Words of wisdom from Ken MacLeod, in the aftermath of what appears to be home-grown suicide bombers.
I can’t say strongly enough that verbally or physically attacking the communities the suspects came from is exactly the wrong way to go. The police and politicians have held that line. It’s too much to hope that all sections of the press will. That line must hold. Otherwise we are looking into the abyss, and the abyss is looking right back.
There’s really nothing else I can add.
More names to add to the vile scum such as George Galloway and Nick Griffin who are exploiting the terrible tragedy for political ends. Some of the presenters and guests on Rupert Murdoch’s pro-Bush propaganda organ Fox News.
This is what their talking heads had to say.
KILMEADE: And he [British Prime Minister Tony Blair] made the statement, clearly shaken, but clearly determined. This is his second address in the last hour. First to the people of London, and now at the G8 summit, where their topic Number 1 –believe it or not– was global warming, the second was African aid. And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it’s important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world’s advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.
VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.
KILMEADE: Yeah.
So it’s a good thing that 50+ people died, so that western governments will pay less attention to Africa and global warning?
This is just vile. Unlike the BNP’s brand of stupidly visceral bigotry, this is cynical, calculating evil. Somehow it seems even worse. It’s a mindset that considers innocent British civilians as expendable pawns to further the agenda of corporate elites. It makes them no better than the vile slime that planted the bombs.
I don’t know who Varney and Kilmeade are; they might just be a couple of blowhard idiots. But I wonder how much their words reflect the real thinking of some of the neo-con right?
(Link from The Ministry of Information)
In our hearts, we all knew it was inevitable something like this would happen sooner or later.
John Kovalic, who may be American but travels to London regularly, says things better than I can.
To quote an old Londoner who lived through the blitz and got caught up in the Canary Wharf explosion: “I’ve been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!”
London is a tough old town, and will bounce back just fine. Which is not in any way, shape or form to diminish what happened today. Indeed, I wish I was there now, to be with friends and family. Or just as a defiant “in your face” to the killers who did this. I recognize all the areas from the clips American television replays (and replays, and replays), and I want to be with my city while it’s hurting.
If the Luftwaffe couldn’t bring the city to it’s knees, these pathetic penny-ante cowards certainly won’t.
40-odd deaths is less than a quarter of that of the Madrid Bombings, the equivalent of about four day’s worth of road accidents. If this is the worst they can do, we’ve got off lightly.
Al-Muhajabah has this to say:
Whoever is responsible for this atrocity will face the wrath of God for the crime they have committed. He who takes a single innocent life is as though he had killed all mankind (Quran 5:32). My prayers are with the victims and their families. May God ease their pain and help them cope. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.
I also have complete comtempt for anyone who tries to use this to make political capital, such as the grandstanding clown George Galloway. Even if you do have serious misgivings about the conduct of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, now is not the time to crow “I told you so”, especially if you’re a well-known apoligist for Saddam Hussein.
Of course, this atrocity is being exploited by the racist troglodytes of the BNP and their fellow travellers to stir up communal tensions. I refuse to link to their vile website, but the content is exactly what I’d expected, with rants about ‘alien creeds’ and ‘the blood stained green crescent of death’. All this is of course a grotesque slander on the vast majority of Muslims who do not support terrorism. But I shouldn’t need to have to say that.
After being in the the country’s most marginal seat at the General Election, I’m now in the middle of this Parliament’s first byelection, in Cheadle. I’ve having to stock up on garlic and crucifixes in case I get canvassed by Michael Howard. (Would be be repelled by a Euro note brandished as a holy symbol, I wonder?)
The Tories seem to be running their campaign on the fact that their candidate, the former MP who lost the last two general elections, actually lives in the constituency rather than half-a-mile outside it. It’s easy to imagine there’s nothing else they positive can say about him. I call this the “Eddie Lopez Lives in Slough” tactic. Eddie Lopez was the Labour candidate in Slough in the 80s, unreformed Old Labour at it’s worst, who’s only selling point was that he didn’t live in Ascot. He never came close to winning. Local band Nine Steps to Ugly even took the piss by recording a song called “Eddie Lopez Lives in Slough”. That became his political epitaph.
Liberal England says, in a post about the government’s plans to extend school hours, to cater for the needs to parents with full-time jobs:
One of the great changes in British society in the past 30 years, though it is rarely commented upon, is that it now takes two full-time incomes to maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. This explains, amongst other things, why divorce is now financially ruinous for all concerned.
What I’d like to know is whether there is any consensus as to why it now takes two incomes to support a middle class lifestyle?
Is it just the the middle classes have grown as a proportion of the population at a faster rate than the economy as a whole has grown, so the ‘middle class pie’ is spread more thinly?
Has a middle class lifestyle got more expensive with things that used to considered luxuries (2 cars, foreign holidays) now considered essential?
Or have median disposable incomes actually fallen in real terms? Insert you villain here according to ideology. Is it those ‘stealth taxes’ the right wing media keep telling us about? Or is it the ‘fat cats’, hoovering up so much in inflated salaries and bonuses that it’s impacting the income of the rest of us?
I have an uncomforable feeling that I’m one of the generation that’s worse off financially than my parent’s generation.
I’m not an economist. But I’d like to know the answers to these questions.
One of the few decent blogs I’ve found from BlogExplosion, amid the sea of frothing wingnuts and vapid musings. This has to be one of the most kick-ass blog templates I’ve seen for a while. And the blog itself seems to be successful at getting up the noses of the wingnuts. And what’s Eddie’s real agenda?
My local Member of Parliament Patsy Calton, who I voted for earlier this month, has died. As reported by the BBC
Ms Calton won her seat with a majority of about 4,000 despite defeated Conservative MP Stephen Day trying to win it back.
She was unable to attend the count at Stockport Town Hall due to cancer treatment.
Liberal Democrats president Simon Hughes said: “This is a real tragedy, Patsy I’ve known for many years.
“I was born in the seat she came to represent, she had lived there for many years with her family.
“She became not just the MP for Cheadle… but she became a true community MP.
“In her last days, fighting against cancer, she refused to give in, she said ‘other people have to fight, I’m not going to give in just because I’m a politician’.”
He said there was “no greater recent model of political courage” than Ms Calton.
I knew she was seriously ill, even before the election. But her death still comes as a shock. I’ve only lived in Cheadle for a couple of years, but I gather she’d established a reputation as a very good constituency MP, who will be hard to replace.
At last some people on the right are beginning to realise that the stories of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Bagram can’t be dismissed as ‘a few rotten apples’ or ‘lies and smears by the liberal media’
Perry de Haviland of Samizdata.net says:
The Taliban is history and Al Qaeda is a mere shadow of its former self, so the question is why are US (and UK) forces still in effective control of Afghanistan? The latest example of appalling behaviour by US interrogators (who appear to have tortured a taxi cab driver to death at Bagram for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is starting to turn local opinion against the over-mightly US presence. Not only do the people responsible need to be suitably called to account a good way up the chain of command, clearly there are some serious institutional problems in sections of the US military that need to be stamped on pretty harshly.
I’ve always believe the memetic war (the battle of ideas) is far more important than the actual shooting war. If we can’t win over the hearts and minds of ordinary people in Afganistan, Iraq and other parts of the middle east, we cannot win by any means short of total war. Torturing innocent people to death, setting attack dogs on naked prisoners, or desecrating Korans are not the way to promote western values of democracy, freedom and individual rights. No matter how cathartic it might be to some idiotic middle Americans.
Personally I think the buck goes as far up the chain of command as Donald Rumsfeld himself. He’s a classic rightwing alpha-geek, which is why so many rightwing geeks worship him. He may well be a tactical genius, seeing battles as a gigantic board game. But like a lot of geeks, he’s socially clueless. He’s got no idea about winning over hearts and minds. He can’t see why the prisoner abuses will lose the war if they go on unchecked. He sees combatants as cardboard game tokens rather than flesh-and-blood people. He needs to go.
Time to annoy the samizdata.net crowd by linking to Mark Rosenfelder’s newly-revised What’s wrong with libertarianism.
Admittedly, it’s really an attack on hardcore anarcho-capitalism rather than on the entire spectrum of libertarianism thought. He explicitly excludes ‘small government conservatives’. It’s also rather focussed on American politics, even though libertoids exist in other English-speaking countries.
He does make the point that Libertarians’ claims to be “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” is a big lie.
The [american] Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There’s the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).
I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.
The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition.
Quite. I notice that British libertarians utterly loathe the socially-liberal Liberal Democrats, tend to back the socially-authoritarian Tories (the party of Ann Widdecombe), and have even been known to endorse crypto-fascist loons like the UKIP.
He gives some examples of the practical consequences of libertarian policies in practice, including the era of the robber-barons, Pinochet’s Chile (the fact that some libertarians are fans of someone known for attaching electrodes to the genitals of his political opponents speaks volumes about where their priorities lie), and post-Communist Russia.
I think he may be attacking some straw men in one or two places, but his characterisation of the attitudes of many Internet Libertarians seems to me to be pretty much on target.
Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.
First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else– love, humanity, justice.
(And let’s not forget that lurid fascination with firepower– seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government’s president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell’s site, and the Mises Institute.)
I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don’t need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don’t need a cheering section; they are– by definition– not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It’s the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.
His next point puts the boot in, but does seem an apt description of many of the trolls I run into on assorted Internet fora:
Second, it’s the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who’s read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.
Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.
Matt Sellwood has discovered the perils of speaking your mind when you’re directly involved in electoral politics.
First off, I should apologise for being out of the blogging business for almost a full month. Unfortunately, as those of you who live in Oxford East will have seen, the Liberal Democrats rather took advantage of my open approach to posting my views and thoughts on the Internet and splashed a ‘loose quotation’ from me all over their election literature. It was a sad lesson for me in the dangers that elected politicians face in trying to engage in open discussion – and I took the decision not to post anything until after May 5th, just in case the Lib Dems were lurking to selectively quote me again!
Can’t trust those geography teachers, can you?
I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more blogs by candidates, councillors and MPs in the future. What values will prevail in the collision between the honest and informal style of blogging and the current political culture of spin and image?
We’re also reached the stage nowadays where a lot of aspiring politicians might have been usenet posters; how many campaigns will be sunk because of some comment posted to the net while drunk at 1am in the morning fifteen years ago?