those who are not yet into shits. This certainly was the case in the past, and is certainly the case abroad. Are we so special, by some virtue of Britishness, or some peculiarity of this point in history, that we are a people apart from the world as it exists and history as it happened? Plainly not, though some fools seem happy to suggest that we are.

So, where did the police lie? Or more accurately, so this does not become some gargantuan index of corruption and murder, where have the police just lied in a high profile case? Well, the shooting of Mr De Menezes, that is where. Lenin and China Mieville have posted more than adequately on the report by ITN that the circumstances of the shooting of Mr De Menezes appear to be completely add odds with the police reports of the events. Will this silence the disturbingly blood-thirsty advocates of shoot-to-kill policies? I would gamble my mortgage that it would not. Some people are shits, and others are stupid. Jon has a good post on just how we are persuaded to accept police impunity, while this exchange, culled from the comments boxes at Conservative Commentary, shows just how stupid, or shitty, some people can be:

+++++
Number of potential bombers shot: 1
Possible lives saved: 100+
Life lost: 1

Lets see who the statistics support now, hrm?
Joseph Cullen

+++++
Perhaps the police should just start picking off potential bombers at random at the Tube entrance; think of all those possible lives saved.
Alan

So, the lessons that I have learned over the past few weeks are this: when anyone complains about how something is done in Britain, for example, when they ask for a more draconian criminal justice system, moan about liberalism or demand that we adopt the working practices of exploited Third World workers, the appropriate response is; “Get the fuck out of Britain if you hate it.” That seems to pass for reason on the right. And two, if I knock someone down, or otherwise harm them, I can use the other favourite argument of the right and reactionary left; “They could have been a suicide bomber – you should thank me.”

Shits. And I have not even started on Gate Gourmet yet.

Empirical Majesty #1 – reviewed

2005-08-10T22:13:00.000+01:00

Empirical Majesty chapter one has been reviewed in Comics International (August 2005, #187).

“This attractive comic takes the form of a 16-page booklet with the cover in the style of a 1930s Penguin novel. Secret agent Kelvin Vijay Brooke is the hero of a spy drama set in an alternate history in which the twentieth century begins with Britain as a republic founded upon scientific reason, and America is ruled by the irrational exiled Hanoverian monarchy. Glimpses of Victoriana nicely evoke the age of empire.” (9/10)

So, a good score, though I think the review could have done with a little more hyperbole. In the same issue of Comics International there is the second “Independent Comics for Independent Minds” advert. Unfortunately, I don’t have any comics to promote on the next one, but I am working – slowly it has to be said – on a new comic with Dave Evans (I am sure that he has forgotten) called Praxis! and Journeys into Fantasy with Michael Trimble, an artist I met at the Bristol Comics Festival. I also have three stories ready for a still untitled anthology I am putting together Brian Janchez [one page strip here].

In the meantime I have to write a paper and organise an academic conference. Nothing to do with comics either.

In the meantime, here is the advert from CI#187:

You can buy Empirical Majesty – Chapter One for 75p including p&p. E-mail me at aj_bartlett1977(at)yahoo(dot)co(dot)uk for more details. Payment can be made by PayPal (inc. credit card payments) or by cheque.

Tales of the Contrary is also available for £2 (or £2.50 together with Empirical Majesty #1) including p&p.

Tales of the Contrary reviewed

Buy Tales of the Contrary and Empirical Majesty

Most of all, many thanks to Paul Scott (of Solar Wind and Omnivistascope) a still growing giant of the British small-press scene, for organizing these adverts.

Britishness? (part two)

2005-08-06T11:43:00.000+01:00

First, the word ‘Britishness’ is not, according my spellchecker, a real word. It offers me the option of replacing ‘Britishness’ with ‘Brutishness’, which, I admit, would be an accurate description of Gerald Howarth and those who share his thuggish ideas of what it means to be British.

Second, when David Davis calls for Britain to adopt the American model, he makes a whole handful of mistakes. On a simple level it seems that he thinks that Britishness can be imported. I have no problem taking good ideas from beyond our borders. But then I do not express reverence for the Britishness of values. On a more serious level, we cannot be sure whether he is speaking of the reality or the myth of US integration policies. Does he mean the US where people routinely describe themselves as Italian-American, African-American, Irish-American and so on? Or does he mean the US of myth, an immigrant nation where successive waves of new immigrants did not simply assimilate into some native population (who were kept out of the way on reservations), but took an active part in shaping the cultural, social, economic and intellectual landscape of the developing nation? I think that David Davis is talking about neither. I think that he is calling for us to adopt the ‘American model’ is merely a rhetorical trick. He calls on ethnic minorities to “respect the British way of life”. No description of how, as Britons, they will take part in shaping ‘the British way of life’. So does he mean the ethnic identification that is a routine part of American life? No, he criticises the promotion of “distinctive identities”. So which America model is it that Davis is speaking of? None whatsoever, except the one that he has invented through his imaginative powers to serve his political purposes - an invention that mirrors the creation of definitions of Britishness.

Third, we have the Liam Fox on the Today Programme stating that adherence to the idea of a free market economy is an essential part of British values. Well, that rules me out of being British then. When you have a nominally socialist party in power, to state that an adherence to the idea of a free market economy is an essential part of being British is to make a tremendous number of people within the borders of Britain non-British. Or even anti-British. Traitors, as Gerald Howarth calls them*.

But then, these are two sides of the same coin. Howarth is, after all, a resolute defender of General Pincohet, who certainly made an adherence to a certain brand of free-market values a requirement for living as a free Chilean.

This is the problem with the debate about what it means to be British – it is necessarily exclusionary, and as the debate is a political one it is very far from being an attempt at arriving at an objective statement of what Britishness IS, but a statement of what Britishness OUGHT to be. This must exclude people, marking them as un-British solely on the basis of a definition that conforms to the desires of political and media opinion formers. We ARE British. Britishness is what we do. British values are those that we hold. Any other definition, any definition that attempts to paint some British people – including me, it seems – outside the borders of Britain is an exercise is wicked political rhetoric. To even take part in the debate, except to point out the absurdity of this brand of discourse, even if your aim is to express a liberal view of Britishness, is to bolster the legitimacy of exclusionary definitions.

*The Conservative Party appears to be doing a clumsy job of disassociating themselves from Howarth’s comments. While stressing that Howarth was expressing a personal opinion rather than a party position, Tory HQ have performed a cack-handed defence of his ‘traitors’ remarks by saying that he was speaking solely about suicide bombers themselves, not Muslims who may hold critical opinions of British society. Of course, this is nonsense, and more than that is nonsense spoken in the full knowledge that the speaker is peddling a line in pap.

He said; “If they don’t like our way of life, there is a simple remedy – go to another country, get out.” With regard to the British born; “Tough. If you don’t give allegiance to this country, the leave. // There are plenty of other countries whose way of life would appear to be more conducive to what they aspire to. They would be happy and we would be happy.” Do these sound like comments aimed at suicide bombers? No, these comments are clearly aimed at people who are critical of the British way of life. And, as I said before, Gerald Howarth is one.

Britishness?

2005-08-05T12:53:00.000+01:00

Reading the Guardian’s press review of multiculturalism, I was struck by the utter lack of self-awareness displayed by most of the columnists quoted in the review.

For example, the editorial in the Herald reads:

“In Britain ... there is almost a sense of embarrassment about our Britishness… It may all sound rather American but perhaps the time has come to abandon our usual British reserve about our own cherished values… it is time to accentuate our shared Britishness.”

So, let me get this straight. We accentuate our Britishness by abandoning one of our traditional national characteristics?

While the George Kerevan in the Scotsman writes:

“According to Mr Howarth - the hitherto faceless shadow defence spokesperson - those Muslims who object to the 'British way of life' should pack up and leave ... Even if we ignore Mr Howarth's synthetic political spleen, it is still a fair question to ask why anyone would want to stay here if they hate it so much that they want to set off random bombs on the London underground.”

Hang on just on second. Those who set of the bombs in London are, by definition (as the people who set off the bombs are now dead), not the same people as other Muslims who may object to our liberal values. Indeed, what we should point out is that it is not just radical Muslims who object to our liberal values, but mainstream politicians such as Mr Howarth. The response to Mr Howarth should be “why don’t you go and live in America?” given that, when faced with people who do not share his values, that appears to be the most complex and considered type of argument that he can muster.

All these calls to abandon traditional aspects of British tolerance are, necessarily, expressions of disdain for British society. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is not perfect – far from it – and we should be allowed to criticise it, even condemn it if we think it so bad. But it is an offence against reason to demand that those who condemn Britain and British values, previously tolerated by British society, should be criminalized, as the very nature of this argument demands that this criminalisation must be selective, allowing Howarth and Davis and other conservatives* to voice their displeasure with the values of Britain. Not only that, in calling for legal action to be taken they are implicitly calling for violent acts to be taken in the demolition of the British values of tolerance, though these violent acts will be undertaken by the police and security services.

Tony Blair, when he says that “the rules of the game are changing”, is an enemy of British values, by this simple-headed calculus. And indeed, he is an enemy of what I would hope would be the British values that are worth preserving. Why are the rules changing? Are we facing an existential threat? The answer to this question is, categorically, no. The rules are changing because he wants them to change, and we allow him to change them. I have been arguing for some time that while terrorists may kill a few people, the greater danger to our liberal, humane society is our own political class. There will not be Sharia law in Britain any time in the next few centuries, despite the rantings of some on the right/reactionary ‘left’. But the re/action of our own political class to the opportunities found in the fear created by terrorism may very well lead us down a nasty authoritarian path, from which there may be no turning back.

So I will ask again – these new terrorist laws that will make it an offence to indirectly incite violence, will they prohibit all indirect incitement equally? If it is to be on offence to say that a suicide bomber was a martyr, will it also be an offence to call for internment camps, for detention without trial, for torture, for war? These are far more direct incitements, and they are found everyday springing from the mouths and the media that align themselves with Tony Blair and ‘British values’. If those are British values, I spit on them.

*And also challenging ‘British values’ are those battling racism, those fighting for gay rights, equality for women, a more just distribution of wealth and so on.

Jack Straw – liar or incompetent?

2005-07-18T15:31:00.000+01:00

Jack Straw has today rebutted the conclusions of the report [pdf] produced by Chatham House. According to the Guardian, the report “found that a key problem in the UK for preventing terrorism is that the country “is riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war against terror”.” Straw’s response was reported as “I'm astonished that Chatham House is now saying that we should not have stood shoulder to shoulder with our long-standing allies in the United States,” Now, this is not what Chatham House have said. They have said that this position is not a productive position with regards to reducing the level of terrorist threat. This argument may be wrong, but Jack Straw is not arguing this. He is simply engaging in a piece of misrepresentation.

But his utter stupidity comes when he cites the bombing in Turkey this weekend. The Guardian writes; “Mr Straw said Saturday's attack at a beach resort in Turkey also showed that terrorists “will seek any excuse” to strike. “They struck this weekend in Turkey, which was not supporting our action in Iraq,” Mr Straw said.”

Hang on. First, it is not correct to say that Turkey did not back the attack on Iraq. Turkish airspace was used by Coalition aircraft, and there are US military bases in Turkey. It may be the case that there are no Turkish troops in Iraq, but it is rather disingenuous to suggest that Turkey is disconnected from the War in Iraq.

But this is a minor point. The attack in Turkey was not the work of Al Qeada-inspired terrorists, so far as we currently know, but the work of the PKK, a Kurdish non-Islamist group fighting for Kurdish autonomy. Kurds fighting for independence are useful heroes in one context and damnable villains in another, it seems.

The PKK may commit terrorist acts. But to imagine that they are part of the same phenomena or ideology as Al Qeada inspired terrorist acts is to commit yourself to a nursery school analysis where the IRA, ETA, Al Qeada, the Tamil Tigers etc. are all equivalent.

Furthermore, as the PKK are the prime suspects in this weekend’s bombings, the idea that there would be no link to the Iraq was is hardly surprising. Jack Straw is, appropriately enough, attacking a straw man, though one so poorly constructed it is difficult to know where to begin criticising his anatomy.

Given that Jack Straw is Foreign Secretary, you would expect him to have spotted that Turkey is blaming the attacks on the PKK, and to know the difference between Kurdish separatists and Islamists. So, the question is; is Jack Straw as misleading dissembler or simply an incompetent Foreign Secretary?