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Yet anothe reason why I’m glad I don’t live in America. The local police act like a bunch of jackbooted thugs and conduct an armed drugs raid on a high school, apparently with full support of the school administrator. The raid terrorised more than a thousand school pupils and found no drugs.

So there were allegations of drug dealing at the school? Surely there are more effective ways of dealing with this than lashing out in a way that terrorises guilty and innocent alike.

Heads deserve to roll over this.

My experiences of (much milder) collective punishments at School never left me with any greater respect for authority, or even anger at the miscreants that provoked the punishments. All that was left was a burning sense of injustice, and a belief that the teacher in question was a fascist idiot.

The only good it did was to teach me that collective punishment is always wrong, whether it’s carried out by some frustrated Welsh economics teacher, or by Ariel Sharon.

Slacktivist gives us a tour of surreal worldview of the all American heresy of Millenial Dispensationalism, through the pages of the truly dreadful Left Behind books. Here Slacktivist concludes that they’re just not creepy enough.

Left Behind, despite its religious trappings, is part of a larger genre of earth-shattering apocalyptic tales. Contrast the opening chapters of LB with the early pages of Stephen King’s The Stand, which offers a similar sweeping epic tale of the end of the world.

King’s story is genuinely frightening. L&J’s is not. This is, of course, partly because Stephen King is a better stylist. But the main difference is not King’s skill as a storyteller, but his objective. When you read The Stand, he wants you to imagine this is happening to you.

The tone and objective of LB, instead, asks you to imagine this happening to someone else. The reader has no purchase, no foothold in the story — and thus no reason to find it personally unsettling.

L&J’s approach divides their readers into two categories. You can, like the authors, consider yourself among the departed, looking on these wooden characters with a gloating scorn. Or else you must be, like these characters, the object of that scorn. Either way, there’s little room for the empathy necessary to make such stories truly frightening.

What I find truly frightening is that millions of otherwise sane Americans apparently believe this nonsense. Not only that, but this heresy, thanks to the political power of the Religious Right, is influencing American policy in the Middle East.

Now they’ve dumped the rather hopeless IDS, it looks like Michael “Something of the Night” Howard is going to be the next Tory leader. I’m inclined to interpret this as meaning they’ve abandoned all hope of winning the next election, but want to maximise their core rightwing support in order to avoid complete annihilation. They’ve decided to become the Nasty Party again, targetting the Daily Mail readers. It raises the spectre of him and David Blunkett trying to outbid one another over who can be the most authoritarian and illiberal.

Tom Coates of Plastibag.org has this to say:

Instead of being able to view the Conservative party as representing an alternative – perhaps more market / efficiency driven – approach to running the country, appointing Michael Howard is no more or less than running up the Conservative Skull and Crossbones again and setting sail for the easy targets of cheap political swag.

This leaves the Liberal Democrats as the only party with a socially liberal agenda. Charles Kennedy should be very pleased with this .

Please tell me that this is all tinfoil hat paranoia. I’m beginning to worry that it’s not, and there really might be some dark times ahead.

Ken MacLoed links to this article about the profoudly antidemocratic beliefs of Leo Strauss, the ideological guru many of the Bush regime’s neocons.

The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.

Ken MacLoed himself says:

Strauss warned the elite that they should dissemble, because if the truth about their views and aims came out they would face the persecution of the masses. Let us hope he was right. Witch-hunts, purges and show trials are essential weapons of democracy: witch-hunts to detect anti-democratic conspirators, purges to smoke them out of the state apparatus, and show trials to expose their crimes before the public.

Sounds worryingly Stalinist, Ken. I do hope you’re being ironic here.

Ken McLoed isn’t impressed with electronic voting in the US, a subject Jeanne D’Arc also tackles in Inside the black box. Ken has this to say:

I find the whole thing almost literally unbelievable. How the hell can a great nation hand over control of its voting, for crying out loud, to corporations? Corporations who are deeply partisan? And deeply interested in the outcome of the elections? Hello? Some of them run by people who believe in theocracy? WTF?

Touchscreen voting with no verifiable paper trail is to real voting what McJobs are to real jobs. You don’t have votes, you have McVotes.

This is something that you wouldn’t put in a science fiction novel, unless it was a blatant knock-about satire – you know, some squib about a world where Mickey Mouse runs for Governor of Florida, or Arnold Schwartznegger for Governor of California. It’s too unbelievable. A good editor would call it a plot hole.

There’s nothing quite as foolproof as the good old British paper ballots that you mark with a pencil. OK, so it’s a lot of work counting them all up, and they have to hire vast armies of experienced bank clerks to do it come election time, but surely that’s a price worth paying to have clean elections.

Of course, it may be that the rumours of rigged elections are groundless. But with these electronic machines with no paper trail, the software in then being proprietry code which won’t be revealed, and the company that makes them having close links with one party, it requires a degree of trust I simply don’t have in order to believe that elections aren’t being rigged.

I’m sure the truth will eventually come out. If there have been fraudulent elections, let’s pray that the truth comes out while those fraudulently elected are still in office.

Not that I’m saying British elections are totally free from fraud, or British politicans are uncorruptable and totally trustworthy, of course. But these dodgy touch screen systems in America are two dangerous to trust any politicians with.

Andrew of Dodgeblogium has just survived the Tory Party conference. From what he says, the prospects don’t look good for them.

The conference, as you may have read elsewhere, was rather poorly attended by all types of people. It was possible to get into the bar in the conference hotel at 2am for the first time in all my times at conference. What was most striking was the sneering delegates, staff, and hangers-on who impishly spewed bile about all but themselves. The state of play was everyone’s fault but their own. CCO and parliamentary staff drunkenly hurled abuse at those they felt did not belong, or worse, passed vile insinuations and secrets to the press. The last night, the Conference Hotel reminded me of Lord of the Flies.

….

Unless the Tory Party are very lucky and Tony Blair commits seppuku they have no chance of winning the next election. The party is heading to oblivion, and none of the Party’s apparatchiks seem to give a damn.

I’m not by any means a supporter of the Tories, opposing many of the things they stand for, but it’s still highly dangerous for any democracy to lack a credible opposition. If the Tories continue to implode, can the Liberal Democrats take their place? Or, in the most apocalyptic of scenarios, will the racist thugs in the British National Party exploit a gap in the market?

We Brits are in for some interesting times in politics in the next few years.

Madkane gets to inteview Donald Rumsfeld.

A lot of so called Christians, including George Bush, seem to believe in The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus, even though it doesn’t appear in any translation of the Bible I’ve read. (Link from Body and Soul)

A lot of people have been posting 9/11 thoughts today. Rather than post a long semi coherent essay, I’ll point you at what others have written. Start with Scott’s Thought for the day, quoting Roger Waters. Solonor says Just Remember. Read Al-Muhajabah’s words. And read the whole of the9/11 memorial poem on Body on Soul. And read my own post of a year ago today.

The War Party are saying “Never forget, Never Forgive”. These are the people that believe 9/11 was the start of a clash of civilisations, a fight to the death between the west and the Islamic world. The “Never Forgive” line sticks in my throat. I was bought up a Christian, and forgiving your enemies is a central plank of Christian believe. Christ told us to forgive our enemies for a reason. If you give into hate, the hatred will consume you and you will become what you hate.

“Forgiving” doesn’t you should not defend yourself against people that want to kill us; 9/11 told us there are fanatics out there who hate us and have no respect for human life. But we must remember they are just a hard core of fanatics. And if we have to go after them, it must always be for no other reason than self-defense. Never for revenge or a sense of “closure”.