No Vote - No Work

"SPREAD THE WORD IN IRAN,STOP paying your bills (water, gas, electricty), STOP paying taxes. It worked in '79.RT Please #iranelection"

Says one Iranian Twitterer. And if there was ever a perfect time to organise mass civil disobedience, it is now. The list of pranks which the Iranian people could play on their government, and which could be disemminated online, is almost inexhaustible.
But the uiltimate weapon is still, as always, withdrawal of labour. No Vote. No Work. Can't Vote - Won't Work.
The opposition have already begin the process of reclaiming Islam from the sect which has defined it for twenty years, and possibly begun remodelling it to suit a modern world. If they can do that to a religion, they should manage the relatively humdrum task of remodelling a country. Especially one which for twenty years has been the puppet of the same faith now being shouted from the rooftops every night in defiance of the Mullahs . And there's not a thing the Revolutionary Guard or the secret police can do about it.

140 Characters In Search of A Revolution

[Play muted for best effect]
The cringeing cowards are out in force. It seems that Twitter is being used as a tool by the dastardly CIA. And according to a recent Harvard study, most social website users don't play with their toys much after Christmas Day, and therefore Twitter is nothing but the plaything of the idle western consumer, and not to be taken seriously. Or it is just a rumourmill, seething with as many lies as the Daily Star or Newsweek, or FoxNews and easily dismissed by print diehards.
It's all in the choice of the word 'rumour' instead of 'lead'. Twitter is, initially, providing leads. Old fashioned confirmation always provides stories. And what about the images and videos, how many of those are just 'rumours'?
Whatever bored consumers use it or don't use it for, it has been proved to be a valuable tool for people organising against suppressive or fraudulant regimes. Yesterday and today requests have been made for ideas. What kinds of collective actions could be taken to paralyse the state machine? What is the best remedy for tear gas and pepper spray? What are the safest ways of posting images and video? What kind of retaliation can be expected in this very Persian game of political chess. How can the Basij be identified and even targeted..?
The other argument is that the internet as a tool of change simply doesn't work because it can be turned off at will. This is patently not true, as the masses of footage emerging over the last week has shown, and it is an insult to the craft of the Iranian commentators, who know their business just as well as any Wapping hack knows how to bloat his expenses. And it also ignores the fact that for several days, the conventional media have been turned off entirely and have to rely on the civilians at trheir laptops. The shooting of Neda Agha Soltan on Saturday was news which was reported on Twitter several hours before it appeared on the BBC. Without Twitter, it may never have emerged at all.
Like many other aspects of the internet, personal publication does represent a massive shift of power, as proved by the Iranian regime's actions against it - actions made largely futile by the counter-actions of the global hacker community, garnered partly via Twitter and Facebook.
The sneering has to stop at some point. It seems that the left has to re-learn its own lesson, that the production, distribution and exchange of a commodity is inherently empowering. So when that commodity is information in an Information Age, is it any wonder that tyrannies begin to tremble?

The following Twitter users don't count, it seems.. or the use itself.
crisisintehran TODAY 4pm - Haft Tir Sq - Meydan 7 Tir - Tehran - in memory of our martyrs - Karoubi said hes coming(on his facebook)


stevemahfouz Please be very careful about what information you share on Twitter. The Iranian government monitors Twitter closely #iranelection #gr88


silentherotx #IranElection To deal with tear gas soak a bandana or paper towel in lemon juice or cider vinegar can breath a few minutes, also buy goggles


TGskills NAMES AND NUMBERS OF BASIJ AND OTHER ITELAGENCE AGENTS http://www.goftaniha.org/ #iranelection #iran #persiankiwi #mousavi1388 #twitpersia

etc etc etc. All useful to those concerned, and when the spooks do manage to work their wicked wiles, no doubt we'll find out about it. Until then, they have their hands full trying to stem the flood of unsuitable information leaving Iran. And it is a battle they are losing because of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, and other weapons which the Medieval minds of he mullahs still don't understand. Those using the internet to tell their story are way ahead of the defeatists.
Iran is the most sophisticated blogging community in the world, and the second biggest. They are the ideal people to test the new politics of personal publishing. And they have the sympathy of the freelance global hackers, who quite fancy the idea of making trouble for dictatorships from their bedrooms and garden sheds.
The argument against Twitter is the same one which discredits the Gutenberg press for culminating in Rupert Murdoch. In fact, what Twitter does is it give too much power to those awful ordinary people with their seditious, rabble-rousing pamphlets. Good.
Iran represents a definiing moment in the clash between medievalism and modernity, and modernity will win because the medieval mind does not understand the technology being used against it.
It is in the dilemma of needing the internet to survive in the modern global economy, while trying to deny it from the most sophisticated online community in the world. It will lose because it is not only trying to suppress its own people, but the aspirations of a global community.

REDACT ALL ABOUT IT!

MP.'s Expenses in Full.

R.Hon. member for Bogmouth on Sylt.
period

Recieved with thanks the honourable member for with a melon.
All claims presented to the committee between and subject to Freedom of Act.
As Follows.

Plus further monthly increments of
credited to offshore companies in

Principal residence plus brother in law.
Following sale of
Other addresses

in the event of the death of the goat.

Evil Gordon Brown to Blame Says Supreme Leader

'The most evil of them is the British government'.

... What did we do? Or is the Supreme Leader now a leader writer for the Daily Mail? It's hard to tell. Does this give Gordon Brown another shot of global street cred?
The reality is that any credit the british government gets from this bizarre attack by an obvious rambling loony, comes courtesy of the BBC, which is the real target for relaying the information provided by the Iranian people - via Twitter and the other internet tools which are still obviously beyond the comprehension of the mullahs - not being mentioned in today's address from the Supreme Leader's Fortress of Righteous Justice. Either he knows enough not to mention a battle which he lost when trying to rally his troops, or he simply does not understand that the real war is also also all but lost. That access to global communications changed everything as radically as did the discovery of agriculture or the printing press or algebra, and that by threatening a bloodbath, he is only delaying the inevitable as horribly as possible.
So Gordon Brown and David Milliband take the blame for the BBC acting as delivery boy for the Iranian people. Whoever said politics was fair?
Khameini's used this opportunity to declare that the government is approved by god, and that therefore those who have no faith in the government have no religious faith. They therefore must 'take the consequences', meaning brutal repression, especially at the hands of government loyalist vigilantes, who were directly put on alert by this speech.
The gloves are definitely off, and the bravery of the opposition is exceptional. But given the attitide of the Twitter posts leaving Iran, it seems violence is now far more likely after today's address from the holy men than before, which is historically typical.

Live To Fight Another Way

For the opposition to hold their demonstration tomorrow and openly defy Khameini is to risk a bloodbath. The comparisons with Tianmen Square are obvious. But in this game of image and face, the streets are not the real battleground. It would deliver a far more powerful message if the expected confrontation were not to happen, just as the silent march a few days ago was more impressive than than occupying the streets and burning a few cars. It would represent a far more sophisticated display of concerted action if the crowd were merely to stay home and hang a green flag from their windows, thereby overcoming international reporting restrictions at a stroke. The means of organising it would also represent the new politics of communication, rubbing the noses of the government in its greatest blindspot. Mobbing is surely a much more effective form of action than the mass bloodshed which could well follow a confrontation tomorrow.
Turning on all the electrical appliances on full for an hour would play havoc with Iran's national grid, possibly. Mass journeys at the 'wrong' times of day, causing congestion and leaderless chaos. The ways in which concerted mass actions can be used to disrupt the state without bloodshed, or leaders to be put on trial, are only limited by the imagination of the people.

Images.

More Images From Yesterday's Protests

Orwell Demolition Tools (‘There Are No New Ideas’)

Why so many trees have to die defending progress from the defeatism and misogyny of reactionaries is a mystery. One volume of Orwell essays, and they are exposed again as the Paper Tigers they are.

TRIBUNE.February 25, 1944
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement:
‘There are no new ideas.’
Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying:
‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.

When will those who despise and fear progress learn to live without it, and return to their roundhouses bearskins and rickets? That's what I'd like to know.

Ethnic Cleansing Ulster Style

Old habits die hard, it seems. There will be NO Surrender! to Roma.. And now many of them have been hounded out by classic Ulster redneck thuggery in the finest traditions of the province. It was interesting to hear the Belfast police trying to reassure the public by saying that 'paramilitaries were not involved' in terrifying dozens of Rumanian families from their homes, if not out of the country. As if it were a matter of some pride that this hatred did not need agitators but sprang naturally from the local culture.
The organised Ulster Loyalist groupings (who are still armed to the teeth four years after IRA decommissioning) have a sad history of links with the nazi nutter-sects across Europe and America. Now we are told that this poisonous ideology does not need organisation in Belfast, but is completely natural. And if it is 'natural' in Belfast, then it must be equally natural to scapegoat Rumanians in every other capital city of the European Union. Racism and thuggery are natural human qualities, not manageable, preventable consequences of economic desperation and ignorance. So there's nothing we can ever do about racism, it is here forever because we are inherently Evil.
The police should be more careful what they say they are grateful for, especially on TV.

Twitterized Mullahs

How they all laughed at Twitter. Well, they're not laughing now. It will be interesting to see with just how much relish the sniggering classes eat their words. The Supreme Leaders of Iran can tell them just how wrong they were to write off an instant, open-ended means of communication. The nature of the current anniversary coverage of Tiananmen Square might be very different if the people had access then to similar ways of co-ordinating action and of broadcasting their own story to the world. Since the advent of the cameraphone, the question has been 'Who Spies on the Spies'? and the answer is US. As both the London G20 demonstrations and the recent expenses scandal showed, public surveillance of authority is now almost as much of a civic duty as paying taxes or driving on the correct side of the road or ensuring that a child does not stand too near to an open fire.

The Iranian ruling elite is in the dilemma of depending for its economic and military power on the same technology which will undermine it. So they can't un-invent the internet (in order to suppress organised dissent) because this is the modern world, and they need their email addresses and online banking systems and commodity exchanges as much as every other regime. Unless, of course, they choose total Talibanisation, and a return to the C13th, which the Iranian people simply do not want. Not for Osama and All His Goats. And what's good enough for the people of Iran is good enough for people living under any other dictatorship, China included.

Whatever the result of the election MIGHT have been, or how indistinguishable the policies of the two main parties, and however hamstrung Iranian democracy might be by Medievalism, the fact is that the djinn of freedom has been let of the bottle by the actions of the tyrants themselves. A few weeks ago, most Iranians might well have been prepared to give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt, but since the shootings and internet shutdowns, and arrests and open disrespect of the increasingly aspirational educated masses, the theocratic regime has partly replaced the West and its sanctions as a demon. The betrayal of the government and the mullahs has driven the wedge of outraged personal self-esteem into the face of theocracy. Apart from anything else, surely modern technology and religious fundamentalism are incompatible. The Quran may not proscribe computers and iPods by name, but it is nevertheless undermined in people's minds by such innovations, just as the invention of agriculture freed us from Animism and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of Papal power.
So the political choices now are very different from the ones the Iranian people once thought were on offer two weeks ago. The internet has helped reveal the unthinkable in Iran.
In Orwell's 1984, the 'proles' are pessimistically generally ruled out as agents of change, 'Goldstein's Book' within the book also dismisses any hope in the masses with one proviso:

"They (the proletarians) could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly..."

The internet is the ultimate educational technology, which expands to fill the use and curiousity available, and is now invaluable to the efficient management of the modern state. And any attempts to limit it to the elite are futile. Even the best efforts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cyber-agents could not stop the flood of information from the people this week, and furthermore, the global hackocracy rallied to the defence of the Iranian people and mounted attacks of their own against state departments.
It would seem that global ignorance is less of an excuse for tyranny then ever.

Cyber War Guide for Iran Elections
http://www.daneshjooyan.org/english/
http://www.picasaweb.google.com/bahramks/RiotsInTehran#
http://www.daneshjooyan.org/english/article/100705a.html
http://www.twitter.com/persiankiwi
http://www.worker-communistpartyofiran.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-protests-go-beyond-regimes.html

Choice for Idiots

At its forthcoming conference, the B.M.A. is to debate the motion that children who have not been vaccinated against measles should not be allowed to attend schools and risk the lives of other children. No jab, no school.
This has naturally provoked the rearguard of the anti-MMR lobby, but also raised the predictable outcry that this sanction would limit something called 'parental choice'.
The moral choice facing the parent is depicted as being one of individual freedom versus subservience to the 'greater good' - to which all vaccinated children are offered as a statistical sacrifice. This is an entirely fake distinction. A polarisation contructed to paralyse collective instincts and blind us to the fact that they generally act in the interest of the individual, not some abstract impersonal entity called the state.
The actual choice facing parents is whether to send their children unprotected into an environment in which it could contract a possibly deady disease. Statistically, an unvaccinated child is far more likely to be permanently harmed by a measles epidemic than by the MMR vaccine. And the more children who go unvaccinated, the more likely such an epidemic becomes. So for the responsible intelligent parent, there is no choice. It is not a choice between the good of The State and the good of the child, but only of the good of the child. An objectively selfish decision, as most co-operative decisions tend to be.
'Choice', as in so many misuses of the word, is purely for idiots. And as idiots, their statistical children would possibly not benefit from any schooling they would be forced to miss.

Lens Life

people and places

Political Reform - The Red Tape Revolution

More committees and a cull of MP's. That'll solve the problem, according to the politicians and Esther Rantzen. Plus of course a routine moral regeneration resulting in everyone becoming nice and responsible and decent and dutiful overnight. Happens all the time.
Naturally, a recession mentality is different, being forged by deprivation rather than gluttony. And the culture it creates may well deliver more status for social duty than before, when those not lining their pockets were merely a bunch of suckers and losers. But for as long as the profit motive rules, politicians will be bent, and the public will have to judge as best they can.
Individuals now have more power of information than ever. The concept of counter-veillance is here, as seen in the G20 protests. And the steam train is no longer the fastest means of communication. So we do not need the same forms of political representation we did when most people still lived a days trainride from delivering a petition to anyone who could make a difference. We don't need the same form of delegated politician, we need more access to the decision-making process itself.
For the time being, we have the technology and the infrastructure to restore an element of the community camp-fire to politics and economics. And restore some of the trust between people which has now almost completely vanished. And save the planet a bit.
If that technology can put the first black man in the White House, it can surely help restore the balance in favour of those deserving community interests hitherto out-priced and out-lobbied from power by vast commercial interests. We are facing a deep ideological choice between the politics of the last 200 years, and a politics which can see us through the next 200 years.

As the socialist George Orwell said:

"I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue."

The Clingon Expenses Scandal

If indeed it is inevitable that Labour will lose the next election then it has to get rid of Gordon Brown now. By doing so, it might at least cut the size of the landslide to come, and some Labour MPs might save their jobs.
If the Labour party does not have the long-term political survival instincts to see this, it deserves to lose. By proving it does have them by choosing a new leader, whatever his or her merits, it might just stand a chance of reclaiming some public credibility and at least be able to mount some form of effective opposition to the crippled meanderings of Cameron and his Etonian mates.
Gordon Brown will naturally cling on to power as long as possible, hoping to be rescued by his international prestige and his perceived role as the Action Man of the Crunch. But by doing so he is presenting the anti-political media with another year to undermine not only him, but the entire political class, recently resurgent after decades of inaction, but now cowering in the shadow of the next issue of the Daily Telegraph.
By staying, he is also risking the jobs of many of his colleagues, and is therefore in a very delicate political game which cannot be won by bullying. So he may not be granted the time for Barack and Angela and Silvio to make their decisive Facebook entries.
So with the bankers and politicians now discredited, the only thing to do is to invite fascists to have tea with the Queen. Obviously. Only a rank socialist would imagine any other solution.
People are right to be angry at the corruption and greed of the politiciuans they trusted with their vote. But methinks they do protest a teeny bit too much too. After all, they would never cheat the IRS. Just as journalists would never inflate their expenses, or their bosses hide their money in tax havens.
If they were sincere about democratic accountability, the media would be doing some accountancy, namely, by conspicuously balancing the numbers of offending MPs against the numbers of the innocent, giving a true picture of the problem. But the message blaring out is that all elected politicians are villains, which (conveniently) only leaves the press and Joanna Lumley as a source of honesty and decency. Plus of course the unelected politicians...
The obvious solution to this state of complete decadence would be for all the press to back the nutter party of their choice, and by empowering it, seek to then 'control' it.
The rest is history.

When the Harrumphing Had to Stop. From Dunkirk to D-Day.

High tory Sir Patrick Cormack baffled the house of commons and the daytime TV audience at Mick Martin's Last Shamble on monday by comparing the disintegration of British political credibility with the Norway Debate of 1940, now remembered as the moment Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign as leader and make way for Winston Churchill.
To sum everything up in the same vein, today is being portrayed more and more as parliament's Dunkirk, a British disaster which turns the tide, leading presumably to a D-Day assault on the real den of democratic corruption, the frightful European Parliament gravy train, which we will all be voting about next month, and which the fascists and Little Englanders are hoping to join.
Parties are striving to outdo each other as reformers, some going as far as to demand elections to select those to be elected, which will mean a logarithmic rise in election expenses to be paid by the taxpayer. But in another way, this repersents a welcome show of Obaman co-operation in the face of an agreed threat, and a move away from the negative competition usual between British political parties. And why shouldn't they co-operate more? They don't have many ideological differences to fight over since the Labour party signed up to the capitalist consensus in about 1926.
The British people are somehow shocked by the fact that MP's fiddle their expenses as diligently as journalists, or anyone else who feels they are not paid enough. They are shocked by the fact that their MP's are just like them.
The big question is why, after everything they have been told about politicians and bankers and businessmen and the police, are they only outraged now? Why has it taken them so long to wake up to the emasculation of politics by the same culture of consumerist greed which they have enjoyed for ten years, and which was ushered in by their idol, Margaret Thatcher - who, incedentally, also introduced the very expenses system now being dismantled.
More mischief from the grave, which a chastened generation has to now undo.
As for Martin himself, his position was made clear by handling of the illegal police raid on tory shadow minister Damien Green's office months ago. As Nye Bevan put it as prosecution counsel in the case of The People Versus Anthony Eden:
'If he knew that the police were going to raid without a warrant, he is complicit in an illegal action, and should resign. If he did not know, he is too stupid to be speaker.'

The popular accusation is that MPs have undermined of democracy. Also that they have no morals, conscience or backbone. This was exactly the kind of politician needed to allow mad 90's marketonomics free rein. And the same people who demanded this race of eunuchs in parliament are now outraged to discover they have no balls. The generation of politicans which made Roy Hattersley look like a Trotskyite was bred in the kennel of reaganomics and monetarism, and reared in the dreamworld of global digital consumerism. What do the British middle classes expect? A breed of Aneurin Bevans?

G20 Agents Provocateurs

The Metropolitan Police have been very quick to deny accusations by Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake that there were plain clothes officers urging the crowd to violence at the G20 protests on April 1st. Apparently 'a spokesman' has said that they would never 'deploy officers in this way or condone such behaviour.'
Brake will present evidence tomorrow to the parliamentary joint committe on human rights that one individual who was noisily inciting the crowd inside the kettle was suspected by the crowd of being a police plant, and on displaying a form of I.D. was allowed out. Brake and others are assuming this person was a police officer in plain clothes, or more likely, in some form of crusty costume deemed appropriate for the day. This may well be a reasonable assumption. But it ignores the fact that the other kind of person generally allowed through police lines are journalists, who would have much more to gain from a violent crowd than the police.
The police are generally only obeying orders from their superiors, and the rewards are meagre. Journalists are generally obeying the orders of the market for sensationalist copy, and the rewards, at least for the tabloid owners, are enormous, especially at a time when newspaper sales are crumbling.

The Joanna Lumley Mercenary Agency

Joanna Lumley's emotional need to repay her debt to the Gurkhas is understandable, if a little spooky in its father-worship. But the delights of her public therapy session should not prevent us asking the serious question of why Britain is still hiring mercenaries from the poorest parts of the world. We should be fighting our own wars, not siphoning the most able young men from a tiny state which needs their energies much more than we do.
As usual, Nick Clegg hit the nail on the thumb when he said that those prepared to fight for this country should be allowed to live here. The truth is the reverse, that only the British should be asked to lay down their lives in defence of Britain. Poor countries should not be treated as pools of cheap hired killers doing the dirty work of much richer and more powerful countries.
The current contract granted a pension on return home which enables Gurkhas to take a leading part in Nepalese society, providing whatever skills and experience they might have acquired. Now, not only will Nepal be drained of even more manpower, but once they are gone, they will be unlikely to return. What we will gain on the fast food counters, Nepal will lose in its community councils and education system.
The khukris are out for the government, and this affair provides another hapless cabinet lamb for the block. But it is a triumph of jingoism over sense, and histrionics over government.
La Lumley's populist campaign has given the tabloids another chance to wave the flag and revel in war fever, thereby selling more papers. These are the same tabloids which daily demand British Jobs for British Workers. They are able to simultaneously push the BNP line while also supporting British Military Jobs for Foreign Mercenaries, which is a phenomenal act of mental contortionism. But then, the tabloids are produced by highly trained minds, able to jump through all kinds of intellectual hoops on command. Oxbridge trained minds, in some cases. Some of whom even went to Westminster School and studied anthropology at Cambridge University. ...

Police Medic YR394 on Duty at G20

Threadneedle Street, April 1st 2009. Approximately 1pm.

An unprovoked attack by a police medic standing behind the safety of two rows of colleagues. He cannot know who he is attacking, and is in no danger himself. Another of his colleagues seeks to restrain him and only succeeds in knocking his hat off.

Violence by police medics surely breaches the Red Cross code, by which medics are allowed free passage because they do not bear arms, and thereby endangers other officers in the future.

Meanwhile, officers walked around with their numbers concealed:

The branch of the RBS on Threadneedle Street was surrendered by the police with surprisingly little resistance. As one officer near me explained:

"We'll let them let off steam for a bit."

In other words, RBS was the sacrificial lamb in this game of crowd control.

[Police escorting tents and protesters into RBS]

And given the hate campaign of the right wing press against bankers as a race, and the RBS in particular, it was obviously the easiest sacrifice to sell to middle England. A similar kind of thing happened in the famous trashing of the Whitehall MCDonalds on Mayday 2000, when police just stood back and watched. And then 'kettled' the crowd in Trafalgar Square for four hours.

While Daily Mail readers didn't hate McDonalds at all in 2000, they now hate Fred McShred and his ilk like poison, or so they say. So where were they on April 1st? And how can the Daily Mail and Telegraph and Times run the disgraceful character assassinations of Ian Tomlinson that they did?

It is as if the mainstream press is being torn between two neuroses. The automatic reflex to find a scapegoat for its own follies and vices, and the badly weaned infants' need to love and trust without question the nearest parental substitute, traditionally the police. Which is a familiar trait of the threatened middle classes throughout history. The middle classes (as represented in the pages of the newspapers they buy most) seem on the brink of demanding that bankers have large yellow dollar signs stitched prominently on their suits for all to see, while at the same time frothing at any practical demonstration of the anger they feel at their global, financial betrayal, and excusing any means of suppressing it. A crazy mixed-up social class to be sure. But none the less dangerous for that, as those falsely imprisoned in the city Kettle discovered.

Every time this tactic is used, more people will decide not to demonstrate, they will, in effect, revoke their right to protest, and so opposition is suppressed and a basic human right is debased. The clear intention of kettling is to polarise opposition and reduce demontrations to the so-called 'hard-core'. This frees the police to use more brutal tactics, as nobody loves the 'hard-core', and at the same time invite them to devise a counter-tactic to the kettle, which is not likely to be very peaceful. The result will be more violence and less protest.

The trouble is, that there is as much futile scapegoating by the 'hard-core' as in the pages of the Daily Mail. The hated bankers were simply obeying the laws of the market. If they hadn't grasped the short-term opportunities offered by the alchemy of risk management, with its claim to have discovered the financial elixir of eternal profit, then their competitors would have, and they would be out of a job. They are personally no more to blame than the famous 'Jewish Banking Conspiracy' of Nazi mythology was to blame for the depression of the 1930's. They really were only obeying orders. And furthemore, orders which the consumerist readers of the Daily Mail sanctioned with every purchase on their credit card and every repayment of their tracker mortgage. There were no complaints from them when the value of the houses they occupied rose, just as there were no complaints from the masses of Americans who inflated the 1920's share bubble, while it lasted.

Now that the property market is exposed for the updated sharecropping it is, people are naturally angry. But without property, what are they? When a culture in which identity is defined by property, wealth and power fails, a lot of people are left looking for an alternative source of status and being.

Some will naturally seek a semi-divine embodiment of uncompromising power, who will impose some idealised state of order and deliver a sense of dignity to those willing to follow. Others will reject the entire social project altogether and take to the woods. Others, hopefully the majority, will appreciate that we do now have the technology to do without competition as a way of feeding the world and delivering a reasonable standard of life. And that the anachronistic level of competition still in the system is more of a hindrance than the driver of innovation it once was when it was inventing the steam engine and requiring a more literate workforce and thereby making them aware enough of their rights to demand them.

So is the man who was in town on April Fool's Day, and who talked so enthuisiastically about the need for co-operation, able to satisfy both extremes? Or was that speech his April Fool's joke? After all, Obama is a nice middle class boy too.

In my experience, the level of police violence at Meltdown was not significantly different from anything experienced over the last twenty years, but only now is it causing any widespread outrage - now that professional journalists no longer have a monopoly on the evidence, and their proprietors no longer have a monopoly over distribution.

What does that say about their level of commitment to the truth in the past, given that they must have witnessed and photographed (and suppressed) much worse than what we've seen from Operation Glencoe? For all we know, there may be mouldering images in a draw in Wapping of Blair Peach being murdered.

And what do the lies told about Ian Tomlinson have in common with the lies told about the victims of Hillsborough, who were remembered yesterday? Initially, both sets of lies were told to cover up a breakdown of police tactics and discipline. Blaming the victim is a basic reflex of the British establishment.

During one of the more absurd police advances in Threadneedle Street, when we were yet again forced backwards into a mass of people, and against marble walls, I reminded one officer of the similarity with the tactics of Hillsborough. his response was a curt:

"Well stay at home then!".

That would solve everything, as far as he was concerned.
(http://www.iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk/).

A much better photograph.

YR394 FROM THE FRONT

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Daily Mail Denies Right to Self Defence

David Cameron has not expressed support for the following declaration.
He is therefore unfit to be an MP.

8. 'The obligation of the British Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into British waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the import of arms to Britain, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.'

Gaza is a sovereign state run by an elected government. It has a right to defend itself from attacks by a ruthless neighbour with no scruples about committing war crimes.
Whatever religious nuttery is promoted by this Istanbul Declaration, the assertion of the right to self-defence is something the Daily Mail, and everyone now calling for Daud Abdullah's head on a plate, would surely support - except in the case of one of Israel's victims, apparently.
Let's not forget what the Israeli navy can get up to given a free hand. Days before the onslaught against Lebanon, they were busy shelling Beirut beach parties, in heroic defence of their homeland.

Watching Jade Goody

Watching the ebb and flow of the Jade Goody story is like watching a society turning itself inside-out to try and find out why it hurts. As if watching the way she dies will teach us how to live. As if, in an age when information is power, everything must be scrutinised to make us feel we are alive, because power is life.
So in Goody, but also in the televised family histories of celebrities, and even in our growing need to discover more and more information about our own heritage, and in the entire cyberworld of facebook and Blogger and Twitter, we are involved in a world in which the more details we control and create, the more hits we have on our website, or the more we know about a specific person, the more a part of something we feel, rather than alone.
Jade Goody has provided a perfect story product for our time, massive content for the cyber-world, and as part of that g-g-generation, knew instinctively what to do with it. Where do morals come into it, really?
Maybe now Channel 4 will think about doing a Big Brother from a hospice.
It may happen.

Tory Trots

All conservatives are commies, this week.
As late as last year, most tories would have wearily patronised anyone attacking obscene banking bonuses as being completely out of touch with the realities of the business world. These sums were essential to keep the best talent, and maintain the highest standard of practice in the banking industry, we were parentally reassured.
Today, with the masonry still collapsing, the tories are now the most vocal in their outrage at the very idea of rewarding failure in this way. Today's Daily Express would have front-paged a picture of Sir Fred Goodwin dangling from a gibbet if it could have. And George Osbourne, the Bullingdon Blagger, is frothing that

“Whichever way one looks at it, this obscene pension is unacceptable"

'Obscene'? Six months ago it was a healthy sign of a vibrant, dynamic progressive industry, facing the challenges of the future with confidence and resolve.
And other bollox.
So is this complete about turn evidence of innate conservative malleability - the ability to hold contradictory opinions - and all the political implications of that failing? Or is it evidence that the conservative mentality always tries to solve problems by finding a victim it can punish? It could even be both. But it certainly isn't evidence that tories are any good at realising that you can't cure smallpox by lancing the spots.

.

On The Halls

I've just read two biographies of George Robey back to back and both authors say that all comedy since has been shite. I've noticed this with some Music Hall freaks. They even despise Variety.
But none of them were writing after seeing the effects of The Comedy Store and All That. What is known as Alternative Comedy. What they seem to admire in the Halls, and bemoan the death of since, is exactly what the current generation of standups is delivering. It seems to me.
And certainly none of them saw Bill Bailey's Amazing Guide to the Orchestra last week, with the hilarious performance of The Swan on tuned alpine cow bells. What did it remind me of? And then the fuzzy black and white memory came to me of a row of suit-tailed harmonica players, one a demi-dwarf with the enourmous bass harmonica, playing musical chairs to the William Tell Overture on Sunday Night at The London Palladium.
So what I really want to know is, has there ever been a funnier time on the British stage? And whether funnier or not, isn't much of what happens on the comic stage (and TV) now very similar to the bizarre world of the music halls?
'Alternative comedy' and the punk rock movement were cultural twins. The same general gamete of anti-glitz created them both. And John Lydon maintained that he was not a rock singer but a music hall performer in the British style. An angry, latter day Billy Bennett, possibly. The surrealism of Bennet is certainly there in Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble and John Cooper-Clarke. And Lor-luv-a-duck, Marie Lloyd's real name was Victoria Wood, who could have easily penned the gloriously ironic 'A Nice Quiet Day' or 'Don't Have Any More Missus Moore'.

Now I works just like a good'un
And I isn't over strong
And I'm mostly on me trotters all the time
So I'm glad when Easter Sunday or a Whitsun comes along
'Cos a day of perfect rest is really prime.
So I lately took it easy 'cos I had a day to spare
With the wife and kiddies in their sunday clothes.
Twas a treat to make me mind up for a bit of country air
And the pleasures of a quiet day's repose...

Pornography does Dehumanise, and It's On Your Street Corner

Research at Princeton University in New Jersey claims that changes in brain activity suggest that images of women in typically sexualised poses and costumes can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon. The part of the brain which deals with technology is turned on, and the part which enables empathy is turned off - which is not the same as 'attraction' - a conclusion which the tabloid twerps have been typically quick to jump to. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference was told that the experiments showed that sexy images lead men to think of women as 'less than human'. In other words, that sexual 'objectification' is a reality, and not the PC Gone Mad of media paranoia.
Even more confirmation, if it were needed, of what every feminist since Mary Woolestonecraft has been saying and the producers of 'Weird Science' knew already. Namely, that the use of sex for political and commercial purposes is always going to be a tactic to dehumanise women, and that it will take a constant process of education and radical cultural reformation to overcome it. And that ther is a vast amount of money to be made from exploiting that primal reflex in men.

"The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives."

'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'

An interesting feminist response comes from Feministing.

Simply taking naked women out of the picture (figuratively and literally) is not going to resolve the problem, and implying that "men can't help it" will just be used to contribute to the same sexist customs and rape culture that we're fighting against.

But it missses the point. Mere nakedness does not create the kind of objectifying, stereotyping, dehumanising effects which the research is talking about. It is as different as objectification is from genuine attraction. Nudist camps? I rest my case.
Commercialised sex, driven by commercial pornography, is a rape culture, and rape is not sex, but the exercise of power, as every feminist also knows.

Fiske explained that the areas, the premotor cortex and posterior middle temporal gyrus, typically light up when one anticipates using tools, like a screwdriver. "I’m not saying that they literally think these photographs of women are photographs of tools per se, or photographs of non-humans, but what the brain imaging data allow us to do is to look at it as scientific metaphor. That is, they are reacting to these photographs as people react to objects."

Fisk also tested the men for levels of sexism and found a surprising effect those who scored high on this test, "...the hostile sexists were likely to deactivate the part of the brain that thinks about other people's intentions. The lack of activation of this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens. It’s a very reliable effect, that the medial prefrontal cortex comes online when people think about other people, see pictures of them, imagine other people."

Scientific American

The debate this report provokes will at least air some home truths about the mind-bending pornography we routinely plaster all over our field of view, and enable more people to see it for what it is, and be able to overcome it.