Here am I spreaking at the Oxford Union, in entertaining mode.
You can see the other speeches in the debate. The Motion “This house still dreams the American Dream” was defeated.
The following week the motion “This house believes that Israel is a force for good in the Middle East” was also defeated. I hear Peter Tatchell was excellent.
I don not think the format of such debates is antiquated and irrelevant. It helps get students thinking, and you get a range of opinion denied an airing elsewhere. I can never get to say those things on the mainstream media.
Doug Scorbie
I give up. It’s Arabic in transliteration. Try Medeival Scottish, you translated that well enough. Why not use the chapter and verses I sent for you to find the quote in your own Qur’an?
A good comment on a Guardian piece about Katherine Gun 10 years on.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/03/katharine-gun-iraq-war-whistleblower
StephenStewart
03 March 2013 1:35pm
I have two questions:
It seems as if the Guardian’s readers pay to read articles such as this one about Katharine Gun, but who pays the Guardian to publish passionate defences of Bush, Blair & Co. by people like Cohen?
Ten years on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid
Perhaps the Guardian is unaware that the US National Security Agency is not the the UK Government Communications Headquarters’ “sister agency” as Martin Bright indicates. In fact, GCHQ is a branch plant of the NSA and GCHQ personnel who are “UKUSA indoctrinated” owe their first loyalty to the NSA.
Still, regardless of the questionable legal framework under which GCHQ is empowered, it was a scandalous criminal act to use the GCHQ to soy on delegates to the United Nations in order blackmail them and coerce their votes in support of a military action justified by lies and fraudulent misrepresentation.
Katharine Gun is, of course, a hero for exposing these crimes at the expense of her career. Every citizen of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand owes her a debt of gratitude. Why is Ms. Gun still being persecuted?
“It will be contrary to this agreement to reveal its existence to any third party whatever.”
UKUSA Agreement linked
Not so secret: deal at the heart of UK-US intelligence
linked
::
The article is written by Martin Bright who claims credit for releasing the Katherine Giun story, He is also the political editor of the Jewis Chronicle.
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
2 Mar, 2013 – 9:41 pm
@ Dougie :
“We haven’t heard your apology to Guano yet.”
“Re. Arabic/Koran/doubting he’s Muslim, if you remember!”
Habbabkuk I have nothing to apologise for.
It wasn’t Arabic he used in the original post I referred to and he hasn’t answered my question.
DS
What I said was that the Zionist USUKIS are supporting a militant, abusive form of Islam which makes life intolerable for ordinary Muslims by intruding into their private lives with spying. The Zionists know that these techniques of control are abusive and forbidden in Islam. They no longer need to oppress Muslims with dictators because they have recruited self-appointed criminals who know how to hack into IT equipment to s to control the lives of Muslims who are going about their ordinary lives.
People object to being dictated to by hypocrites who take money from non-Muslims to oppress Muslims in an insidious way. The oppression by spying/ moral police under President Morsi is parallel to the bullying tactics used in conjunction with weapons of mass destruction throughout the Muslim world to terrorise and murder innocent people. Psychological oppression, restriction of opportunities and physical oppression.
Hazel Blears’, Hitler’s and Blair’s heads on a single ogre’s torso, rolled into one, and called the war on terror.
Clark, i think this the piece from Julian you were referring to:
An extract:
“The WikiLeaks Philosophy
“The left? The left is still stuck in the 1960s,” Assange states drily. Ideologically, he is closer to the free market, even though he says markets always tend to evolve into monopolies unless they are forced to work freely.
Assange might not be afraid, but he is clearly taking a huge personal risk with his disclosure activities. There must be a driving force within him, and it is definitely not a political ideology.
Assange takes a deep breath.
“I can answer long and theoretically, or short, depending on your audience.”
Assange is service-oriented now. Or just very eager to be correctly understood when he is about to answer why a world full of freely competing news media, political movements and research institutions really needs publishers of secret material like him. Assange wants to make a deeper point. WikiLeaks, he says, is about more than just scandalous revelations and splashy headlines.
“In the same way that the ability to solve physical problems is limited by our understanding of physical laws, the ability to solve societal problems depends on our insight into human institutions. All political theories on how the world is and how it should be are built on such an understanding.”
By “institutions” Assange means governments, private companies and other networks of power groups. The problem, he explains, is that while institutions constantly change as they absorb new technology and make old theories outdated, the information about how they actually work is concealed, kept secret.
“Much of what we are being presented, and upon which we build our understanding of the world, is designed to make these institutions palatable for the outside world.”
“This is why only by knowing the internal communications of these institutions can we understand how they really work. So, if we want to make the world more just, if we want humanity to reach its heights and not its lows, then the first step is to get access to that information,” he says.
“And then there’s the media.”
—
and Clark may i add to your ” that lack of corporate transparency increases corporate power,”
….add….. and leads to scandalous corruption and fraudulent business activity.
Check out this list of accounting scandals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals
Notable names include Xerox, Enron, Halliburton, AOL, Merrill Lynch, Nortel, Anglo Irish Bank, Lehman Bros.
And lets not forget AIG and the ‘Royal’ Bank of Scotland and their escapades.
The Habba-cuckoo can and must do his own further research here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Corporate_crime
HOMEWORK SET.
DS
Does my description of the war on terror remind you of the oppression of other ethnic groups? E.G. Jews in NAZI Germany.
Doug, is that Hubble-Bubble of an arse planning to apply for the mod’s job, sensing Jon’s absence of late? Anyway, you can tell him where to put his micro….ooops…sorry telescope!
guano
2 Mar, 2013 – 2:36 pm
Doug Scorbie
References from the Qur’an:
Ever feeble indeed is the plan of Satan.” (An-Nisaa’: 76).
“See you not that We have sent the devils against the disbelievers to push them to do evil.” (Mariam: 83).
I don’t need references from the Qur’an I have a copy.
You said earlier:
“Allah says in the Quran: Kaida shaytana dha’eefa…”
I asked you what language this was. You haven’t answered me.
Please do so.
guano
4 Mar, 2013 – 7:06 pm
DS
“Does my description of the war on terror remind you of the oppression of other ethnic groups? E.G. Jews in NAZI Germany.”
What description of the war on terror? Where is it?
Villager, thanks. Yes, these are the bits I was looking for:
Advertising, marketing, public relations, spin, perception management… All of them forms of deception, to varying degrees. All of them crafted to manipulate what we think, believe, desire, and do.
Villager, yes; wherever there is secrecy and lack of accountability, corruption will develop. Wikileaks is also called the Sunshine Press. Let there be light.
Guano and Doug Scorgie, your discussion is most entertaining. Like two battleships closing as they prepare to exchange broadsides, but strangely discovering that actually they’re in separate Monty Python films.
I was enjoying the speech until you mentioned ‘climate change denier’ with it’s usual connotations.
Skeptics have never denied climate change. The climate is always changing. The UK used to be under ice for thousands of years but that melted before we came along.
We don’t accept climate change is due to CO2 and this is now accepted in the msm with reports of no warming for nearly 20 years ( reported by the met office recently) despite a massive increase in fossil fuel output and CO2.
Global warming is just a scam with feed in tariffs and carbon credits etc costing taxpayers millions and filling the pockets of Al Gore etc who have been made multi millionaires on the back of the poor.
Windmills provide the likes of Tim Yeo a means to make money. Dave’s dad makes £200k a year renting out his land to the windmill scam. Windmills that provide zero output when needed the most. In the dead of winter.
Clark
4 Mar, 2013 – 8:32 pm
“Guano and Doug Scorgie, your discussion is most entertaining. Like two battleships closing as they prepare to exchange broadsides, but strangely discovering that actually they’re in separate Monty Python films.”
More like the Pink Panther films I think.
Bob, your comment is self-contradictory:
Yes, there are rip-offs going on, but that doesn’t mean that CO2 doesn’t trap heat. But I don’t want to argue. Just ask yourself why your sources are convincing you of a contradiction that benefits big corporations either way, and take a look at this (I suspect that you probably don’t trust Monbiot, but the article is well referenced):
http://www.monbiot.com/2007/12/11/rigged/
Bob
4 Mar, 2013 – 8:45 pm
“The climate is always changing. The UK used to be under ice for thousands of years but that melted before we came along.”
A Non sequitur Bob
“We don’t accept climate change is due to CO2” [Who we?].
“…and this is now accepted in the msm…”
Examples and references please.
“…with reports of no warming for nearly 20 years ( reported by the met office recently) despite a massive increase in fossil fuel output and CO2.”
Facts, figures and references please.
“Global warming is just a scam…”
Justify that statement.
“Windmills that provide zero output when needed the most. In the dead of winter.”
Zero output?
Dog’s knob (Bob) seek help.
You won’t last long on this blog.
“We don’t accept climate change is due to CO2 and this is now accepted in the msm with reports of no warming for nearly 20 years ( reported by the met office recently) despite a massive increase in fossil fuel output and CO2.”
I take it the MSM you refer to is the Daily Mail and Fox News.
They got it wrong as usual.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong
Doug Scorbie
I have answered you clearly. The passage is transliterated from the Arabic of the Qur’an and is to be found at the reference provided. Running out of pearls here, can’t you go and eat acorns?
Guano, No disrespect mate.
But you’re beginning to sound a bit like Barry, from Four Lions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSafNLCY2P8
from the pro green BBC..
“The new projection, if correct, would mean there will have been little additional warming for two decades despite rising greenhouse gases.
It’s bound to raise questions about the robustness and reliability of computer simulations that governments around the world are using in order to determine policies aimed at combating global warming.
The Met Office says natural cycles have caused the recent slowdown in warming, including perhaps changes in the suns activity, and ocean currents.”
source.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/met-office-scale-back-global-w
Our 4,000 windmills providing 1.8% today ( coal 50% ). Wind produced zero to 1% during Jan.
source.. http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
J Assange as quoted:
‘Much of what we are being presented, and upon which we build our understanding of the world, is designed to make these institutions palatable for the outside world.”
Yes. It’s called lying. You put horse, you call it beef. It’s a completely useless exercise to expose lies because liars are lie factories and institutions are lie planets. If an institution vomits snippets of truth out of the quicksand, it is breaking all of the rules of physics. The only thing you will find in the quicksand is a crafted lie that has been dipped into the quicksand of an institution to make it look as if it came out from the vortex by itself.
The only purpose of Wikileaks is to convince people that the vortex of institution quicksand is capable of re-gurgitating items of truth/integrity/fact. The US army is good because it has produced a whistle blower against itself.
The smallest item of social behaviour is a human and his God. In Islam we are not even permitted to take a picture of the external view of that human, because the only relevant view of a human is the that which is hidden in the heart which is only known to God.
Wikileaks is a Pollywood fantasy apology for politics. All politics is in reality personal greed and refusal to submit to the will of God. Assange is a creation of the New World Order to advertise the concept of a World Order while the concept of the collective having a benign influence in the abscence of individual integrity is ridiculous. In reality there is a lot of individuals running away from their consciences and consoling eachother that there is safety in numbers from facing up to personal accountability.
Wherever there exists a feeling of personal responsibility, as opposed to majority-imposed guilt for non-compliance in collective wrong-doing agreements, there also exists truth.
I see Islam as a force for good if it is composed of personally accountable individuals. Thatcher was given a church pulpit to state that the meaning of personal responsibility is to look after your own interests, 360 degrees turn from the touchstone of monotheistic scripture that you are responsible for your actions.
The problem with the West is that it has depended on the collective lie that Jesus pbuh is going to shoulder the sins through the shedding of sacrificial blood for so long, that this lie has become the mould for all western institutions in a post- religious world. Even Muslim CEOs spend hours on Due Diligence, which is a mechanism for ensuring blame for everything will always fall on somebody else.
Muslims who believe they are accountable – Do Diligence. They do their job and take responsibility for their job. The term Due Diligence sounds like Doing something but is in reality the evasion of diligence and the transfer of Doing anything or taking responsibility for Doing it to somebody else.
Bradley Manning as an intelligence expert who has leaked information is like a soldier who has killed on orders. He has colluded in what is wrong and repented. The institution will always try to make it stick that the whistle-blower has betrayed the institution because they previously colluded in its actions. The Institution is not happy to have its Due Diligence shoved back in its face.
Assange on the other hand can not be accused of betraying the institution and in fact he is, as a free market believer, on the side of the power of institutional collective power over individual responsibility himself.
What the political mind has prepared in the New World Order is a collusion of all disparate self-interest. It will punish those who betray collusion severely but it cannot punish those who never colluded in the first place. my instincts tell me that Assange is a fake whistle blower, part of the scheme of the institution to re=create itself in a palatable public face. ‘We made this hero, we can’t be all bad.’ The treatment of these two whistleblowers has inevitably been different. The first has been like Guantanamo the punishment of an enemy. The second almost playful, so far.
I am very impressed with Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie for his personal intelligence when he refuses to collude in torture himself and tells us that we are very stupid as a nation if we collude in it collectively. At last some common sense.
Here’s a wee Hard hitting Video..that Pretty much says it all about the Military Industrial Complex
This guy is apparently very popular in usa..and apperently worth 22 million, Whatever he has put together a decent video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oCTqufadFvs
A great speech except for the slightly laboured strawman ‘climate deniars’ point. I think people are allowed to not agree with areas of scientific opinion and not be labelled ‘deniers’ by now, especially when the validity and objectivity of that scientific opinion has some serious question marks hovering over it. Or have we not learned anything since the days of Galileo?
@ Angry,
You said:-
“But the point about his book, and the reason why I raised it, is that wealth and lifestyles is not zero-sum where one group becomes wealthy ONLY by dispossessing another. Think about this, in the early post-Pleistocene era there were far fewer people living nastier, more brutal and shorter lives than the majority of the seven billion alive today. How is it possible that more than hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two of those are living pretty comfortable lives when 10,000 years ago the Earth couldn’t support those lifestyles? Clearly an expansion in actual wealth has occurred.”
“Clearly an expansion in actual wealth has occurred”
So be it. There is however the stupidity, greed and general dysfunctionality of the species as a whole. The factors that caused the wealth production included exploitative processes – slavery – maginalisation of the many – skewed income distribution to the few – and general processes that beg today for a new global architecture.
I read the book, but it was very long ago. Continue the debate Angry.
To all Halibaba angry resident sobbas,
your sniggering at and rather poorly argued denials of zionist conspiracy are in my opinion the most concincing evidence for its existence. As Deek Jackson says in the role of a conspiracy clown “It is all in the history books you do not have to read the text just look at the pictures.” I am citing him from memory hoping that some pedantic soul will correct me if necessary. I can warmly recommend his website http://deekjackson.com/ to any denialists of zionist conspiracy who are in my opinion a bunch of sabbath goyim and self-hating antisemites.
guano, 1:07 am, I see this quite differently.
Firstly, a trivial point; Assange is not a whistleblower, real or fake. He is a publisher and a publicist, drawing attention to the material provided by people like Bradley Manning.
You believe that God sees into the hearts of people, and in a way too obscure to explain here, I agree. But Wikileaks is a physical organisation that reveals the hearts of other organisations. As such, I regard Wikileaks as one of the works of God.
I also agree that usually, it is not exactly truth that gets revealed by Wikileaks. Rather, the internal machinations of deception get placed upon display. This was seen, for instance, in the Cablegate leaks. Such organisations cannot produce much truth as they deal mostly in delusion, but what matters is the discrepancy between their internal delusions and the delusions they communicate to the rest of the world. Displaying these discrepancies demonstrates that such organisations are deceptive.
Even more importantly, note the reaction to the revelations. Like any compulsive liar, these organisations cannot tolerate their dishonesty being demonstrated, and they erupt in an outburst of violent anger. Note the similarity to the reaction of people who have convinced themselves of their own lies; they cannot stand it when they’re shown to be inconsistent, and instead of humility and apology, they deploy shouting, anger and threats.
Insanity and sin are the same thing; deviation from honesty. Human institutions are effectively insane. Wikileaks is like therapy, but these organisations rebel against truth, they don’t want to be treated, they prefer self delusion and the power to deceive others in order to achieve unfair advantage.
Couldn’t post this under the Ambassador’s 30 January and 16 February entries, so I’m putting this here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/29/assange-allies-oxford-union .
The American Dream would NOT be The Great American Dream-On if there were more whistleblowers willing to sacrifice EVERYTHING!
or, alternatively, Herbie (yesterday, 18h25), YOU could provide ME with a reasonably compelling sample of my posts to prove your claim that I do not refine my posts but rather go in the opposite direction.
You must think I was born yesterday – you make a claim and then ask me to provide evidence to invalidate the claim? LOL
“from the pro green BBC..”
Some people pick and choose when to take the bbcs statements at face value. The bbc state their world news is “balanced” so if they say you might find anything unbalanced -that would be extraordinary?
It is a great shame that bog standard spin and PR tactics have managed to keep some people cynical about the need and value of taking care of our wider natural environment. The has been no great campaign by the bbc to do such a thing either. The BBCs nature programs can for the most part be watched perfectly comfortably by people who are uncomfortable with warnings and appeals for climate and environment care, reality biting segments come as small disposable introductions or endings to some nature programs and are completely missing from others. Only very occasionally is a program dedicated to the climate change or environment crisis which an underrepresented amount of people and an even more underrepresented amount of scientists and proffessionals gravely observe in modernity.
At the same time the attitude of Top Gear and other high flying technology programs and many dramas of course is obscenely disrespectful of environment and people on the BBC.
So the BBC are not “pro green”. Few people really are because “green” is marginalised as a dumb hippy astral flying stupid windmill fantasy club by cleverer than thou types who will quote transient controversy over recent 20 years records to deny an understanding of global warming which depends on a century of research and centuries of detectable variation, an understanding which was calling for urgent action over 20 years ago.
AIPAC up to its devious tricks again
“US aid to Israel may be saved from sequestration and moved into Pentagon budget. That might be the result if the Israeli lobby in Washington gets its way and the American people aren’t paying attention…”
“So their goal here is to exempt aid to Israel from the so-called across-the-board cuts. But of course they don’t want to announce that on the marquee, because Americans are going to be told: ‘oh, now we have to cut Head Start early childhood education because of the sequester cuts, but meanwhile aid to Israel is going to be protected.’ That’s going to make a lot of people in the United States very angry.”
http://rt.com/op-edge/aipac-israel-aid-us-761/
It will be interesting to see if this pans out.
The American Dream?
“Internment camps for political dissidents in the U.S. aren’t a conspiracy theory. The Department of Defense document entitled “INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS” or FM 3-39.40 proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/03/leaked-document-military-internment.html