I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.
Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.
Happy New Year everybody.
Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.
It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.
We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.
2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.
The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.
I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.
Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.
Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.
Trolls always try to get in early in a post’s blogging life. Nothing new about that. Ignore them.
Here’s an interesting website. This is of relevance in relation to my earlier post about early recorded Indian music, but also dovetails neatly into the subject of British imperialism and Anglicism vs Orientalism – a debate which continues to preoccupy us in the UK today.
http://chandrakantha.com/articles/tawaif/4_the_means.html
technicolour, thanks for the excellent link. The Glasgow Media Group is a superb resource and its Head, Professor Greg Philo is a superb public and academic intellectual. He’s also a very good man.
Vronsky; thanks v much for this, well done (again) the Glasgow Media Group. Am spreading it. Trouble is, as flatmate just said, where’s the political will to run with this? Who is standing up for the public?
From a letter from Prof Greg Philo of the GMG published in the Guardian:
“The population has actually become more radical on issues such as tax and re-distribution, partly as a result of the banking crisis and because the bottom 50% of the population now own only 9% of the wealth. A YouGov poll we commissioned this year showed 74% of the population would favour a tax on the wealthiest 6 million (who have an average of £4m of private wealth per household) to pay off the national debt and therefore avoid the cuts. The wealthiest were slightly more in favour of this than the poorest.”
@tungsten:
1. Yes, we are clinging to the empire of old. I sense that whilst we might not entirely agree on the provenance and power structure of the system, I would regard the Washington Consensus and Chicago School capitalism in the same way as you see “Anglo-Dutch monetarist synarchy” – a mechanism for massively enriching a small wealthy elite at the expense of the world’s resources and the reasonable living conditions of most of its peoples. And, given our views on the media, a mechanism also for hiding the fault-lines of inequality: the nature of class draws a peculiar dividing line of wealth between the under/working class and the “hard working middle class”, but the real dividing line should group both of them together in mutual assistance and solidarity against the financial elite who exploit them.
2. I think we may differ about religion, but then – as with many contributors to this blog – feelings on religion often come from ones own personal experiences. I come down hard on religion because I had a poor experience of it, though I nevertheless still support freedom of religion for anyone who wants it.
Whilst you and AB are likely disappointed that I believe the state should gently separate itself from religion, and the teaching of the state religion, this is not intended to be code for *dissuading* people about religion. I’d still offer Religious Education in schools, but would teach it from each religious perspective and from none. A priest in one week, a rabbi the next, an Islamic teacher after that, and then an atheist.
My views on religion have been modified by the wars and conflicts we’ve seen recently – each have been fuelled by the myopic views of the sword bearer’s commanders, and the sword bearer sallies forth to die without question. Witness the stubbornness of the settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who cite a 2,000 year old book as reason to attack another people, rather than history books from 1967!
3. We’re in much agreement here. Partly the destruction of public services comes about because of managerial techniques in fashion, and the NHS is certainly suffering for those. And that’s quite aside from the long-term problems caused by PFI, which is rightly ridiculed as an expensive white elephant from the Left and the Right.
Sure, expensive and pride-driven resource wars put a squeeze on all other public services.
4. Book publishing is certainly in the hands of the wealthy, but there are still a lot of publishers, and I don’t see a great deal of censorship here. You can still get Chomsky, Alex Jones and David Icke at most bookshops, and you can order Kevin MacDonald from Amazon. So I don’t see that as a great threat at present.
But you’re right about control of broadcasting. There is a certain amount of progressive and independent radio in the United States, which for various economic and licensing reasons has not caught on in the UK, and yes, independent broadcasting on the internet is a positive phenomenon (such as Democracy Now, which I should really make more time for). But it is mainstream television broadcasting, and newspaper reporting, that makes up the beliefs of a nation, and that represents a very narrow band of mainstream opinion.
In the UK, there are only a few fearless journals of reportage: the left-leaning Morning Star, with a small circulation of maybe 20,000 copies; and Private Eye, whose coverage takes a highly variable political position. Neither have a great impact on the consciousness of the nation, sadly.
I contend that we tolerate the mainstream press because there are glimmers of genuine reporting amongst the detritus and propaganda: the expenses scandal, from the Telegraph, and Wikileaks, from the Guardian are two I liked recently. I think it’s important that if something is given prominence in the media, it does not automatically make it false: its “supposedly free” nature means that sometimes decent, progressive stories leak out!
See, there’s perhaps not such a great difference between us after all. You want to dump the ‘Frankfurt School’ agenda, which I believe is a particular perspective that is felt in some quarters to unwittingly carry out an elite agenda. For my part, I see the neo-capitalism of the last thirty years, pushed by Thatcher, Reagan and the Chicago Boys *as* the agenda. I don’t see the agents of the media as deliberate mechanisms to further this world design, but we’re probably agreed that they may as well be, since their interests are well aligned with it.
The same goes for the political class – it takes a great deal of intellectual courage and stamina to resist the easy neo-conservative path: signing up to permanent war, building the military-industrial complex, the lazy acquiescing to the privatisation of our public amenities, and the attacks on welfare systems that reduce the quality of life for the impoverished.
Interestingly, one can inadvertently assist what one claims to be opposed to. After our discussion above, AB makes the point that he would remove the British minimum wage. However this accelerates the decline of wages, which is a significant feature of neo-capitalism: one has to choose between no job (because it has gone to India) or a job that pays below the poverty line (because one is trying to compete with the Indian wage). Foisting people with jobs that don’t pay a living wage is a cruelty; far better to insist on a minimum wage, and then apply import tariffs to goods and transaction flows at the border.
In any case, I remember the hullabaloo in the UK when the minimum wage was first proposed. The business community was in uproar (sometimes a sign that what is being proposed is a good thing) and, once it was enacted, the world did not stop turning on its axis.
In closing, let me encourage you to make more civil contributions like you’ve made above. Whilst I think technically you’ve been banned, Craig clearly isn’t interested in enforcing it – ditto Larry – but we get a much better quality of discussion when it’s free of ad hominem. We can be free to disagree with the nature of the world system and still agree on a number of solutions, such as my suggestions on the economic mechanism. Which have already caused howls of displeasure from the financial elite!
@AB:
“But The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court and therefore is not bound by any consideration of due process in international relations.”
“if there were a major terrorist attack in the US suspected of originating in Iran, Tehran would be turned to glass.”
Do you approve of either or both of these things, Alfred? I sense that, on the one hand, you’re opposed to elite agendas, but here there seems to be implicit approval of unilateralism and the omnipresent threat of untrammeled, nuclear annihilation from the prevailing military superpower. These both serve very well the system that I believe you claim to be opposed to!
NGO funding interests are always interesting reading, I think. Do you have laws requiring transparency for NGO funding in the UK?
btw sure glenn generalised, but not ‘lazily’ – teachers are often fond of collective punishment. it’s easier than taking responsibility and it makes them feel, temporarily, powerful, especially if they have the headmaster to back them up.
” teachers are often fond of collective punishment. it’s easier than taking responsibility and it makes them feel, temporarily, powerful”
So teachers are less likely to “take responsibility” than others and more prone to wanting to feel “temporarily powerful” than others?
Hmmm, that’s so lazy I must ask if you’re a teaacher.
I am glad you had such a splendid Christmas and hope that you enjoy good health and prosperity in the New Year.
I agree with you about the police. From the amount of detail about the “suspect”, it seems very likely that they have been feeding information to the newspapers. The man appears to have been the sort of eccentric schoolmaster who could only thrive outside the state sector.
how do you infer that? from the start of their career teachers have far more opportunity for punishment than most professions: a postman, say, or a shop assistant. It is built into the system. Your conclusions are so illogical that I must ask if you’ve ever been to school.
@AB:
“On the contrary, it seemed you were rather suavely inserting the stiletto.”
Not true. Genuinely, I am interested in what you believe, even – as above – if I find it self-contradictory at times.
“I have explained that [the answers to a series of questions] elsewhere, but no one remembers what I said about anything.”
There is no deliberate intention to entrap you, AB. There are lots of people here, and remembering peoples’ positions on each political question is way too much to remember. You may have answered them in various places before, but I don’t recall reading them. I thought it would be interesting to have you answer your own questions in the same thread.
“It [the teaching of acceptance of homosexuality] is indoctrination just as much as teaching children that homosexuality, fornication, whatever is right if it feels good.”
That’s not my motivation. My thesis is that there is a percentage of the human population, which I understand to be about 5%, who are naturally/genetically gay. There furthermore is a another group of people who are not genetically gay but who experiment (I once saw an internet survey that asked how the reader defined their sexuality, and there were tick-box answers of this kind: “a straight man who sometimes sleeps with other men”).
My liberal perspective leads me to believe that such persons are sound of mind and rational, consenting adults, and so no law can be proposed to limit this behaviour. Furthermore, yes, I am in favour of teaching tolerance, since where this isn’t talked about at all, bigotry and homophobia grow naturally.
That however doesn’t amount to indoctrination: in my PSE (Personal & Social Education) classes of twenty years ago, we were asked “What do you think about gay people, and being gay?”. It was good that we were asked, and no view was foisted upon us. But they didn’t cover hate crime, or homophobic bullying, and looking back I think they should have done. Perhaps they do so now, given the strides we’ve made in gay rights over that time.
Was Blairism fascist? Not in the same way as C20th facism, if we’re referring to symbols of outright propaganda, deliberate generation of obedient political hysteria, police thuggery, state liquidations and disappearances, and so forth! Do you mean in what you see as the paternalism of New Labour? I’d say that the two don’t really bear comparison, tbh. The danger of calling someone a fascist of course is that it obeys Godwin’s Law: it is generally understood that Nazi is being meant.
Finally: yes, I do think there is a role for the state to try to expose people to ideas to get them to live in harmony. In a perfect democracy, of course, this would be subject to the will of the people (broadly now tolerant of other faiths, races, sexualities) and subject to change as our ideas improve. The alternative institutions you propose, namely the monarchy and the church, are in my view quite backwards on these things, and have shown themselves repeatedly to be motivated by self-interest, access to political power and empowered by traditional forms of discrimination. I suspect we’ll just have to disagree on this one!
For what it’s worth, it has sometimes been a struggle to discuss things with you of late. I see Suhayl as entirely well motivated, and his persistence comes from – I think – a notion that you harbour ideas of racialism or genetics, but prefer to be coy about them. Try not to take offence at this, as you have done in the past! Instead, say what you think. I agree wholeheartedly with you about the liberal bias on this blog: anyone can say anything, and they should trumpet from the rooftops what they believe.
I don’t think you’re a paid agent, by the way!
Happy new year to all, I hope you have reinvited the Latvian women to a possible housewarming party were they can meet strapping Sam and some other handsome builders. I must give him the return chance to redeem himself in pool…
A very special happy new year to the justice for women campaign, now invigorated by many bandwaggoning has beens, women writing their manicured hands wound, eager to benefit from a pile of shite, who just can’t resist the lure of a high media profile downwind of this massive heap, regardless of whether someone is guilty or not, thats merely elementary dear Watson.
Like Hyena hovering around a possibly sleeping crocodile, lusting to kill, but not on their own, Oh no that’ll be too dangerous, best to join in the throng of other dogs, who knows, the croc might just be asleep and not dead.
Pathetic carpetbaggers.
Whilst considering a few new dittys before you rush off again, whats happening in Ivory coast? why is this man Laurent Gadbo so different to other west African dictators, that his neighbours all gang up on him, what has he got that they want?
As for the leviathan gas field, explored at a time of a gas glut,who owns the sea bed in the eastern Med?
Jon, I admire your efforts with ‘tungsten’ – and your post of 12:46pm, as always, is excellent in terms of both the content and the way the ideas are expressed.
As others will know, I did try very hard to engage with him (as I did with ‘Larry’) for a sustained period of months and he occasionally did engage – hence the refs to his early life, etc. – but then he always reverts to abuse.
He’s an intelligent, well-educated troll (most trolls who actually discourse, as opposed to those who simply post spambots and imitate people) are. Not unlike Alfred and others of similar ilk, he mixes excellence with nonsense, including, in tungsten’s case, links to white supremacist and anti-Semitic websites.
I fear he’ll just end up insulting you again. Like many of the trolls hereabouts, he seems to enjoy insulting me, probably because he’s envious in some way. I suspect he wants to write and publish books and he hasn’t managed to do so.
As well as anti-Semitism, I also detect a visceral undercurrent of other forms of intolerance, with, for example, silly references to me being “in Tora Bora”, the cod-West Indian accent he tries to put on, etc.
Nonetheless, good luck with it.
… or maybe it’s a cod-Deep South accent? Whatever. Apostate appears to derive enjoyment from making fund of black people.
” from the start of their career teachers have far more opportunity for punishment than most professions: a postman, say, or a shop assistant. It is built into the system.”
So punishment is a job perk for teachers? And somehow avoid responsibility? Built into the system?
Glenn
“Run on home for your tea…”
I’m a lover not a fighter.
Sing along posh boys glenn and anno and techie:
Sup up your beer and collect your fags,There’s a row going on down near Slough,get out your mat and pray to the West,I’ll get out mine and pray for myself.Thought you were smart when you took them on,But you didn’t take a peep in their artillery room,All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,What chance have you got against a tie and a crest.
Hello-hurrah – what a nice day – for the Eton Rifles,Hello-hurrah – I hope rain stops play – with the Eton Rifles.
Thought you were clever when you lit the fuse,Tore down the house of commons in your brand new shoes,Composed a revolutionary symphony,Then went to bed with a charming young thing.Hello-hurrah – cheers then mate – it’s the Eton Rifles, ]Hello-hurrah – an extremist scrape – with the Eton Rifles.What a catalyst you turned out to be,Loaded the guns then you run off home for your tea,Left me standing – like a guilty schoolboy.We came out of it naturally the worst,Beaten and bloody and I was sick down my shirt,We were no match for their untamed wit,Though some of the lads said they’ll be back next week.Hello-hurrah – there’s a price to pay – to the Eton Rifles,Hello-hurrah – I’d prefer the plague – to the Eton Rifles.
your logic & sentence construction are disintegrating further, anonymous. who said the power to punish was a ‘perk’? it is a fact that teachers are mandated to impose sanctions on others, individually and collectively. as any fule who remembers school will kno, some will enjoy it, but that was not the point.
@technicolour at January 2, 2011 1:21 PM
Sheesh, now you’re generalising. To think how I got in the neck for generalising about commercial music! What’s this collective punishment that all teachers are so fond of? I went to school in the bad old days of corporal punishment and compulsory Latin but I don’t remember any collective punishments – and I attended a most authoritarian and conservative establishment.
@jon
“and then apply import tariffs to goods and transaction flows at the border.”
Thank goodness I’m not the only advocate of protectionism. The idea needs emancipated, as our politicians give it the same emotional timbre as ‘conspiracy theory’. It was always attacked so fiercely by Gordon Brown and his kind that one began to sense it was the right way to go.
collective punishment is ‘easier’ because it dehumanises, and throws the responsibility back onto the (largely innocent) class, rather than on the adult being paid to deal with the troublemakers. It is also, of course, used as a bullying tactic to extract information. “Unless one of you owns up, I’m going to keep you all in”. Do you really not remember this?
‘apply import tariffs to goods’ – have you see the price of avocados? agree we import far too much (we can even grow avocados here) environmentally and socially. but raising the price of things just means that the 50 percent who won 9 percent of the wealth (shockin stat) will be able to afford even less, and the person on DLA none. No?
Happy New year to you and your family Craig.
Sorry to see the mutters are already posting on your site. It is a shame when you cannot comment on how lovely you find the opposite sex?
I fully support the defence e of Mr Assange until he is found guilty in a court of law. His treatment by the English courts is appalling.
Also happy to hear about the success of Murder in Samarkand.
@Freeborn:
“[Suhayl], Jon et al are just itching to moderate out free expression and independent research on this blog”
Not true. You have a track record of abusive behaviour, and I think this could be improved with the knowledge that excessive ad hominem would be deleted. But, as tungsten demonstrates earlier, you have the capacity for calm, rational discourse.
Folks here often won’t deal with you on the basis that you’re banned, but since Craig doesn’t seem willing to enforce that ban, how about you put your ideas forward in a clear and non-abusive way? As per my exchanges above: that approach will get you results, exchanges, answers. Which, presumably, since you’re here, is what you want.
I had a look at Kevin MacDonald’s site, and he certainly has a scholarly background, and third party reviews of him haven’t dismissed his work entirely. From a scientific perspective, the idea that any particular race might act in its own ethnocentric interests is fascinating, but its proponents do need to admit that the discourse is politically useful to the racist far right. In fact, MacDonald appears to have done so himself, and has talked in interviews about this topic. So, one needs to understand these dynamics with material that might otherwise be determined to be anti-Jewish, or whatever.
Having read up a bit on MacDonald, I was going to determine that he was not racist at all, but he appears to have taken a newly right-wing position of late. In one interview, he felt that the US Republican party, which he believes is already standing up for ‘white rights’, could make only minor changes to its platform in order to do so overtly. Notwithstanding the scientific interest of intra-group assistance, this is a worrying development, and harks back to pre-civil rights era violence, deep south Negro lynchings, and the offensive discrimination of apartheid.
I don’t think MacDonald, for what it’s worth, supports any of those things. But he’s clearly no fan of multiculturalism, and with a new emphasis on white rights, I think one needs to rely on his work very carefully, less one end up supporting the creation of fresh racial tension.
You certainly approach your NWO material with fevour and enthusiasm. That is commendable in one sense, but be assured – as we all are here – that no single thesis is correct, and that no single person can be entirely right. All of your heroes are flawed, just as mine are. If you bear that in mind, perhaps that will encourage you to *engage* with people, rather than just throwing links at them?
If I do get moderation rights – then it is *not* my intention to start zapping your posts because your name is on it. Nor am I particularly in favour of zapping posts that question the Holocaust. But I am in favour of removing posts that are disruptive or abusive. This is not a denial of freedom of speech, since everyone has it within their power to conduct themselves on this board with civility.
Martial arts expert? Sounds a bit middle-class and poncey to me. Where I come from people fight with their fists. Leave cavorting in a costume to yer Fortescue-Smythe friends.
@technicolour at [January 2, 2011 2:32 PM]:
I think protectionism is the least harmful way to go. In my mind, it would be done very incrementally – and we have import taxes anyway – to see what economic changes it engenders. Yes, this will make things more expensive, but then hopefully either excessive profit margins on imported goods will be reduced, and a fresh incentive to grow/manufacture locally will be created, in support of decent environmental targets.
I agree one needs to take a good look at the impact of any proposal on the poor, but I think affording less imported goods is a better deal than losing ones job to the eastward flight of manufacturing. In any case, I’d apply the tariffs so slowly, that it might show some incremental local benefits well before the prices of goods shot up dramatically.
Happy New Year everyone. Thanks for mentioning the case of the gardener in Bristol, someone had to point to the striking inconsistence the case is surrounded with and I am looking forward to reading about wikileaks affair soon. finally, I cannot help myself – @Justice for women: do you really mean what you are saying?
Alan, I didn’t know you were a ‘Jam’ fan. Those are bloody great songs, three-minute moments of blistering perfection.
But man, you don’t need to swagger in a sort of workerist proletarian manner or attack people because they weren’t brought up in some mythical, muscled, homoerotic, Peter Howson utopia, but instead aim for excellence like, say, Jimmy Reid or take the messages in ‘Working Class Hero’ to heart. Or indeed like ‘The Jam’.
And Technicolour, yoo musst bee a skool Slade fan!
Fact is, nowadays, many teachers are terrified of pupils. Teachers get spat at, assaulted, sworn at, etc. Some pupils maliciously scream “child abuse” at the drop of a hat and they know that the educational establishment, the local press and their own parents will always back them up and crucify the teacher. It’s gone far too far the other way.
Teachers have now been bullied on a systemic scale by successive governments and bureaucracies who operate through a corporate, rather than in an educational, modus operandum. Teachers can no longer be allowed to teach as individuals but must become corporatised grey women and men who are not supposed to even touch children lest they be accused of child abuse. I am generalising, obviously, many teachers and head-teachers are able still to do an excellent job.
Educational standards is another, separate, issue. I agree with those who say they have dropped. They have dropped.
The days of our schooling – though I don’t know what age you might be! – where, among the many excellent and humane teachers, there were a few psychopathic teachers, etc. and (in my Scottish school) perhaps a little too much gloom and authoritarianism – are long gone. Since the 1980s, like social workers and many other public sector workers, teachers are attacked by the Rabid Right because they represent (for the Rabid Right, the hated) idea of free public education.
“justice for women” – I think your declared vendetta is misplaced, if it is genuine. I’d hate to think you would support the closure of a blog on the basis you disagree with it – doesn’t sound very liberal to me.
On the topic of womens’ rights versus sexism, you’ll find plenty of differing views here, and most folks here disagree with Craig on at least one or two political positions. But Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein are right to stand up for Assange: the powers that want him deported to the United States are the same powers that suggested the invasion of Afghanistan was good for womens’ rights. Which, as you’ll know, hasn’t been very good for women at all – since they’ve borne the lethal impact disproportionately.
Beware of the bandwagons, I’d say!
The allied occupation of Afghanistan has increased female child school registration from 0 to 73%. The rights of Afghan women have been greatly enhanced.
Also in Iraq there are now four female ministers.