Which is not to say that the left can’t learn from the right. Some of the bigger left-of-Labour blogs have much higher traffic than specifically Labour-identified ones, but there are still bad old leftist habits. One thing that’s impressive about the Tory bloggers is that, though they have disagreements, they don’t escalate into nuclear polemic – they do recognise each other as being on basically the same side – and also, they link to each other assiduously. Compare that with the far-left blogs, where in some particular cases, a mixture of sectarian dogmatism and personality clashes leads to long-running feuds, and in one or two cases putatively socialist blogs that do little except run furious denunciations of other socialists.
I’m not that familiar with the toffosphere, but I wonder how much of that supposed unity isn’t an optical illusion. From what I’ve seen of the American wingnut sphere there as a high degree of lockstep as well as long as their “movement” was on the ascent — once the Repubs started to lose the rats started to bite each other. Furthermore, much of their unity was also centrally directed, with much of the traffic being vertical, top to bottom rather than horizontal between equal(ish) partners/blogs. If you get your talking points from the RNC, disseminated via the bigger blogs & mainstream media, then reinforced by the smaller blogs linking back (and being linked to as examples of “grassroots outrage”), it’s no wonder there’s a greater degree of communality amongst rightwing blogs.
But even before the lost presidential and congressional elections there were schisms. There has always been the paleoconservative, libertarian and isolationist right (Pat Robinson, antiwar.com, Jim Henley, etc), subjected to almost as much wingnut hatred as the socalled liberal left for their anti Iraq war stance. Then there were the high profile apostates like Balloon Juice or Andrew Sullivan, once part of the wingnut right until they sobered up (latest example: Little Green Footballs). And currently we have the Teabagger/Palin fanatics trying to purge the unbelievers and vice versa. So much of what makes the rightwing blogs look so united is a ruthless attack of anybody on their side who doesn’t adhere to orthodoxy. So I’m skeptical about how nice the Tories really are towards each other and how much of it is –at least for the moment– enforced from above.
All of which doesn’t take away from some of the more self destructive tendencies of the non-Labour left, it’s true…
Aaronovitch Watch draws my attention to the latest Decent crusade against Amnesty International for having the audacity to actually, you know, work with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner in getting this prison and torture site closed as well as persuading European countries to take in ex-prisoners. According to The Times AI is “damaged” by their partnership with Moazzam Begg, providing as evidence the innuendo and assertions of “A SENIOR official at Amnesty International”, one Gita Sahgal:
Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
It’s all the usual guilt by association and scary buzzword — Taliban, Al-Qaeda, jihadi, served up in that undercooled semi-objective writing style the Times is so good at; all done nicely and proper with both sides of the story presented, but you still know what to think just from the headline. That said, it’s still a lot more sane than Martin Bright’s rant about it, as noted on Aaronovitch Watch:
Bright’s prose is somewhat over-caffeinated: “… blowing the lid… rightly sick of the lazy alliance… blown the whistle [hmm, lots of 'blowing' going on here - Ed] … Begg is now an integral part … she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists … Jamaat-i-Islami, the south Asian blood-brothers of the Muslim Brotherhood… It is Gita Sahgal who should be the darling of the human rights establishment, not Moazzam Begg.” What, I wonder, is giving “house-room”? Until today, when, according to Bright, Ms Sahgal was suspended she was a ’senior official at Amnesty’ (Sunday Times). So which of them, if either, was a ‘darling’ of the “liberal intelligensia”?
All the usual stuff from those who want Amnesty International to be the cheerleader for US-led human rights imperialism, who want AI to denounce the enemy-du-jour and then shut up, who want AI to mention Iranian torture, not Israeli torture. It infuriates somebody like Martin “not too” Bright, that AI does not distinguish between torture done in the name of Allah or torture done in the name of anti-terrorism. With his Us vs Them mentality, his worldview of a civilised west in conflict with barbaric Islam he’s the spiritual descendant of the Cold Warriors who in the seventies and eighties accused AI of being communist dupes, as he now accuses them of being jihadist dupes. What has changes is the reification of human rights — back then Cold Warriors could still argue that the fight against communism justified the occasional human rights violation, even if they tried to bagatalise them, but today Bright and others like him have to pretend they are the real human rights defenders.
Accusations like these are nothing new therefore. hey tend to pop up whenever AI or HRW or any other human rights organisation focuses attention on the wrong sort of human rights violations, those perpetrated by the US or its allies (especially Israel). First these crimes are denied, then once that becomes impossible they’re minimalised, then AI is accused of paying undue attention to them and not enough to other crimes (usually said by people too stupid to even scan their website which always proves the opposite) and finally it is accused of being a (willing/unwilling) tool of the enemy. Lather, rinse, repeat; concern trolling on an international scale. It’s a transparent ploy that has never worked in the past, but as long as you sling enough shit something will stick in the end. And that’s the real crime, if fake scandals like this persuade people not to support AI anymore.
George Monbiot has a modest proposal for everybody disgusted by and mistrustful of the Chilcot inquiry. If they won’t prosecute Blair and his cronies for the War on Iraq, we will:
All those who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop messing about and allow the international criminal court to start prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this nation, who re-elected a government that had launched an illegal war, have a duty to do more than that. We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.
But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton, one of the architects of the war in George Bush’s government, at the Hay festival in 2008, and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to detain Robert Mugabe, nothing focuses attention on these issues more than an attempted citizen’s arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the European Union. He didn’t of course, but I asked those who had pledged money whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
So today I am launching a website – www.arrestblair.org – whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I’ve laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available until Blair faces a court of law. The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are likely to try.
At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass murderers to move on.
Somehow, that poster seems almost designed for satire. There are excellent reasons why it works so well; it’s possibly the most stylised example of a political advert I can think of. In a sense, it’s a movie – not at all original, but highly competent in a limited way, and therefore a perfect subject for parody. You only need to identify a small number of controls, or variables, that define it, in order to produce a message that matches the requirements of the format perfectly but has an entirely different payload.
(Yes, he does think a bit too much about these things, but that makes his blog a must read…)
Via Naked Capitalism comes the news that three Guantanamo Bay detainees who were supposed to have committed suicide together as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us” according to Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the then commander of the prison, were more likely to have been murdered:
The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.
According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.
Haiti has been punished for its founding sin over the centuries. But it’s not the earthquake or any other natural disaster that’s the punishment, nor is what ever diseased idea of devil worship this old asshole has dreamt up that’s the sin. The real sin for which Haiti has been punished ever since it was founded, was the simple fact that it was the Black slaves who won their independence for themselves, forming an intolerable beacon of freedom and independence:
By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary observers, the armies led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines had broken the chain of colonial slavery at ‘what had been, in 1789, its strongest link’. [7] Renamed Haiti, the new country celebrated its independence in January 1804. I have argued elsewhere that there have been few other events in modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant order: the mere existence of an independent Haiti was a reproach to the slave-trading nations of Europe, a dangerous example to the slave-owning us, and an inspiration for successive African and Latin American liberation movements. [8] Much of Haiti’s subsequent history has been shaped by efforts, both internal and external, to stifle the consequences of this event and to preserve the essential legacy of slavery and colonialism—that spectacularly unjust distribution of labour, wealth and power which has characterized the whole of the island’s post-Columbian history.
Since its independence Haiti has been kept poor through domestic repression supported by foreign interference, which started with having had to pay France restitutionj (!) for the loss of its slave colony, through US supported dictatorship after dictatorship up until the present day, with the UN “peace force” stationed in Haiti since 2004 after the wrong man had been president for too long:
The real goals of the occupation that began on 29 February 2004 are perfectly apparent: to silence or obliterate all that remains of this support. During the first week of their deployment, the Franco-American invasion force operated almost exclusively in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods and killed only fl supporters. Their new puppet Prime Minister Gérard Latortue (a 69-year-old ex-un factotum and Miami talk-show host) publicly embraced the convicted mass-murderer Tatoune and his ex-army rebels in Gonaïves as ‘freedom fighters’—a move interpreted by the New York Times as ‘sending a clear message of stability’. [54] Latortue’s ‘national unity government’ is composed exclusively of members of the traditional elite. On March 14, the Haitian police began arresting Lavalas militants on suspicion of unidentified crimes, but decided not to pursue the rebel death squad leaders, even those already convicted of atrocities. The new National Police chief, Léon Charles, explained that while ‘there’s a lot of Aristide supporters’ to be arrested, the government ‘still has to make a decision about the rebels—that’s over my head’. [55] On March 22 Latortue’s new Interior Minister, the ex-General Hérard Abraham, announced plans to integrate the paramilitaries into the police force and confirmed his intention to re-establish the army which Aristide abolished in 1995. [56] In late March, anti-Aristide death squads continued to control the country’s second largest city, Cap Haïtien, where ‘dozens of bullet-riddled bodies have been brought to the morgue over the last month’. [57] While scores of other Aristide supporters were being killed up and down the country, the us Coast Guard applied Bush’s order, in keeping with usual us practice (but in flagrant violation of international law), to refuse all Haitian applications for asylum in advance.
The Security Council resolution that mandated the invading Franco-American troops as a un Multinational Interim Force on 29 February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization Force to take over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly sent his Special Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili, to assess the situation on the ground. The ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti’, published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism of un discourse to new levels. ‘It is unfortunate that, in its bicentennial year, Haiti had to call again on the international community to help it overcome a serious political and security situation’, wrote Annan. The circumstances of the elected President’s overthrow were decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely noting that: ‘Early on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country’. The toppling of the constitutional government was deemed to offer Haitians the opportunity of ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned future’. [58]
It’s this history of domestic and foreign exploitation and repression that has not only kept Haiti poor, but has so ill prepared it for this earthquake. It costs money to make a city earthquake proof and that money had been stolen from the Haitians years ago. The tens of thousands or more of deaths are the result. But at least both the presidential palace and the UN mission were hit as well.
A team led by biologist Julian Finn of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, was observing 20 veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) on a regular basis.
The researchers noticed that the animals were frequently using their approximately 6-inch-long (15-centimeter-long) tentacles to carry coconut shells bigger than their roughly 3-inch-wide (8-centimeter-wide) bodies.
An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment.
This, on its own, astonished the team. Then they noticed that the octopuses, after using the coconut shells, would arrange them neatly below the centers of their bodies and “walk” around with the shells—awkwardly.
“I’ve always been impressed by what octopuses can do, but this was bizarre,” said study co-author Norman, senior curator for mollusks at Museum Victoria.
To carry the shells, a veined octopus has to stick its arms out and over the edges of the coconut and walk around as if on stilts—making the octopus, while in motion, more vulnerable to predators—study leader Finn explained.
“An octopus without shells can swim away much faster by jet propulsion,” he said. “But on endless mud seafloor, where are you fleeing to?” In other words, a coconut-carrying octopus may be slow, but it’s always got somewhere to hide.
If/when we finally fuck up the world enough to become extinct, they will be our succesors.
Says the bankers’ toady in an attempt to justify their massive greed, so be sure to punch him in the face when you see him.
It’s our own fault that these assholes take the mickey after our money bailed them out. The Royal Navy had a tradition of executing admirals unlucky enough to lose one battle too many; this should’ve been done to a couple of bankers as well when the crisis hit last year. Because we didn’t, but instead bailed out the fuckers without demanding anything in return, they now feel emboldened to demand bigger bonuses or they’ll move abroad. If they were smarter they would have stayed silent, but if they were as smart as they think they are, they wouldn’t have caused the crisis in the first place…
Remember Dr David Kelly, driven to suicide after it was revealed he was the source for the BBC’s allegations about the “sexed-up” Iraq dossier? Remember how his death wasn’t investigated by a coroner, as it should’ve been done but was instead ruled as suicide by the Hutton Inquiry? Well, a group of six doctors, unconvinced by the verdict, have now applied to the attorney general for a proper inquest:
The doctors say the Hutton inquiry was “totally inadequate” as a means of identifying the cause of Dr Kelly’s death and they are seeking to obtain Dr Kelly’s autopsy report.
Their main argument is that the bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery in his left wrist is “highly unlikely” to have caused his death. They say a number of studies have shown that it is unusual for a patient to die from a single deep cut to the wrist.
They say the Hutton Inquiry lacked the powers of a full inquest because it did not hear evidence taken under oath, it did not have the power to subpoena witnesses and it did not have the power to summon a jury.
They also say that the proviso which enabled the Hutton Inquiry to replace an inquest has only previously been used for mass deaths, such as the Ladbroke Grove rail crash or the inquiry in the deaths of patients the hands of Dr Harold Shipman.
It’s easy to dismiss these doctors as conspiracy loons, especially since their appeal comes so late, six years after Dr Kelly’s death. But they are right that the circumstances of his death were well dody and have not been investigated properly. But I still wonder why they appealed now and not sooner.
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