In honour of the Manure win tonight:

Jumpers for goalpoasts and that.

From Comrade Struthers, the man who brought you Spiders on Drugs and Conspiracy 911.

Though the final copy of the report has yet to be released, the Montreal Gazette has obtained several chapters of the final draft of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission’s report on the “reasonable accommodation” of minorities in Quebec. Their findings, as summarised by the Gazette, are “learn more English, be nicer to Muslims, get better informed”. The CBC is reporting “fury” at the results of the report. The Gazette is being criticised for overemphasing bits of the report that support their bias–I have no doubt that they’re putting an undue focus on the need for French speakers to learn English–but it seems that more critics are upset with how Bouchard and Taylor are blaming racism and xenophobia on the Quebecois, instead of on the minorities themselves.  The Journal de Montreal, however, has no use for such subtle reasoning and is instead putting most of its attention of Muslim women.

I was—and still am—of two minds about the commission. I was initially sceptical about it and wasn’t sure what it intended to achieve. It appeared to me as if a bunch of bigots who were best off ignored had managed to force their idiotic opinions (remember that this debate came to a head over the Herouxville incident) to the level of national debate.

However, whether or not the grievances immigration are legitimate, they are very real. Right-wing demagogue scumbags like the ADQ’s Mario Dumont are only too happy to capitalise on them for political gain, and allowing the grievances and tensions to fester without adequately dealing with them will only play into his hands. Jean Charest and his Liberals—though I’m not fond of them—played this well not just by starting a commission in the first place, but by putting two very well respected academics with a strong commitment to liberalism, Charles Taylor and Gerard Bouchard, at the head of it. The findings of the report were something of a foregone conclusion. The consultation document affirmed that Quebec is a secular liberal democratic society, so it was never in question that deranged rants about kosher peanut butter were going to change the commission’s fundamental views on the nature of Quebec society.  I don’t see this as a necessarily bad thing, though some do.

At the same time, racists tend not to be susceptible to rational argument, and if these people have their minds made up that they are under siege despite all evidence to the contrary, then there’s nothing that the best-written and most well-reasoned report in the world can do to change this. And so we’re back to my first objection. Better to just load up the guns and shoot the fuckers.

Unmixed fiery hair like the flower of a pomegranate is not good, since for the most part their characters are beastlike and shameless and greedy.

Aye.

Does Stephen Green have a bloodlust for British Muslims? If this provocative question containing an implicit statement concerned a respectable citizen with a reputation worth preserving, it might well result in a law suit for libel or defamation of character.

But I don’t see that happening in this case as the individual in question is a turd of a human being who possesses not a shred of credibility. Stephen Green, leader of the fundamentalist lobby group and rent-a-mob “Christian Voice”, has on pre-watershed TV this evening said that there will be civil war in the UK, with Christians taking up arms against our “nation in pain”’s Muslim population.

We shouldn’t take the threat seriously, however, as it’s unlikely that Green and his fellow fundis would know one end of an assault rifle from the other. On the other hand, a few low-grade fertiliser bombs are probably not beyond the capabilities of Christian Voice’s brighter acolytes.

If I didn’t regard the British government’s anti-terrorism legislation with contempt, I would no doubt be calling for Green’s prosecution for incitement. Actually, he would be better sectioned under the provisions of the Mental Health Act. A few years of chemical-assisted psychiatric treatment might do him a world of good.

Suffice it to say that I am utterly sick and tired of Stephen Green’s voice, Christian or no.

Question Time — he’s for it

Three-Way Fight blog just posted an interesting article about the views by white supremacists/nationalists on Barack Obama: “Post-racial: Even white supremacists don’t hate Obama.”

The author, Michael Crowley, wrote:

…for every instance of loony racist paranoia, one finds a countervailing explanation [by the white supremacist far-Right] for why Obama’s rise is not a story about black America rising up. White supremacists are less inclined to hate Obama than the white race-traitors who are enabling him. “If you are a white supremacist who is dedicated to a biological understanding of racism that says blacks are inferior, the only way [Obama] could be elected is with the conniving of unseen forces,” explains Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a Boston-based expert on white supremacists.

You can see where this is leading. Crowley continues:

There’s an even bigger culprit in this world than white liberals, however. Naturally, we speak here of the Jews. It turns out that what truly animates the white supremacist contingent these days is not racism but anti-Semitism. The black man is of trifling concern next to the “Zionist Occupation Government,” or ZOG, a term that describes puppet regimes of the global Zionist conspiracy. As one commenter on the popular white-power Web forum Stormfront explains it: “The blacks would be a non-factor if it weren’t for the ZOG’s legislations and skullduggery (civil rights act, hate crime laws, affirmative action, welfare, forced integration, etc etc …), allied with a compliant media that promotes black worship.” Thus, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an anodyne article on Obama’s support among American Jews, white-power sites like National Alliance News (”your single source for worldwide pro-White news”) quickly pounced. “Barack Obama: The Jewish Connection” came the breathless headline. (Never mind that Obama has had a rockier relationship with the American Jewish community than has Clinton.) “[U]ltimately he’s just another Jew puppet,” concludes another Stormfront commenter. “I look at his foreign advisers,” adds David Duke. “[They’re] Israeli supremacists. He’s even got Dennis Ross!”

Intrepid reporting follows:

Obviously she experienced more shots than in Bosnia.

And. 4 shots each is the amount — pathetic wankers - neither of them should be president. Really pathetic shit. A real poor show all round.

I’m getting more inclined to Obama as things ‘progress’ now. Does he hold his drink? That is the real measure of the man.

Newest Hitchens available here.

A great end paragraph:

But in 1914, Saki surprised all his elite admirers. His reasons for insisting on signing up for the trenches, when he was easily old enough to evade that fate, were almost comically reactionary. Enraged by the antimilitarist left that thought socialism preferable to world war, he argued in effect that even world war was preferable to socialism. Yet he declined any offer of an officer’s commission, insisted on serving in the ranks, appeared to forget all his previous affectations about hollandaise dressing and the loving preparations of wine and cheese, and was so reduced by front-line conditions of wounds and illness that he grew a moustache to conceal the loss of most of his top teeth. He carried on writing, though chiefly about the interesting survival of wildlife in the no-man’s-land of the Western Front, and he repeatedly sought positions on the front line. In November 1916, near the village of Beaumont-Hamel on the river Somme, he found what it is quite thinkable that he had been looking for all along. On the verge of a crater, during an interval of combat, he was heard to shout “Put that bloody cigarette out!” before succumbing to the bullet of a German sniper who had been trained to look for such tell-tale signals. In that “vanished puff of cigarette smoke” or, if you prefer, his image of a dissolved bubble of effervescence, there died someone who had finally come to decide that other people were worth fighting for after all.

Me with a group of people. A confused discussion ensues about spirituality and religion where no one understands the point that anyone else is trying to make. One member of group relates a story about a person they know who recently attended an hour long prayer session at their Church for the benefit of the people of China and Burma. Said person stated that they didn’t understand how people could think that this would help and that maybe an hour doing fundraising might have been better.

I made the point that I didn’t understand how people could want to pray to a God who required people to pray to Him before He got off His arse and did something.

This earned me the wrath of someone in the group.

It was demanded of me that if people want to pray, or go to Church, or believe in God then what had that got to do with me? If people think that by praying to their God they are being helpful then that is up to them. What have people’s religious belief and practice got to do with me? It’s harmless and nothing at all to do with me or anyone else .

However, I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when a bill passing through the Commons is threatened because of some people’s religious beliefs. I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when a Church dictates what MPs should and should not vote for. I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when religion seeks to intrude upon democratic process.

With the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill being debated in the Commons this coming week, this really was not the time for someone to tell me that I can’t have an opinion on the religious, when the religious are attempting to impose the consequences of their ‘opinons’ on everyone else.

As this someone was to discover.

The Archbishop of Canterbury appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme today to talk about the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Transcript here.

Leaving aside his actual views on the conflict, which I am sure you will find of interest never-the-less, the bit that I wanted to comment on here was the exchange between the Archbishop and the interviewer Carolyn Quinn about the incongruity of war and religious belief: 

CQ: … if you’ve seen the front page of the Times today, it shows Israeli soldiers taking a break from their bombardment in order to pray. How do you feel when you see a picture like that, almost showing the incongruity of war and a religious belief?

ABC: It’s sadly an incongruity which is part of a history we share. Christians do this, Muslims do this, Jews do this … it’s that unhappy impression that God is somehow content with the killing of innocents.

So God’s content with the killing of innocents is an unhappy impression? That’s as well be, but it’s a pretty damn accurate one all the same.

Perhaps the Archbishop  isn’t aware, but recently 29,000 plus people have been killed in an earthquake in China and 10,000 plus Burmese have been killed in a cyclone. 

The Archbishop’s God seems pretty happy to have sat back and let those events happen.

Why would this be, I wonder, if God doesn’t feel content at the killing of innocents? Maybe His powers don’t give Him any control over the actual planet itself and therefore stopping natural disasters is beyond His remit. Or maybe He doesn’t consider the people of China and Burma to be ‘innocent’ enough for Him to bother preventing their suffering such mass-scale death, destruction and displacement?

Or perhaps it’s just that He’s a bit busy right now and has other more pressing things to attend to. After all, He only works six days a week and He presides over the whole world and everyone and everything in it -  that’s a lot of work for one lone celestial being.

Or maybe He just doesn’t give a shit.

Fortunately, however, for those of us who have no God, and who recognise that we only have each other, there’s the Red Cross.

Those approving words describe the murder of a young pregnant woman and her boyfriend in Haryana state by her father and other relatives.

From society’s point of view, this is a very good thing […] We have removed the blot.

It is a story of sexism: the defence of entrenched male power, status and property and the enforcement of women’s role as factor[ies] for making men’; racism: keeping the ‘caste’ and class pure by preventing fraternisation with ‘lower’ orders; and the maintenance of economic power relations through unbridled barbarity in the service of feudalism–the vicious oppression of workers and peasants, all underpinned by a thick layer of superstition and religious obscurantism.

We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honor of doing the village proud […] We would not have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was the act of ‘real men’.

So much for empathy then, the prohibition against killing one’s children cast aside in an instant.

A video with everything–yes, even banjos.

What Jim said

Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful messengers who are today no longer alive is the justification for my existence on this earth, rather than a claim for honour.

The words of Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 children from extermination. She has died at the age of 98.

Others too have tried to find a way to encompass the enormity of an act of virtue that seems beyond language.

Elzbieta Ficowska, one of those saved as a five-month-old baby in July 1942 and now the wife of a leading Polish poet: “It took a miracle to save a Jewish child. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come’.

And so we try to understand. The poet, George Szirtes, uses her obituary to explore the poetics of action - dread and numbness followed by ‘the melting of that which is frozen into the otherworldly warmth of language‘. The scientist Francis Sedgemore, in an unrelated post, comments on scientific evidence showing that “Morality is … hard-wired into our neural network“.

Thinking historically, we can see that the possibility of almost unimaginable cruelty is always with us. However, when it emerges, we also invariably find a Sendler; an ordinary person who achieves the extraordinary. This ethical heroism is an historical constant. Whatever the level of barbarism, it can be and is resisted. In that resistance lies the seeds of a future, different world, peopled by survivors and their rescuers. And history is our collective memory; we must commemorate our real heroes - and never forget.

The application of science can, according to AC Grayling, create serious ethical dilemmas. Indeed it can, but scientific data can also confound the designs of ideologues and cultural critics. Take, for example, recent neurological research which disproves the assertions of commentators who plough a moral relativist furrow when trying to convince us of their political prejudices.

In his fortnightly New Scientist column, Grayling the philosopher (not the Guardian Comment is Free wind-up merchant) discusses the implications of research which shows that across our species mirror neurons in the motor cortex of the brain fire in sympathy with what the individual perceives in the activity and experiences of others. That is, irrespective of ethnicity, nationality, gender or whatever, we create in our minds a model of what others are experiencing.

The essential point, says Grayling, is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognise what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them. Morality is therefore hard-wired into our neural network:

“So even when customs differ, fundamental morality does not; and if two societies differ over what they consider to be moral, one of them must just be plain wrong.”

Some of us already hold a belief that this is a defining characteristic of humanity, but this in itself is a prejudice. Or rather was. What the data now show is that the basis for morality is shared by all humans, and there is a universality to our being that crosses ethnic and cultural divides.

Q: How do you criticise religion without offending its adherents?

A: You can’t. So fuck them all anyway.

The mystical kernel of all religion is inherently hierarchical, discriminatory, and exclusionary, monstrous, archaic, persecutionary and retrograde — a fusion of fascism, populism, forgery, hysteria and excrement — reactionary, pre-modern and primitive. It is incompatible with the process known as the Enlightenment.

All of religion’s shit amounts to a battle between philosophy and priestcraft, between this-worldliness and otherworldliness - between the material and the magik.

Just thought I’d mention it… (and it gave an excuse to chuck up a Youtube with some glib one-liners included).

Will someone please direct the Elders’, or the Lobby’s, efforts against this nut! And soon, before he publishes some half-baked “criticism of Israel,” to defend himself with.

A few selections from the article, “The professor the anti-Semites love: Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach, and the downside of academic freedom”:

“What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews,” Martin Fiebert [MacDonald’s potential publisher] wrote… “Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I’m sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion.’”

“I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It’s very crude,” MacDonald added. “But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don’t have any problem with that.”

I like hijacking other people’s words and using them to start hares running. On my own blog, I’ve used this word ‘negativist’ (much loved of Will of this parish, from whom it came). And a while ago, we had ‘bloggertarian.’

That was a laugh that was.

My favourite word at the moment is ‘memebot.’ I saw it a few weeks ago in the comments here …or more precisely, here:

“For examples, see just about every other article by Seumas Milne. The imperviousness to evidence and reason is quite remarkable. He’s not so much a thinker as trafficker in assertion; a memebot, if you will.”

Seumas Milne is, indeed, a memebot. As is Simon Tidsall (dealt with nicely by Norm here).

These are both examples of journalists that offend my Eustonian prejudices, of course - I’m sure that you can find a few membots that exhibit them as well. Be my guest.

Other examples are, of course, our friends the bloggertarians. Raise a question - any question - and the answer is always ’sack public employees’ / ’school vouchers’ / ‘government can’t work’ etc. The thick shitheads.

A one line assertion is always sufficient for memebots. It’s getting so that you can’t write a post anywhere without a few of them popping up to annoy you. It must stop.

The reason that I’m writing about it here is because I think it may be a useful shorthand comments policy for any bloggers who like getting half-decent arguments back in their comment threads.

In future, I may just delete commenters on the grounds that they are memebots. A one word explanation. Take my advice, for once in your life? Delete your memebots too. Life’s too short to do anything else.

The final paragraph in the newest C Hitchens article.

That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60^th, let alone a 70^th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.

Last night I thought about writing something about the BBC documentary series Wild China that has just started its six-episode run. But events in China have taken a catastrophic turn in the form of a very wild natural event that is reported to have resulted in the deaths of thousands.

Unlike in Burma, the Chinese authorities are known for their skill in dealing with natural disasters such as the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Sichuan province early this morning. Let’s hope that all goes well with the emergency effort, and there are no aftershocks that take further lives.

The first episode of wildlife film producer Phil Chapman’s documentary broadcast yesterday was superb, and I’m looking forward very much to the rest of the series. The dead tree edition of the Radio Times this week describes the film as “sumptuous”, and for very good reason. Chapman says that there was a lot of negotiation involved between himself and the Chinese state broadcaster, which is ever wary of foreigners. Says Chapman:

Our greatest misconception of the country is that it’s military-dominated, industrialised, trashed, with a cowed population. Well, it just isn’t like that. China’s a big, beautiful country, with amazing people, most of whom don’t give a shit about Beijing or politics. I was expecting a much more guarded, fearful society, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’re in, it’s hard not to fall in love with the place.”

It sounds like the kind of place I should see for myself. What Chapman says is no doubt correct, and those of us who spend much time criticising China for its state capitalist dictatorship would do well to remember this and keep a sense of perspective. Totalitarianism is a complex beast.

I want a t-shirt made up with this image — it will enhance myself as a thing of beauty when worn.

respec - madfuckker

I am narf tired oot by all the highfalutin political activism that is blogging I am.

I want one of these to ease the strain.

Where do you buy a horse from?

Heine’s famous quotation, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” has had a fresh outing in the wake of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the public burning of books by the Nazis. Today, Islamist militias in Iraq are showing that they can eclipse even the Brownshirts in brutality. They have skipped a stage. They don’t bother with destroying art - they are killing artists.

In November Seif Yehia, 23, was beheaded for singing western songs at weddings, and painter Ibraheem Sadoon was shot dead as he drove through Baghdad. In February Sunni fighters killed Waleed Dahi, 27, a young actor, while he rehearsed for a play due to open at the Jordanian National Theatre this month.

These chilling words came from a spokesman:

‘Acting, theatre and television encourage bad behaviour and irreligious attitudes. They promote customs that affect the morality of our traditional society.

I suppose beheading is a moral act then.

One of the things tyranny fears most is art. It is the anti-imperialism of the mind, expelling the totalitarian occupation force of the official ideology. Instead, it offers rational thought and human emotion - truth and beauty. It is on the front line.

Here’s a guest post from the one and only Dave Osler

The last time an Old Etonian got to head a major British political party, the Beatles had only just released their second single. Back in 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home ‘emerged’ as a non-elected prime minister, after not being elected to head the Conservative Party.

The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor did the hapless Tory backbenchers, for that matter. It would have been a damned impertinence to subject Baron Home of the Hirsel, fourteenth Earl of Home, to that kind of inconvenience.

Instead, a handful of leading Conservative figures selected Sir Alec for the job, by a process only paralleled by the mechanisms for choosing a new Pope.

They say Sir Alec was a good chap and a jolly nice fellow and all that. But as a paid-up, grouse-shooting, not particularly bright member of the upper class, he was very obviously out of touch with ordinary voters. Labour was quick to realise that, and leader of the opposition Harold Wilson hammered home the point. Repeatedly.

A year later, Wilson was in Number Ten. The Tories had been ousted from office after 13 years, with class politics one of the major reasons. From then on, the Tories were determined to broaden their appeal.

Home’s replacement, Edward Heath, became the first grammar school boy to lead the Conservatives. Later, things got more plebeian even than that, with the job later going to a petit bourgeois grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the son of a garden ornament manufacturer who went bust, and even a kid from a comp in Rotherham.

Until now, that is. As if to illustrate the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, the Old Etonians are back in charge of the Tories. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an OE with deep family roots in the ruling classes of several nations, has just been elected mayor of London.

Meanwhile, the party is headed by David Cameron, offspring of a stockbroker and the daughter of a Baronet, making him fifth cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. He is thought to be worth £30m.

Labour has historically been the party that represents the majority of society against the elite, so all this should present it with an open goal. I mean, Wilson was nobody’s idea of a prole, but he was still able effectively to highlight what the Tories are and who they represent.

But you can bet on one thing. Labour today - ‘ideologically neutral’ New Labour, with its schoolgirl crush on the super-rich - won’t try anything of the sort. That would smack of class politics, and we can’t be having any of that, can we? Not even if the other side are most insistent on its reintroduction.