The Pope launched an attack on atheism today, saying that it had led to some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” known to mankind.
According to the Pope, “A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope“.
Oh no! I have got it wrong about our ability to make a better world. We will just have to leave it to the Church won’t we?
Er, the market, I meant: Yours for only two large.
Nice stuff from Atilla the Whore in comments here (ignore the rest — it’s the usual gang of dipshit trolling freaks, bastards and loonies).
…the RCP are what Marxist-Leninists call ’social chauvinists’ — backers of ‘their own nation’s imperialism’ against ‘foreign imperialisms’. During the Yugoslav wars, they took the side of John Major’s Britain against Germany, over the question of whether to recognise Croatia’s independence, and the side of Major’s Britain against the US opposition, over the question of whether to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnians. They were lavish in their condemnations of Germany and the US while virtually silent on British policy.
They also supported Thatcher’s line on opposing sanctions vs Apartheid South Africa. And like the Tory government, they attempted to squelch publicity of the Rwandan genocide, the occurrence of which they denied. Long ago, they condemned Western critics of the Sudanese regime as ‘the new crusaders’. Their ‘anti-imperialism’ involves supporting friendly relations between the West and murderous dictators, without allowing morality to get in the way. Hence their preference for Tory over Blairite foreign policy.
Much as I loathe and despise the SWP, I have to admit they’re not as bad as the RCP, who are simply evil. As well as being postmodernists.
Oh yes, they also claim that rape is not a particularly traumatic crime for the victim, but is only made so as a result of ‘media hype’. Nasty, nasty people…
What strikes me particularly is that they (LM/Spiked/RCP) are expert at the very process that they have recently been claiming was harmless for fascists — and consequently make great personal gains and exposure as a result. They find platforms everywhere — from Channel 4, The Times, The Moral Maze, etc and now — for fuck’s sake — Jewcy and Engage (ok — Engage is a favourable link-to only — but still — I expect more cleanliness). These fucking fruitloops are everywhere. There is plenty of material online and elsewhere on what they are like (dangerous, weirdo, crackpot tossers in essence). I think that what is needed is a concerted campaign to deny them their platforms and start a process of deligitimisation. Just kicking them off Jewcy and Engage will be a start though. Let’s make that start.
First the insipid Harry Potter books had knickers in twists because of the ’satanism’ and ‘black magic’ contained therein, now as Jim has already noted, The Golden Compass, the film of the first book of Phillip Pullman’s excellent His Dark Materials series is annoying god-botherers everywhere. The question is, is the film atheist enough?
Some are calling for a boycott of the film when it opens in the United States on Dec. 5 because Philip Pullman, author of the book the movie is based on, says he is an atheist.
Oh, the rotter.
“Religion is at its best when it is furthest away from power,” [said] Pullman … “As soon as it gets its hands on power, it’s no good.”
Fair comment.
“It’s stealth campaign, a dishonest way to produce anything,” Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, [an organisation which advocates for the world’s largest child sex network] … “They want to make sure there’s a second and third movie based on the books in the trilogy. This teaches atheism to kids. Phillip Pullman is very open about this. The movie is basically innocuous, but parents may want to say to their kids, ‘You know what? A great Christmas present would be to buy his ‘Dark Trilogy,’ the name of the three books’ [it’s not, but four syllables would be pushing it, and ‘materials’ sounds like ‘materialism’ and that’s like kah-munism]. Now you’ve introduced your kids to atheism. I don’t think most parents want to do that.”
Remember–the celestial dictator loves you so much, he’s sending you to hell. Have a nice day.
I took in Control last night, Anton Corbijn’s bleak and gorgeously shot biopic of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division who’s remembered today either as the Young Werther of Manchester or, as Woody Allen once said of Sylvia Plath, an interesting poet “whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.”
The theatre was refreshingly free of the college girl mentality. Most of the audience were, like me, in their late twenties and thus born sometime around Curtis’s suicide; also, sadly, weaned on the post-punk revival of New York, which affords all of the gothic iconography on a trust-fund diet and sans the working-class angst that made the genre what it was. (Pity poor Julian Casablancas warding off his father’s fashion models, and then his own.)
With just two studio albums to their credit, one released posthumously, Joy Division’s legacy rests almost entirely on the moody gray aura of their stagecraft - complete with zombie-automaton movements by Curtis - and the bass-heavy, metallic instrumentals. If these Lithium bottles could sing…
Of course, you can’t become a cult phenomenon if you’re a well-adjusted young artist who waters the lawn on Sunday and changes nappies. Control, which is based on widow Deborah Curtis’s memoir Touching from a distance, depicts its protagonist as a deeply tormented solipsist who only barely recognized the damage he was causing his family. The film is all about Debbie, really, given how difficult it must have been for her depict an unloving, philandering hubby who cried while having sex and couldn’t bear to stay in the same room with his infant daughter. “Everyone hates me, I’ve made everyone hate me,” Curtis tells an oddly magnanimous Tony Wilson, and I confess I found myself sympathizing with everyone just a bit. His heart belonged to another, Annik Honore, the kind of over-mascared Belgian waif Wes Anderson would do something insufferable with, who interviewed him for a fanzine she was writing and asked questions like, “What do you find beautiful?” (It’s O.K. I choked on my Junior Mint, too.) Well within the parameters of rock star fame, you might say, but here’s how Ian Curtis talked to his wife:
“If you wanted to sleep with other men, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Ian, when you say a thing like that, it makes me think you don’t love me anymore.”
“I don’t think I do.”
Well. Either this is a faithful dramatization of what chatter in the Curtis household was like, or it’s the screenwriter’s idea of plausible affectlessness at the dawn of the Thatcher era. Whatever the case, it put me in mind of the sillier moments in Mike Nichols’s cracked-romance clunker Closer (”Did you swallow his cum?” “Yes.” “How did it taste? How did it taste?!” “It tastes like you, but sweeter!”). And as if to capitalize on the mawkishness of that set piece, guess which famous Joy Division track is cued as Debbie walks away?
Thankfully, Control is bleak but not dire due to the humor of the supporting cast, i.e., the rest of the band and especially their manager Rob Gretton, played to scene-stealing perfection by Toby Kebbell. (Where’s he been and what’s he doing next?) Curtis’s noblest gesture, in fact, may have been to play at giddiness on the eve of Joy Division’s U.S. tour just for the sake of his mates. In keeping with his true nature, however, what he gave he also took away, since he hanged himself on that same eve. Suicide is not just self-murder, it’s also a form of theft from which one is able to escape consequence.
One scanted element of the band’s cultural significance was their Nazi iconography. The name Joy Division was taken from the ambiguously fictional term for a group of Jewish sex slaves in World War II concentration camps - as described in the 1965 novel The House of Dolls - and bassist Peter Hook and guitarist Bernard Sumner later admitted that the band was intrigued by fascism. They played up the aesthetic mainly to antagonize critics who were appalled that so many National Front-type skinheads kept turning up for gigs.
One doesn’t mean to be a commissar about arthouse filmmaking, but, at the very least, some confrontation with this rancid political element might have helped beat back the Inside-Ian’s-Head longueurs. All we get is one infamous riot the night Curtis collapsed with a seizure on stage, which the roughneck audience of course assumed was all part of the act. Instead, it was Michael Winterbottom’s hilarious 24 Hour Party People that deftly handled the Fascism Question. Steve Coogan’s Tony Wilson has the following exchange with a music journalist:
“How do you respond to charges that Joy Division are a neo-Nazi band?”
“Are you not aware of situationalism? Postmodernism? Haven’t you heard of the free play of signs and signifiers?”
This must be why Mancunians - even those who would gladly don Che Guevara tees without a hint of irony or some vapid Derridian justification cooked up - used to call Wilson a fucking cunt. But the So It Goes host had a point. Fascist kitsch, if not actual fascism, in mainstream seventies music predated Joy Division: David Bowie went through his rather unfortunate Nietzsche-quoting, sieg hailing period, and Iggy Pop once dedicated the song “Rich Bitches” to all the “Hebrew women” in the audience.
Still, the dun-colored Hitler Youth uniforms were a new provocation, which is why New Order - founded by the remaining members of Joy Division after Curtis’s death - went out of their way to distance themselves from British nationalism. Their explicitly anti-hooligan song “World in Motion” was commissioned by the Football Association in 1990 to champion England for that year’s World Cup in Italy. The English club was already being sequestered on Sardinia due to the fear that heavy boozing and drug-use would make them and their fans violent. Italian counter-terrorism forces were enlisted to monitor the players, with the full consent of the Conservative Minister of Sport in London, who was still reeling from the notorious “Heysel disaster” in Brussels, and feared that Brits - not just National Front thugs - were becoming personas non grata on the continent.
Ask Billy Bragg - always more of a Clash man himself - about the perils of mixing pop and politics, but there’s no avoiding the issue.
I well remember The Teddy Bears’ Picnic: If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise….
Gillian Gibbons is up for trial in Sudan today. The facts of the so-called case are already well known. The children she taught chose to call their class teddy-bear Mohammed, an act which, according to the charge, involved “insulting religion and inciting hatred”. You see, this was her responsibility. She let the children choose that very nice name because the children liked their teddy. That was way back in September though, since when some well-meaning pious soul has shopped her, so now, just in time for Christmas, she faces forty lashes or a prison sentence.
Much has been written about this but the charge is not wrong. There is incitement to hatred. Only it’s not Gibbons that is doing the inciting: it’s the sharia court. No surprise there, not down those woods. They boil in hatred, they wallow in it, they apply it liberally, why, they lash it on. Forty lashes of it.
Ah but it is because – you must understand – Moslems so love Mohammed, says the cleric interviewed on telly.
Love does interesting things. In the case of fundamentalist Islam, the religion of peace, it does hate exceedingly well. So well you can hardly tell the difference between hatred and love. Because, of course, if you love so much you must simply hate those that don’t love so much. Surely you see the logic of that? Please make an effort to get it through your thick skull. Do move on. Nothing to see here, folks. Just move on. And while you’re moving why not sing along? Here’s some music..
For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic…
As Dave Allen used to say: May your God go with you.
Alicia Kennedy, Deputy General Secretary of the Labour Party, emails me with an important announcement:
This Saturday, 1 December, is our final National Campaign Day for 2007. And I was wondering if you would be able to join us to draw the year to a close with a huge campaigning event, so that we can start 2008 with a great team and momentum.
While I am not averse to the idea of door knocking and leafleting, folding and stuffing, running street stalls and, or even the dangerous area of fundraisers, the phrase “keeping one’s head down” comes to mind this week.
Given the luck the Brown government has had in office so far, campaigning in marginal constituencies should probably wait until after the plague of frogs, the asteroid strike on Wembley, and the war with Spain over Gibraltar have occurred. In any case, starting with a great team in 2008 must be a clear sign that Harriet Harman will be gone soon.
Ever the pinup boy for fascist lads of confused sexuality, Morrissey’s remarks, as reported this morning, neither shocked nor suprised me:
Morrissey has made an unexpected–and to some of his fans a thoroughly unwelcome–contribution to Britain’s loaded immigration debate. The musician has delivered a swingeing attack on what he perceives to be Britain’s encroaching multiculturalism and the loss of national identity.”England is a memory now,” he says, in an interview with the NME published yesterday. “The gates are flooded and anybody can have access to England and join in.”
He goes on: “Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. Travel to England and you have no idea where you are. It matters because the British identity is very attractive. I grew up into it and I find it very quaint and amusing. Other countries have held on to their basic identity, yet it seems to me that England was thrown away.”
A nice bit of ‘I’m-not-buttery’ there.
Morrissey now lives in the land of Mussolini. He once wrote:
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE
I will leave our resident rap historian to provide an analysis.
Again, it’s a mixed story, but Iraq is still appearing to have improved since the use of a new strategies. The following is from a Guardian reporter who has been embedded with US forces.
From the little I have seen of the capital, I am inclined to agree that a hasty US retreat, while seductively simple, is not the way to suck out the poison. I saw Iraqis pleading with US soldiers to spend more, not less time patrolling their neighbourhood because they believed worse options - extremist factions, gangsters and criminals - were waiting to fill the vacuum. To be sustained, any downturn in violence needs the country’s sectarian leaders to find common political ground.
Under General David Petraeus, US military forces in Iraq have learned lessons the hard way - but at least they have learned them. They get out of their vehicles and talk to the people about everyday concerns over security, power and schools. They play football with grateful children. They offer amnesties to former insurgents and bring them to the negotiating table. When attacked, they do not lash out blindly but depend on brave citizens, whose trust they are winning, to help identify the criminals. “We cannot kill our way out of this,” I heard one colonel say.
[…]
But the Americans - apparently believing that having started this war, they have a moral responsibility to finish it - are now getting most of it right most of the time. A journalist who spent Thanksgiving Day touring Iraq with Petraeus told me that one of his strengths is that, unlike the caricature of a US army commander, he is not afraid of ambiguity or paradox. He will find Iraq has plenty more of both to offer in the long years ahead.
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
These were the words of Lollard priest John Ball, delivered in 1381 to a group of rebels at Blackheath, from where I write now. Ball, immortalised by Froissart as the “mad priest of Kent”, continued…
“From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will ) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”
Ball delivered his sermon shortly after being sprung from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison in Maidstone at the beginning of the Peasants’ Revolt. Ball was shortly thereafter taken prisoner at Coventry, and then hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the child king Richard II.
But that’s enough history. The reason I bring up John Ball is that this hero of the common people was the subject of a song sung on Tuesday evening at the Royal Festival Hall in London, of all places.
The irony-appreciating artiste was Chris Wood – son of Kent, musician, singer, storyteller and teacher. Wood is known and respected in folk music circles. He is part of a longstanding collaboration with diatonic accordionist Andy Cutting, and a few years ago founded the English Acoustic Collective with Robert Harbron and John Dipper. Wood is also a solo artist, and writes material together with storyteller Hugh Lupton.
Wood was at the RFH to give a concert as part of the Imagined Village project, but he started the evening with a solo spot. Just him and his guitar, delivered from the side of the stage.
Only a few songs were performed, but each was introduced with a story delivered in Wood’s distinctive north Kent accent. We learned of peasants and kings, and also the singer’s well ‘ard six year old daughter. Wood sang, accompanying his rich, baritone voice with a guitar made “from an old Post Office” by some bloke in Exeter. A true English guitar with a gorgeous, harp-like sound.
We were also treated to a discussion of the Enclosures Act. Wood has this theory that the implications of major social changes can take seven generations to be realised. We are, he said, only now facing the consequences of the 1801 act of parliament, which transformed a fifth of England into private land to which commoners were denied access. The result was the forced urbanisation of many English working people. Wood sees the effects of the Enclosures Act in, for example, a soaring prison population, and our inability to take a drink “without going maaaad”.
The highlight of the evening for me personally was Chris Wood’s solo set, but the highlight of the programme was The Imagined Village. The latter is high decibel folk, dub, ambient, bhangra – you name it – with a direct line to centuries past, and performed by a large group of Englishmen and women of varying ages, hair coverage, skin tones and cultural heritage.
The Imagined Village project is:
Bragg is one of the cheeky chappies of popular music and left politics. Traditional music aficionados will know all about Eliza Carthy and her dad Martin. Carthy junior is the only fiddle player I know of who can pogo dance while playing. This young woman is absolutely manic, and by the end of the evening her bow had hardly a hair left on it! Carthy senior is a national treasure.
Project founder Simon Emerson is a musician and record producer of renown, with an impressive track record going back to 80s jazz-soul outfit Working Week. In the 90s he founded the Afro-Celt Sound System.
Sheila Chandra is a singer who has done work with complex vocal drones. Johnny Kalsi used to play with Transglobal Underground, and is now with the Dhol Foundation. Andy Gangadeen is a respected session drummer who founded The Bays, and bassist Francis Hylton is well-known in Hip Hop circles. Cellist Barney Morse Brown knows a thing or two about playing live with digital loops and stuff, and Sheema Mukherjee is a diminutive figure who sits near the back of the stage, but fills out the sound with her virtuoso sitar playing. Chris Wood we’ve already covered.
Benjamin Zephaniah. Good grief! What can one say about Benjamin Zephaniah? For some years I was unable to appreciate his talents, but I now rate him very highly as a writer and storyteller. Zephaniah is part of the Imagined Village project, but didn’t appear on stage owing to other commitments. Instead he recorded the vocal track for a variation on the ballad Tam Lyn, and appeared in large relief on a video screen above the stage.
John Copper is, following the death in 2004 of his father Bob Copper, the head of a group of a capella folk singers known as the Copper Family. Hailing from Rottingdean in East Sussex, this tribe has for generations collected, performed and preserved many English folksongs, and the family songbook is a priceless document. John Copper sings along with his sister Jill, her husband Jon and Bob’s six grandchildren, who perform independently as the Young Coppers.
The Imagined Village set began with a video of John Copper describing the changes his family has seen in the South Downs, and talking about the bond between people and place in the Sussex landscape. Billy Bragg, wearing a pearly jacket, then delivered a version of John Barleycorn. He also sang a song called England Half English, which beautifully describes the state of modern England and its peoples’ sense of national identity.
Martin Carthy introduced the performance of Tam Lyn with a story about the origins of this ballad of a young woman seduced by a man in thrall to the fairies. Zephaniah transformed the song about love at first sight into a modern ballad about how a girl in search of the “holy herb” meets an asylum seeker in a nightclub. Carthy senior is regarded by some as an arch-English traditionalist, but it was his idea to have Zephaniah reinterpret the old classic.
My favourite song of the Imagined Village set was Chris Wood and Eliza Carthy’s version of Cold Haily Rainy Night. This was backed up by the Young Coppers, Johnny Kalsi’s ferocious dhol drumming and Sheema Mukherjee’s hall-filling sitar.
Hard Times of Old England (Retold) was the final song of the set. It was sung by Billy Bragg, and recast to reflect the contemporary realities of empty holiday homes, closing post offices and the crisis in agriculture. A lament, for sure, but with an optimistic twist that emphasises the Good Times of Old England as a multicultural and inclusive society.
Thanks to David T of Harry’s Place for supplying the ticket. I’m very glad I accepted the invitation.
Comparing the novel The Golden Compass to a porn flick, a spokesperson for the Catholic Civil Rights League wants the book banned by the Windsor Catholic School Board. A school board in Halton, Ontario has already done so. The book’s original title in the UK is Northern Lights, book one of the trilogy His Dark Materials.
“Under the guise of an exciting adventure story, the very clear message being given is that the Catholic church is an evil organization and God and Christianity are a fraud.”
Several school libraries already have copies.
Baksi said his group has asked Bishop Ronald Fabbro’s office to approach school boards in the London Diocese area about removing the book.
“It shouldn’t be in (Catholic) schools in the first place,” he said.
Baski hasn’t read the book or seen the yet-to-be released movie, but added that shouldn’t undermine his opposition.
“I don’t have to see Debbie Does Dallas to know whether it is appropriate or consistent with the faith and values I would like to have in my house for my children,” he said.
Author Philip Pullman, in a two part interview on the CBC’s Writers and Company, said he can’t think of a more effective way to encourage students to read his work.
The book won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in the UK in 1995.
The BBC gather a variety of views about the Sudan Teddy Bear crisis. The majority of openly Sudanese and/or Muslim comments are not bonkers, although one or two are either attempting humour or out of their brains:
Speaking as a father I do not feel this was a well thought out plan by the teacher. However, I feel that she has done nothing wrong. The children themselves should be punished for having chosen the name of our great Prophet for a lowly bear. The teacher was misguided, whereas the children were malicious. They must be brought to answer for their blasphemy.
Abdullah Al-Zawawi, Sudan
Top marks for Mohammed:
My name is Mohammed. Should my parents be tried for insulting Islam?
Mohammed
An apidistra yesterday. It’s owner narrowly avoided prison by naming it Reginald, although Sudanese authorities warned him that it did have the same number of letters as the name Mohammed and he should take care in future.
The comments over at Harry’s Place on allowing nazis a platform are fucking hilarious.
On the matter of the fash and free speech - the pomo wankers are fucking everywhere!
Another thing… seen that post by Le Bore?
“And, happy birthday 5th birthday HP, and here’s to many more years of vigorous debate. Harry, who is an old friend of mine, has performed a valuable service for the left, for free speech and humanity in general”
Oh fuck — I think I’m about to have a seizure with laughing too much.
As for this, “vigorous debate” at Harold’s Place — I think that is a euphemism for ‘trolling by complete, utter fucking tossers’. And where would humanity be without it? Yes — a big thank you to HP Sauce for saving us all from ourselves. Gawwwd help us all — we are not worthy..
I take it you have all seen Pickled Politics defending the Oxford Union? Another triumph for the ‘liberal left’. The libcuntspiracy, it gets more preposterously pompous by the second - a humour free zone full of self-important twats.
The Cuntspiracy (only looked today out of morbid curiosity) has a piece by Sunny Hundal, calling Martin Amis a racist. He must have insulted Hundal’s goatee too is all I can say. The title of Hundal’s post on Amis is a joke in and of itself, of course… “Why I think“…. indeed! Hitherto we’ve seen precious evidence that he does this at all.
I’ve had real fun at Jewcy tonight.
Check it out. Maybe join in if you are so disposed. Fucknuts and arseholes – they get everywhere.
To those still attacking Martin Amis.
1. Amis has been a bit of a “daft cock” (to steal a phrase from a fellow PopinJay). This does not necessarily make him a racist.
2. Attacking Amis now is nothing more than a vanity project. “How should the liberal-left approach such issues?” asks one particularly vapid commentator who presumes to know the answer. If you disagree, you may be a racist.
3. Attacking Amis is attacking Amis. It does not undermine strong more considered left wing critiques of Islamism, which are neither racist, indicative of wider racist sentiments in the left, or Western imperialist constructs. When people say they are calling Amis a racist, they hope that the slur of racist will smear others they disagree with a little bit wider than Amis.
Apparently fighting nazis is ‘totalitarian’. Political discourse has degenerated to the extent that race hate is now just another ‘text’–as valid as any other. For the facilitators of this discourse, reality is reduced to a series of abstractions–discrete, unconnected occurrences–where ‘nigger/paki/yid/poofter’ is not followed by a fist, boot, or bottle. In their privileged bubble no-one is ever that nasty and the politics of genocide are reducible to a parlour game. They congratulate themselves on their virtue, secure in their certainty that there is no connection between the words of their transgressive entertainer for the evening and the axe-murder of a teenager in Liverpool. If the pile of corpses swells enough to reach the doorstep of their bubble, the best we may expect is that they ring their hands and wail ‘well we never thought they actually meant it’–again.
One week after achieving the Guinness World record for the world’s most expensive dessert – a $25,000 “Frrozen Haute Chocolate” containing 5 grams of edible 23-karat gold – the New York restaurant Serendipity 3 was shut down by the health department. It turns out that in addition to truffle shavings and other Haute Chocolate ingredients, the restaurant’s kitchen contained “a live mouse, mouse droppings in multiple areas of the restaurant, fruit flies, house flies, and more than 100 live cockroaches,” according to the inspectors.
Barbara Ehrenreich points out that it is a delusion of the rich that they can escape the consequences of a rotting public sphere.
Oh, and you lobbied against higher taxes and regulations on business? Then think twice before you sink your teeth into that chocolate and gold dessert. The vermin are always with you.
Personally, I have a sneaking sympathy for the view she quotes of Brian O’Connor in the Detroit News
He recommends guillotining the Haute Chocolate eaters, “Then we could treat the needy to a helping of my favorite dessert: ladyfingers.”
The aversion to infallibility would have brought Popper up to arms today against market fundamentalism. Neo liberals and libertarians ‘believe’ that a free market and absolute freedom will always lead to a better result for mankind. Reality proved them wrong. In the book The Lesson of This Century Popper claims: “A free market without intervention does not and cannot exist”. Unconditional belief in freedom and a free market often lead to indifference towards people who can’t perform in society due to sickness or old age. It even leads to corrosion of the free market due to monopolies. A strong government is required to guard the free market from monopolies and price agreements. A strong government is required to defend the constitutional state and to guarantee the safety and freedom of its civilians. A strong government is required to help the sick, seniors and disabled, and to give children the educational opportunities to develop their own talents.
Certain aspects of Karl Popper’s ideals and philosophy are abstractly appealing (some, sometimes, with qualifications).
Why the same philosophy and ideas should appeal to ‘libertarians’ is a mystery. Look here and see more.
Headline in Guardian:
Ahmadinejad offers to be an observer at US presidential election
… So does violence and mayhem follow the ideology espoused by the criminals Irving and Griffin. The Times reports that Oxford is in ‘lockdown’ this evening ahead of the Irving-Griffin circus at the Oxford Union.
[C]olleges today sent their students e-mails warning them to stay indoors during the protest. Students fear that a counter-demonstration by far-right activists could set off scuffles.
…..
Students said there was anger today that colleges had failed to press the union to cancel the debate, and that their only action appeared to be sending out e-mails warning of violence.
Keren Bagon, from Somerville College, who is planning to take part in the protest tonight, said: “Individual colleges have sent out warnings to students saying that there is a strong chance that it might turn violent and warning people not to go into town. People are worried that extremist protesters are going to come and launch counter demonstrations, and that it could turn violent.”
Don’t go out tonight–the Fash rule the streets of Oxford. What a jolly game the Tarquins and Penelopes are having at the Oxford Union.
Graeme at Hocemo Li Na Kafu? has another excellent post up: Sixty years ago we fought fascism with rifles and bombs, now we do it with a vigourous chinwag over cheese and port.
