Category: Current Affairs

More and more, it seems, the nutters are taking over the asylum Internet. Take this dispiriting discussion on the Graun’s website. In the first few posts, the Germans are Nazis, the Russians are Soviets, and the Brown Peril (was Yellow) is poised to sweep across Europe, which has been rendered weak by its democratic system and minimum wage laws.

As you can probably tell, comments of this nature often come from gloating Americans, insecure in their imperial overstretch and determined to prove that only the US of A can save the world. Typical are comments such as this:

All I am saying is that I believe democratic institutions are not capapble [sic] of reacting quickly enough within Europe in response to the growing internal peril that is evident. I may be wrong but I think, as an American, that supporting the [BNP and other far-right parties] (providing these parties are not anti-semitic) may be the way to go.

By the growing internal peril, they mean people like Sajid Mahmood.

Perhaps the surest sign of right-wing US nuttery is that it’s OK for us to vote for racists and xenophobes, as long as they’re not anti-Semitic. In case you were wondering where that leap of logic came from, it’s because we Europeans are incorrigibly anti-Semitic, and therefore can’t be trusted not to start herding people into camps at the first opportunity. America – where levels of anti-Semitism in actual scientific surveys come out about the same – is beyond rebuke on such issues, and can therefore lecture us all it likes.

The firm behind the e.coli outbreak in the US is called Natural Selection Foods.

You’d think there’d be only one answer to the question, “should we destroy the Geneva Conventions?”, but you’d be wrong. The US Congress is debating the issue at the moment, with prominent Republicans like John McCain standing in opposition to the Bush and leadership line. The intellectual calibre of the pro-torture lobby can be summed up by this comment from Peter King (R-NY), reported in the New York Times:

“I just think John McCain is wrong on this. If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it.”

There we go. It should be made legal to torture *anyone*, because in an extremely unlikely hypothetical scenario, we might want to torture one person (even though it wouldn’t produce reliable evidence). As a great English judge once said of torture, it is repugnant to reason, justice and humanity. This could apply equally well to this Administration’s human rights policy.

Kung Fu Monkey thinks about the terror threat, and wonders why we are so terrified, when that’s what the other side appear to want. Quote:

I am absolutely buffaloed by the people who insist I man up and take it in the teeth for the great Clash of Civilizations — “Come ON, people, this is the EPIC LAST WAR!! You just don’t have the stones to face that fact head-on!” — who at the whiff of an actual terror plot will, with no apparent sense of irony, transform and run around shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house!

Le Monde reports that Nicolas Sarkozy, llike Steven Byers, would like to be rid of inheritance tax.

Just to show that the Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch was merely ahead of its time, a shocking and shameful story on the BBC news site. Two Asian passengers had to be removed from a Monarch flight from Malaga to Manchester, because some of the passengers refused to fly with people who were Asian and speaking a language that might have been Arabic.

Well done, passengers! Another victory for terrorism and Daily Mail stereotypes.

PS. It won’t surprise you to learn that the Daily “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Mail reported this story favourably.

Or is it the People’s Front of Glaswegia? Jilted Scottish Socialist leader Tommy Sheridan ‘may form another party’, according to the BBC.

A reminder for Dick Cheney from chapter 15 of

In the year 1487 there was a severe storm in Switzerland, which laid waste the country for four miles around Constance. Two wretched old women, whom the popular voice had long accused of witchcraft, were arrested on the preposterous charge of having raised the tempest. The rack was displayed, and the two poor creatures extended upon it. In reply to various leading questions from their tormentors, they owned, in their agony, that they were in the constant habit of meeting the devil, that they had sold their souls to him, and that at their command he had raised the tempest. Upon this insane and blasphemous charge they were condemned to die. In the criminal registers of Constance there stands against the name of each the simple but significant phrase, “convicta et combusta.”

An apt cartoon from 1983.

An American church unveils a reimaigining of the statute of Liberty. After all, who needs liberty when you have God (or his worthy ministers) to tell you what to do?