Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
On a day when fear ran rampant around “the markets”, some distraction from the Apocalypse might come from considering horror movies.
Incidentally, lots of the pre-tribulationist Rapture watchers in the US have been expecting the world to end on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year - which is why Congress is closing down for two days. Weird!
Anyways, back on topic. I agree this is the scariest movie scene ever. From Mulholland Drive:
Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.
But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)
Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).
You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.
And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’
Something of a sequel to my first post of that title on the politics and poetics of science fiction.
One Green One Red by *complejo on deviantART
Though its original crest has long receded, the 60s British New Wave of science fiction continues to produce ripple effects. I wonder, in fact, if M. John Harrison’s Light, which I’ve just read (though it was published in 2002), plays a little with the moniker given to that group of writers around Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds with his thematics of a constellation of planets - some artificial - forming pebbles on a beach next to the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract, a porously impenetrable space where all the laws of the universe appear to be confounded.
One of the silliest tropes that’s entered political discourse over the last decade or so is the closeness of the apocalypse. I can’t help thinking that, as John Gray suggests in his interesting new book on Utopias, Black Mass, this return of the eschatological is related to the apparent impotence of rationality in the face of seemingly intractable crises. It’s something of a common theme across the political spectrum - similar notes are sounded by George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmenijad, and while deep Greens are accused of climate change doomsaying, the war on terror crew can’t stop painting insane scenarios of terminal decline and clashes of civilisations. In fact, although we face convergent crises, we’re not without the ability to respond rationally, if only political and policy debate could be cleansed of emotive catastrophism. In light of all this, the work of Canadian political scientist Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon is very timely. Sydney folk have an opportunity to hear him and Ian Dunlop discuss some of these issues, with a particular focus on climate change, at an event hosted by the Centre for Policy Development on Monday. Go round there for details. I’m hoping CPD Director Miriam Lyons will be writing a guest post for LP to give those of us who can’t make it a sense of what’s discussed.
I’ll see your fridge magnet and raise you a Go bag.
The City of Sydney along with the Federal Government wants us all to get ready.
Sydneysiders will be encouraged to prepare themselves and their families for emergencies in an important and emotive public education campaign launched today.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore MP said Let’s Get Ready Sydney encourages people to think about how a major emergency in the CBD would affect them and provides advice on essential preparations everybody should make.
Bus stop advertising, a website and pocket guide asks questions such as who’ll pick up the kids from school and what would you do if there was no mobile phone reception.
The campaign has been developed in partnership with Emergency NSW and the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department and included consultation with senior representatives from the State’s emergency services, local residents and businesses.
Prepare yourselves for the end times people!
Gordon Brown hasn’t had the most pleasant of starts to his Prime Ministership, with three failed car bombing attempts in the past couple of days (incidentally, what kind of whackers are these guys? How hard is it to set off a bomb?). But his very first task as Prime Minister is, while unlikely to be ever acted upon, is perhaps even more foreboding:
As prime minister, with ultimate responsibility for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Mr Brown has to write a letter, in his own hand, giving instructions detailing what the UK’s response should be in the event of a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
The letter will be opened only by the commander of a British Trident submarine, who would have to assume that the prime minister was no longer in a position to take “live” command of the situation. The options are said to include the orders: “Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there”; “go to Australia”; “retaliate”; “or use your own judgment”.
I had no idea that the Euston Manifesto was still bubbling along its merry manifestist way (which I imagine to be a third way of some sort) in cyberspace as opposed to having hit a dead end. But it seems it is, and that there is an entire YouTube channel devoted to videos such as:
This informative discussion involving key Ministers in the British government, trade unionist activists, a top journalist and key NGO leaders; discussed the lack of a Arab response to the crisis in the Darfur, the excuses made by Western intellectuals for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts, Iraq and the need to support democrats, and the future for the UN (and whether it is a ‘failed’ organisation).
I’d have thought its moment past, since even though it purported to be some sort of declaration of enduring truths for the left, its actual genesis was in a particularly Blairite moment which will soon be fading into history as a Brown led government loses interest in neocon adventurism and liberal imperialism. The Tories, perhaps appropriately for a party with a pragmatic Oakeshottian philosophical tradition, never had much attraction to grand projects for inscribing democracy on the sands of the Middle East. And British troops will soon be gone from Iraq.
In any event, as some of the subjects discussed in the series of videos linked testify, the Manifestists were never particularly focused on tasks peculiar to the left but rather on raising non sequiturs such as “the lack of a Arab response to the crisis in the Darfur” in order to mask the hypocrisy lying behind the inaction of the West, and the extremely uneven application of principles of international humanitarian law. This, of course, was an aporia necessary to such a project, as those whom the Euston Manifestists would applaud had no actual commitment to principle except as convenient spin and justification of power. In short, rather than re-inventing the left, the Manifestists were more interested in firstly defending Blairism (and to the degree that they showed any interest in the traditional economic and social goals of the left, subscribing to morally authoritarian communitarianism) and secondly justifying their own effective exit from any plausible left. Really, it was all about the two I’s - Iraq and Israel.
Continue reading ‘Of manifestos, and manifestists, or; has the future a left?’
If things get really desparate for the government this year, will they be tempted to take a leaf out of Utah Republicans’ book?
“Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan’s influence on illegal immigrants. (…)
Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan’s minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.
Legislators in Mexico City are moving towards decriminalising abortion.
Scott from Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the central point well:
The key question of abortion policy is always not whether women will get abortions, but whether non-affluent women will have access to safe abortions. It’s strongly in the interests of the forced pregnancy lobby to ignore this reality, because once you do take it into account abortion criminalization is essentially indefensible.
Also interesting, and important, are Amanda’s thoughts at Pandagon, in a post entitled What clinic would Jesus bomb?. She links to some commentary at Feministe.
Not surprisingly, the Church is fighting tooth and nail against the liberalization of abortion laws in Mexico City:
“Catholic leaders and church officials have denounced the proponents as “baby killersâ€? and have warned that the law could provoke violence against doctors who agree to provide the service. A group of Catholic lawyers are pushing for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to avert the vote in the city Legislative Assembly.”
Yeah, the law could “provoke� violence. Violence that will just fall out of the sky. I think we’ve seen that it doesn’t take much to prime that particular pump.
For the religious right, that is. Rudy Giuliani, surging ahead in the polls, is now the preferred candidate of the conservative GOP primary electorate. Go figure. Warning - the gender politics of the video over the fold are dodgy. But I don’t imagine that fundies would think that for the same reasons I do.
The allegedly scientific research organisation, the “Family Research Institute” has reacted quickly to news that Mary Cheney is having a baby with her partner Heather Poe:
Mary Cheney, the Vice President’s unmarried daughter, is expecting. Dr. Paul Cameron, Chairman of the Family Research Institute, a Colorado Springs think-tank, condemned her decision:
“Unmarried women should not deliberately have children. Their children are more apt to experience privation and disruption. Consequently, such children are more apt to do poorly in school, disrupt society (e.g., engage in criminality), and be personally troubled. These wrongs are compounded when the child is brought into a homosexual setting.”
The head of this “research institute”, Dr Paul Cameron concludes:
Her pregnancy is further evidence that participation in homosexual activity distorts value systems, inducing practitioners to harm the commonweal. Our society already has too many children born without the benefits of marriage; Cheney’s action is not only a bad example, but poor treatment of an innocent child.
More wingnut reaction reported here, along with evidence of the positive psychosocial development of children raised by same sex parents.
The Age has the market cornered in really just plain wacky stories with anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic angles.
When the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Inquisition used to publish the Index of Forbidden Books, it used to be possible for scholars and students to access the prohibited materials for research purposes. Now that Australia is releasing its own Index of Terrorist Tracts, courtesy of Grand Inquisitor Attorney-General Ruddock, our own authorities aren’t so sure that similar arrangements are justifiable.
Anyone would think there were a few elections coming up. Last week, apropos (presumably) of the Jack Thomas control order, we had the Federal government ranting and raving from the PM down (with assists from Cossie and Ruddock and various minor characters) about how Muslims should learn English, respect women (femoRWDB Janet Albrechtsen thought he didn’t go far enough), and hurry up and assimilate. Meanwhile, in NSW, Peter Debnam, fresh from interfering with justice and demanding that thousands of gang members be arrested the day after the election, wanted cop cars to be displaying the Aussie flag. The good folk in their Vaucluse mansions must be cowering in their beds at night.
[Worth observing here that The Devine Mrs Miranda mixes her messages as usual - quite understandable, burqas, really when you consider the need to protect your daughters from Paris Hilton.]
Meanwhile, over in the land of the free, we had Bush comparing Bin Laden (presumably breathing a sigh of relief now that Musharraf has decided to leave the Al Qaeda and Taliban types near the Afghan border alone) with Lenin and Condi comparing folks who dislike the Iraq War with supporters of slavery during the Civil War. Hmmm, them were Democrats, weren’t they?
The Decider-in-Chief has topped all this by claiming that his use of rendition, secret CIA prisons (whose existence Condi et al are on the record as denying), Guantanamo Bay, and military tribunals frustrated by those pesky judicial activists had foiled numerous terrorist plots. Just before, erm, September 11. Interesting that some snakes which used to lurk in the mud are now exposed to (partial) view (can’t tell the good folks at home too much about “techniques” and “intelligence” in case the terrorists are listening). I’m sure his motives are patriotism and defence of our civilisation, and nothing at all to do with the parlous position of the GOP going into the November elections.
Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop parses the Bush speech succinctly.
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