I am delighted that a new canpaign has started today against the state enforced child slavery in the uzbek cotton industry, especially as this campaign originates in Germany, where a significant portion of society appears to have finally woken up to the reality of the German government’s appalling complicity in the Nazi style regime and atrocities of Karimov.
However in the UK it remains the case that since the coalition government came to power, there has not been one single government statement on the human rights atrocities in Uzbekistan or – even more damning of our sham democracy – one single statement or question from New Labour.
@Mary “Fred and others – I never had any intention of responding and will not do so now. To give any answers to the resident interrogator would just result in one of those pointless circular arguments. Just to say that it is not a nice feeling to be singled out for rubbishing but I guess that there is some agenda. Something pathological about it?”
Mary I would guess that you are singled out because you are a particularly committed and coherent contributor to this blog, and are highly valued by most of us here – you are like a proxy for all of us.
PLEASE could we have Habbabkuk excluded?
At least could we all refrain from feeding him, as Mary rightly does.
It is not hard to skip his comments, but to start reading other people’s and find they are just in an argument with him gets very frustrating.
DONT FEED TROLLS
Phil W,
why should we be deprived of a light amusement provided daily in the style of Glenda Slagg and at no cost by numerous valuable contributors, like habbabba? Your plea, “PLEASE could we have Habbabkuk excluded?”, should be perhaps addressed to Craig who seems to be rather fond of him. Admittedly, even I have become somewhat fond of habbabba’s verbal ejaculations, which never fail to amaze me.
“PLEASE could we have Habbabkuk excluded?”
I don’t think we should discriminate on the grounds of colour creed or intellectual ability. Whether Habbabkuk was born like that or dropped on his head when he was a baby it’s not his fault and shouldn’t be used against him.
What sort of a society are we becoming? Have some compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves man.
Habitual Babbler Kuku
“Villager, I don’t flatter myself that my posts will do anything to bring Mary closer to assuming a degree of responsibility for the rubbish she sometimes posts.”
Come on, you’re a liar (unless you’re admitting your insanity), oh yes you do flatter yourself which, perhaps, is why you go on and on at it (your latest attempt at 19h50). There is definitely something pathological about the insufferable, petty habitual babble you cook up.
‘Intellectual firepower’ and ‘educational mission’, etc indeed. LOL you really do fancy yourself don’t you? You’re a cracked-up human being but in your idiocy you are complete.
Fred wrote
“I don’t think we should discriminate on the grounds of colour creed or intellectual ability. Whether Habbabkuk was born like that or dropped on his head when he was a baby it’s not his fault and shouldn’t be used against him.
What sort of a society are we becoming? Have some compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves man.”
Fred, I agree with your compassion, but did you say born? I would have thought he was found by someone in hospital lifting a mattress or on some doorstep. Since then he’s been preening himself in front of a mirror.
Phil w. How can you be so callous to this poor soul
Mali was just fine until the cross-hairs were focused away from a smashed Libya towards West Africa. On a pretext the mercenaries arrived, the front-end of terror. French neo-colonialism twix British rape and pillage on a fig-leaf to steal oil, gas and minerals, hinder Russia and China while creating a splint for the broken dollar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=ONu2ns3vsm4#!
The Bull-shit button available here:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BULLSHIT-BUTTON-NOVELTY-TALKING-ALARM-BUTTON-BULLSHIT-RESPONSES-7-x-5cm-/310567435975?pt=UK_Toys_Games_Games&hash=item484f42fec7
Villager, 10.25pm
Hi, are you able to contact any one of Clark, John Goss or Nevermind? We’re trying to get you into the loop for maybe coming to the Assange Oxford Union counterprotest outside the Ecuadorian embassy on Wednesday, as you’d expressed interest in going, but none of us have your contact details.
Arbed, thanks for picking up on that. I can confirm within the next couple of days my participation and will email Clark accordingly. Hope to see you and others then.
Thank you also Clark.
Good Sunday to all–stay well and warm!
Come on all of you, stop behaving like vultures. Do not spoil the fun. After all habbabba provides a perennial sort of entertainment at this site. In these hard times, my rather confined quarters do not allow me any more the luxury of providing lodgings for a couple of jesters to entertain me during dinners. So what is left to me in my old age? Private Eye seems not so funny any more and Charlie Hebdo is full of feeble cartoons about Muslims, which somehow fulfills (at least in the eyes of Charb, the head “anti-zionist” of that rag) their weekly pensum of defending the freedom of speech. Let me plead for more tolerance and compassion to our less fortunate neighbours from hell. It is unfortunate that these two noble attributes of humanity are so rare nowadays.
What about torture by British forces in Iraq? That never seems to get any coverage here. How come?
@Habbabkuk: “Depends what you call civilised..” – you put your finger on it, it’s a matter of definition, isn’t it. You’ve advanced the criterion of never having invaded or occupied another country, which, although perhaps questionable (was the Allied occupation of Germany a good or bad thing?), could be one criterion. There are obviously alternative ones.
Thank you – and we agree, it’s all about the definition. At its most basic, I’d suggest that has three broad categories – how it treats its own people, how it treats others, and how much it respects the environment. Not necessarily in that order.
Perhaps Wales and Ireland were too busy dealing with a very imposing old enemy to do too much conquistadoring of their own, if that’s actually a verb. All the same, neither country repressed its own people overmuch or attacked others – Wales was under the rule of English Lords and their minor despotic little rulers, again – possibly they never had much chance to do so.
Anyway, let’s look at Britain as a whole. It’s relatively non-violent compared with most of the rest of the world – although China apparently ranks a little better (their reporting may be suspect). We don’t allow people to starve, or go without healthcare. But we do have enormous inequality.
Perhaps allowing vast disparity in income and wealth marks a country as not so civilised, because that appears to be the most significant factor in almost every social measure of well-being.
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/
*
How it treats others – ‘good’ wars, ‘good’ occupations and so on, is another large subject. Open to the dubious history written by the victor, naturally. Given Britain has attacked almost all other nations at some point, this particular measure is not in our favour here.
As for the environment – we gave the world the industrial revolution, what more do you want? :/
In my darker moments, I feel this gift is playing out its final stages, and I have doubts that we have more than two or three decades of recognisable civilisation remaining.
I agree that this current case has not been mentioned but Baha Mousa, the Kenyan torture and Abu Ghraib have been in the past. This current case, although important, is a side show when the main culprits, Bush and Blair, and their cohorts, go free.
I wonder who is funding the three days in the High Court. That will be about £150,000 minimum and demonstrates the difficulty of obtaining justice in the UK. The price is out of reach for the average person.
For instance, the cost of the failed appeal to the Attorney General to grant a judicial review of the decision not to grant an inquest for Dr Kelly wiped out the fund which stood at £50,000 + I believe.
http://www.inquest4drdk.co.uk/
The proceedings, which most of those attending could not hear or observe due to the physical limitations of the RCJ, the antique Victorian Gothic pile in the Strand, lasted just six hours and most of that time was taken up by the barristers reading out passages of dry law and the judge reading out a long judgement which seemed to be pre-scripted! A travesty.
http://www.inquest4drdk.co.uk/
Cameron is speaking live from Chequers making a statement about seven Britons having been killed in Algeria – three people definitely, three unaccounted for but assumed dead, and one British resident dead. He is displaying cold outrage. You would think he bears no personal responsibility for the deaths of anyone in Libya, Syria and now Mali.
Apparently Hague will be on Marr later which, in Marr’s absence, is being presented by the lightweight Jeremy Vine.
If you doubt my calling Vine lightweight, he is biased too.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1357134808.html
Hi Mary
Talking of Jeremy Vine, I’ll never forget the time I was listening to his show and a caller tried to raise the issue of 9/11 Truth. It was astonishing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a caller dumped faster. The ostensible subject of the debate was Afghanistan, and the caller in response to a point about Osama bin Laden started to say he didn’t believe the official narrative of 9/11. He’d hardly got to the end of the word eleven before Jeremy Vine, in total panic, shouted over him, ‘Oh we’ve run out of time, we have to go to the news…’ (or words to that effect) Then he turned the music up and drowned out the caller. But it was about four minutes to one o’clock, so we listened to the song for three minutes or so, thus putting the lie to the claim that we had run out of time. Amazing.
So what are you saying? That Jeremy Vine is part of the organised cover-up for 9/11? Maybe he just didn’t want some looney Troofer wasting everybody’s time.
It is not just the slavery in the cotton fields in Uzbekistan. There are prisoners of conscience like this writer who is also ill. Please sign the petition and invite your friends.
http://www.causes.com/actions/1701475
King of Welsh Noir Ha! He gets two hours every weekday to put out the propaganda. Say a little, play a little musak, then get someone to speak to, etc etc ad infinitum. It’s the radio equivalent of moving wallpaper. A gullible audience no doubt.
eg Yesterday http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pt6pp
Algerian hostages and school closures
Availability:5 days left to listen
Duration: 2 hours
First broadcast:Friday 18 January 2013
Jeremy discusses the Algeria hostage crisis, school snow closures, how to deal with boiler breakdowns and a lucky crane driver who avoided the London helicopter crash.
I promise I have never listened to his radio programme. I do think his comedian brother is quite amusing in a schoolboyish sort of way. Jeremy’s second wife is Rachel Schofield one of the BBC News presenters on TV, part of the state broadcaster’s propaganda machine. A family business in actual fact for the Vines.
Paxman the prime feeder at the BBC trough referred to Jeremy Vine as a ‘mini me’ apparently. There’s a put down.
Barack Hussein Obama has just repeated the oath of office. Let’s see what he says tomorrow. Just like the last time? Think what has been done in his name over the last four years, not least the drone killings and the extra=judicial killings.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/01/20/35016/obama-oath/?mobile=nc
Biden took his earlier at the Naval Observatory before Justice Sotomayor and then went to lay a wreath at Arlington with Obama. Disgusting hypocrites. Biden dressed his up with a clergyman reciting a prayer and a reading from the book of Micah. From a tweet
Reading from the Prophet Micah before VP Biden’s oath: ” …only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk humbly with your God.” LOL
http://live.wsj.com/video/vice-president-biden-sworn-in/F3998531-D23E-4415-8351-BAB0EEFFBABE.html
@ Glenn_uk (03h40) – thank you for your post, to which as follows.
Your three broad categories are as good a starting point as any and the order in which you list them is a logical one.
Before commenting on your specific points, I think we’d agree that this exercise is fraught with methodological difficulties, amoung which I’d suggest the following main ones:
1/. do we give equal importance to each of the three categories or attempt to establish a hierarchy of importance (I think it’s this you may have been alluding to when you wrote “But not necessarily in that order”?); if the latter, then a weighting might need to be determined (in this connection, see next point)
2/. do we, after factual examination, give a “mark” for each category, or do we dispense with “marks” in favour of a judgement based on feeling/intuition/flavour (I’m trying to find the right word here, but I hope you understand what I mean). If the former, do we fix a “pass mark” for each category or do we aggregate the categories and fix a “pass mark” for the aggregate number.
3/. what elements/events should each of these broad categories encompass; bearing in mind, in this connection, the need as I see it to pronounce judgement on a country as it is now and in the fairly recent past (policy and outcomes) where this is sensible and possible.
It goes without saying that HOW those elements/events should be judged is key (although this is not, strictly speaking, a methodological difficulty).
So, now to comment specifically but telegraphically (you’ll see that most of these comments will flow from one or the other of the above 3 points).
A. How the UK treats its own people.
Include societal elements such as degree of personal freedom, tolerance of differences (including sexual)and dissent by both the state and individuals, individual liberties (eg right to abortion).
Importance of income and wealth disparities as against whether even the lowest paid have enough for a reasonable life (ex.: poor in the UK is rich compared to poor in India)
B. How the UK treats others.
Certainly one has to distinguish between types of wars and occupations …and not fail to remember either that a bad outcome does not necessarily invalidate a good motivation, and vice versa. Accuracy of the claim that at one time or another the Uk has attacked most other countries (and in verifying this claim – and indeed distinguishing between types of wars – question of whether we are looking at the UK as it is now and its fairly recent past or the UK over the last…x…centuries). Need to take into account development assistance and record of matters such as asylum.
C. The UK and the environment.
Your example is actually a good illustration of the dangers of anachronism. UK the first country to industrialise, at a time when the environment (whether natural or human) was simply not an issue. Hence need to evaluate present (and reasonable recent)policies and outcomes.
Well, that’s enough for now. Thank you again for providing good material for discussion and I look forward to your thoughts if you feeel like continuing!
re Mary today (09h01) on David Cameron “You would think he bears no personal responsibility for the deaths of anyone in Libya, Syria and now Mali” :
whether he does or not, he certainly bears less than the late Colonel Ghadaffi, the soon-to-be-late President Assad Junior and whoever started the fighting in Mali.
Mali’s problems are directly related to western paranoia and guile.
Just as they tried to give Iran a falsified nuclear bomb blueprint, they also trained Mali and Nigers anti terrorist forces in the wake of 911, in the hope that they would be their bulwark, would support western ignorance of sovereignty and misunderstanding about property rights.
They obviously did not and felt that the stooge junta in place since 2012 was able enough to put the Tuareg’s in their place, who for decades fought for an autonomous region in northern Mali and so they started to use the terror training they received and bought modern weapons from what little resources they controlled.
Mali and Niger are crucial to France as it is dependent on energy derived from uranium. Mali’s gold/gas and oil reserves, with abstraction controlled by foreign countries to the tune of 80%, could make it very prosperous should they ever take control over their affairs.
Instead it will be engulfed and divided by decades of strife and chaos, in the same way Iraq was ruined, according to Cameron today, its neo-colonial rape and pillage by neo fascists who can’t make their own systems sustainable, or keep to their principles.
should read ‘since 2012 was not able enough’, mea culpa.
Mary @5:26
Biden should expand his Biblical references to the New Testament. As a shameless Bag-Man for his POTUS, he bears some heavy responsibility, besides a pious disposition.
Matthew 22:15-21
“15 Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.
16 And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.
17 Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?
18 But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?
19 Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.
20 And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?
21 They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes……
How Washington helped foster the Islamist uprising in Mali
December 2012
http://www.newint.org/features/2012/12/01/us-terrorism-sahara/
As the French-led military operation begins, Jeremy Keenan reveals how the US and Algeria have been sponsoring terror in the Sahara.
The author –
Jeremy Keenan (born 1945) is a British social anthropologist. He is a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. The regional focuses of his research are the Sahara, North Africa and the Sahel region. Concerning the contents, he concentrates on anthropology of development, security and globalisation. During the last years, he has published a number of books and articles about the approaches of the United States to counter terrorism in Africa.
Keenan has long argued that Islamist terror groups in North Africa are masterminded by Algeria, with the knowledge of the CIA and other intelligence services, which stage “false flag” attacks to expand Algerian political influence over the region and its economic resources. In his book “The Dark Sahara”, Keenan accuses the United States and Algeria of having conspired to fabricate evidence and exaggerate the threat of al-Qaeda terrorism in Northern Africa. He calls the “global war on terror” a deception and claims that it is causing immense damage to the peoples of the Sahara, namely the Tuareg.
On 22 May, he alleged in a BBC interview that the Algerian government (despite being officially secular) was backing Ansar Dine, both because Ansar Dine justified the existence of the government’s security apparatus, and because backing it allowed Algeria to “project power in what it sees as its sphere of influence”.[
If the contents of this piece and of the one above are true, then Agent Cameron is well out of his depth amongst the sharks.
Algeria Hostage Crisis: Terror Attack ‘Inside Job’ Gone Wrong, Says Professor Jeremy Keenan http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/19/algeria-hostage-crisis-inside-job-wrong_n_2509920.html
The annual shindig for the vultures at Davos is about to kick off. Amongst the over 280! speakers are Cameron (on The Global Development Outlook) and Gordon Brown – the latter listed to speak three times. Who would sit there and listen to him after his failures? And they pay to go. I also spotted Stephanie Flanders BBC and Gillian Tett FT guru. And of course Soros and Gates. Funniest of all was Nik Gowing BBC World Service speaking on ‘Is Democracy Winning?’.
http://www.weforum.org/node/111075/speakers?page=0
http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2013
In the Huffington Post article Mary links to at 21h09 Professor Keenan doesn’t mention the US or any other foreign power once. He focuses exclusively on the Algerian state security services.
So why has Mr Cameron been mentioned in Mary’s post?
Mary’s 17 lines on Professor Jeremy Keenan (cf. her post of 20h51 today) are lifted – without acknowledgment – straight out of Wikipedia.
For another, perhaps more sceptical perspective on Professor Keenan I suggest readers turn to an article entitled “Death and career in the dark Sahara: the sad fate of Jeremy Keenan”. It can be found on a website called http://www.tomathon.com and ends with the following lines:
“Keenan reduces a complicated living history and society to the manoeuvres of the Algerian secret police and the CIA. Those are not nice or well intentioned people: no doubt. But the CIA and Algeria’s secret police are easily understandable by western readers.It (Keenan’s thesis) paints a world of binary conflicts, with simple motivations, focussed on Western elites and their concerns. Perhaps this is comforting for his western reader, but it is also a narrative that removes several million Africans from their own history, as if they all simply take orders from other white folks with whom Keenan has a beef.”
I laughed. We should all laugh.
Cameron says tonight that the terror threat in north Africa could last decades.
When “we” were toppling Gaddafi, France armed and funded the Islamist group currently causing bother in Algeria. We funded and armed and trained another group or two in Syria. And we just love having Pharaoh Morsi in charge in Egypt (remember how Hillary gave him her blessing just after Iron Dome).
And so rolls on the War for Profits redux. Now that Syria is off the menu, it didn’t take “us” long to cook up a substitute – one that will take years to sort out.
The media will keep it current, though. They won’t do anything inconvenient like join it all together.