international
Your Stupid, Fat, Red Face
Comments for regular anonymous folk are once more throttled to one of the site authors’ say-so. I warned you, Russian and Turkish spammers, your licence to at least this bit of the internet is restricted until you learn to play nicely.
Thanks to new employment I have less time than usual to kick around solutions so to bide you over here is the best (genuine) comment I’ve seen for yonks, thanks to the inimitable* Speak Your Branes:
Cluster Up
Getup irritate me. I’ll make that clear from the start. As a died-in-the-nylon-wool-blend leftie this admission comes with some difficulty as they do mean well, are organised fairly cleverly, and generally side with the angels. They shit me, despite this, because they habitually simplify and misrepresent.
They’re against cluster bombs and in favour of the international treaty eliminating their use. Fair enough, so am I, so are lots of people. The premise of their campaign, however, is that the Australian Government is stalling on the treaty because wants to protect their own “cluster bombs”, despite the UK having “reversed” their position to protect their “own weapons”. To put it mildly, this is not the situation.
The Kerb Stomp
As we on the broadly-defined Left slowly wait for our well-celebrated livers to dry, like so many vinegary gerkhins left out after thorough pickling, it’s probably time for a bit of digestion of the moment. I don’t necessarily share premature disappointment over Kevin Rudd’s conservatism, because George Bush after all won his 2000 election on a platform of moderation, though I’ll certainly concede that his acceptance speech was a bunch of bullshit hyper-cliché that would have shamed a rugby league coach. All it needed to complete the scene was Tim Gartrell having a bucket of ice poured over him in the background, and Laurie Ferguson scratching his balls through tracksuit pants.
A the election result was an annihilation, and it’s not hard to savour the schadenfreude. The question is, for a Left so unused to electoral success (and so unwilling to mention the unfortunate State level of Labor Government, kept by a discursive Grace Poole in a locked room of the progressive soul), how best to scratch the insatiable itch of triumphalism?
To follow the current fashion of cliché: history is the best teacher. We should look forward from our past, secure in the future, and always twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Here it is, straight from 2004, the most right-wing piece of writing ever put to publication and made infamous by social bookmarking websites: Adam Yoshida’s masterfully terrible Four More Years!
Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards.
Oh yeah. That’s how you do it.
Like A Tiger
You can’t make this stuff up.
Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has made a haggard-looking appearance in a video issued from hiding, calling for protests against President Pervez Musharraf’s state of emergency.
Mr Khan, who led Pakistan to victory in the 1992 cricket World Cup, went underground on Sunday, a day after police placed him under house arrest at his home in the eastern city of Lahore.
This isn’t the guerrilla message. I can’t actually find it, but I sincerely hope that Khan used the words “like a tiger” in his communiqué from-the-underground.
If not for the people of Pakistan, then for us Late Show fans.
"Nightmare with no end"
A top retired US general has labeled the “surge” strategy in Iraq a “nightmare with no end”.
In the bluntest assessment of Iraq by a former senior Pentagon official yet, retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez also lambasted US political leaders as “incompetent”, “corrupted”, “derelict in the performance of their duty” and suggested they would have been court martialled had they been members of the US military.
Wonder what Sanchez’s background is…
Labor Stands For Something, Yessss: UPDATED FOR LEADER HATE
Update: Absolutely fucking unbelievable, What party does he think he’s leading? Is he not accountable to Conference and his own party’s policy platform? Of course not. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I am de-friending Rudd on Facebook and burning my Kevin07 Tshirt.
But Mr Rudd said that if elected prime minister, his government would never make any diplomatic moves to argue in favour of sparing any terrorist’s life.
A Rudd government would maintain the long-held Labor policy of only intervening in support of Australian nationals who were facing capital punishment abroad.
original post
I was so pleased to wake up this morning and read the front page of The Australian, which quotes quite extensively from Rob McClelland’s speech to George Newhouse’s crowd:
In a prepared speech released last night, Mr McClelland criticised the Prime Minister for supporting “the executions of the perpetrators of the Bali bombings, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein”, while continuing to state that “Australia opposed capital punishment”.
Mr McClelland said Labor would be consistent in its public comments on capital punishment.
Considering the prevailing wisdom that most Australians would be happy to see the Bali Bombers strung up by their testicles, tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered and shot, this is pretty brave. I’ve always liked Rob McClelland, and I now have a reason to make him my facebook friend.
Just to be clear, the relevant parts of the Labor Party’s policy platform read:
Labor opposes the death penalty and believes that death by hanging, beheading, electrocution, firing squad, or stoning is inhumane, no matter what the crime. Labor in government will strongly and clearly state its opposition to the death penalty, whenever and wherever it arises and will use its position internationally and in the region to advocate for the universal abolition of the death penalty.
and
Labor will be forthright in raising concerns over human rights violations with relevant governments in our region and beyond. Similarly, we expect and welcome the prospect of international scrutiny of Australia’s domestic human rights record. This includes the mandatory imposition of the death penalty.
Iraq death toll tops 1 million
Guest post from my greenest leftist friend, who doesn’t have his own blog and wants only to be known as Jason
Somehow the Australian MSM managed to miss a story last week that Iraq’s death toll now tops 1 million.
Ah well, good thing we got rid of that murderous Saddam Hussein, eh?
This article sums it up pretty well:
If we’re not enraged, let’s ask ourselves why. Is it because the slaughter of Iraqi’s is happening thousands of miles away? Is it because they are not like us in appearance or religion? Would we, say, feel the loss of British or Irish people more intensely? We Americans are upset about the loss of lives of American soldiers. When we’re not shopping at the mall or watching Sunday football, we’re concerned about this. But the death of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s? We don’t feel that. We don’t imagine what it looks like. Our politicians don’t convey the terrible weight of what we’ve done to that country. Perhaps there is something to be angry about. Very angry.
Glasgow
The Times reports on the suicide bombing attempt on Glasgow airport. Beware: horrendous eye-witness descriptions of self-immolation in article.It seems that the whole harrowing ordeal was handled with typical British aplomb:
On arrival at the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley police said he was found to be wearing a “suspect device” – thought to be a suicide belt. The casualty ward was evacuated and hospital workers reported seeing a policeman run from the building and throw a “belt-like” object into a cricket field.
To my dear friends in the UK, I hope you are staying safe and well.
Maya Angelou Endorses Hillary
WEDGE! WEDGE!
A lot of people care for you, not just admire you, but really have profound affection for you, ever since you stood up as a woman and said, yes, I’m a woman, phenomenal woman, that’s my mothers and all your mothers, and my grandmothers, and all your grandmothers, and my great grandmothers and yours, and great greats and great greats and all you women here along with Hillary Rodham Clinton AND ME!
Hillary's campaign song: a fix if ever I heard one.
I’ve been closely following Hillary Clinton’s moves to allow voters the chance to pick her campaign song. Votes are now in, and, extremely disappointingly, rather than going with some great overblown messiah-complex soundtrack, they’ve chosen the most insipid song in the world. I very much doubt that this was the democratic result.
You and I
Were meant to fly
Higher than the clouds
We’ll sail across the sky
So come with me
And you will feel
That you and I
Were meant to fly
Much more promisingly bizarre, however, was the method of announcement, which entailed Hillary and Bill spoofing The Sopranos finale, complete with jokes about Chelsea being unable to parallel park. The video is here. Considering that The Sopranos is a show about power achieved through violence, intimidation, murder and patriarchal solidarity, I’m thinking this is the best indication yet that Hillary’s got what it takes to fuck everyone over and win the day.