Tag: politics

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Blog categories…

I’m just in the process of introducing categories on the blog (you can’t see them yet, as I haven’t found or added the code to have them listed on my pages, but will do as soon as Sarda gets online and helps me out).

Now, the quandary is, do I got for big general categories (music, life, politics, cats etc) or do I go for v. specific ones (gigs, tech-talk, food, cat health, cat photos, uk politics, world politics, spirituality etc)? Not sure which way to go… I guess I should start with general ones, and then add categories as they become necessary.

Soundtrack – D’Angelo, ‘Voodoo’.

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Vanity Fair parties like it's 1975…

From Feministe, a critique of the current Vanity Fair magazine, their ‘Hollywood Issue’.

I’m not particularly well-versed in Vanity Fair’s usual output – I’ve picked it up in airports before now, only to put it down due to there being nothing in it worth reading, like almost every other magazine out there (if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to turn me into a tree loving tearful EcoMonkey of the most extreme variety, it’s magazine stands in newsagents – trees being chopped down in their millions to publish page after page of unreadable horseshit… but I digress…)

Anyway, the critique of the gender politics at work in the current issue of Vanity Fair is pretty incisive, though oddly enough it only seems to be shocking because Vanity Fair is less crass most of the time, otherwise they’d be critiquing Loaded/FHM/Maxim and all the other porn-lite that peddles the notion that a clothed woman is unworthy of being interviewed or photographed.

It’s not a new problem, it’s indicative of the relationship between women and print media for half a century, but it just seems to be so stark in that particular issue of Vanity Fair, and the critique is particularly clear (as with about half the stuff on Feministe – the other half being patchy…), worth a read.

Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’.

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Kennedy Quits

so Charles Kennedy has quit as Lib Dem leader – apparently more than half of the Lib Dem MPs thought he should go, having admitted having a drink problem on Thursday… the admission was Thursday, not the drink problem. A drink problem that only last for one day is just called ‘getting drunk’.

Anyway, I’m kind of saddened by this. I like Charles Kennedy, he’s a believable chap, and while the Lib Dem policies at the last election weren’t enough to convince me to vote for them, they are certainly the one party of ‘the big three’ that if I had to choose one, I’d go for. Certainly of the three party leaders, he’d win hands down.

That said, alcoholism is a huge monkey to carry around on your back, especially in a job as fraught with stresses as that of political party leader, so perhaps he really isn’t in a fit state to do his job. It’s a shame he wasn’t able to get it sorted earlier – after all there’s been speculation for a long time about his drinking, so you’d have thought that would have served as a warning shot across the bows…

So who’ll be up next? Menzes Campbell is deputy leader, but realistically far too old to lead them into the next General Election. Simon Hughes is party chairman, and a lovely bloke, but perhaps too nice??? Who knows. Can’t really think of anyone else in the public eye already that could do it… Mark Outon is apparently in the running, but doesn’t really command party leader respect…

let’s wait and see!

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The unfathomable mystery of American gender politics…

One of the blogs I read fairly regularly is that of Hugo Schwyzer – an american gender studies lecturer, in a college in Southern California. His blog is interesting, and his manner genial. The weird thing about it is the amount of vitriol that gets heaped on him from a group known as ‘the men’s movement’ – now, being a man, you’d have thought someone would have told me about this movement, about the need for ‘men’s rights’, but apparently I missed the memo informing men that we are somehow hard done by and feminists are out to get us… no, wait, I remember something about that, on sitcoms in the 70s. Surely the idea that feminism is about man-hating monstrous women trying to take over the world was dispensed with before the beginning of the 80s? Do people really think like that? Apparently they do.

The latest shit-storm that Hugo has blogged about doesn’t actually feature him. This time it’s Jill from Feministe – another friendly blog about feminist issues – who has taken a load of flak. Initially, it started out as some horribly insulting stuff posted about her photos on a message board for a college in New York (I think – I’ve not really been following the details that closely), but spilled over into a whole slew of personal attacks, and some really really stupid anti-feminist ranting from the goons over on the college forum.

All of which points to there still being a very definite gender-war ongoing in the states. My guess is that it’s still going on here too, I just haven’t come across it, but it reminds how fortunate I am to hang round with such a wonderfully mellow and enlightened bunch of people, but also how sheltered I am from the lunacy that is prevalent in parts of the world. A lunacy that I wouldn’t encounter at all if it wasn’t for the wonders of the global interweb highway thingie.

I’m genuinely stunned that men still see feminism as a threat, that men who don’t conform to really crass gender stereotypes are labeled as effeminate and ‘not real men’. Just bizarre. Maybe it comes from the same place as all the homophobia that seems to permeate large sections of the web. Maybe such neanderthal thinking is way more prevalent that I’d ever have given it credit for, and this is just the place where my world and its collide. It’s like when UKIP got a whole load of votes in the European elections – I realised that the general populus is considerably more stupid that I often give it credit for…

Anyway, have a read of Hugo’s blog, and Feministe – they all seem like lovely people, and not at all the people you’d think to attack in anyway… And avoid the ‘MRAs’ (I think that’s what they are called – Men’s Rights Advocates? something like that…)

I can’t imagine writing a blog that stirred up such ire – I guess I might wind up the occasional bass-fundementalist, though I haven’t even had any of those ‘you can’t do that on a bass’ emails for quite a few years… lucky me.

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So long, David

From the BBC News Site –

“Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett has resigned after a meeting with Tony Blair in Downing Street.
Mr Blunkett had been under pressure after breaking the ministerial code of conduct over paid work he took while he was out of Cabinet.”

Oh well, see ya David – will we miss you? Er, no. Blunkett has for a long while been one of the scarier members of a particularly scary cabinet. His track record as home secretary put him closer to Michael Howard as Tory home secretary than it did any Labour predecessor. His draconian pronouncements about immigration, asylum and the like were horrific to anyone with any sense of compassion for the people fleeing persecution or destitution in their country of origin. ‘Lock ’em up in camps’ says David. Er, thanks.

And now he’s gone – the catalogue of screw-ups over this ministerial code thing is a pretty huge. The scariest one was him accepting the directorship of a DNA testing company – a company that was in the line to apply for contracts with both his previous department, the home office, and his current one, the departkment of work and pensions. No conflict of interests there then. And he bought 15 grand’s worth of shares in the company… but clearly his professional conduct as a cabinet minister would never have been compromised by that. No siree.

Daft bastard – he’s screwed up (again), and is out of the cabinet (again). And I’m rather glad to see the back of him. His appt. in the early years of the Blair government was seen by most as a good thing – he had a fab leftie track record, and being blind, it meant that there was now at least some disability representation on the front bench. No enough, but there was some. But he turned out to be a mad dictator, ranting about law and order and passing all manner of laws designed to turn Britain into a police state.

It remains to be seen who takes his place at Work and Pensions – Charles Clark hasn’t done a great job at Home Secretary; again, we were hoping he’d back pedal on some of Blunkett’s more fascistic pronouncements, but sadly not… Clark was doing a better job in Education…

Soundtrack – Ralph Towner with Glen Moore, ‘Trios Solos’.

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I really don't get this…

From the BBC news site –

“Defence secretary John Reid is “keeping an open mind” about whether a World War I soldier shot for cowardice should be pardoned, the High Court has been told.”

How can someone be shot for ‘cowardice’???? Apparently the bloke in question refused to fight, was court marshaled, and then executed. The case hangs on whether or not he was shell-shocked.

I’m really really troubled by a world in which someone can be shot for choosing not to kill. I appreciate that the middle of a war is probably not the best place to decide that, but to force someone to fight seems just as barbaric as shooting people in the first place.

I don’t know what he reasoning was, or if he was actually up for a scrap but was indeed shell-shocked. Either way, the lack of a pardon now seems sick in the extreme. That his family were punished by having his pension taken away so they ended up homeless is another injustice.

I’m often amazed at how far the world has come in the last century. Even in the last 10 years. A documentary on last night charted the relationship between the emergence of pop culture in the 50s and the changing attitudes to sex, drugs and gender politics. Some of the thoughts and ideas that were common place in the 60s and 70s seem so bizarre now. Others seem quite attractive. The huge leaps forward in terms of equality for women, gay rights, racial integration etc. are counterbalanced by the way the world has been divided up by the growth of a consumer culture and a transnational business model where entire countries are turned into sweatshops. I doubt the concept of fair-trade was much of an issue back then (though apparently the Salvation Army started a fair trade match factory in London in response to the dreadful treatment of match-makers by Bryant and May in the late 1800s, paying them four times as much and changing the work to protect their health).

Some things about the modern world are frightening – gun crime, the massive rise in teenage pregnancy and STIs, etc. – but on the whole, I’d rather be here now than there then. I’m a modern at heart. I don’t want to live in world where women are oppressed, black people are enslaved and people who refuse to fight in wars are executed. Sadly, all three things still exist. There’s still work to be done.

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’ (a really really lovely album – it’s a strange world where Charlotte Church’s crap attempt at being a popstar results in top 10 hits, but Cathy hasn’t got a deal… Buy this, and feel smug that you’re one of the chosen.)

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Religion…

The problem of religion.

Jyoti’s ever marvellous and provocative blog has a huge rant on it about the place of religion in politics. His contention is that religion is irrational and bad things are done in the name of God, and has no place being used to define political life…

The weird thing is that, as a believer, I at least partly agree. Not that all spiritual belief is irrational (clearly, that would be a weird thought for someone who aligns them self with the christian faith), but that the use of one’s faith to solely define one’s view of the world can end up in a very totalitarian view of the world.

This paragraph of Jyoti’s is interesting –

I’m an atheist. More than that, I’m a radical, materialist, proselytising atheist. That means that not only am I opposed to Christianity as an irrational pile of poop, I’m also against Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, Judaism, Scientology, spiritualism, astrology and, of course, Islam. (I’m obviously not anti-religious people. Some of my best friends are believers, honest guv! Love the believer, abhor the belief, I say.)

Now, the last sentence is clearly an irony, but the strength of opinion expressed in the first half is very close to what I hear from devout thinking people of faith. It’s clearly not raving madness, but it is dogmatic to a slightly scary level.

One of the wonders of post-modernity is that we are now wrestling with the definitions of truth can something be ‘factual’ by untrue, or vice versa? Can two seemingly contradictory accounts of The Way Things Are both be true. We’re now able to wrestle with the concept of abstracting truth from its linguistic strictures, from it’s cultural contexts and examine things for what they point to as much as what they state. We can embrace the concepts of ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ truth, with infinite truth being essentially unknowable but anything that points to or describes in any way the infinite truth is ‘finite’ truth.

The deconstructionists told us that all language is a metaphor, that words resonate with other words, and within the context of the semantic buildings in which we bring them to life – so the word ‘dad’, on the surface means ‘the guy who impregnated your mother to cause you to be born’ but is on a deeper level going to mean so many different things to different people based on their experiences of father-figures.

However, we still have the tools of history, or literary criticism, of science and biology that can act as boundaries and sign-posts for our discussions, as bridges between our experience and the posited notions of the various religious traditions. So, when Jyoti says,

I don’t believe the stories about Jesus, Thor, Isis, Satan, Apollo, Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, Spiderman or The Great Pumpkin. They’re all lovely stories, and I appreciate the wit and wisdom of the writers but are they true? No. They’re mostly stories written by men to help shape their societies and keep the majority of ordinary people, especially women, oppressed. Apart from Spiderman, of course, that’s very egalitarian.

there’s some pulling apart that needs to take place – which of those stories collapse under scrutiny, and how? What is being brought to bear to cause them to collapse, and is what’s driving that motivation itself substantial

Would you want to live in a country under Scientological Law? Or Odin’s Law? Does either proposition sound like a reasonable way to frame a civilised country’s legal and social system? No? So why does it make sense to run a country according to Christian or Muslim myths? They’re no less ridiculous, random and invented.

Let’s me spell this out: the problem isn’t with fundamentalist Islam or right-wing US Christians or huge churches run by ex-Hitler Youth members.

It’s with religion itself

Enshrining irrationality at the heart of our societies, validating myths and letting them define our human rights is an act of supreme idiocy. We all have the right to live, to love and pursue our dreams and no-one should be able to deprive us of those rights by waving a crumbling sheaf of lies in our faces.

He then goes on to present two stories of people be tortured and killed in the name of religion, and comments –

That news story is from June 2005. That’s what happens when people believe 2000-year-old superstitions to be literal truth.

Look at the Muslim terrorist attacks on Britain and America. Look at the God-steered response by Bush. That’s what happens when old men hear their God’s whispering in their ears.

If religion had its way, we’d all still be cowering in caves, blinking fearfully at the ghosts and goblins in the darkness.

We need to step forward into the light of reason, to embrace the hard truths of our mortality and unimportance rather than the comforting bedtime stories about gods and everlasting life.

That means we must oppose the irrational whoever promotes it and whatever colour their skin happens to be.

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So this is meant to change my mind about Smoking

So the pro-smoking lobby have got David Hockney on side? He’s apparently been making a noise at the Labour party conference about the right to smoke in pubs –

“You cannot have a smoke free bohemia. Without a bohemia you pay a heavy price,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Picasso smoked until he was about 98 and so did Matisse.” – right, and so did a fair few other people. However, millions more are dying across the world of smoking related illnesses. Most of them smoke, some of them don’t. Very few of them would smoke again if they were given the chance to start over. And as for a smoke-free bohemia – I thought artists were supposed to be forward thinking, blue-sky-people, envisaging the world that could be. etc. etc. Clearly Hockney is sold on some cliched view of Bohemia as Paris in the early 20th Century. You might as well say you can’t have a Bohemia without huge amounts of dog shit on all the streets – that’s been a feature of Paris for a long time as well…

Clearly Hockney has no idea what he’s talking about – no medical training, no background in social theory. He’s a painter (quite a good one). This quote from the article is telling –

Mr Hockney was taken to Brighton by Forest, a pro-smoking lobby group funded by cigarette makers. At a packed meeting he attacked the government’s plans alongside Joe Jackson, the 80s singer, and the chef Antony Worrall-Thompson.

Right, and what other areas of my life are going to be informed by the three stooges? What on earth have Joe Jackson and Worrall Thompson got to do with anything? I quite like Joe Jackson’s music (recorded, not live), but I’m not about to take tips from him about anything, least of all public policy. Forest are guilty of the most ludicrous of PR faux-pas. Three minor league celebs with no qualification to talk on any subject other than their speciality of art, music or food, pontificating about the right to smoke – PISS OFF, CRAP CELEBS! Nobody cares.

Smoking is rubbish – pointless, damaging, anti-social and expensive. The industry is corrupt beyond belief (it always astounds me when I meet leftie eco-monkeys who smoke – how on earth do they square that one???) and the health effects are a HUGE and pointless burden on the NHS.

Hockney’s comment on this is telling –

Did the artist worry about being hijacked by the tobacco manufacturers? ” No,” he quipped.

“I am glad of the tobacco manufacturers. I am a big customer of theirs. They make a good vegetarian product.”

So no concern about the other environmental effects of the tobacco industry, the human cost, the aggressive marketing to the world’s poorest nations, the covering up of health reports. So long as it’s ‘veggie’. You dickhead.

If I smoked, I’d give up after hearing that, for fear of being associated with a moron like Hockney. and If I owned one of his paintings, I’d probably chop it into 20,000 pieces and sell them.

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A picture speaks a thousand words…

Picture nabbed from Jyoti’s blog.

Yup, that’s an old bloke – Walter Wolfgang, 82 years old, who came to England as a Jew persecuted under the Nazis. At the Labour Party conference, he was bodily thrown out for shouting ‘nonsense’ during Jack Straw’s (Jack Boot?) speech on Iraq.

So not only are the Govt still trying to defend the disaster in Iraq, they are throwing out old men for disagreeing – he wasn’t being threatening or rowdy, or winding up ready throw a fresh dog turd at Straw (oh, that he had!), he just disagreed. But no, under New Labour such things are not allowed. And what’s more, he was prevented from re-entering the hall under the new Anti-Terror Laws!! WTF?? Since when was ‘nonsense’ hate-speech, or incitement to blow shit up, or whatever?

Blair’s half-arsed apology this morning was an embarrassment – a pathetic attempt to shrug off common assault taking place in the name of his party stifling dissent.

This quote from the Guardian sums up the government’s response

Returning to the scene today, Mr Wolfgang received a round of applause from both the conference floor and from party members standing outside. However, the two cabinet ministers on stage at the time, Lord Falconer and David Miliband, refused to join in.

Of course they refused – how could they applaud the exposing of a deeply flawed spin-machine-decision? They’d probably get thrown out of the cabinet.

in contrast, “Later, in his closing speech to conference, the defence secretary, John Reid, apologised to Mr Wolfgang with the prime minister applauding from the stage.” – that’s right, applaud the controlled written apology, worded to try and make light of the whole thing. But don’t join in with the rank and file plebs as they show support for an old man assaulted by hired goons.

How long are the labour party members going to put up with this?? The general public in Britain are on the whole way too apathetic to do anything about it on a national level, but those inside the Labour party who’ve seen their beloved institution stolen out from under them and replaced with some kind off hybrid ‘psuedo-compassionate Thatcherism’. It’s hideous, it’s tragic and it’s wrong.

The berk who man-handled Walter should be tried for assault, as should whoever decided on that as a policy. Wouldn’t it be great to have seen a mass walkout in protest? You bet your arse if it had happened in France that’s what they’d have done.

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"Vague News' from the Labour party conference

From the BBC news site, once again –

Charles Clarke has vowed to “eliminate” anti-social behaviour and disrespect in society by the time of the next general election “whenever it comes”.

Huh? How can anyone say something like that? What’s he going to do, make being drunk a capital offence? Enact a cull of people deemed to be unfit to live in the country by the government? And what constitutes disrespect?

Apparently the context was to do with eliminating disrespect so bigotry can’t be used by extremists as a weapon in elections – so he tags on some nonsense about extremists to try and add gravitas to his vague and ridiculous pronouncements.

Any notion of ‘reinforcing a culture of respect’ in the current climate is doomed to fail – nobody trusts the government, we’re terrified of the anti-terrorism laws, the prime minister is a proven liar and supporter of illegal military action, the PFI schemes on education and health are ruining public services, teachers feel undermined, doctors overworked, GM food is being pushed along despite zero public demand… How on earth are they going to demonstrate anything worthy of respect?

There definitely needs to be a change somewhere along the line, but the current Government are part of the problem not part of the solution. It’s fucking disrespectful to lie to the nation and kill thousands of Iraqis.

Put your own house in order.

Soundtrack – Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’.

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