Category: Politics

It may be boring, but someone’s got to do it.

A “tribute” to Augusto Pinochet

~ Inquisitor

“My husband was under arrest. I went to see the commander of the regiment, and he told me not to worry, that they were going to release him for Christmas, that he was a good person. I went to see him December 31, but they told me he was not being held there any more. I came home. A truckload of soldiers had just left a sealed coffin at my front door a few minutes before.”

[Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Part Three, Chapter Four ]

Good riddance to the bastard. And isn’t that video of Baroness Thatcher cosying up to Pinochet in 1998 (long after we knew what he’d been up to) just sickening?

The Guardian’s obituary, the report above, the various Wikipedia articles on Pinochet’s favoured methods of disposal of troublesome opponents and these tables provide the necessary context to appreciate this statement. Good thing we aren’t supporting any mass-murdering dictators anymore.

[I was intending on putting this little tribute to Maggie’s own favourite dictator up the second I heard of his death, but my net connection was down over the whole weekend. Oh well, just as apppropriate now.]

“Britishness” at its “best”

~ Inquisitor

Vandalising a WW2 memorial with swastikas and the SS symbol (as well as spraying what I can only assume from the context was JEWS OUT over a few nearby premises.) Wow, they really must love our country, musn’t they? You have to wonder what goes through British Nazis’ minds; it must be some form of obtuse doublethink.

And then there was the Nick Griffin/Mark Collett decision. Collett at least deserves prosecution for his part in maintaining the R*dw*tch hitlist (name starred out for obvious Google-related reasons), and this fact – given by both Channel Four’s Young, Nazi and Proud and the BBC Secret Agent programme – has never been capitalised upon despite R*dw*tch being run by an actual bona fide terrorist group and having caused many violent attacks against those listed on it. The fact that he wasn’t even charged over that is somewhat infuriating.

Admittedly, this government has done naff all against the various ALF/ELF/SHAC hitlists, anti-abortion hitlists, Christian Voice’s BBC hitlist and various others – they seem just not to care. Even the US has done more – these sites were ruled illegal by the Planned Parenthood/ACLA decision over the “Nuremberg Files” – so it’s not like the Home Office couldn’t get it shut down if it wanted to. Why it doesn’t, much like why it doesn’t go after the animal rights versions that cost millions to the taxpayer, is beyond me.

Now, I usually take a free speech position; scumbags are there to be refuted and ignored, not jailed. But hitlists are not valid free speech; they are threats against people and property which the site owners obviously intend to be acted on (in the way the Nuremberg Files greyed and scored out dead abortion doctors, for instance.) They contain information which is not meant to be public, sometimes even things like credit card numbers.

It’s basically terrorism – we’ll list you and you could just get a bunch of thugs wanting to stab you on your porch someday, just for saying “Nazis are bad, mmkay?”. At the very least, it’s much more of a terrorist act than some guy who has the “Attempt To Blow Something Up In A Completely Inaccurate Way Handbook” on his hard drive, which this government seems to find no problem prosecuting. There are some things it’s just impossible to get.

I’ll leave you with an obvious question drawn from the Griffin/Collett trial: since when was “we’ll show those ethnics the door” not racist, anyway?

Added: But Scaryduck does have it right on…

Daily Star ignorant; sun comes up in morning

~ Inquisitor

Courtesy Media Guardian (free registration may be required):

The Daily Star last night pulled a page that mocked Muslim law by turning the tabloid into the “Daily Fatwa” following a newsroom revolt.

Well, doesn’t sound too promising from the title; sounds suspiciously like someone’s trying to be funny and failing miserably. Any details?

The page included a “Page 3 burqa babes special” showing a woman in a niqab, as part of a feature billed as “How your favourite paper would look under Muslim law”.

The page also contained a blank editorial stamped with the words “censored” and “Allah is great” while across the top of the page were the words “no news no goss no fun”.

A competition told readers to “Burn a flag and win a Corsa”, while a picture of the US president, George Bush, was accompanied by a caption “death to infidels”.

Oh dear. Not going into the complexities of Islamic law, but it does vary heavily based on religious interpretation; viz-a-viz the differences between Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at one end and the UAE on the other. Yesterday’s Guardian had a fine article in G2 by Zaiba Malik, who wore the niqab (Taliban-style one-fit full-cover garment) for the day, experienced the usual racism and despite trying hard didn’t find anyone else wearing it; she points out Quranic verses defending her non-niqab position.

One can safely surmise that whoever did write the Star article was, at the very least, a total fool, but glad to see that Star journos had the sense to use the union to right the wrong. It sounds very much like poor inaccurate stereotyping of the sort that simply pisses people off and gladdens the hearts of racists and other idiots. There are many valid reasons to criticise fundamentalist Islam, many of them the same as the reasons I criticise fundamentalist Christianity, but these aren’t them.

A rather oblivious howler

~ Inquisitor

Simon Jenkins doing a “Damn those uppity scientists, having their profession destroyed by shitty “with it” GCSEs and chronic underfunding and having the cheek to protest about it” piece for the Guardian (I’m sure they employ him just to piss people off):

My own science O-level included trigonometry, advanced algebra and differential calculus, and related them to physics, engineering, statics and dynamics. I can not remember any of it, nor have I found the slightest use for it. I imagine more people use Latin than trigonometry.

Uh, Simon, quite a lot of people use trig – to take an appropriate example, if you’re pointing missile A at WMD facility B you’re going to need to work out what bloody angle it needs to point in. Is that a howler or what?

It’s a totally useless article on an interesting debate: as someone studying for a science degree entirely due to excellent teachers in high school, although in the much less compromised Scottish system (where combined science splits into chem/physics/biology at GCSE-equivalent rather than at A-level equivalent), I feel that people should have more opportunities to encounter science at school, whether segmented or not. At the same time, this science GCSE sounds terrible: whether it will actually be any good when taught is a different matter, but it doesn’t sound like it’s there to lay down the basics as a good intro science course should do. Shame, huh?

Incredibly, even the cesspool that is Comment is Free manages to produce an interesting comment discussion, proving that even it can be redeemable sometimes. And this is the kind of thing that Ben Goldacre usually has for lunch; if only the Guardian let him write more often.

Your privacy diminished, again

~ Inquisitor

So we’ve just given in to the American demands for flight data.

Now, I can just about see why they’d want to know the names of people coming into their country, but they get that anyway when they look at your passport, along with DOB, a photograph of you, and currently biometrics of you as well. Why on earth they need to know whether you ate the fish or the chicken, or your credit card number, on the other hand… Isn’t that just overkill?

Panic on the check-in at Heathrow

~ Inquisitor

What on earth is going on? Here we have John Reid making one of his regular “freedom can get tae f***” speeches while obviously knowing what’s going on in the background, a “terrorist plot” allegedly foiled by the security services, and thus the introduction of yet another kneejerk “security” feature that seems to be designed to make people’s lives hell whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop anything bad getting on the plane.

(I mean, explosives getting set off by an iPod? The amount of effort needed to get the battery out of one of those things would make any terrorist attack using one about as effective as Richard Reid’s shoebomb. Maybe a mobile, but that would take time to set up too – and would be just as effective in the hold.)

What’s amazing is that these ‘security’ additions haven’t been thought about at all: instead they’ve just gone for a blanket ban. If you’re facing a threat from “liquid explosives”, (although the current Net rumour is that it was a production-of-HCN chemical reaction designed to incapacitate the entire aircraft) you don’t need to ban laptops, MP3 players, cosmetics or, of course, any and all reading material. Instead, you just have to force people to hand over their bottles of “water”.

Which idiot civil servant thought that banning (or rather, not allowing) reading material was a brilliant idea, and how much of an idiot does John Reid have to be for forcing it through? It’s a tell-tale sign that all that’s going on is a serious kneejerk reaction of the type that does nothing to improve the safety of British citizens. Spending (say) 24 hours on a flight to Australia with young kids, no reading material, no games consoles, nothing other than ludicrously priced airline mineral water is not going to be fun for those families who have to go through with it, or anyone else on the aircraft.

I was close to the weight limit for check-in baggage when I left Britain for Germany at the beginning of July. I return at the beginning of September. If I have to put all my books and my laptop in check-in (along with my laptop’s backup drive, AC adaptor and restore discs, wonderful, no chance of anything going wrong there oh no), it’ll probably take it over Easyjet’s 20kg limit and I’ll get charged oversize baggage – no-one is waiving the fee, because they don’t have to. Worse than that, I’m going to be stuck in Berlin SXF for a long time with absolutely nothing to do, followed by being stuck on a two hour flight to Glasgow with absolutely nothing to do other than read Easyjet’s pathetic in-flight magazine, followed by hoping beyond hope that my bag comes through unharmed with my laptop intact. Don’t know about you, but I’m dreading it.

BBC Have Your Say seems to think that we should blame the terrorists for all the disruption and be thankful that we weren’t blown up, since obviously if we were allowed books some terrorist might find a way to break a window with a bound Qu’ran or whatever. If the plot was real, then I’m fine with the cancellations and the removal of water bottles et al; however, I won’t blame currently hypothetical “terrorists” for what British airline passengers are suffering right now. I will blame John Reid and BAA for being unmeasurably stupid, for instead of thinking about what was necessary to protect us they simply chose to follow the TSA-style kneejerk “Oh my god, let’s ban everything!” overreaction.

And this is his claim to be deputy leader? Pathetic.

If you liked this rant, take a look at Europhobia, where as always Nosemonkey lays it out in the best written of terms.

Music choices of the Commons

~ Inquisitor

According to the British Library (via the Guardian), the top favourite album of British MPs is Led Zeppelin II.

Not actually a bad choice, to be honest – and a cross-party choice, probably one of very few things Damien Green (Tory immigration shadow) and Lembit Opik agree on. There’s some amusement in there: Mark Oaten’s choice was the Human League’s Dare! (I’m saying nothing – I like it a lot myself), Michael Howard went for the White Album, Greg Pope went for Never Mind The Bollocks, and Galloway picked Blood On The Tracks. How so very appropriate.

When even Tory MPs like Zeppelin, rock’s very own Satanic scapegoat until Black Sabbath came along, we know that rock has truly entered and capitulated the establishment. Does this matter? Probably not – MPs will always be a bit remote by nature, and surveys like this always provide a bit of amusement.

But hey, it’s always nice to know.

The day in stupidity

~ Inquisitor

Bobby Gillespie has apparently been beaten up in Madrid. Probably wasn’t because of the Scream’s new album – he has a tendency to mouth off extremely stupid things about world politics, especially Israel/Palestine – but it should have been, ’cause it’s terrible. Shame, really, I like XTRMNTR a lot (despite the stupid politics) and wish they’d do more in the same vein.

And also in stupid politics, Bush has confounded even the harshest of critics’ expectations with his truly awe-inspiring CCTV-monitored conversation with Blair, who doesn’t exactly distinguish himself either. I mean, “Yo Blair“? Come on, this is the leader of the free world we’re talking about here and he sounds like he’s just got his first Myspace profile.

Much of the media are, like the sheep that they are, focusing on the fact that Bush refers to the Israel/Lebanon situation using the word “shit”, which is really the least interesting thing about the transcript (a better translated, but incomplete version is on the BBC website) – in fact, more interesting is that he refers to it as “ironic”, which indicates a complete lack of understanding of what irony is. The conversation does indicate that Bush has some kind of control, but in a very “folksy” and unprofessional way; it also shows his complete dislike for all things “ceasefire”, unsurprisingly.

It’s a must see document, mainly because we shouldn’t be seeing it – although all professional politicians are supposedly trained to treat mics as live at all times, so who knows why it them so long to turn it off? Oh well, it’s one of the few times that we actually get to see the real, un-stage-managed, Special Relationship, and for that we must be thankful to whoever left the mic on.

Scary people

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Because Israel and Lebanon are hurling threats and bombs at each other, it must be APOCALYPSE TIME! At least according to denizens of the Christian fundamentalist Rapture Ready messageboard.

Choice quote:

I am excited beyond words that the struggle of this life may be over soon and I can finally be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

You know this is a bit embarrassing for them because when the link to the thread started spreading among the US lefty blogosphere, the board killed it off. Gee, wonder why? It exposes what the Christian right really think about world events – as a sort of paranoiac, list-making exercise in misguided, greedy self-confidence. Everything must be linked in God’s glorious plan, after all, no matter how awful or screwed up it may seem to the rest of us.

And don’t forget, we’re looking here right at the percentage of the US population who’ll still vote for Bush. We’re looking here, possibly, at Bush. They have their hand on the Bomb, and they hope every day for Armageddon. Doesn’t that just scare the shit out of you?

(via: Pharyngula, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion.)

Good news, and follow-ups

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

In the good news, Jim Davidson has been declared bankrupt because he won’t pay his tax bill (serves him right for living in Dubai, not to mention being a racist, sexist little shit).

If you delve deep into the BBC Europe site, however, you find some much worse news relating to the League of Polish Families (UKIP’s bunk-mates in the European Parliament), a seriously dodgy ultra-ultra-Catholic political party which has an unfortunately large role in the current Polish government. One of the party’s founders said the following at a Europarl commemoration of 70 years since the Spanish Civil War:

Thanks to the Spanish army and Franco the communist attack on Catholic Spain was thwarted. The presence of such people in European politics as Franco guaranteed the maintenance of traditional values in Europe and we lack such statesmen today. Christian Europe is losing against atheistic socialists today and this has to change.

[BBC News, “Europe diary: Franco and Finland”]

Wow! And he has the cheek to call other people “revisionists”. Those people who Franco made disappear would probably differ on that one, but hey. “Atheistic socialists”? Give me a break.

One would suspect Jesus wouldn’t have appealed much to him.