Long Sunday

Things Changed

It’s a point that’s been made quite well on Lenin’s Tomb a while back, but I thought I’d rehearse and add to it here. Why is the government so zealously pursuing new legislation relating to security? When in fact it isn’t necessary. This from today’s Guardian: [Blair] was speaking as police arrested 10 foreign suspects with a view to deporting them, not under Labour’s new laws, but under the national security terms of the 1971 Immigration Act. Asked why the law had not been used earlier, he replied: “Because things changed after 7/7.”

In other words, a law existed already which allowed the government’s aim to be achieved. Yet this didn’t stop it drawing up new legislation. Would the Law Lords have ruled imprisonment without trial unlawful had they made their ruling after 7/7, Blair asked yesterday, trying to drive home the idea that “the rules of the game are changing.” Be prepared to hear this phrase a lot over the next few months as the government tries to capitalize on a fragile cross-party consensus for new anti-terror laws. Be prepared too for a framing of the argument about civil liberties and human rights that will present security and freedom as a trade-off.

Coffee anyone?

Imagine that a foreign government is orchestrating a ruthless terrorist war against you. It funds and instructs the terrorists, who deliberately murder civilians, rape women, smash babies against trees and innumerable other atrocities - all this takes place within the borders of your country, and continues until the task of the foreign government is complete: to have a government in place of which it approves. Then the terrorists want to sell you coffee. Do you buy it?

Touched by Bloodless Abstraction

The argument about indifference here needs elaborating. The ‘indifference’ – and in one case the advertising of one’s indifference – amounts to saying ‘what does not touch my immediate experience is a matter of little concern to me, or concerns me only as it touches my immediate experience, community, interests.’ Another, slightly more philosophical way of putting it is that I am touched by what happens to those who share the same predicates as me – white, middle-class, American or whatever. Conversely, I am incapable of being touched by - or really grasping - a level of humanity that precedes such predicates. My moral compass is governed by the accident of nearness. Thus, such people are spontaneous Rorty-ite liberals, a position here deftly summarised and defeated by Teagleton:

Holidays in the Sun

Ever wanted a job with real perks? Like free foreign holidays, luxury rooms at top hotels in glamorous Mediterranean locations, free flights and a mobile phone thrown in? Then join the CIA.

Iraq in the Name of Freedom

Some video of Iraq, for "mature audiences only," which rules out most of our current leaders, I figure (courtesy of Splinters). 

Update:  For the no-bullshit words of someone who's been there, and who is still there now, you may go here.  Goddamn this fucking war, and the greedy, head-in-the-sand OCD crooks who brought it.