| Author |
Message |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 1:00 pm: | |
Blair has stepped down, Brown has yet to be invited to form a new government. We are ungoverned! Which is a rather lovely feeling. Just thought I'd mark the moment... |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 2:27 pm: | |
Aboslutely: I experienced total anarchy between my lunch break and 3.17 this afternoon.
Under the pavements - the drains!
Be practical - demand Sainsburys!!
Comrades, you have nothing to lose but your chain stores lacking Starbucks and Pret in-house!!!
One man, one Volvo!!!!
Raise the black flag from Atlantis to the townships of Titan!!!!!
*This* is modern anarcho-syndicalim on the march!!!!!
All right, officer, I'll come quietly ... |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 3:16 pm: | |
Yup, we're ruled again now. GBUK. |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 6:25 pm: | |
Tony B ain't done contributing to peace in the Middle East: he just took a job as the UN's senior peace envoy.
If I'm not mistaken, the primary reason experts were speculating that he wouldn't take the job was that it would cement his reputation as being Bush's poodle.
Fuck. It's a broken world. And getting broker by the looks of it. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 6:43 pm: | |
What has hit the news in Spain is the part about going catholic.
I mean he couldnīt have done it while still in office. It would have caused an uproar unlike... Leading your country into a war by lies?
So he has religious feelings? He should be becoming a monk in a hairshirt or something. Medieval kings in quandaries like his sometimes did.
Words fails me. They truly do. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 7:25 pm: | |
Very interesting article in the Guardian today about Blair's lack of shame, self awareness, etc -
2112419%2C00.html,http://www.guardian.co.uk/Column ists/Column/0,,2112419,00.html
Just been watching his farewell speech on the news. He got a standing ovation! He went on about nobility, etc! Quite astonishing... |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 8:14 am: | |
The people who stand
and applaud
are the people who've been paid
to stand and applaud
- J. Christ (attrib.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 9:00 am: | |
They applaud the man who bamboozled them into voting for what is certainly the most imbecilic, dangerous (expensive!) British foreign policy act since Suez. For a disastrous neverending war. That is what has to be explained. Why wasn't he led out of N. 10 in handcuffs? |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 9:28 am: | |
Well, looking at his new Middle Eastern peace *appointment* I can only assume that he IS the antichrist. Either that, or it's Cherie... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 11:13 am: | |
It says something about us that as a society we can regard such applause as normal, understandable or good manners in these circumstances. I am not really making a criticism of individuals. But the strange absence of fallout for Blair suggests how unreal we have become, how detached from the real processes that are taking place around us: actuality, in these terms. Iraq has created a global monstrosity, its consequences stretch far beyond its borders. Are we going to be able to come to terms with that? Brown undoubtedly has illusions but I also believe that he never personally agreed with the war. Is it a political measure for someone how well they can deal with, admit to, their failures? It will be very interesting to see what happens shortly in foreign policy. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 11:39 am: | |
In Milliband he has chosen someone who also privately doubted the sense of the war. But the question is how that will translate into our relations with America. In a way all of them, Milliband, Brown, Harmon have demonstrated already that it is one thing to believe something but quite another to pursue its living truth. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 1:01 pm: | |
>> Are we going to be able to come to terms with that?
I couldn't agree more; we're a society in denial. What's interesting is the extent to which a corrupt, short sighted and profoundly venal US administration has impacted on our own body politic. What we're witnessing is not so much a failure of the UK political system; rather, it's a demonstration of just how much in thrall to US presidential concerns UK politics is.
BTB GB is apparently a close friend of Henry Kissinger; I suspect that there won't be too much change under him.
Oh, and what also amazes me is the extent to which EUphobes rant about loss of sovereignty to Brussels, while being entirely complacent about loss of sovereignty to the US. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 4:41 pm: | |
>We're a society in denial ...
And I don't mean we're visiting Egypt, children!
Old joke. Sorry ... |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 5:11 pm: | |
Not to be a drag, but denial implies conscious recognition (on some level at least) of a fact and then the subsequent rejection of said fact. To my mind at least, this doesn't apply at all to the sort of people who clapped for Blair as he leaves office.
These sorts are the same people who cheer for American Idol, who have difficulty distinguishing politics from soap opera, and who sport yellow "support the troops" ribbons on their SUV bumbers. Their instrumentation is so massively fucked that such events really and truly seem clap-worthy.
I wish it were denial - it's more amenable to intervention than obliviousness and personality disorder.
God, I'm such a ray of fucking sunshine, aren't I? |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 9:10 pm: | |
You are indeed the Rantmeister, but in this day and age that's a very cool thing to be!
Intrigued by the denial point - how can these people not know what's going on? Not so much denial of knowledge but denial of the possibility of knowledge - if they let themselves find out, their self images would explode, so they just don't.
Reminds me of a diplomat I used to know, who was posted to Iraq. Her stance on being out there was 'if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem', which struck me as rhetorically fascinating - the implicit belief that a British diplomat can in fact be part of a solution out there. Well meaning people in their late 20s sorting out the world.
Tho' she did in fact speak truth; to my mind, she certainly wasn't part of the solution. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 9:50 am: | |
It has something to do with the need for an admission of a collective guilt and its apparent impossibility or irrelevance given the context of our daily lives. We are implicated in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib, torture and war atrocities and so forth but at the same time we are normal human beings living in a normal society, so it can't be true can it? What have any of us got to do with all the stupid things our society is doing? That may not seem like a real question but it is not going to go away. In my view, its ennunciation is going to become more and more emphatic. Society's horrors take place amidst normality, this is a normal society, therefore it cannot be happening. The obvious comparison is with Nazi society, where 'normality' was taking place from horrors a few miles down the road. The comparison seems banal but it's logical. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 1:24 pm: | |
Just to add something else. A modern consumerist society dissolves the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, in the absolutist senses that used to apply to daily human conduct. Rules for living are now informal for the most part. I think we would now be shocked by the sorts of social expectations, conformities, and restrictions that existed until quite recently in our society; that we were supposed to take them seriously once. In this sense, consumerism dissolves narrative and in certain very beneficial ways. It seems no longer possible to 'tell the story of our behaviour' in so far as it no longer seems to take place against the background of anything. (Which is one reason why we have a reversion to fundamentalisms I think: fundamentalisms of disbelief as in Hitchens, as much as of belief.)...But now what of this; that since consumerism and consumerist politics get rid of 'the story' of life so completely, they also create the simultaneous illusion that therefore nothing is actually happening? Nothing is really taking place in the world? So that Iraq is kind of a consumerist illusion. |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 3:25 pm: | |
>>irrelevance given the context of our daily lives
MJP, I don't disagree with most of what you've written, but I think that the statement above is the most pertinent precisely because is less grounded in a philosophical formulation of the problem.
Most people, especially those who are the most disenfranchised by our parasitic governments are too busy struggling to make ends meet to, say, bum rush the White House. Or rather, too busy making ends meet to come to understanding of how taking radical action would make ends meet more easily. People subsisting off of the McDonald's dollar menu rarely contemplate the unreality of their chicken nuggets, much less world leaders. ;)
One of the biggest challenges facing those of us who would like to see things change for the better is finding a way to formulate the problem that allows for swift and effective intervention. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 4:19 pm: | |
Dave, I watched a program, I believe it is still on you tube too, where random people in middle America were asked about world issues. Silly questions were posed such as "Do you think we should invade Uzbekistan?" Or general knowledge ones like: "Where is Israel on this world map." The answers were horrifyingly clueless. It may be unfair to view that as a representative sample; but I think it symptomatic of the morass into which we have sunk, not just America. In 1956 Anthony Eden could not contemplate continuing in government partly because the public lost faith in him. 2003- on Blair continued in government despite all the evidence coming out about the enormity and the stupidity of the lie he had foisted on us and its consequences. Nothing shook him; the suicide of a civil servant as a direct consequence of his actions rattled him certainly - but it didn't even begin to topple him. How is that possible in a consumerist mass media information age? Or is it actually a consequence of that consumerist mass media information age? I think it is partly. Bush's support for Blair also played a part in that too of course. But what happened to responsibility?! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 1:42 pm: | |
The tendency is towards insularity. Politics is like literature in this. A people belonging to a great literary tradition, with world-beating figures in it, tends not to feel the need to read abroad. Their own ocean is already big enough. With some or with many Americans perhaps there is already the feeling, "This is the world". America! The rest of the planet is invisible. So the strange vagueness of many Americans towards the rest of the world. What counts is Americanness. Thus: "Bush is a Texan, isn't he? If he thinks invading Uzbekistan is a good idea I'll go along with that." This country (Britain) is somewhat different. But Bush and Blair coincided completely in one thing: they both displayed a frightening indifference to detail, to fact and actuality; and clung to the Christian story of good and evil as if it somehow gave them access to the truth - regardless of the facts. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 03, 2007 - 8:50 am: | |
Of course, we keep forgetting about the real bottled spider here, Dick Cheney. |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, July 05, 2007 - 3:32 pm: | |
Responsibility to who, for what, MJP?
Who takes responsibility for interviewing idiots in order to produce depressing idiocy; for the fact that the media is so clearly bought and paid for - yet obstinately reacted to as though it weren't.
To a large extent, this *is* the world & it certainly is America. How could it be otherwise when so few control so much?
I don't think there's any indifference to detail, fact or actuality. The men running the show know, not omnipotentently, but more or less, exactly what they're doing. The war in Iraq is doing pretty much what it was intended to do, etc.
It's the dissonance between what they are orchestrating and doing and what they say they are orchestrating and doing that is at the heart of it all, I think.
If a Christian story of good and evil keeps the sheeple content, who can fault the government for continuing to tell it. Why should they work harder than necessary? What else should we really expect from psychopaths who have wormed their way into positions of power? Responsibility from psychopaths just seems a tall order to me...
I often wonder what I'm responsible for though. Why is the response to such a government so disorganized? What can I do? Should I just go to the Netherlands and get my PhD and plug into a system where my efforts will be useful and constructive? Should I stay here where things have run down so far than nothing I do will matter that much... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, July 06, 2007 - 7:59 am: | |
Responsibility in this context, the political, seems to be one of those things where one is most helpless; it seems so. But in this country, in Britain, anyway, we have just had an object lesson in its pitfalls, in the form of our previous Prime Minister whose name I cannot bear to mention. He didn't come to power because I voted for him. But all the same I did vote for him in the first election (though not in any later ones) and he did come to power. I have been thinking long and hard about this. I fell on my face with this one which makes me seriously doubt my own - or anyone else's - ability to form sound political judgements; a very pessimistic view. Am I just getting lost in generalities however, reasoning from the follies of particular individuals to form what can only be transient concepts of truth, or is this instinct right, are there actually flaws so fundamental to our politics that there is no solution to things as they stand? The contrast with the new PM couldn't be greater, in my opinion. Where T.B. would constantly be reacting to the media's perception of terrorist events with 10 point plans dreamed up on the back of an envelope, Brown is far steadier, far less lazy, much more intent on actuality; above all, he pays close attention to detail. Maybe he will straighten things out a bit. For B. the 'feral' media as he hypocritically called it, defined the very nature of an event. I am convinced of that. If the Sun said that x or y T.B. would instantly generate a policy from the vantage of his sofa for dealing with it - in 10 radical new ways. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, July 06, 2007 - 2:48 pm: | |
I would like to know where Gordon Brown stands, on everything from pensions to war to flooding, and I'd like it to be the truth. Then I'd like to be able to see his stance consistently apparent in everything the government does. Only then could I be sure that I knew where I was. Sometimes I think I'd prefer to live in a benign dictatorship. |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, July 06, 2007 - 4:10 pm: | |
Tall order Alex. Oh, that it weren't so. In the meantime, I hope that MJP is right about Brown. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, July 09, 2007 - 11:49 am: | |
I thought T.B. was a good idea at the time and would have taken some persuading otherwise. He was to be a recovery from the Thatcher years and the creepy weirdness of John Major. So I would say on the evidence of my record so far my judgement is badly flawed. We will see with Brown. Subjectively however I feel huge relief. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Monday, July 09, 2007 - 12:44 pm: | |
Hmm, well he is one of the master salesmen of modern time. Reminds me of an old marketing adage - you can sell people anything you want once, but if you want to sell it to them again it's got to be what you told them it was. |