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laresident 861 posts |
Nov 19, 2015, 18:44
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You are right. Iceland it is. Plenty of geothermal energy, water and fish.
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sanshee 1080 posts |
Nov 19, 2015, 22:37
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France is bombing Syria and at the same time scrambling to sell guns to the Saudi regime. As are we. As are America. The Saudi regime find Isis comes in handy somewhat. Barely flip an elastic band at them. The Saudis certainly do not wasn't to home any refugees. Fellow Muslims in need? Who cares! Can we perhaps get 'out' and away from these places and tell them to shove their oil up their arses? Or something? We do not have a clue what the fuck we are doing. Corbyn (yes, he) asked Cameron if we ought to consider denying Isis supplies by imposing sanctions on those countries bankrolling them. Cameron gave it a 'yeah yeah we need airstrikes though'. We (well if you care to look, not us all) are being funnel fed crap every day.
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spencer 3071 posts |
Nov 19, 2015, 23:21
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Anna Soubry, Cameron's mouthpiece on intervention, is getting s t u f f e d. Even Max Hastings is against. Listen to that audience.
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Toni Torino 2299 posts |
Nov 20, 2015, 00:05
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spencer wrote: Anna Soubry, Cameron's mouthpiece on intervention, is getting s t u f f e d. Even Max Hastings is against. Listen to that audience. Talk about being conflicted, Hastings made some valid points tonight. Soubry is a Capitalist being asked to articulate Government policy on Daesh ideology.
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sanshee 1080 posts |
Nov 20, 2015, 00:15
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Fresh from watching it, the bloke from Aljazeera reminded her when she said she was aghast at 'decapitations' by I.S that the Saudi regime (our pals) get up to that stuff too. Stupid lying boot was speaking as if she 'had no idea that sort of thing went on before'. That sent the audience in full jeering mode. Burnham pulled it off 'ok enough', Max Hastings was quite smart and was surprised to hear how rational audience member Simon Warr's contribution was (heard him on Vine a few times blow his lid over not very much, even though the bloke has had a tough time of it). Seemed audience had no appetite for another Iraq or Afghanistan. Did not believe Soubry's claim that had she been an MP she would not have voted for those wars. Did not like 'Independent' owner though.
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Dog in fog 317 posts |
Edited Nov 20, 2015, 06:51
Nov 20, 2015, 06:49
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06p0xgl Radio 5 has a good post-programme phone-in this week... comes in at 1 hr 39 mins...
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sanshee 1080 posts |
Edited Nov 20, 2015, 11:08
Nov 20, 2015, 11:05
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Saw Andrew Neil's 'diatribe' last night, no surprises it's been a topic today. Turned off programme though as I can not stand Kendal. Can almost tolerate if Alan Johnson is on, not her though. Andrew Neil used a rather unfortunate term, 'Islamist Scum' to describe attackers. Now I understand they are appropriating the word 'Islamist' for the purposes of describing a 'terrorist' and even though Neil's speech was not intended as a direct assault on Islam we should remember that being an 'Islamist' in its pure sense means you believe in Islam. Being 'Christian' means you believe in Christ, yet when some lunatic decides to commit murder with his god in mind we never use the word Christian in that way or with such loaded rhetoric. Anyways the lowlife who carried out these attacks did not believe in Islam. They drank alcohol, partied, took drugs. Even ran a bar FFS. Would have been good if Neil had decided, if he felt his speech was necessary, went some way to remind those others, and everyone else, of that.
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thesweetcheat 6218 posts |
Nov 20, 2015, 18:41
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She used to be a reporter on Midlands Today or something similar I think.
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Lump Of Green Slime 56 posts |
Nov 21, 2015, 05:37
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I didn't know which thread to put this in. But it seemed to be worth posting. It's from Terry Eagleton's 'Reason, Faith and Revolution'. It's an analysis that pre-dates the rise of ISIS but neatly summarises the backdrop to recent events. I'll post it in two parts: 'It is striking how avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam. Indeed, most of them hardly mention the word 'capitalism' at all, however they may protest from time to time against this or that excess of it. One has not noticed all that many of them speaking out against, say, the appalling American-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. It is a familiar fact (though not, apparently, all that familiar to the US media) that, thirty years to the day before the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an odious puppet autocrat who went on to massacre far more people than died in the World Trade Center. The United States also supported for many years, a regime in Indonesia that probably exterminated more people than Saddam Hussein did. Those who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes as a protest against Islamist atrocities should perhaps keep those facts steadily in mind. There is good reason to believe that the outrageous violence of Islamic terrorism is among other causes a reaction to this imperialist history. As Ajiz Ahmad has argued, extreme Islamists are those in whose overheated puritanical imaginations the West is nothing but a sink of corruption and debauchery, and who, having migrated into what they see as a hostile Western environment, 'imagine for themselves a permanent, shared past that never was.' It is a delusion they share with many other emigrant communities, notably the American Irish. Even so, Ahmad goes on to point out, all these potential recruits to Al-Qaeda stem from countries that have long, discreditable histories of European domination or colonial occupation. In the Arab world, these dissidents have seen their rulers ‘mortgaging their national resources to the West; squandering their rentier wealth on luxury for themselves and their ilk; and building armies that may fight each other but never the invader and the occupier.’ Finding no credible armies to join themselves, they proceed to fashion one of their own: secret, stateless, devoted to the propaganda of the deed. ‘They have seen so many countless civilians getting killed by the Americans and the Israeli, Ahmad adds, ‘that they do not deem their own killing of civilians as terrorism, or even comparable to what their own people have suffered. If anything, they would consider themselves counter-terrorists.’ Those who might suspect such statements of Islamist propaganda should note that their author compares the violence of such groups to that of revolutionary terrorists in tsarist Russia, while likening the ‘horrendously punitive and arcane regime’ of the Taliban to Cambodia’s Pol Pot. With an equipoise rare in such debates, however, Ahmad also reminds us that ‘Taliban rule was hideous but it was the only time in post-communist Afghanistan where no women were raped by the ruling elite, no rulers took bribes, no poppy was grown or heroin manufactured.’ The relevant contrast is with the previous, US armed rule of the warlord mujahideen. If the Taliban turned the whole of the country into one vast prison for women, in conditions of mass starvation and destitution, the reign of the mujahideen meant vast orgies of rape, cesspools of corruption, and mutual annihilation. In the past half-century or so, Ahmad points out, the great majority of politically active Islamists have begun as pro-Western, and have then been driven into the anti-Western camp largely by the aggressiveness of Western policies. Among the Shia, the Khomenist doctrine that civil government should fall under the sway of religion, and that armed insurrection was a legitimate means for achieving this end, was a stunning innovation in an Islamic tradition that had for the most part viewed political change in electoral terms. Those who sought to impose Islam through the gun constituted a very small minority. The Islamic faith forbids both suicide and the killing of civilians. What brought this violent doctrine to birth in Ahmad’s view was a combination of factors. There was the suppression of the leftist and secular anti-imperialist forces in Iran by the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, which restored the monarchy, eliminated the communists and social democrats, and created a bloodthirsty internal security force. The extreme autocracy of the Shah’s regime, along with its intimate ties to the United States, were later to trigger a radical religious backlash in the shape of the Islamist revolution of 1978. With the assistance of the CIA, Iran had travelled from a nation which included secular leftists and liberal democrats, to a hard line Islamic state. In Indonesia, a nation with the largest Muslim population in the world but also one with the largest nongoverning Communist Party as well, the secularist anticolonial government of Sukarno was overthrown in 1965 by a US supported coup, involving the single biggest bloodbath of communists in post-Second World War history, half a million or more dead, and the installation of the Suharto dictatorship. In Afghanistan, it was the United States which fostered and unleashed Islamic jihad against both the native communists and the Soviets, thus laying the basis for the warlord Islamist government of the mujahideen. In Algeria, a state threatened by a democratically elected Islamist party poised to form a government called off the electoral process to loud applause from the United States and Europe. One outcome of this suppression was to lend power to the elbow of the jihadist elements within the Islamist movement. In Egypt, the US backed regime of Mubarak repressed the parliamentary party of the Muslim Brotherhood, jailed its leaders, and rigged elections. In the subjugated Palestinian territories, the mass of the populated voted overwhelmingly for Hamas, but the election of this legitimate government triggered a Western economic stranglehold which continues to squeeze the lifeblood out of the Palestinian people. None of this, in Ahmad’s opinion or my own, provides the slightest legitimation for the use of terror. Nor is it to suggest that the West is responsible for suicide bombing. Suicide bombers are responsible for suicide bombing. It is rather to point out that the West has had an important hand in creating the conditions in which such crimes seem worth committing. Ahmad is surely right to claim that it is a ‘combination of domestic, anti-left and mostly autocratic right-wing (Muslim) regimes on the one hand and, on the other, determined imperialist-Zionist policies (by the West) which is creating the objective conditions within which ‘moderate’, democratic, Islam is itself giving way, in so many places, to the extremist, millenarian variety.’ It was the West which helped radical Islam to flourish by recruiting it as a force against so-called communism – a label used to describe any country which dared to espouse economic nationalism against Western corporate capitalism. It was the West, too, which by ensuring the overthrow of those secular governments in the Muslim world that either tolerated communists or refused to align with the West (Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt), or which preached even a mild form of economic nationalism (Mossdegh in Iran), narrowed the space for secular politics in such societies and thus assisted the emergence of Islamist ideology. Moreover, when Islamism grew into a powerful tendency in many of these countries, the West handed them ‘anti-imperialist’ credentials on a plate by sponsoring autocratic leaders like Mubarak and the dictatorial Saudi dynasty against them, while organizing holy war against Soviet rule in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Israel continued to flout international law in its occupation of Palestine. Islamist insurrectionists are for the most part rabidly bigoted anti-Semites, thoroughly ignorant of their own religious faith, monstrously repressive and medievalist, and ready to murder without the faintest qualm. All the same, it is hardly surprising that, as Ahmad remarks, ‘Islamicists just don’t believe that the Western law…will ever give them justice.’ When Dickens Artful Dodger, dragged into the dock at the Old Bailey, loudly protests that ‘this aint the shop for justice’, he is engaging in a self-pitying piece of grandstanding. He is also, as the novel perceives, perfectly correct. |
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Lump Of Green Slime 56 posts |
Nov 21, 2015, 05:37
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'Between about 1945 and 1965, Ahmad argues, most Muslim majority societies, from Indonesia to Algeria, were extremely hospitable to leftist, secular ideas. Any number of Muslim scholars, as we have noted already, have held that Islam and socialism (or even Marxism) are mutually compatible, and have doubted the Islamic basis of private property. In the 1950’s, the most massive political organization in Iraq was the Communist Party. Between the mid-1960’s and late 1970’s by contrast, in the wake of the coup in Indonesia, the destruction of Arab armies in the Arab-Israeli war, and the first stirrings of Afghan jihad, leftism and secularity in the Islamic world were pitched into severe crisis, as the competing fundamentalisms of Iran and Saudi Arabia grew increasingly powerful. Nasserism, once the dominant secular-nationalist, authoritarian-socialist current in the Arab world, was effectively destroyed by the Western-backed 1967 Israeli victory over Egypt. The Islamist that arose in the wake of that defeat arraigned Nasser for his failure to lead the Arab forces to victory over Israel. The political balance within the Arab world shifted accordingly, away from a discredited Nasserism to the monarchical, pro-Western Wahhabi fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia. What a secular politics could apparently not accomplish, a fanatically religious one would achieve instead. The West had thus helped to lay down the conditions that would unleash future assaults on its own power. After the Israeli massacres in Jordan in 1971, Islamist ideology amongst the Palestinians went from strength to strength. By 1990, with the advent of an Islamist state in Afghanistan under US tutelage, the resurgence of radical Islam was well under way. The world was now witness to a rabid form of religious fundamentalism – one which either made its piece with and was nurtured by the imperial West, as in Saudi Arabia, or continued the anti-imperialist struggle while establishing (or seeking to establish) theocratic, repressive, xenophobic, brutally patriarchal regimes at home. It is this militancy in which commentators like Martin Amis and many others in the West can see nothing but the actions of psychopaths, in woeful or wilful ignorance of what Ahmad calls the ‘malignant contexts within which all sorts of cancerous growths become possible.’ ‘The secular world’, he comments, ‘has to have enough justice in it for one not to have to constantly invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane.’ The solution to religious terror is secular justice. None of this is to claim that there would be no fanatical Islamists without Western imperialism. There would indeed be, just as there would doubtless be fanatical Christian evangelicals. It is rather that, without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza strip, it is not at all out of question that the Twin Towers would still be standing. Those who resent the ascription of even this much rationality to an Islamic radicalism which they prefer to see simply as psychotic, should have a word with those in the British secret service whose task it was some years ago to monitor the Irish Republican Army. Those professional antiterrorists knew well enough not to swallow a lot of cretinous tabloid hysteria about terrorists as monsters and mad beasts. They were well aware that the IRA’s behaviour, however sometimes murderous, was in a narrow sense of the word rational, and that, without acknowledging this fact, they would be unlikely to defeat them. The CIA, with its record of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering, its support for death squads and suborning of democracy, can certainly be said to qualify as a terrorist organization; yet this does not mean that its agents are irrational. Far from it. The other side of pathologizing one’s enemy is exculpating oneself. As long as we see faith as the polar opposite of reason, we shall continue to commit these errors.’ Whatever one thinks of Eagleton's Marxist analysis here, that last sentence is telling. It confirms for me what what David Hume once said about reason being 'the slave of the passions'. And it shows an awareness on Eagleton's part of something that others don't seem to have acknowledged, namely, that the world (apart from Western Europe) doesn't seem to be getting any more secular.
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