By one means or another, what is being avoided here is that Anders Breivik's politics were shaped not by the fact of immigration, nor by jihadism, nor by any actually existing Muslims, but by ideas beginning in the mainstream right and radiating out to the far right.

correct.

here.

earlier this year the always exceptional Graeme made a couple of posts about the ideology of craft beer (part one here, two).

you should read both the posts in full, certainly if you've ever drank a beer and enjoyed it, or, if, like me and some of my mates, you know a bit about the stuff.

Graeme started to hit on some - you might say - peculiarities in the north American craft brewing scene (what the UK calls micro-breweries, or independent brewing, not the giant conglomerates pumping out the same carbonated lager that corners most of the global suds market).

if you've ever drank a few American (or Canadian) craft brews, you'll know a lot of their brewers often enjoy really hopping up their beers (for a rather bitter taste), and a lot of their brewers produce some powerfully knock-out stuff, with a very high alcohol content (by beer standards; which is i guess one in the eye against the Python-initiated joke that American beer is like making love in a canoe, fucking close to water).

Graeme's first post - writing from Montreal, though he has lived in the UK and knows his beer onions to say the very least (though i cannot vouch for terms and conditions at micro-breweries in the UK, but am interested in a discussion of the north American scene on its own merits) - discussed this, and more (it really is worth your while reading them), then he let fly in the second post even more widely

(sample end-quote: Things that I plan on looking at further in depth over the coming weeks, months, years:

-The way in which craft beer is percieved to be about more than just what's in the glass or bottle: when you drink craft beer you're making a political/ethical choice. I'm going to critically examine that notion.
[...]
Craft beer and labour. Craft beer hearkens back to an earlier time before the advent of megabreweries, but completely overlooks the role that trade unionism and labour radicalism had in the brewing industry. We're looking at a neutered version of history, and one that in particular benefits the bosses. What sort of political/ethical choice are we making by drinking craft beer when the workers at those breweries are making far less (ie close to half as much) as workers at the unionised megabreweries?

-Whatever else comes to mind. I'm sure there will be plenty to write and think about.)

i hope he carries on.

this is a particularly pointless vanity post (so like any post here) as i have nothing to add to what Graeme is saying in general (his typically thoughtful points are starting to say it all as he teases out what he means), except i really just wanted to blurt about the hopping in some American brews (i've drank plenty of Canadian craft down the years, but have spent far more time in the USA, so i will restrict my necessarily generalising remarks to the States), and the strength, so, more a 'me too' just on the styles of the beer itself, as opposed to all the extra structural issues.

now, we all know that the USA is one of the great beer nations, Bell's Brewery near Kalamazoo, Michigan, is for instance (just to restrict myself to one example) in my view one of the greatest breweries on earth.

one could go on.

Portland, Oregon is up there with Munich in terms of breweries per head of population, if not more (if you like food, coffee, the outdoors, or beer, you'd like Portland), and the Pacific Northwest in general is very good for beer, Denver has a reputation, the Bay Area's steam beer (the only original indigenous American beer style AFAIK) has its fans, Delaware's Dogfish Head brewery is very fashionable among ale drinkers in the UK these days, my British mates that drink beer all know i'm a huge fan of Chicago's Goose Island brewery, and so on, these all illustrate its strength in beery depth.

Graeme already mentioned it once, but whilst American craft brewers have been very strong on high alcohol by volume brews such as imperial stouts, or India Pale Ales, down the years, they haven't gone in for session beers so much (as understood in the UK, lower strength, usually bitter ales, though often not very 'bitter' in taste, certainly not compared to some of the scoops you get across the pond).

presumably this may be because the relatively low-strength lagers that are the mainstay of every American street-corner local bar, your Millers and Old Styles and Buds and what have you, are the true working man's session beer (anyone who's drank in a blue collar bar in the States will marvel at the keg Guinness and the cheap pitcher deals, and the fact that in some places, a bit like in Irish villages where the pub of yore can double as a general store, you get a bar stuck in the middle of a pharmaceutical shop or what have you), and perhaps US craft brewers wanted to set out to do their own thing and just experiment all the way up to 11.
(interestingly, as in the UK, beer drinkers in the USA of history were at first ale people, New York two centuries ago for example was an ale town, but over the decades for various reasons that i won't go into, lager came to predominate, as it did in the UK from certainly around the 1970s onwards - my middle aged father is uncompromisingly a lager drinker only, for instance, my elderly grandfather a bitter drinker, and because my brother and i had the good fortune to grow up in an era when micro-breweries are fashionable in the UK and enjoying a renaissance, my little brother and i are bitter drinkers. well, i'll drink anything, including lager, but you get my drift.)

but the amount of times i've sank overly hoppy, strong brews (an abundance of hops means a beer will inevitably taste bitter) in the USA is too many to mention, and the amount of times i've just wanted a mildly hopped, more balanced (a beer is not just hops, malted barley is all-important too) lower strength ale of some sort instead, the same.

i appreciate everything that goes in to a high-quality American craft beer (the Old Rasputin Imperial Stout from California's North Coast Brewery is a fine, fine drink, for example), but trying for a broader range of styles and strengths would be a welcome development for American craft brewers (who may be doing this these days for all i know, it's been years since i paid attention to that area).
certainly Goose Island's pub, not far from downtown Chicago, was showcasing more diverse styles and strengths of beers the last time i was in there (as well as continuing to knock out strong, classy bottled products, such as the Belgian-style Pere Jacques).

The Southern Poverty Law Center and a coalition of other civil rights groups asked a federal judge to block Alabama’s anti-immigrant law from taking effect Sept. 1.

here.

Bruce Wayne: Targeting me won't get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight, but this is different. They've crossed a line.

Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them and hammered them to the point of desperation, and in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.

Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren't complicated, Alfred. We just need to figure out what he's after.

Alfred Pennyworth: With respect, Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man you don't fully understand either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?

Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

[...]

Bruce Wayne: The bandit, in the forest in Burma, did you catch him?

Alfred Pennyworth: Yes.

Bruce Wayne: How?

Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

fuck. me.

B'Tselem interviewed 50 Palestinian minors for the report. Many described being arrested in the middle of the night, denied access to their families or lawyers and mistreatment. Only two of the children interviewed for the report, No Minor Matter, had an adult present during questioning.

here.

(via Elizabeth.)

love this war and i love gun

there was a incisive (indeed snarky, and in some respects rather unfair but hey) Number Crunching in a recent Private Eye that i want to quote but before i do i just want to note it made me flash on a very good point yer man Owen Jones made in his recent book Chavs: The Demonization of the working class (do get hold of a copy of this essential tome about class and how society's imbalances are structured).

Owen notes how Margaret Thatcher launched the 'right-to-buy' scheme in the late 70s, a policy whereby tenants of British local government-owned housing were encouraged to buy off their property from the local authority and own it outright. the policy was opposed by housing and homelessness charity Shelter, who had the foresight to realise the negative impact it would have in the long-term on housing for the poorest and most vulnerable Britons, people who had come to rely on so-called social housing (local government provided).

as Owen notes "The policy was undoubtedly popular with many working-class people" (one million homes sold off in ten years), and all part of Thatcher's plans to make Britain a more individualistic nation.

the big effect (that Shelter called) was that the very poorest tenants got left behind, unable to afford to buy their home.

local authorities were encouraged to run down their properties, Thatcher started to spend far less on social housing than previous governments, and local authorities were encouraged to flog all their housing stock, whilst proceeds from sales of houses were not put back into social housing, helping to create a perfect storm of ghettoisation (rates of deprivation in social housing areas sky-rocketed under Thatcher), as she left Britain a far less equal place than the Britain she was put in charge of.

anyway, owning your own home is a big thing in the UK as we all know, and it is with this societal golden rule (and clearly to be fair, as it is, a mortgaged property can easily be cheaper in the long run than renting, natch) that was in mind when the Eye recently printed the following Number Crunching

43
Average age at which young people in UK can soon expect to be able to afford to get on property ladder, according to new figures described as "worrying"

43
Average age which young people in Afghanistan, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone can expect to live to, not described as worrying

"There was random shooting at people, no distinction between women, children, armed or unarmed men. Many, many were killed, many unarmed civilians."

"I left Talkalakh to protect my honour. When we talk to our relatives in Banyas, Homs and Talbiseh they tell us horrifying stories. They told us that so many women were raped. These men don't fear God."

"Once they beat me so hard on the back of my head blood filled my eyes, I couldn't see anything. When they interrogated me they would tie my wrists and leave me hanging for hours."

hell in Syria.

In March, the coalition Government ignored the pleas of students and Further Education Colleges alike and announced it would scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) that so many young people rely on to afford education beyond school. A bursary scheme replaced the EMA, albeit proposed with less than one third of the funding.
The Government is now using the News of the World phone hacking scandal as an opportunity to bury bad news, disclosing that the bursary funding will be reduced by a further £65m - a drop of 36%.

UCA Students’ Union Executive have said: “not only does the abolition of EMA itself show disgraceful disdain, but further reduction from the promised £150m replacement scheme shows that the Government is not committed to adequately supporting students and is actively undermining its own commitments.

“How much lower will the figure fall over the coming years, as the EMA recedes into distant memory?”

here

This Fourth of July weekend, one very powerful and wealthy man named Dominique Strauss-Kahn was free to leave house arrest because of so-called problems with the victim's "credibility." I do say so-called, because neither lying on an immigration application, nor having an incarcerated boyfriend, makes it less likely a woman will be one of the 600 women raped on any given day.

here

Cy Twombly has died.

As you approach the studio-home of sculptor Stephen Cox RA, an old farmhouse not far from Ludlow, you make a steady ascent up Clee Hill.
This high peak, made famous in A.E. Housman's poem, A Shropshire Lad, in the line 'From Clee to heaven the beacon burns', still shows signs of its Iron Age past. As you climb, depending on the weather, a panorama of the Welsh Marches unfurls: Snowdonia to the west, the Peak District to the north and, further around, the Cotswolds, the Malvern Hills and the Black Mountains.

This view is not, as Cox might have thought when he and his curator wife Judy moved there from London in 2002, merely of scenic interest. Had he but realised, Cox had chosen an area of the British Isles whose geology precisely matched one of the materials he had used in his own work. The carboniferous rock called dhustone or dolerite, a feature of this area of the west midlands, was the exact type that he had spent years travelling across the globe, specifically to India, to explore in his sculpture.

(from the summer 2011 edition of the Royal Academy magazine)

'The result is a teasingly ambiguous sequence of makeshift workshops and half-lit shelters where weary merchants might have just spent a night, or where itinerant weavers had long before abandoned their tapestry factory. The whole experience is a loop: from beginning to end symbols reiterate and multiply until you are suddenly popped outside into an internal courtyard or Byzantine backstreet. This moment of clarity is like the breath you take at the centre of a labyrinth or before entering an unknown darkness - the vertigo before the plunge.

It's only later that the physical feat of taking the pavilion's roof away and replacing its innards with three storeys of brick and cement render hits you, of how dramatically and seamlessly Nelson switched interiors, leaving almost no trace of himself, like a sculptural thief in the night'

- (emphasis mine) Ossian Ward describes artist Mike Nelson's installation in Venice

If you are Kurdish today, even if you don’t speak the language, you can hear a song in Kurdish, and your soul roars. It makes you feel part of a struggle.

here

The boy amid the ruins could have been no more than 12 years old and he looked at us with genuine disinterest, sitting on a broken office swivel chair in the middle of rue Trablos, scruffy brown hair on top of a tired, old face. He was wearing khaki dungarees about three sizes too big for him and a boy's shirt with pictures of Mickey Mouse printed across the front. In his right hand he held the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle, its wooden butt resting on the roadway. In his left he balanced a glass of scalding hot tea.

[...]

The buildings around us were scorched by fire, their roofs long fallen in, the facades scored by shoals of bullets, shattered by artillery fire.

It was hot and the cicadas whispered away in the shadows. Somewhere, perhaps a mile away down the Beirut front line, shells were bursting in a long, low rumble that ever so slightly changed the air pressure in rue Trablos. The explosions were dull and heavy; the sort of noise that an expensive carpet would make if thrown onto a road from a balcony.

[...]

When we approached the 12 year-old's little aluminium throne with its torn plastic seat and its bent wheels, he looked at us with that special insouciance of the Lebanese militiaman. The gunmen of Lebanon had grown used to the sahafa, the press. Sometimes they would take journalists to the front line; sometimes they would risk their lives to help reporters. Or they would rob them or threaten to execute them. One day, in years to come, they would kidnap them, too. Our 12-year-old had plenty of time to make up his mind.

'If you want to see the war, you should go that way,' he said, gesturing wearily in the direction of a gutted restaurant. He put down his glass of tea, lifted the rifle to his shoulder and trudged off into the debris. We followed him, across the street and into the building. It was Al Ajami, once one of Beirut's most prestigious restaurants. We walked into it through the wall, through a shell-hole that had been enlarged by the gunmen for easy access. In the darkness, we padded across the dank, wet velvet floor and out through the kitchen wall into a street whose hollow buildings leaned outwards. Four or five storeys high, they tottered against each other, held up only by the shells of neighbouring structures, their innards shrivelled up by fire, a real Dresden of a street.

What did the boy want to do when he grew up? I asked. 'I want to be a guerrilla commander,' he said in French. An educated gunboy, his intellectual ambitions were limited. He gave us a grin of yellow teeth.
He was enjoying himself. And if the war ended? He shrugged.

- Robert Fisk in 1976

The UN's human rights commissioner has criticised Australia's tight policies on refugees and the treatment of Aboriginal people.
Navi Pillay, who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, said it was part of an undercurrent of racism in the country, which leads to refugees and migrants being subjected to arbitrary detention in Australia, and also in Malaysia.

(source: Big Issue, June 6 - 12 2011.)

Controversial government changes to housing benefit could see 11,000 young disabled people forced out of their flats, putting them at risk of homelessness, according to campaigners.

oh goody.

Graeme (one of the few worthwhile politics blogs out there): The rot at the centre of Canada's political culture

A new Council of Europe treaty will make a real difference to abuse sufferers – so why is our government so reluctant to sign?

by Gauri van Gulik

May 19, 2011

Ministers from countries all across Europe gathered in Istanbul today to sign a new Council of Europe convention on domestic violence at the Istanbul summit of the committee of ministers. Incredibly, the UK wasn't one of the signatories. The British government so far has not commented on its reasoning...the government is nibbling away determinedly at those services that are needed to fight violence, such as legal aid and protection for female asylum seekers who suffered domestic violence in their home country. And now it is reluctant to sign a groundbreaking new treaty that will truly make a difference throughout the European region.

here.

the government probably has one eye on asylum and refugee claims.

lots of things in Europe come down to a vile, miserable calculation about the marginalised and the Other, after all.

even if the UK signs this tomorrow (as they should), their pause will have been noted.

Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 Teachers?

I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and got into bed before the room was dark

i've banged on about this one elsewhere online but my love for this one is real.

vital tech-house eudaimonia, how do i love you?

let me count the ways.

if a DJ dropped this at say 6 am during an all-nighter i'm afraid i would go fucking mental.

love how the two vocal samples play off, and the expanding feeling of whole-hearted euphoria.

And who is insisting on these human sacrifices but the high priests of banking and finance whose blow-out created the problem in the first place and who continue to claim heroic levels of "compensation" when they are villains not heroes?

- Robin Blackburn

Four-handed in Newsweek

(i) on a plane with Abu Mazen:

he told me bluntly that Obama had led him on, and then let him down by failing to keep pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank last year. “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze,” Abbas explained. “I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it."

[...]

Abbas is missing the tip of his right ring finger. The story I’d heard seemed to reflect the awkwardness Abbas experienced going from being Arafat’s behind-the-curtain deputy to leading the PLO—and how much he hated crowds. While campaigning for president after Arafat died in late 2004, a horde of people surrounded his car in southern Gaza. Unsure about their intentions, he pressed the electric button of his armored window and closed it on his own finger. But Abbas told me the real story, a version that made more sense. It was his driver, concerned for his safety, who pressed the button. By the time Abbas reacted, the tip of his finger had been severed.
Abbas was due to give a speech in the town, so he bandaged the finger and stayed for two hours. The same driver then ferried him to a hospital in Gaza City, 30 kilometers away. “I found the doctor there, he made the surgery for me,” Abbas told me.
Is the driver still working for him? “No, no, no. I told him, ‘You have to leave,’ and he left.”

(ii) 'War photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in Libya last week, telling a story no one wants to hear.'

(iii) Old colleague Michael Ware remembers Hetherington and Hondros, and more besides: The news bludgeoned me on a sunny Australian morning

(iv) In many ways, Beltrame seems miscast for the role of Brazil’s top cop. He speaks slowly in a measured tenor, with the singing accent of his native Rio Grande do Sul, Brazilian gaucho territory. A youthful 53, he has sandy hair brushed with gray and wears bookish wire rims. Country aphorisms dot his speech. “We’re eating porridge from the edge of the bowl,” he says: fire with fire in Rio.

UK: "Channel 4 to air 'horrific' Sri Lanka footage"

'Crimes within the Court's Jurisdiction'

4's Sri Lanka page

apparently at least 400 people have been killed by the Syrian security forces in the recent crackdown on civilians.

meanwhile, this coming Friday in London, for the UK royal family wedding, the Crown Prince of Bahrain has just politely turned down his invite, setting out his reasons why in a letter to the groom's father.

the Crown Prince's manners toward another unelected powerful man are touching, though sadly his concern for etiquette does not extend to the doctors his security forces are torturing with impunity, or the civilians his security forces are killing with impunity.

like so many civilians in Libya in recent weeks, the British photographer Tim Hetherington has been killed by the merciless Libyan dictatorship.

i read an interview in a men's magazine with Hetherington years ago in which he described how his British Forces brother, Guy, had just got back from Afghanistan or Iraq (frankly i forget which, shamefully, and i can never find the interview online), and how this had affected his brother.

he said that his brother went into a pub and randomly walked up to a group of blokes, and started punching them.

he said that he went into a London cafe with his brother, who nervously scanned exit lines and insisted on sitting away from the windows.

he said that his brother would jump when walking on the pavement if a car pulled up nearby.

RIP Tim Hetherington and your colleague Chris Hondros.

Owen Jones has more on David Cameron, and immigration generally.

In his speech Cameron takes on "forced marriages", cynically conflating the issue with immigration when the vast majority of people entering the country reject it as much as anyone else. There were 1,735 cases of potential or actual cases reported to the Government's forced marriage unit last year - disturbing, yes, but to be treated separately from a debate on immigration. Cameron's intention is clear: to excite the popular imagination into believing the idea that hundreds of thousands of people are arriving on our shores who reject the "British way of life" and that he is the leader to "defend" us from this invasion.

[...]

while it has been fashionable to understand inequality in racial terms, class has been tossed to one side. This has encouraged some white working-class people to develop notions of ethnic pride similar to minority groups, promoting an identity based on race to gain recognition in multicultural society. The BNP has tapped into this disastrous redefining of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalised ethnic minority.

Asian families should speak English at home. I wonder if he says that to the Brits who buy second homes in Spain. Do they have to speak Spanish? How about...friends in Tuscany? Do they speak Italian? The man has no sense of history and proportion.

that's Ken Loach speaking about David Blunkett seven years ago, but it could be someone describing Cameron today.

one obvious end-product of New Labour's lurch to the right on immigration and asylum when in power is this, of course; they shifted the goalposts and here we are now.

Mehdi Hasan has more.

I was not prepared to document torture and severe abuses when I started researching the human rights situation for migrants in Europe. After all, I was working on Western Europe, the developed world with a rule of law, independent judiciaries, functioning social services, and oversight bodies.

Greek coast guards punctured rubber boats carrying adults and children before pushing them back toward Turkey. Some migrants never made it to shore.

Ukrainian officials tortured migrants and asylum seekers with electric shocks after Hungary and Slovakia deported them, often after denying them an opportunity to lodge asylum claims.

The French airport border police tried to deport a 5-year-old Comorian boy alone to Yemen, a country he had passed through, not knowing where his parents were or why he had arrived by himself.

Various ships passed by and ignored a damaged, leaking, overcrowded rubber boat drifting for days in the Mediterranean. After finally being rescued by a Turkish freighter, the 140 sick and exhausted African migrants had to wait another four days to disembark as Italy and Malta debated which was responsible for taking them.

These abuses do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they are the consequence of European governments' boundless efforts to deter, stem, or divert the flow of migrants and asylum seekers trying to enter Europe.

here

since the start of 2011, Iran has executed at least 116 people.

Amnesty writes the majority were convicted of drugs offences and at least nine were political prisoners.

support actions against capital punishment in Mongolia, here, and in Iran, here.

used to shott weed, now I sell records

- Wiley

---

One in five young British people are not working, nor in any form of training or education.
in some areas (particularly inner London, provincial cities like Birmingham, and parts of Wales and Scotland) the figure is more like one in three.

the coalition government decided to cut young Britons adrift.

the local authority i live in, Southwark in southeast London, is one of the worst affected (tangentially, one of the parliamentary constituencies that lies in Southwark, Camberwell and Peckham, has been noted as having a greater percentage of people below the breadline than any other constituency).

Southwark lies just south of central London.

from my bedroom window i can see most of the skyscrapers of the City financial district.
a few hundred yards from my front door on a bend in the road you can see some of the skyscrapers of London's other main financial area, Canary Wharf in the east.

despite the fact the government is slashing vital living allowances for disabled Britons, and despite the fact that institutions like Barclays Bank were, in fact, helped by the British taxpayer during the crisis, the British chancellor thinks we're all being too mean to banks, and that the financial sector has suffered enough.
bonuses in the sector are, of course, as healthy as ever.

is this, morally speaking, right?

Ireland Park

here's a link to some photos (taken last summer) i want to share.

they're of the Irish famine memorial in downtown Toronto; at the bottom of Bathurst Street, by the water.
(in one of the captions i re-up an Alex de Waal quote noted at this blog before, i must admit.)

anyone reading this who knows me on Facebook might already have seen them (though they were only put up there just yesterday).

you don't have to have a Facebook account to view.

click on individual pictures to enlarge and read captions.

the most recent addition to this blogroll is Andrew Spooner's Asia Provocateur at the Asian Correspondent site. Andrew spends part of his time in the UK so it seems fair that he opens his introductory column with the following UK-specific blast

As the title of this blog suggests Asia Provocateur will be an attempt to stir up intellectual engagement, intelligent debate and radical thinking on a range of issues facing the region and, in particular, Thailand. I won’t be aiming to please or to always be objective but I will hopefully bring in a spread of voices and concerns that are kept to the margins of the political and cultural debates.

In addition, I have always been struck how weak the UK left/liberal-leaning media is on Thai and Southeast Asia-related debates. When set against the blanket coverage and informed discussion surrounding the recent uprisings in the Middle East the paucity of intelligent analysis of the 2010 Red Shirt uprising and the subsequent Bangkok Massacre was striking. I hope, in at least some way, to redress this.

What is also an interesting facet of the Western media coverage of Thailand is the continual failure to even mention the self-censorship and repressive draconian atmosphere placed on coverage of the country via Thailand’s lese majeste laws.

the other most recent additions are Christian Bleuer's non-profit Tajikistan Research Resources, the blog of the proud liberal Muslim Egyptian woman Mona Eltahawy, and the musings of my man Marmaduke, a rather well-turned out Portsmouth-bred, London-based musician and singer, and the campaigners at 38 Degrees, who were among many concerned Britons that wanted to protest Tory-led plans to sell off national forests, a campaign that has forced a U-turn on the issue (though there is still this that concerns).

these magnificent convulsions currently taking place across much of north Africa and west Asia - isn't it shameful that Tony Blair (a man with babies apparently named after him in Liberia, and fair enough really, given his record there) - with his appalling and unjustified warm words for Hosni Mubarak - places himself on the side of the autocrats, the dictators, the police states, and the two constituencies easily among the worst in the entire democratic world, i.e., the Right in Israel and the Right in the USA?

They call it a 'democratic coup d'etat,' see. You have to have lots of coups d'etat. Otherwise it isn't a democracy.

Khamsing Srinawk

If you want interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want torture, you send them to Syria. If you want them to disappear you send them to Egypt.

Anonymous American "source" quoted in the London Daily Mirror, Saturday 12th February 2011.

meanwhile, the dictatorship in Bahrain shot an unarmed protestor in the back, and then tear-gassed mourners and opened fire at mourners during his funereal procession, killing another human being in the process.

Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.

- Stephen Harper

There is nothing under the sun that the Thai police cannot do.

- Phao Sriyanond

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.

England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

- James Connolly, January 1897

Juba, Monday February 7, 2011

(photo Pete Muller, AP)

Egyptian Christians protect praying Egyptian Muslims

photograph from Cairo by Nevine Zaki

'Big society' suffers setback in showcase Liverpool
City pulls out as key partner in Cameron initiative due to government-imposed spending cuts

here

how a Tory-led government can embark on ideologically motivated austerity when 18 members of that govt's cabinet are millionaires and MPs in that cabinet represent some very wealthy constituencies - when their programme will affect the poorest and most vulnerable constituencies and some of the most vulnerable people in the UK the most - is appalling, and something that needs to be consistently called out, among other ways of trying to oppose this outrageous shambles that a load of public schoolboys without a democratic mandate for their experimental lunacy are trying to foist on the rest of us

THIS > One guy in Tahrir had a "get out Mubarak" sign in Hebrew. "A message for Netanyahu," he said.

listening to Music For Airports and wanted to say out to my dear, dear, dear friend DT, because i was in touch with him during a maudlin moment late last summer in an American airport and this reminds me of him, and more besides

June said she knew there'd be some people from the south here tonight, because some of you guys get out here in California, the damn place is so crazy, you just got to get something to eat some way don't ya

Orange Book Liberal Democrats should be regarded as no better than Tories.

via Terry Glavin - who, yes, is on the wrong side of the argument with Graeme here (you have to be absolute on these matters, don't you) - is this piece.

as the heading to Rachel Reid's piece states "Who benefits from Taliban revisionism?
The Afghan government is trying to whitewash the Taliban's image by claiming it no longer opposes education for girls"

Terry is always worth paying attention to on Afghanistan, because of things like this.

There is a lack of proper communication in your country about Afghanistan. They don't see all the good progresses. For me, the hope is for the younger generation. Young men are voting for women. The society is under a big transformation, and there are people who don't want to see this.

[Amos] Vogel argued that film criticism was suffering because too many critics were from a literary rather than visual arts background 'with the visual serving as illustration of an underlying literary thesis'

- Dan Fox

What could you imagine doing if you didn't do what you do?

John Waters: Being a defence lawyer for the damned in the US court system.

Never, never, never, not one single time do I have a plan.

- Scientist

from the interview by Joe Muggs in the December 2010 issue of The Wire

last month

this bloke

interesting point here

Kettling is illegal elsewhere and it certainly should be here. I speak as someone who was kettled in Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge last Thursday, one of several thousand people held for nine hours at zero degrees without food, water, heat, toilets.

The widely reproduced photograph of a youth urinating against the plinth of Winston Churchill's statue during the protest over tuition fees provides a disrespectful image, but kettling represents disrespect on a premeditated, industrial scale: degrading conditions of confinement enforcing the shame of performing one's natural functions in public.

from here

very grateful to my friend J for finding the 1985 defence Hitchens made of Chomsky over the Khmer Rouge thing.

a good taster of Hitchens' wonderfully pugilistic style is to be found early doors in the piece (my emphasis)

Sixteen years ago I went to the Examination Schools at Oxford University to hear Professor Noam Chomsky deliver the John Locke Lectures. The series was chiefly concerned with modern theories of grammar, syntax, and linguistics, but Chomsky attached a condition which the syndics of the university could not easily decline. He insisted on devoting one entire, self-contained lecture to the American war in Indochina and to the collusion of "academic experts" in an enterprise which was, he maintained, debauching America even as it savaged Vietnam.

Several things intrigued me about the stipulation. First, I liked the way Chomsky separated his political statement from his obligation as a guest lecturer rather than, as was and is the style at Oxford, pretending to objectivity while larding the discourse with heavily sarcastic political "pointers." There was no imported agenda of the kind one got from Hugh Trevor-Roper, Max Beloff, or John Sparrow. Second, I was impressed by his insistence, which was the inverse of the shifty practice of Tory and liberal scholars, that academics could and should have a role in political life but should state their allegiance squarely.

The UK Tory-led coalition govt's dismantling of govt quangos (look at the useful work, say, the Forestry Commission does) is "not primarily to cut costs" admits Tory MP Francis 'I wouldn't trust me to run a bath' Maude on BBC Radio 4 earlier today.

well at least he's honest, the small state loon.
they really are setting about their task of making the UK a less fair and equal place, hollowing out the safety nets that neo-liberal capitalism in the raw fights against, with some zeal.

what good is it to anyone to stop London schoolchild visits to the London Zoo?

jesus wept.

these people should be given about as much time of day as the preachers that wander Brixton market.

except for George Osborne, who should be interned without charge or something, and whose estate should be disbursed to community projects in Wythenshawe and Runcorn.

The boss of BP's exploration arm, who quit after the Gulf of Mexico disaster last year, has been hired by FTSE-100 oil giant Petrofac for another major role in the industry.

Andy Inglis's appointment to the board of Petrofac comes just a week before American president Barack Obama's commission is due to publish its findings into the cause of the spill catastrophe.

Inglis, 51, was one of the most senior lieutenants of BP's ousted chief executive Tony Hayward.

oh.

that's nice.

You could try, as you say, to put it on VAT, sales tax, but again if you look at the effect of sales tax, it's very regressive, it hits the poorest the hardest. It does, I absolutely promise you. Any sales tax, anything that goes on purchases that you make in shops tends to . . . if you look at it, where VAT goes now it doesn't go on food obviously but it goes very, very widely and VAT is a more regressive tax than income tax or council tax.

- David Cameron, May 2009

We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT.

- David Cameron, 23 April 2010

IT WAS A BLACK DAY WHEN I LEFT MY LAND

heads above parapets: an anonymous declaration from incredibly brave and eloquent Gazan youth

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!

hear hear

in a way, this is a little bit reminiscent of the Black Book (simple analogy, so elastic as to be virtually meaningless, at its widest meaning two documents attempting to speak truth to power; but i did flash on the Black Book and so wanted to mention), though as reading Caity Bolton would indicate, this Gazan statement could well be something bigger in terms of rejecting the status quo (as opposed to the Black Book's authors accepting the dominant paradigm, according to Bolton).

as the always elegant and humane Peter Ryley writes, here are "compelling acts of courage against the abnormality of lives lived in servitude or subject to arbitrary violence".

see them on Facebook here



(i took this image - via a Google Images search for large images of 'joe sacco palestine' - without permission from The Moving Silent blog, run by Karzan Kardozi, and specifically from this page on same blog here.)

Respeito, camarada!

P.S.
Gbagbo may be a blustering brute with a hardline wife who virtually talks in hate speech, who has exceeded his mandate and who is trying to fiddle an election, and who may bear overall responsibility for what are some serious crimes, but one of his latest opinions is, obviously, bang on the money (naturally, he's saying anything at the moment, granted)

Amongst today's great global powers, each has its own sphere of influence. When it's something to do with Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, France speaks and the rest follow

more self-indulgent wanking

P.S. (i) the song i remember euphorically losing it to more than any other whilst out this year was 'Katy On a Mission'

(ii) one mix i loved more than many this year is actually about ten years old, but i only discovered it this year (!)

it's our man Droid, with his Droid Inna Dancehall Vol. 1, which somewhat improbably starts with some almost twee, rather beguiling Mike Paradinas electronica before edging into fairly urgent chat.

and obviously big up Cee Lo Green and i look forward to seeing Janelle Monáe and Chas and Dave in the next few months with any luck.

oh i'm also going to get into yank telly show Burn Notice, having caught one random episode the other day.

any programme with Bruce Campbell in a loud yellow shirt eating a slurpee can't be all bad.

"Class war: your boss believes in it, even if you don't"

one thing i learned today is that Daily Express journalist Richard Palmer shares at least a trait or two with David Cameron and Nick Clegg: all three mischaracterise the state of things, and all three have, at times, blamed the last Labour government for problems not, in fact, caused by the last Labour government.

now, we all know Clegg is a liar *, as he does like to mention how he's all about the fairness (this is, of course, simply untrue) and we know Cameron is a liar, as he will go on about the mess he's inherited from Labour, something Clegg has occasionally joined him in (to say they are being disingenuous is an understatement).

Palmer, in noting a welcome bit of official recognition in the New Year honours list for Aylesbury estate tenants' association chair Jean Bartlett, writes whose plight became a symbol of Labour's failure in the inner cities.

now, the last Labour government did not do enough on issues of social deprivation and social mobility and fairness, that's self-evident (though, as Owen notes, their extremely necessary investment in public services is the one thing that made New Labour particularly distinct from preceding Tory govts on the home front), but, to have a writer for an extremely conservative newspaper - strong supporters of neoliberal extraordinaire Margaret fucking Thatcher, let's not forget - almost airily summarise decades of neglect in this manner basically takes chutzpah to new and exciting levels.

to quote Graeme (i borrow the class war phrase at the top from him), quoting David Harvey:

My view is that [neoliberalism] refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimised draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. This project has been successful, judging by the incredible centralisation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead.

* no fashionable and oh so easy cynicism about mendacious politicians in democracies please: these are demonstrable falsehoods on a big scale about important, structural matters that have the potential to really reshape society

---

on a lighter note, another thing learned (or perhaps that should be reminded of) today watching the pop video telly year round-up is that whilst i don't exactly care buckets for every last Katy Perry single this year, there's one kind of almost fey number ('Teenage Dreams') about a boy she digs i really like (plus it's hardly the same but i've seen quite a lot of lush, lovely, hushed neo-folk gigs this year and it evokes some of these for certain reasons), and the euphoric sounds of that Starstrukk tune's chorus she's involved in are mint (and i like her "set them up" lines), and, yes, still dig the cast of Glee doing Journey.

and i adore Alicia Keys, adore adore adore her.

out to the London club Night Slugs, and out to anyone caning it to Plaid and Weatherall and Moss Side's finest in SE1 tonight, and out to Nicki Minaj, among others.

here's a LRB piece that makes a really good point about John Cage.

(via the magnificent Will, no longer at the greatest politics site i've known, but at least tweeting.)

---

the below 8 minute long YouTube is from Britain's Channel 4, and their journalist (a proper journalist), a bloke called Miller.

it was originally broadcast a few weeks ago.

(contains graphic images.)

incidentally, it's hardly the biggest (or, to be blunt, gravest) headline from the continuing intrigues thrown up by the UK's Tory-led government, but culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's (who, to be fair to him, is nowhere near as big a cock as his boss) musing aloud that cuts to the arts sector could be an opportunity for the UK to foster an American-style philanthropism in the arts is classic small state baloney, the sort of line of shit that British Tories and their Liberal Democrat accommodationists (well, certainly the Orange Book wing of that party) just love to further due to it being in their DNA.

wealthy individuals helping the cause of the arts is all well and good, but, let's be honest, today it's the arts, tomorrow it's something else.

fuck the Tory party and fuck Nick Clegg and the horses they all rode in on.

P.S.
out to the city of Derry for winning that European capital of culture award; a fine town.

i've only been once, spent about four nights there, mainly looking at things, eating fried food, drinking a lot of alcohol, and talking to locals (and some other English) in her pubs and bars and clubs.

big up.

P.P.S.
my fellow greater Mancunian Owen Jones has a blog, now up in my links bar just past the lovely Maura Johnston as one of the newer additions up there.

check out his first proper post, 'Will Cameron build a new political consensus?', here.
(i hope Owen's conclusion is proven right.)

Owen has a book forthcoming next May on Verso, 'Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class'.

I am absolutely sure that our wise people will have absolute trust in the first president, the leader of nation, which means stability in the society and the well-being of every Kazakh citizen

- Vladimir Nekhoroshev, parliamentarian

("Kazakhstan's parliament has backed a plan to scrap the next two presidential elections, allowing Nursultan Nazarbayev to stay in power until 2020.
Parliament, made up entirely of members of his party, said the proposal would go to a referendum.
Mr Nazarbayev has led Kazakhstan since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.")

"We have recovered 80 dead bodies so far in Jos," Daniel Gambo, an official at the Nigerian emergency management agency said late on Monday.

great quote from yer man Richard Dowden in an Observer piece yesterday about Gbagbo.

Gbagbo is a big and blustery character, a bit of demagogue, but his wife is really scary. When the civil war started, she was saying things like, 'We cannot have Côte d'Ivoire ruled by foreigners', which is just language for northerners. His wife and other allies do seem to be driven by racism towards the north. The idea of the country being handed over to a northern Muslim is terrifying.

there's a tangential point from today's wires here: "Ouattara still draws his support from the northern half of the country, where residents feel they are often treated as foreigners".

as with a recent flare-up in violence around Jos, seems instructive that fault lines in African society that can be seemingly sectarian, may have deeper roots, be they structural causes, or manipulation by powerful people.

i want to mention that this day of surrealist lectures at Tate Modern last month included a talk from young artist Simon Fujiwara that was not 'just' a talk (as all the other participants gave, all with illuminating screenings accompanying their presentations, or in the case of Liz Rosenfeld, two fine short films of hers), but was something rather special, and a real privilege to catch.

i'm just going to quote a Frieze piece at length to describe Fujiwara, and the lecture of his we saw that day.

‘I am my work,’ Simon Fujiwara told me when I visited his studio. The implications of this revealing statement are two-fold, for not only does the artist personally deliver the performative elements of his work, but much of his material is rooted in the autobiographical. Born in Japan to a British dancer mother and a Japanese architect father, Fujiwara, who is the recipient of this year’s Cartier Award, studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, then spent time at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and became an artist. Or did he? Artist, architect, novelist, cellist, son, father, lover: these defining terms become impossibly entangled in a body of work that may take the form of imaginary buildings, erotic fiction or live cello performances. Fujiwara adopts a quasi-anthropological approach – presenting evidence and interpreting it – during which a simple autobiographical fact is quickly swept along on a current of metaphor, exaggeration and pure fabrication.

Take the series ‘Welcome to the Hotel Munber’ (2006–ongoing), a work that, as Fujiwara puts it, ‘retells my parents’ life as erotic fiction’. Before he was born, the artist’s parents ran a hotel and bar in southern Spain during the final years of General Franco’s dictatorship – a fact Fujiwara uses as a springboard to considering Franco’s censorship of pornography and homosexual activity, making up for the absence of gay erotica of the time by concocting his own, with his father as the main protagonist. The artist’s conceit of casting his own father as a homosexual adventurer in what is effectively an intra-generational exchange of sexuality is an uncomfortable one, which is amplified by the protagonist satisfying his repressed desires using the objects and architecture of the hotel itself as sexual surrogates; more revealing, perhaps, of Fujiwara’s own psycho-sexual investments in architecture than the approach of his architect father.

Part of ‘Welcome to the Hotel Munber’ takes the form of a lecture in which Fujiwara describes this awkward conflation of political and family history, reading extracts of erotica and illustrating the talk with a number of props arrayed on a desk in front of him. These include snapshots of and original relics from his parents’ hotel, newspaper clippings, flags, a copy of a typewritten manuscript, pornographic images and an ostrich egg inscribed with Franco’s name. Setting up this pseudo-academic environment of accumulated evidence, Fujiwara spins a tale that veers from the touching to the absurd, culminating in the plaintive admission that his erotic novel is incomplete, the artist-as-writer blocked by the improper conflation of family values and deviant sexuality.

(now for something, er, slightly different)

10 for '10: a year list

10. Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010, the ICA.

mixed bag.

glad i went.

(also spent the day with old, dear friend L here, and at no.7, and eating soup, which helped.)

9. Facing East: Recent Works from China, India and Japan from the Frank Cohen Collection, Manchester Art Gallery.

another mixed bag (including some large sculptures appropriately enjoyed by many adults and children the day i visited; Yoshitomo Nara's mixed media house attracted a lot of attention, too, and Murakami's mushrooms seemed popular).

it was Yue Minjun's disconcerting canvas Between Men and Animal, and a big Thukral and Tagra canvas that were up there, personally.

but out to Fang Lijun, a member of the Cynical Realist bunch, though. 'price of admission' pick for me, astonished by his large canvas of repeated, faint men in cloud.

(the same gallery had a few Ron Mueck sculptures in the next room during the time of Facing East; he is always worth mentioning.)

8. A World Observed 1940 - 2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm, Manchester Art Gallery.

first ever full retrospective.

great stuff, from exquisite early portraits, sublime landscapes and later streetscapes containing the planet: a world observed, truly.

7. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works, Hauser & Wirth.

to quote L (see 10), a "lovely footnote".
(L's art teacher thinks no. 3, below, has over-rated colours!)

6. Steve McCurry retrospective, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

remarkable.

5. Aloe Blacc's I Need a Dollar song.

a catchy neo-soul tune with a title like this would always be a relevant anthem for many people; sadly, more people than ever would find something first-hand in it in recent years.

4. the Bridget Riley Hayward touring exhibition, Flashback, seen at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

epiphanies from Riley, yet again.

3. Gauguin, Tate Modern.

ignorantly, i thought he was basically Polynesian smut.

not so.

multi-faceted wonder.

2. Mike Nelson's 2000 installation The Coral Reef is at Tate Britain these days.

the Guardian's Jonathan Jones said "a modern masterpiece".

co-sign.

1. the Toronto-Dominion Gallery of Inuit Art.

a small (200 or so pieces) yet, actually, perfectly formed gallery in a downtown bank, and, seemingly, without too much fanfare locally AFAICT.

game changing.

Bad to worse in Côte d'Ivoire.

Fucking A.

Elsewhere, i had a Christmas drink with an old pal earlier.

J teaches PE in a tough school in inner Nottingham.

He spoke eloquently, movingly and angrily about the Tory govt's Michael Gove and Gove's attempts to starve school sport (since partly reversed, thanks to ordinary people, children, athletes and the Labour MP Andy Burnham rightly fighting back against Gove's odious intentions); one remarkable 16 year old girl, a teen campaigner who sounds like a fabulous young woman, was name-checked.

Feliz Navidad and that.

Death squads and disappearances: from Abidjan in the Guardian.

"We are most frightened when we hear them speaking English and wearing balaclavas. Then we know they're Liberian mercenaries, and if you are a woman, they are the ones who will rape you."

On Tuesday, Mr Gbagbo appeared on state television for the first time since the election to restate his claim to be the country's legitimate leader.

He blamed his "opponent's refusal to submit to the law" for the recent unrest.

Shorter Laurent Gbagbo: Wot, me guv?

P.S. 'At least 50 people have been killed in violence linked to the dispute, the UN says.'

the D.C. based NGO Friends of the Congo has a page of links for the UN Mapping Exercise, including the uploaded report (.pdf) from the UN in the original French and their English.

documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003

out to everyone protesting on the streets of Italy against that asylum seeker persecuting thug Silvio, yeah?

WikiLeaks mirrors are here.

here's ThaiLeaks - they've recently released a load of Thailand-specific cables.

(via.)

11 years ago today Franjo Tudjman died in Zagreb's Dubrava clinic.

Tudjman was 77 and it is understood he had been battling cancer for the final three years of his life.

the contemporary, well-informed obituary in the London Independent by Branka Magas is masterly, and remains well worth reading.

the opening two paragraphs and closing paragraph pretty much said it all:

AS THE one who led Croatia to independence, Franjo Tudjman secured a special place in the country's history. Yet history will judge him harshly, because of his cavalier attitude to the country's true interests, because of his policy towards neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina, and not least because of his persistent hostility to Croatia's citizens of Serb and Bosnian descent - all of which has contributed to the country's present international isolation.

Death arguably saved him from indictment by the Hague Tribunal, for his overall responsibility for war crimes committed by Zagreb's proxy forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the unpunished brutalities visited upon defenceless Serbs who have remained in, or tried to return to, Croatia.

[...]

The aberrations associated with Franjo Tudjman's period in office were exacerbated, no doubt, by the aggression to which the country was subjected from the very moment of its proclamation of independence and by the policy of appeasing Belgrade long followed by Western governments. It remains the case, however, that dismantling his legacy remains a precondition for Croatia's democratic development.

UK housing benefits to be slashed: analysis here.

The government spin was that their cuts were all about capping benefits for a small number of families in inner London. But even their own reports spell out the truth – these cuts will hit hundreds of thousands, will increase homelessness and overcrowding, disrupt the education and attainment of poor children, disrupt services for disabled people and force people on low incomes into even poorer quality housing.

(from the Tuesday December 7th edition of my local paper, the South London Press)

FOUR men have been cleared of killing an innocent teenager in a drive-by shooting.

The group were accused of gunning down 18-year-old Ryan Bravo as he entered a shop to buy a pint of milk on August 6, 2008.

It is claimed Ryan was caught up in a clash between the Organised Crime, or OC, and the Peckham Young Guns.

Jurors have heard that the OC gang were chasing two rival gang members who pushed past Ryan to hide in the Costcutters store, in Camberwell Road, Walworth. In the hail of bullets, Ryan was hit once, in the back and died.

Prosecutors said the five were Terrell Lewis, 20, Nathaniel Bailey, 19, Nathaniel Grant, 19, and Anthony McKenzie, 21, and Ashley Bucknor, 21.

But halfway through the Old Bailey trial, all but Bucknor were cleared on the direction of the judge Gerald Gordon. He ruled there was no case to answer due to insufficient evidence.

It is claimed the murder was in revenge for a shooting on the Myatts Field Estate in Brixton earlier that same day.

Bucknor, of no fixed address, denies murder.

Eighteen years of age.

shot dead for buying a pint of milk.

another one of the most essential sites anywhere right now is the UK's Channel 4 page on the Sri Lankan civil war

it seems characteristic that Hole's frontwoman Courtney Love rest her left foot on a speaker, as in this clip; a pose i've seen before from her.

i love Courtney.

i fucking love her.

her voice is amazing.

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP

the undemocratic Thai govt is more bothered about Bangkok vendors selling flip-flops with satirical images printed on the soles than they are by the fact that they (the Thai govt) massacre their own citizens by the dozen for the, er, crime of protesting the Thai govt's increasing authoritarianism

Guardian's US embassy cables - one of the most essential websites on earth for a minute now

i note the wiki for the Scottish painter Peter Howson (an artist who, among other pursuits, cranks out enjoyably large canvases with visceral gusto, and does some corking album covers, as my flatmate and i were saying to each other) refers to his time as an official war artist during the "Bosnian Civil War".

this precise phrase, civil war, is actually used twice in the wiki (at time of posting).

it's almost certainly an innocent tag but the word civil really needs to be dropped from the description.

the Bosnian war was a war of federal Yugoslav and Serb aggression; 'civil' could imply an attempt to get into moral equivalences.

there should be absolutely no room for anything remotely resembling equivalency when discussing the murderous assault on Bosnian Muslim society that was the major part of this war (that obviously tragically affected all communities in Bosnia), and to deliberately say otherwise is a rank piece of ethical bankruptcy that must be met with continuous contempt.

no room at all.

if you know about the subject, you'll be familiar with the name (and probably this forthcoming hat tip), and no apologies for linking again to the Marko Hoare article 'What do the figures for the Bosnian war-dead tell us ?'

in a shop the other day and their stereo was playing Do they know it's Christmas (yes that time of the year is looming), which reminded me of two things (by bloggers i occasionally link to anyway) i wanted to excerpt a bit and link to.

both articles are by the Barders.

Brian Barder was the British ambassador to Ethiopia during the mid-1980s when famine struck Ethiopia and the international community responded with famine relief aid; five years ago he wrote this letter to the Guardian in protest at a David Rieff article then doing the rounds (i remember a few blogging peers finding Rieff's line sympathetic; i was personally ambiguous).

the BBC has recently apologised for broadcasting a load of old turkey about the international famine relief effort in a stupidly misleading World Service documentary broadcast this past spring, in March.

Barder has blogged more than once on his site about this, but it's worth reading in full his excellent account from late March taking the BBC to task. it's here, and i want to quote in full the summary at the start of his piece (it's a fairly long article overall).

the final two sentences of Barder's summary are really, really important, and, i fear, may well be prescient. (even with the BBC apologising - after Brian wrote this particular article, it must be said - the damage has been at least partly done, for sure.)

A BBC World Service documentary programme broadcast in early March 2010, and the advance publicity for it, gave the impression that a huge proportion of the famine relief aid given by the international community to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted from starving people to buy arms and ammunition for use in the civil war then raging in northern parts of the country. The specific allegations made by the BBC about the diversion of aid related only to the tiny proportion that was supplied by some NGOs to rebel-held areas, a distinct and very small part of the total relief effort in Ethiopia at the time. The incorrect inference has been drawn that a substantial part of the total aid to Ethiopia, including the much larger sums provided to the government-ruled parts of Ethiopia, were diverted for military use, including the aid raised and managed by Band Aid. While the programme did not make this claim explicitly (just as well, since it would certainly have been exposed as false), either deliberately or negligently the BBC has allowed, and to some extent encouraged, this misunderstanding of its findings, and has failed to point out (other than sotto voce) that its allegations related to a quite separate, and very small, part of the aid. As a result, there is now a widely held and completely false perception that a substantial proportion of the aid given to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted for military use. This has potentially disastrous implications for public attitudes to future emergency relief appeals, and to development aid generally.

Brian's son Owen is a development and aid specialist who lives in Addis.

earlier this month, on November 4th, at his blog, Owen posted this piece.

the introduction gives a good flavour of his feelings.

It has entered our collective consciousness that a large part – perhaps as much as 95 per cent – of the aid given to Ethiopia during the 1980s famine was diverted for military use. This misapprehension was caused by a misleading programme on 4th March, compounded by the BBC’s publicity for the programme on television and radio and online.

As Mark Twain remarked, “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on”.

Today the BBC has apologised. The apology is abject, and rightly so

PLEASE go away Canadian Tories

Graeme: "Seriously, fuck this government sideways in the ass with a broken bottle."

true - this one is genuinely disturbing, a shocking attack on democratically willed efforts to combat climate change from unelected Tory senators

see also - er, so's this.

appalling

Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.

- Aneurin Bevan, 3 July 1948

That's a sin

- Iain Duncan Smith, 11 November 2010

Mr Duncan Smith's defenders (including Nick Clegg in this paper on Wednesday) like to compare the scale and intention of his plans with the Beveridge report of 1942. They forget there was a second Beveridge report, in 1944: Full Employment in a Free Society. He knew that without jobs, the welfare state wouldn't work.

- The Guardian, 12 November 2010

There are at least 18 millionaires in the cabinet...Though few people seemed to notice, on 3 November, a Treasury minister named Lord Sassoon served notice that the coalition's work on City bonuses was done: "The government has taken action to tackle unacceptable bonuses in the banking sector," he said, and that seemed to be that. Six days later, Barclays announced that its latest bonus pot would total £1.6bn – which is about a third of what the government currently spends each year on university teaching. The annual season of big executive payouts is about to commence once again

- John Harris, 12 November 2010

The latest wheeze is the welfare reforms being proposed. I haven't read them in detail, but the language is clear enough; penalties for refusing a job, compulsory community work, and the idea of unemployment as a lifestyle choice. Underpinning it all is the dreadful notion of dependency culture. I hate this concept. I can find little in the way of empirical grounding and even less of empathy and understanding. In many ways, and I intend to cover this in a subsequent post, it is anti-liberal and even authoritarian in its import. It brings no great insights, it is simply a regurgitation of the worst prejudices of the Philosophic Radicals of the early 19th Century. Its attraction lies in it being a neat way of making punitive policies sound compassionate - 'tough love' in the revolting parlance of the Clinton era. Government as Victorian father. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

I want to make a stand for dependency. What is wrong with it? Why should some people not be dependent? After all, we are all dependent at some time or other in our lives. When we are children, ill or old are obvious examples of times when we cannot function without support. And though we prize our independence, it is a sign of a civilised society that those who fall dependent at any one time are cared for in whatever way they can be. Even more, like it or not, we cannot escape the ties of emotional dependence. Actually, we treasure them and those that don't have them long for them. We are all dependent. Love is not tough.

Dependency is not a stigma, it is an inescapable part of human life. We need dignity in dependence.

- Peter Ryley, 12 November 2010

RIP Gregory Isaacs.

christ

We were automatically women's rights by being who we were and making sure we were who we were and remaining who we were.

- Ari Up

it seems almost like a sort of cruel joke that the Conservative party conference this year took place in Birmingham city centre.

the downtown of Britain's second city is part of the Birmingham Ladywood parliamentary constituency, which is one of the most deprived areas in the UK.

Ladywood has the worst child poverty rates of all 650 UK parliamentary constituencies.
it also has the highest unemployment rate of any constituency.

(incidentally, the neighbouring constituencies of Birmingham Hodge Hill and Birmingham Erdington have, respectively, the second and fifth worst rates currently, with other neighbouring constituencies also doing badly.)

and so it came to pass that a politician who represents one of the wealthiest constituencies (in fact, very wealthy by some measures) went to conference, in this suffering zone, to address us about a desire to inflict his brand of sadistic aristocratic economics on everybody else.
(he should weather the storm himself just about OK you'd imagine, if only owing to his £4million trust fund.)

whether it's Tory and Lib Dem buzzwords about fairness proving to be so much demonstrable rubbish, Chancellor George Osborne's laughably threadbare defence of his ridiculously compromised sources, or a potential assault on the fabric of our cities (a severe assault at that), there is much evidence to suggest that the coalition approach to tackling the British deficit may be misguided, although, from the point of view of the Chancellor, what does that matter?

attacking public services is ideological for this guy, and not just incidental to current economic conditions.

growth, after all, will return sooner or later; it's just a shame a concern for wealth and income differences is for wimps (it's certainly not something the Tory party appear to care for).

my friend Ruth wondered re Osborne, that, as a constituency MP for a very wealthy area with relatively few social problems, how much experience he has of life at the deep end.

compare Osborne with recently defeated Labour leadership challenger David Miliband.

Miliband represents South Shields in northeast England, a far less affluent constituency than Osborne's Tatton (a semi-rural area of suburban villages in Manchester's commuter belt).
Miliband apparently once remarked how the problems of constituents (someone facing eviction from their home, and someone facing deportation following an asylum claim, were two examples cited) were a slap in the face to him as a young constituency politician (he comes from a comfortable background and had worked in a policy role in glamorous central London for some time).

now, with all due respect to the people of Tatton, it is inevitable that, say, South Shields - let alone Birmingham Ladywood - will have a greater proportion of beleaguered constituents in the sort of real trouble that demands the intervention of a public servant, not just somebody's private purse.

good for the voters of Tatton, of course, good for them, but it does raise an interesting point about Osborne, and would ideally have more of us asking more urgent questions of him and his ideas given many of the toughest proposals he will be unveiling will, in general, surely not be felt that much in Tatton (though will in all probability be felt keenly in Birmingham Ladywood).

sadly - as Krishnan Guru-Murthy acknowledges - the Chancellor knows the way he wants to go; an observation donpaskini also made recently:

Poorly designed child benefit cuts which take away benefits for some families on £44,000 while giving them to other families on £86,000: £1 billion.

Giving party activists something to cheer by cutting benefits for homeless families in temporary accommodation: £150 million

Not having to explain where the other £13 billion in welfare cuts is going to fall: priceless.

There are some things money can't buy. For spinning savage cuts to the poorest, there's Tory Party conference.

i wonder if certain powerful men in Ottawa have read this?

Sri Lanka: Groups Decline to Testify Before Flawed Commission
Government War Panel Lacks Mandate, Credibility, Independence

An asylum seeker who was being deported on a flight from Heathrow begged passengers to help him moments before he collapsed and died beneath three security guards, according to a new witness who has spoken to the Guardian.

[...]

An engineer who works Angola's rich oil fields alongside other western expatriates, Michael said Mubenga's death spoke to hypocrisy in global border control. "You have got a man deported from over there. Did you ever stop to think how many British are over here, making £400 or £500 a day in Angola?"

from that Globe and Mail piece noted on one's Twitter earlier today: "Thailand has not signed onto the international conventions that can make refugee removals time-consuming."

but of course!

Thailand's neighbours only include such paragons of virtue as the Myanmar junta and the Laotian dictatorship.

in addition, the likes of Vietnam and China are nearby. (and Sri Lanka, granted.)

time time time, we are very busy and pressed for time, we are professional people, we do not have time for all this.

political language decoded: when wealthy, (relatively) powerful governments such as Canada or Australia use some sort of variation on a 'Tamil boat crisis' or such, they are in fact discussing a virtual handful of bedraggled Sri Lankans fleeing who knows what.

in a slightly less imperfect world, the word "crisis" would be reserved for momentous events causing widespread social upheaval, such as the genuine villainy that was what Margaret Thatcher did to much of central and northern Britain in her time in office.

STAY HYDRATED

concerned about the deeply pernicious Tory lies taking root in the UK about Labour's handling of the economy ('everything is Labour's fault' etc), and with so many willingly credulous dicks propping up the UK press corps and giving these lies an easy ride, it's got to be worth lauding when someone stands up and challenges such ludicrous falsehoods.

so, then, with such lies abroad, Brian Barder fisks "six Tory myths" here.

elsewhere: Spotify, thank you for Solomon Burke (RIP), for Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk, and for the Pearson Sound tunes Wad (the longer 5 minute + version that is news to me), and Indelible. oh and the Brownswood Recordings compilation Brownswood Electr*c.

i want to go mental on a dance floor to Wad.

should and probably could have got in with a beautiful young woman in a pub last night but am moving city on Wednesday, so didn't really see the point.

you learn more from a few Private Eye columns in one afternoon than an entire month of mainstream British journalism, swear it.

street paper The Big Issue has a column that interviews celebrities about advice for their younger selves. writer AL Kennedy and actress Sadie Frost have been two particularly affecting ones of late.

among other things, Kennedy noted I'd like to tell my 16-year-old self - don't go out with predatory men. They are less interesting than you think while Frost admitted I wish I could go back and be more gentle, more compassionate with my dad. I had a very difficult relationship with him. I didn't understand his illness - he had manic depression, he was undiagnosed hepatitis C and he had issues with alcohol. He was very unconventional and larger than life and I was very unsure of him and neither of us could connect very well. I think my love and validation would have really helped him. I only came to grips with it all after he died and that has haunted me because I think I broke his heart.

Our mission was to show the world that girls can play rock and roll. When people would say to me 'girls can't play rock and roll' I'd say what do you mean?
Do you mean they cannot master the instruments? Because I'm in school with girls playing cello and violin performing Beethoven and Bach.

What you mean is rock and roll is sexual. And when you play rock and roll, you own your sexuality. And that's threatening to some people.

People are more willing to give girls a shot these days but there's still absolutely that glass ceiling.

- Joan Jett

apparently the World Bank estimate more than 800 million Indians get by on £1.26 a day (that's roughly 2 Canadian bucks or 1.45 euro at current rates).

yesterday i travelled on a coach from London to Manchester, 200 miles or so a trip, a fairly long journey by the standards of geographically small Britain, which is smaller than many states in the USA.

i was with my brother's partner in the morning and we had a central London food court breakfast (which is obviously going to be expensive by the standards of many wealthy nations, let alone in absolute terms), that i shouted.

i had a bagel with cream cheese, and a flat white and a bottle of a fruit smoothie, and she had an egg sandwich and a flat white.

all this was about ten pounds. ten pounds before 9 in the morning, and then i later got on a coach that cost about five pounds for a return journey (a cheap price by the standards of much British inter-city public transport travel, to be fair: because i have an internet connection where i live and a laptop, and can search for cheaper prices - very lucky).

15 quid by lunch because i have the immense good fortune to be a particular middle-class Briton with money to spare.

what luck.

all because of an accident of birth.

i suppose this somewhat self-aggrandising anecdote just goes to show that small-state conservative politicians in the wealthy world are the enemy, because they do not acknowledge that the good fortune of some of us which is built on the structurally sustained bad fortune of others (so therefore, no accident, in truth) must be remedied by more state intervention on capital than has been the case.