Category Archives: Politics

History Politics

Two in the eye in the fundamentalists

April 7, 2006 – 10:49 am

After the discovery of the “missing link” fish/amphibian yesterday, today it is the unveiling of the Gospel of Judas:

The Gospel of Judas, a fragile clutch of a leather-bound papyrus thought to have been inscribed in about AD300…
According to this version of events, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ’s most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge.
According to the 26-page gospel, copied in the ancient Coptic language apparently from a Greek original more than a hundred years older, Jesus told Judas: “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”

Scholars are saying it doesn’t reveal anything fundamental that wasn’t already known about the gnostics (about whom I’ve written here and here), but it is a nice reminder that the whole idea of the Bible as a single, unchanging document, set in stone, is utterly ridiculous – a bit of a problem for the fundamentalists.
***
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today is getting stuck into modernist architect. That left me looking out my Sixties tower block window (and a very nice, practical, well laid-out, light and airy flat) it is too, wondering if the fault on “failed estates” really is with the architecture, or with the lack of investment in maintenance, services etc? I tend towards the latter view.

Perhaps some of the huge estates, with their linked walkways, as seen for example in east London, do by their nature create problems, but to sweep up all modernist architecture in that seems a bit harsh.
***
The Tories have decided that prison doesn’t work and the solution lies in rehabilitation not punishment. Meanwhile Labour keeps locking more and more people up without making any provision for their rehabilitation. It is getting to be a funny old political world.

One figure of note from that article: 2 per cent of the prison budget is spent on education – TWO PER CENT! No wonder the recidivism rate is awful.

Permalink | Comments (5)
Politics Science

If you are a chicken, be a bit worried

April 6, 2006 – 2:23 pm

… if you’re a human, just snort with annoyance at the hysteria over bird flu. It is the only symptom you are likely to see, unless you are in the habit of rooting in the entrails of dead birds in the park, or collecting guano for garden fertiliser, in which case it would probably be a good idea to stop. Yes, I am very fed up with bird flu stories already, and there’ll be days and days and days of it yet…

Meanwhile, the government is destroying civil liberties and centuries of checks and balances in government, as neatly laid out by Jenni Russell in the Guardian:

The government is briskly and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the individual to the state, of the Lords to the Commons, and of MPs to ministers. The ID cards bill will allow the authorities unprecedented surveillance of our lives, and the power to curtail our ordinary activities by withdrawing that card. The legislative and regulatory reform bill, now entering its final stages, will let ministers alter laws by order, rather than having to argue their case in parliament. Then this weekend brought another shocking government proposal to increase its own power and weaken the restraints upon it. Lord Falconer made clear that the government intends to drastically curtail the powers of the Lords. The current convention is that peers cannot block any legislation contained in a party’s manifesto. In future peers will have to pass any legislation that the government deems important, whether it was in the manifesto or not. They will effectively be neutered.

Now that really is something to get hysterical about.

And to demonstrate what these sorts of things mean in practice, two Yorkshire grandmothers face up to a year in jail for taking a walk:

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.
Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary’s Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

Finally the good news, the discovery of the missing link between fish and land creatures. The Guardian is hopeful that this will be a blow to the proponents of “intelligent design”, but that of course presumes that their views have anything to do with evidence, which sadly I doubt.

Permalink | Comments (4)
Environmental politics

Whoo-oo Camden Greens in the national media …

April 5, 2006 – 3:01 pm

Today’s Guardian diary:

It comes to something, we think you’ll agree, when elections are decided by plastic bags. But such seems to be the case in Camden, where the council’s ruling Labour group is so scared of losing overall control in May’s poll that it has sent redoubtable ex-leader Dame Jane Roberts (who isn’t even standing this time) out to do battle with the Greens in the Ham & High over this important policy issue. Oddly, our old friend Cllr John Thane, who will be hard-pressed to hang on to his Highgate ward, was passed over for the key task of defending the council’s outstanding record on reusables, even though he chairs its environment subcommittee. From such seemingly slight and inconsequential scraps of evidence, reader, do we conclude that Labour is bricking it.

Permalink | Comment (1)
Politics

A country depending on a single heartbeat

April 5, 2006 – 11:30 am

Thaksin Shinawatra has declared that he will not remain as Thai Prime Minister. The decision is said to have come after “a word in his ear from the country’s 78-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej”. Huge protests on the streets of Bangkok, and a very strong “none of the above” vote in an election boycotted by the opposition had earlier failed to achieve this result.

Once again, as he has many times in the past, the King, through a mixture of moral, religious and traditional authority, has brought Thailand back from the brink. But he is, of course, the 78-year-old king, and although his mother lived to 99, he’s not going to go on forever.

And the recent political turmoil has once again illustrated the huge gap in Thailand between Bangkok and the rest. The geographers tell us it is the most absolutely primate city in the world (meaning wealth, education etc is most concentrated there). Bangkok was resolutely anti-Thaksin – responsible for both hideous human rights abuses such as the killing of “drug dealers” in custody and for some distinctly dodgy financial deals – but the rest of the country, where political opinion is controlled almost entirely by local “big men”, and which benefited from largess flung to farmers, was resolutely for him.

There is, in Thailand, the kind of division that existed in Cambodia before Pol Pot, and the same culture, that insists on public decorum and a jai yen [a cool heart] – no display of emotion or feeling. (It is no accident that the word beserker amok (amuck) comes into the English language from this part of the world.) When such repressed feelings finally emerge, they tend to do so explosively.

I wouldn’t be making any longterm investments in Thailand.
***
Elsewhere, an example of what the hysterical beating up of “terrorist threats” has done in the UK:

A MAN was “frog-marched” off a plane on suspicion of being a terrorist – because he’d played the Clash song London Calling on his MP3 player.
A taxi driver called the cops after Harraj Mann, 24, played him the punk anthem, which includes the lyrics “now war is declared and battle come down”.
He also played Nowhere Man by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, which includes the line: “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!”

He was inconvenienced, and no doubt a bit scared, but for where this sort of thing really leads, three men, subjected to the American “rendition” procedure have spoken about their 18-month ordeal.

The three men, none of whom was ever charged with any terrorism-related offence, were seized in 2003 and then held in four secret locations by “black-masked ninja” US operatives who made considerable efforts to ensure the prisoners did not know where they were being held. They were eventually released about a month ago.

Permalink | Comments (3)
Politics Women's history

A Monday morning inspiration

April 3, 2006 – 11:44 am

The New York Times has just run a long portrait of Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who, having spoken out against her own gang rape, has become a magnet for similar victims, who she is trying to help, while also running a girls’ school and campaigning to change the position of women within her tribal society.

Every day, poor and desperate women and girls with tear-smudged cheeks arrive in this remote and impoverished village, seeking sanctuary. Every night, up to a dozen of them sleep on the floor in Mukhtar’s bedroom beside her. (She has given her bed to the principal of the girls’ elementary school she started here.)
One visitor is a lovely 7-year-old girl who breaks down in huge, heartbreaking sobs as she tells how the servant of a rich family raped her, and how the rich family then threatened to kill her and her family unless she recanted her accusation.
Then there’s Fauzia Bibi, a 30-year-old who was raped and tortured by eight men for two days to punish her family because her uncle supposedly had an affair with a woman from their clan. The attackers are threatening to kill her entire
family unless she recants.
Inspired by Mukhtar, these women are standing their ground. They are risking their lives — and, in anguish, those of their loved ones — to prosecute their attackers. It’s a lesson in courage and civics I’ll never forget.

OK – it is a bit heavy on the melodrama, but there is a wonderful story to tell. The NYT has hidden the story behind a paywall but it is interesting that it has been picked up by the Pakistani Daily Times. A demonstration of how Western journalists can sometimes make a difference.
***
An interesting piece about the environment which suggests that greens should stop talking about saving the planet and start talking about saving the human race. We might manage to wipe out most of the vertebrates, but the microbes and the insects are pretty much human-proof, and no matter how much of a mess we make, they’ll carry on.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Environmental politics Politics

The anti-4×4 campaign has a success

April 2, 2006 – 12:06 pm

THANDIE NEWTON, the British star of Crash, the Hollywood hit film, has become a crusader against gas-guzzling cars after a Greenpeace activist slapped stickers on her 4×4 accusing her of adding to global warming.
This week, Newton, 33, will make her support for the anti-emissions campaign public by writing to fellow Hollywood stars and other celebrities who drive such vehicles, asking them to join her in switching to greener forms of transport.

One solution to this problem is to make these dinosaurs in cities profoundly unfashionable; to make their ownership symbolic of ignorance and irresponsibility. (Which of course it is.)
***
OK, that’s the bit of good news I’ve found for the day. In Zimbabwe, the situation is going from bad to worse – as shown by the rate of discarded babies being found around the city. (Warning, quite graphic story, complete with an astonishing quote from a quasi-official figure about how they block the plumbing…)
***
Then, with Tony Blair (soon may he go, although from the Green Party perspective perhaps not until after the local election – he is so good for our campaign) seemingly wedded to nuclear power, a timely story on the anniversary of Chernobyl: the BRITISH farmers who still have to get their stock checked with a Geiger counter before they can take them to market.

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »