Author: Mick Hartley

of photographs are published by MIT, and don’t come cheap. I’d recommend their “Blast Furnaces” (no really) – absolutely stunning, though I suppose it’s something of a minority taste. Maybe you need to have been brought up in an industrial area (for me, Sheffield) to go for this kind of thing.

Strange what “progressive” or “anti-war” can mean nowadays. The NYT has this, on Saturday’s demonstration in Washington in favour of immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, under the headline “Antiwar Rallies in Washington and Other Cities”:

The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.

Christopher Hitchens points out some facts about the Answer Coalition:

The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across “International ANSWER,” the group run by the “Worker’s World” party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the “resistance” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a “wide range of progressive political objectives” indeed, if that’s the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed “International ANSWER” as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism. […]

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

(via Secular Blasphemy)

So it’s official:

The biggest-ever study of the harmful effects of TV and computer games on schoolchildren has revealed how long exposure to both produces individuals who are fatter, lazier and more stupid than those whose electronic leisure time is governed.

The research into the behaviour of 23,000 children aged ten to 15 was undertaken by the Criminalogical [sic] Institute of Hanover in Germany

“The results are truly alarming,” said Christian Pfeifer, the director of the institute. “Over-consumption of either makes them fat, lazy, stupid, ill, sad, unhealthy. TVs and computers literally steal meaningful time for play, sport and fun from their lives. In addition, brutal films or video games displace things learned at school or from parents from their memories.”

The research compared two cities – blue-collar Dortmund and wealthy Munich.

Individuals who are fatter, lazier and more stupid…there’s that old scientific objectivity again. I don’t know, I just get the tiniest feeling that perhaps the researchers got the result they were looking for. Middle-class kids are so much nicer, after all.

p, hollow-cheeked, amphetamine glory of his stage presence just underlined the aura of reckless defiance, that almost menacing mood you can sometimes also catch in early photos of Jerry Lee Lewis. The first, acoustic, half was great. The second half, with The Band, was life-changing. When the curtains opened there was a bit of silly shouting from the sort of people who gave Folk Music a bad name. Apparently spurred on, Dylan and The Band broke new ground in a way that no r ‘n’ b or rock ‘n’ roll outfit had either ever done or even thought of doing. This was a redefinition not just of music but of how men should behave. The beauty, grace, intelligence and courage of the performance was impeccable. One thing stood out then, and remains a vivid memory. Dylan sang ‘Just like a Woman’ as ‘He makes love just like a woman’ and kept the subject of the song in the masculine gender throughout. I read a long time later that this song had been written after an alleged period of intimacy that Bob had shared with Allen Ginsberg. Whatever the truth, the lyrics do make much more sense sung this way. What would be so surprising about a woman making love just like a woman?

Just like a Woman was never one of my favourites (nor Michael Gray’s – “The chorus is trite and coy and the verses aren’t strong enough to compensate“), but that’s an angle I hadn’t come across before. Allen Ginsberg in ribbons and bows….Jeez.

esis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.

The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.

They don’t have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.

By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.

A caricature of the Guardian position, no doubt, (and Dalrymple is writing, one assumes, with a slight smile on his lips) but still….those who see racism everywhere are as much in thrall to it as the openly racist.

But what of Muslims? For the leftist-Guardian worldview they’re a problem: more blacks than Indians…..victims of Islamophobia, and so given special dispensation to express opinions which coming from anyone else would be excoriated….yet they seem sadly unappreciative of the efforts of their liberal well-wishers, using the opportunities given them to further their own, deeply illiberal, agenda.

Good stuff from Rod Liddle (via Butterflies and Wheels) – not normally one of my favourites:

According to the Daily Telegraph, a Muslim barrister who ‘advises’ the Prime Minister has said that Mr Blair is the victim of a sinister conspiracy between the Freemasons and the Jews, who control him and took us to war in Iraq. Ahmad Thomson, from the Muslim Association of Lawyers, has previously denied that six million Jews died in the Holocaust: that’s a ‘big lie’, he avers. There are quite a few people who think along similar lines to Mr Thomson, particularly in the United States. Mr Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was one such. These people call the US government ZOG — the Zionist Occupation Government — and they tend to have rather too many canisters of weedkiller in their basements. You might have heard similar sentiments from David Icke, too, although David believes that it is giant lizards rather than Jews pulling the strings. My point is that these people are usually lumped together under the generic heading of ‘nutters’. And sometimes ‘psychos,’ ‘weirdoes’, ‘loonies’, etc. But in Britain you can believe such paranoid, irrational gibberish and not merely be tolerated and excused the eponym ‘barking madman’ but actually be invited to divulge your stupidity to the Prime Minister personally. Because you are a Muslim and such poisonous paranoia is sort of expected from you, instead of being sectioned and maybe having a spot of ECT, you get to have your fantasies indulged.

From the same wonderful folks who brought you the Zimbabwe deportations:

A Ugandan asylum-seeker who was deported without her three children after losing her appeal is fighting to be reunited with them.

Rose Nammi, 39, was put on an aircraft back to Uganda last Sunday without seeing her children Sandra, 16, Peter, 15 and Lucy, 3. It is the first case that has come to light of a mother being removed from the country without her dependent children.

Usha Sood, the lawyer for the three children, said: “We’re not talking terrorists here. We are talking about a family.” Mrs Nammi fled Uganda in January 2001 after her husband disappeared. She said that she was beaten, tortured and raped.

Mrs Nammi claimed asylum after arriving in Britain but the Home Office refused her application, a decision against which she appealed. She was due to have her case heard in May 2002 but was unable to attend. A subsequent judicial review application also failed.

The Home Office said that it believed that the rapes and beatings did not amount to persecution. It added: “Every effort is made to reunite children with their family as soon as possible.”

Rapes and beatings did not amount to persecution?? Separated from her children?? Makes you wonder what kind of attributes the Home Office look for in their new recruits – only total bastards need apply, presumably.

” scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Yes, apart from equality, democracy, religious tolerance and freedom of speech, British morality had done nothing for Hadil. Mr Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, described these hard-won and magnificent freedoms as “simple truths which bind us together”. Talking about being British one cannot but adopt a Hugh Grant stumbling modesty, so ill-mannered and jingoistic does it sound to bang a drum, even very softly.

And I felt insufferably pompous even raising these questions with these bright, funny girls. I suggested they were far more British than they thought. They laughed that living in Iran and compelled to wear the hijab they would probably spend their lives trying to break the rule. “I love it here,” said Dunya, 17. “I never feel excluded in London — there are so many different cultures and we mostly get on.” So why don’t citzenship classes teach that when multiculturalism works it is because British tolerance has made it possible? And that the debate, between the West and Islam that will dominate the political agenda throughout Hadil’s lifetime amounts to more than a choice between the hijab and the thong.

Strangely hopeful, though amidst all the “bright, funny girls” who’ll find their own way of being British Muslims, there are those few dimmer, less self-possessed ones who’ll be seduced by the extremists.

Here’s a new one from, of course, the Chinese: Koizumi as the new Hitler (via Japundit):

In actuality, Koizumi has already declared that Japan will further increase cooperation with the US on all levels, including military cooperation. Japan’s “9.11” election can’t help but remind one of elections in Germany in January 1933. In several areas, the two elections are distressingly similar:

They both occurred after a country, defeated on the battlefield, took steps to wipe away national humiliation and rise again;
In both situations, a country shamed in military defeat felt persecuted, giving rise to politics of emotions, especially with regard to neighboring countries;
In both situations, this “public pathos” was tapped to become an essential element in the political contest for votes, in the suppression of rational politics, and in the push toward a hawkish road;
In both situations, a banner of reform was flown and the “ultra-appeal” of a party head was used to encourage voters to elect them; that party leader was a crafty, masterful actor during the electoral process;
Both situations used the dissolution of parliament to give the ruling party an overwhelming majority of seats;
They both want to revise the constitution to give their leadership and their successors more power, and to normalize the military by resurrect the nation’s army.
While in Japan, and even within the LDP, it has not been merely one lone politician calling Koizumi “another Hitler,” (primarily out of displeasure with his dogmatic political maneuvering), it is probably premature to conclude that, in his foreign affairs strategies, Koizumi is preparing to go to war as “another Hitler.” We still need to carefully examine the kind of foreign affairs policies this new Koizumi administration follows after its ascension, and we must carefully examine what kind of successor Koizumi chooses.

In conclusion, the people of Asia and of the entire world should hope that Japan’s “9.11” election is not the reappearance of a “Hitler phenomenon.” At the same time, looking at the many similarities that exist between the two, we cannot help but be alarmed.

Good stuff from a one-party state currently engaged in another crackdown on any expression of dissent.

e us that if we behave selfishly it is all right – we can’t help it – it is ‘in our genes.’ They try to convince us that life in Western society is a race in which we all start equal, and those who are the best, win. What we are not told that those who win generally start way in front of the rest. Well what does it matter? It’s all in the genes.

This is such a grotesque misunderstanding of Dawkins’ position that it’s difficult to know where to start except to say that no, this is precisely what he doesn’t argue.

For further Midgley confusion, see this Guardian letter:

Why do Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, in attacking the theory of intelligent design (ID), deal only with the arguments of traditional creationists (One side can be wrong, Life, September 1)?
Today’s ID theorists are more sophisticated. They concede that natural selection plays some part in development and that creation is not recent. They do not speak of God but, more generally, of design. Their position is indeed confused but it surely needs to be addressed directly. Of course the theory has been seized on by the neocons as a straight vindication of the Bible.

But really, it signifies something much less simple. It expresses a widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist – or Dawkinsist – orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science.

Even apart from the belief that neocon means the same as Christian fundamentalist, this is strange. Does she think that the world is not random “in some important sense”, outside of the effects of natural selection? If so, how would that differ from intelligent design? The whole glory of Darwinian evolution is that you can talk meaningfully about purpose, about progress: it brings teleology into biology without having to rely on outside supernatural factors.

As Evolutionblog notes (in a post titled “Midgley Steps In It Again”):

Midgley, like so many others who publish on this subject, deems it unnecessary to first learn some science before writing with confidence about it.