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| Politics, PR and hack philosophy from A Guy Called Donald. But definitely no blogging. Probably. | |
29.3.06If it's Israeli elections, it must be time for some tired anti-PR clichesThough he doesn't trot out the worst fallacy, that proportional representation necessarily equals Israeli proportional representation, Michael White's latest still trades in the usual. Among them:...the Blair government got elected on just 36% of a 61% turnout. Pretty unattractive, I agree. But I suspect there has been little public outcry beyond the usual PR suspects because the electorate, those who voted and those who chose to stay away, got roughly what they wanted: a Labour government with its wings clipped, extra seats for the Lib Dems, and a rude two fingers to the unreconstructed Tories. This was the BBC line at the time, too. But short of being a psephologically-minded deity, or having access to some new polling data, I'm not sure how anyone could actually know this to be true. In fact, considering that only 22% voted Labour, the precise opposite seems more likely. What he means is that this outcome was what he wanted. The BeebGraun old guard: NuLabber apologists to the death. 28.3.064GW interactiveRight, this is the top 10, in the right order: China, Russia, North Korea, Vietnam, South Korea, Ukraine, India, Taiwan, Turkey, Iran. The US is at 12, with less than a third of Vietnam. We don't make the top 20.It's nothing to do with tuneful national anthems. Guesses in the comments? I'll give you the answer tomorrow. UPDATE: C'mon, lurkers. Place your bets. I'm gonna dish the answer after lunch. UPDATE 2: Right, just scoffed a goose egg mushroom omlette. Picked up the eggs from one of those places that put signs by the roadside in Somerset. Very nice, too, and still no sign of H5N1 symptoms. The answer: a flagon of ale to Charlie for getting so close. It's the top 10 estimated worldwide military firearms arsenals. The US has about 3 million (behind Germany), Ukraine 7 million (most left as the USSR disintegrated), Vietnam almost 10 million (many left when the ARVN imploded), and the rest's obvious. For much more on this kind of thing, this is a good place to start. I can recommend a good book or two: email me if you're interested. Comment is usually vacuousA propos of this:The New York Times... is a neo-Leninist sheet edited by yesterday's flower children who are committed to Anglodemotionism, and who derogate anything having to do with America's traditional values. They favor centralized power and despise all constitutional protections of federalism. They abhor the Catholic Church ( I am not a Catholic ) and extol homosexual marriage, affirmative action, mass immigration, "hate crime" laws, and hanker after a sort of radical egalitarianism and therapeutic collectivism of the kind that currently is enfeebling, indeed destroying, old Europe. From the comments, obviously. I bet he's a wonderful dinner-party guest. I can think of a couple of people I'd really love to sit him next to. It was only a matter of time before CiF bottomed out. With a previous Livingstone thread on the Reubens becoming "You're a Zionist", "No, you're an Islamofascist" within about, ooh, ten seconds, and the predictable Koranic experts in the comments to this slurry, CiF has already graduated into the world of almost-proper blogdom. Stinks down here, doesn't it? 23.3.06Chip, chip, chipThe canary isn't just choking, he's being buggered by jackbooted Hobbesians with no sense of their own history, and even less of what government is actually for, or whence they get their licence to lord it over the rest of us.Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Rosa Luxemburg Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the colour of their skin. Wendell Wilkie The liberty of the subject should be taken away, not by the act of a politician but by a court of law. Tony Blair, 1994 [W]hen [I] listen to liberal London, [I] think they are pathetic. Charles Clarke Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult Charles Clarke 22.3.06Neil, oh, NeilRight, a fiver for the first person to spot some semi-detached nut blaming the coming mutated-H5N1 pandemic on "the global capitalist system that ensures the poor still have to sleep with chickens under the bed", while of course failing to spot that without capitalism (as any good Marxist knows) we'd all be sleeping with the poultry. My RSS aggregator is pointed right at Neil Clark:New world order democracy says voters can vote for any governments they like so long as they are neo-liberal and pro-American. If electorates do "vote the wrong way" and elect governments not to the empire's liking, they can be pretty sure what to expect. ... Now its Belarus' turn to be labelled "undemocratic" for not voting for the candidate who would have handed the country on a plate to Western capital. Truly the David Icke of political commentary. Way. Beyond. Parody. 21.3.06This soritical Blair governmentRevealed: Blair's secret role in loans scandal:Evidence linking Tony Blair personally to the £14 million "loans for peerages" scandal engulfing Labour can be revealed today. The Rod Aldridge loan should bring Blair down: Today it was revealed that Rod Aldridge "loaned" Labour £1 million. Naturally enough, this was "in a private capacity". But come on... The chairman of a company whose entire success relies on big government contracts (funded by the taxpayer, lest we forget) bungs the government a million quid out of his own pocket (a million quid earned thanks to the big government contracts funded by the taxpayer and other, private sector contracts earned in part thanks to its high-profile government links) and there's nothing dodgy going on? The antidote has turned poison. This vacuous NuLabour project hoisted by its own hypocritical petard. Perhaps Blair, faced with the essentially vague accusation of sleaze, is relying on the sorites defence: no one grain of wheat makes the difference between there being and not being a heap of wheat. Given that one grain of wheat doesn't make a heap, it follows that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it seems that no amount of wheat can make a heap: a paradox that stumps the smartest logicians. So, one paltry Ecclestone doesn't make for corrupt government. Neither does a Hinduja. Neither do a couple of careless signatures over the pains au chocolat. Neither does a little help for your friends. Nor a good day to bury bad news. Nor a few convenient gaps in the memory. And so on. And on. And on. Not one adds up to corruption, so how can two, or three, or four? But there's a problem with the sorites paradox: at some point there's an unmistakeable heap of wheat, and this one's long gone rancid. Like everything else in Blairworld, the puny case for the defence is just semantics. Update 22/3: As if by magic, the sorites defence appears. 20.3.06Liberal and (lapsed?) leftist seeks labelIn a coincidental follow-up to a recent conversation, my old friend Lenin, in the comments here, explains the imperative for supporting Iraqi resistance:...regarding Iraq, what is the alternative to supporting the Iraqi resistance movement? Regarding Palestine, what is the alternative to supporting the armed struggle, including that of Hamas? ...such a stance [might be] Manichean, but [what's] the alternative. Curiously, I find myself following the logic. It's precisely that I used in Central America in the 1980s/90s. I supported the Sandinistas: what was the actually-existing alternative? I supported the FMLN: what was the realistic alternative? Coming an M16's muzzle-length away from a Guatemalan army death squad outside Xela, saved by the foreign pasaporte, did little to change my geopolitical mind. And let's forward-wind to the twenty-first century. I'll (critically) support Chavez, though he's an illiberal thug. What's the alternative? But when it comes to Iraq, and especially to Sadr and his Sunni analogues (the actually-existing alternative), I'll demur. Perhaps this makes me a (liberal) Third Campist, but certainly not a fence-sitter. I unequivocally hope the Americans and their imperialist allies triumph in Iraq. I'll qualify that: such support needn't be uncritical, purblind, lacking in discrimination or sense. Lenin's logic leads to a different conclusion, simply by asking a slightly different question. Not how best to oppose US/European neo-imperialism? But what outcome, on balance, whether intended or not, is likely to produce the best result for the largest part of this group of people? And that is a (temporary, perhaps) triumph for the forces of capitalist expansionism. Not an abstract counterposition between an idealised, idealist, imaginary subject and the actual situation in which conflicting forces contend, ... leavened with a teleological faith in the emancipatory power of late capitalism, but an empirical judgement based on two centuries of capitalism over blind revolutionary sentimentality. |
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