Category: Politics/Metaphysics

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Our apathy is their greatest strength…

This story in The Guardian highlights a whole load of ways that the UK government are fundamentally reshaping our relationship with the state. The reminder that ‘they work for us’ is sounding increasingly hollow, given the way that they are removing all the restraints on the goverment to intrude into our lives, indulge in surveillance on any level they see fit and even prevent us from saying we’re not happy about it.

This chunk from the article, as quoted on the lovely Andy’s blog is indicative of the scariness –

“The government is briskly and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the individual to the state, of the Lords to the Commons, and of MPs to ministers. The ID cards bill will allow the authorities unprecedented surveillance of our lives, and the power to curtail our ordinary activities by withdrawing that card. The legislative and regulatory reform bill, now entering its final stages, will let ministers alter laws by order, rather than having to argue their case in parliament.”

What are we going to do? Mass protest does seem the only route. Civil disobedience seems logical and ethical… What the hell is Blair up to? The distance between the new-labour police state that he’s building at the moment and the lovely utopian ideals put forward when labour won the election back in 97 is a gulf of unimaginable proportions. Was this the plan all along? Is he as much of a lying conniving bastard as it seems, or just one of those politicians who make really stupid assumptions about the importance of civil liberties when faced with some kind of supposed ‘challenge to national security’. Surely this kind of draconianism is a bigger challenge, no?

Anyway, back to recording for me – maybe I’ll just call the new album fuck blair, and list the names of the dead British soldiers on the sleeve, and post copies to MPs, thereby causing them to break the law just by reading the sleeve-notes – can’t have mention of the catastrophic consequences of Blair’s disastrous military cock-up in the gulf actually read in parliament, can we now?

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McWebChat with the McDevil

I’m currently watching a web chat on the channel 4 website with Steve Easterbrook, the managing director of McDonalds in the UK. It’s in response to channel 4 having just shown Supersize Me again. I watched bits of it again, and it’s a fantastic bit of film making.

Clearly, McTurdBoy is going to be a shitbag – you don’t take a job like that in the first place without being McScum – and the webchat is being filtered so it’s all the questions that look really edgy but allow him to recite the McShit party line.

I’ve submitted three questions so far – one of about the Judge’s conclusions in the McLibel trial, one about the McDonald’s statement that none of their meals are guaranteed free from meat contamination and one about whether or not the film has an impact on the ‘diminished consumer confidence’ that McShit listed as one of the reasons for them closing 25 of their hellholes last month… – perhaps not surprisingly, McSatan hasn’t bothered to trouble me with a McAnswer.

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Campaign for an investigation into the Iraq War

as a rule, I find online petitions a problematic area – are they ever recognised by anyone? Are petitions in general trustworthy enough for them to carry any clout?

In this instance, the issues at stake are too great for any faffing over such triflings – the Stop The War Coalition, in a campaign fronted by the wonderful Tony Benn, are calling for an investigation into breaches of The Nuremberg Charter and Geneva and Hague Conventions during the Iraq War and occupation.

read about it over on Jyoti’s lovely blog of cleverness.

The legal smokescreen assembled around the Iraq affair is despicable – I understand the argument that when troops are committed we need to rally behind them. Yes, I understand, I just think it doesn’t hold any water when there’s a distinct possibility/probability/certainty that those very same troops are being shot and blown up on a false pretext, or conversely those troops are implicated in the convention breaches. The endless stream of news stories and first hand accounts of the fucked-up-ness of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, civilians and those labeled as ‘enemy combatants’ (you’ve got to love the ability of the US government to invent euphemisms to undermine the critique of their behaviour) is damning in the extreme, but thus far none of the legal challenges have come to fruition. there’s a cross party campaign by MPs to have Blair tried for his part in instigating the illegal attack, which so far hasn’t come to anything. Hopefully this application to the UN for a proper investigation will get taken seriously.

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If this isn't civil war, what the hell is???

The former Iraqi ‘president’, Iyad Allawi has said that iraq is in a civil war. Seems like a fairly obvious thing to say, given that scores of people are being killed every day, there are two definable sides to this both with military capabilities, that are daily bombing, shooting, slaughtering one another.

However, those genius revisionists in the White House and Downing Street are claiming that there’s no civil war, with Bush claiming that things are looking up for the Americans to ‘win’ the war, and the UK Defense secretary John Reid saying the terrorists are “failing to drive Iraq into civil war.”

Both Bush and Reid come off like Pike from Dad’s Army – ‘Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring’! The barefaced cheek of the US/UK axis of international bullying are once again making themselves look utterly stupid, ill-informed, in denial and ridiculous by claiming that the truth that anyone with a TV can see is in fact all made up, and denying the reality as voiced by their own jumped up puppet ruler in the area, Allawi – they chose him, he was clearly ‘trustworthy’ back then. Now he aparently knows less about the situation than special-needs-Bush and the wanker that is John Reid.

Having just been watching David Attenborough’s latest spectacular programme Planet Earth, I was marvelling at the wonder of creation, at the mryiad beauties of the natural world, and feeling like somewhere the midst of all that beautiful complexity, we’ll work it out. Then the news comes on, and a handful of powercrazed fools in positions of unmerited influence are driving us headlong into a world war to protect the financial interests of a handful of their fucked-up billionaire friends and financial backers. It’s as wrong as wrong can be. Watching a nile crocodile drag a wildebeast to its death shows nature to be red in tooth and claw, but also shows the balance, the circle, the richly woven tapestry of a self-sustaining natural world. Watching the power-mongers in Drowning Street and The Shite House drag the situation in the middle east further into a downward spiral of murder, torture, imprisonment without trial, terrorism – state sponsored or otherwise, car bombs, cluster bombs, anti-diplomacy and thinly veiled white supremecy, is just about as depressing as life can get.

As my mum said only last weekend, ‘isn’t it about time for a revolution?’ I don’t think she was joking.

Soundtrack, Brian Houston, ‘Sugar Queen’.

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Antiwar march on Saturday

Saturday’s anti-war march was a fab event – met up with Jyoti, which was a delight, always nice to put a face to a blog. The march itself seemed rather upbeat, pretty huge (biggest one I’ve been on since the BIG ONE three years ago – organisers estimated 100,000, the police laughably suggested 10-15,000. Using the patented ma lawson method of doubling the police figure, halving the organisers and splitting the difference brings it to 40,000, but I’d say that was on the low side.)

The issues were a bit simpler than for the last few – people get very tetchy about protesting about military situations where there are British soldiers committed, as though it’s somehow treason to complain once they are there. Not much thought given to how little they want to be there, and the legality of them being there in the first place… This one was easier because of the dual themes – troops out of Iraq, and don’t attack Iran. The threat of a military strike on Iran is just nuts. Sure, the Iranian president is a crack-pot, but if anything is likely to bring together the myriad disparate factions in Iranian politics, it’s an attack by the US/UK Team America-stylee crack commando team. A damn fool thing to do, for sure.

So, I got to protest the lunacy of our jumped up nobhead of a prime minister, and hang out with lovely peoples all day.

And now I’m breaking my own rule and am using TSP’s laptop to access the net, as my desktop has bizarrely decided not to connect to the web. It’ll access email, chat, ftp, just nothing with an http in front of it. There are no proxies set up, and I can’t find any changes to the firewall settings (and switching it off doesn’t seem to change anything either) – any suggestions, lovely blogling geeks?

Here’s me on the march, from Jyoti’s photos –

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Jyoti on downloading and the majors…

more great stuff from Jyoti Mishra on downloading. If the BPI starts getting trigger-happy with legal action against people for downloading music, we could end up in a v. bad place.

What they don’t seem to get at all is that more people will pay for music by artists they feel some connection with. Faceless corporate no-marks who happen to make nice music don’t engender any fan loyalty, so people will happily download their stuff. Why not, they’re rich enough already goes the argument. Whereas a band like Nizlopi allow free access to their video of The JCB Song for months, and instead of people just downloading it and then ignoring the record, they get a number one record out of it, totally outside of the music industry machine. It was a glorious success, not to mention a fabulous song, and shows what happens if enough effort is made to connect with an audience, to give them something of value.

The same thing has happened with a host of indie bands that launched this year- Jyoti talks about them with far more insight than I have, cos everything I’ve heard by the Arctic Monkeys sounds like shite, so I’ve not really taken much notice of them musically, but the story is one that fills me with hope, and the quotes I’ve heard from their fans suggest that they engender fierce loyalty.

And there are corporate rock monoliths that still do it. Iron Maiden, Queen and a few others have fans that will buy multiple copies of every single, on as many formats get released, even after they are well out of fashion. Marillion managed to raise the cost of making an album from their fan-base in advanced sales, for a record that wasn’t even written. Loyalty, trust, value. If people feel positively disposed towards an act, they are happy to part with cash. And those who never part with cash for music are going to get hold of it anyway – if you cripple software copying of music, people will just write software that records the audio – it means the copying will be slightly slower, but it’ll still happen, and the file-sharers will have the added buzz of getting one over on the wankers who want to fill their computers with spy-ware to stop them copying CDs to their iPods.

Meanwhile the indies keep providing MP3s, writing blogs to stay in touch with their audience, answering emails, playing gigs and selling merch, and it’s rolling along quite nicely thanks. Balls to the Sony share-holders.

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’ (Michael has spent 20 years on various record labels, putting out great music. This time he makes the album of his life, puts it out himself, and is no doubt doing better from it than any previous album. It’s better packaged than any of his other albums, it’s beautifully recorded and is almost without doubt the most complete musical statement I’ve ever heard from a solo bass guitarist.)

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Great news for people who like their own lungs…

MPs have voted in favour of a total smoking ban in public places – fantastic! I’m so glad they didn’t bow to pressure to make it OK for pubs that don’t serve food to avoid the ruling – that would’ve just meant that posh pubs protected people’s health and pubs in poorer areas left them all to choke to death.

The one group that will suffer from this, sadly, are people with mental illness, whose medication is set based on the fact that they smoke, and need to smoke for the delicate balance of their mental wellbeing. There are already a lot of people who can’t travel on public transport because the need to smoke more frequently, and they are people for whom giving up smoking is a way more difficult proposition that it is for the rest of the population. I’m not sure what needs to happen for them, but I hope due consideration is given.

But for the majority of people, this will be a huge step forward. I might even start going to pubs again. It’ll certainly make going to gigs in venues that currently allow smoking much more enjoyable – no more coming home from the Borderline smelling like Guy Fawkes.

And for those of you that smoke, you’ve got until next summer to give up, then you can be grateful like the rest of us. Hey, if the Shark can quit, anyone can.

Hurrah!

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more on hunting

So tonight’s episode of holiday showdown had a gun toting military family from Lincolnshire going on a holiday-swap with a bisexual anarchist ouple of video artists.

The military monkeys took the anarchists to Texas on a holiday of shooting guns, trying to shoot boar and roping cattle.

then the bi people took the Lincolnshire rednecks to San Francisco for a week of hanging out with trannies, filming the streets of SF for a VJ gig.

What was startling was seeing a bloke, who thought nothing of whooping his teenage son into a testosterone fueled frenzy over a huge gun, describe two men kissing as disgusting and something that no decent person would let their children see… but aiming a Magnum at a human-shaped target (or boar, or deer) was fine.

We’re back to the topic of moral equivalence. OK, so it was intentionally car-crash TV, but the juxtaposition of gun-toting misogyny with anarchist sexual liberalism was a really interesting one, given that bigotry, intolerance and downright nastiness of the Lincolnshire smiling militia.

Shooting good, lovin’ bad. Very odd equation, that one.

As Michael Franti sang – ‘it’s not about who you love, it’s all about do you love’.

As it happens, the wife of trigger happy dan (with his remarkably gay moustache, that made him v. popular in SF!) actually took to the VJ gig really well, but she also couldn’t deal with transgendered dancers in a club. That I’d have had a problem with as well – not because they were transgendered, but just from a human rights angle, I’m not into exploitation at all, and I don’t think transgendered people should be objectified in that way any more than I think women should be. There were a few things in the SF scenes that I’d have issues with, but none of it because it was ‘sick’ or because they were ‘woofters’, more that that level of sexual-obsession tends to stem from either hurt, poor self image or narcissism, none of which need celebrating, just understanding.

But of the two holidays, I’d take a week with the lovely freaky drag-queens of San Fran over a week with the gun totin’, wife subjugatin’ rednecks any day… All the freaky people make the beauty of the world, to quote the lovely Franti again…

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What are the scores on the doors? one old lawyer and 417 Quail…

There are loads of political stories I want to blog about right now. Like this and this, but right now, I just want to highlight one thing about the story of Dick ‘head’ chaney shooting an old man in the face. By accident.

The accident element makes a change, I guess, and at least this time a member of the US government did the shooting themselves, rather than getting the army to shoot people for nothing.

But that’s not really the main bit of this story for me – no, this is – apparently, on the shoot, there were 500 captive-bred birds released to be shot at. 417 were shot. FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN. Sweet Jesus, were they using grenades???? What kind of sicko wants to pretend that a slaughter like that is sport? as harry hutton points out ‘that’s not a hunt, it’s a fucking pogrom’.

Where on earth is the pleasure in that? There’s clearly no sporting skill required (a concept I still can’t get my head round, but I find it easier to manufacture a leap of logic if there’s something to pit your wits against) – it’s just sadistic brutality to release massive numbers of birds to be blasted into a million pieces by the kind of fuckwit who doesn’t even know not to point a gun at a person in that setting.

Are the NRA going to revoke his membership? Will he be prevented from owning and handling a gun again? Will people wake up to the idea that the kind of sick shitbag who sees that kind of avian massacre as ‘fun’ is clearly a moral disaster area? Of course not.

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the mess we're in

Britain is a strange place to be right now. In the last week or so we’ve had two people from the BNP (I’m not going to link to their site – you can find them on google if you want to know more) caught on camera spouting racist filth acquitted of stirring up racial hatred (so leaders of a political party referring to Islam as a ‘wicked vicious faith’ and asylum seekers as ‘like cockroaches’ isn’t designed to stir up religious hatred? hmmm).

Then we have the insane scenes in central London over the last week with some crazy Islamic extremists calling for beheadings, bombings and death to infidels over the publishing of some cartoons in a newspaper in Denmark. No one was arrested, though police are viewing the footage at the moment, and one buffoon who dressed as a suicide bomber has been returned to jail as he was out on parole for drug dealing. So, as Sid Smith points out, selling illegal life-destroying drugs is fine, drawing pictures is evil? The laws of moral equivalence have clearly shifted since I last gave them some thought…

And then we’ve had in the last day or so one English-speaking Saudi newspaper in the UK publish a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler… the mind boggles. And, unlike most of the other stuff that goes on, I’m actually offended. But more baffled than anything else – what on earth has a dutch jewish teenager killed at Belsen got to do with Danish cartoonists? Was the point just to be as offensive as possible to anyone? ‘Anything you can do, we can do better’? Are they willing to do a beheading swap – their newspaper lose their lives in exchange for the Danish cartoonists? What kind of morality is informing such things, or it is as I suspect, just an exploitation of one incident to peddle their own nasty racist ideology.

Let’s get one thing clear, racism is evil and pernicious in any form. The evils of the current Israeli government in no way legitimise anti-semitism, in the same way that the fucked-up actions of jihadists who don’t understand the central tenets of their faith in no way justify anti-Islamic sentiments. If they did, the behaviour of those who call themselves Christians over the last 2000 years could be used to justify a war on the church quite easily – from the Crusades to the well documented corruption of the Catholic church through the years, to the ‘biblical’ justifications for slavery, apartheid and the genocide of the British Empire and the foundation of the USA, right up to GWB’s own jihad rhetoric in relation to the current Iraq war. Surely if God told him to to do it, other followers of God are culpable?

Of course not, but what it does provide is a hook for those who seek places to express their hatred, bigotry, intolerance and a further excuse to refuse to attempt to understand, learn from and be enriched by other faiths, ideologies and cultures.

So the challenge is to do the opposite, to expose the powers at work in the BNP, the fascistic Islamic fringe groups, the right-wing church in the US and UK, the behaviour of the Israeli forces in the occupied territories, and all other places where oppression flows out from intolerance, and to live the opposite. It’s quite a challenge, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an alternative right now…

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