Blood & Treasure

taiwan fetish

The only other Brit blogger with a fetish for Taiwan blogging appears to be Jarndyce. Well, for those of us with such minority tastes there’s the equivalent of a whole shopful of kinky rubberwear here.

...the key problem for Taiwan in handling cross-Strait relations, as well as in its domestic politics after democratization, has been the paralysing legacy of its continuing definition as the ‘Republic of China’, and the dependence on American guardianship that has gone with it. When constitutional reform brought the removal of Taiwan provincial government in 1996, the then governor James Soong protested strongly, saying that what should be eliminated was the ‘central government’, rather than the ‘provincial’ one. He could not have spoken more truly. The roc is an absurd fiction, but a democratized Taiwan remains trapped within it. For if it attempts to change its nomenclature, it risks both offending its American overlord, and provoking an attack by the prc for seeking to set up an independent state, without connection to China. So, unable to settle for a modest reality—just the island of Taiwan—it is forced to go on supporting the unwanted fiction that it is sovereign over more than a billion people and a territory extending to the borders of India and Kazakhstan, thus prolonging continual tension with the mainland.

..not to mention being formally committed to the invasion of Mongolia. Well, if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this thing a lot.

millions of smoother women

I always got the impression that the late Andrea Dworkin wasn’t disliked because of what she said. She was disliked because she meant what she said. And so says John Dolan:

We're supposed to know that you don't take it seriously -- you don't live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.

I remember, ladies. I was there -- at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: "I don't find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible."

Illness aside, Dworkin's last years must have been tough - a kind of topsy turvy political wilderness of lesbian lap-dancing clubs, where the a-list feminariat rushed to back Clinton in an informal coalition of Feminists for Presidential Blowjobs. But she kept on to the end, getting up each day, clambering into her dungarees and waddling out to do battle with stylish greed.

the great octopus, bollywood tories, lib dem angst

You can sit on your arse at home, but you can’t hide. The Lib Dem and Tory leaflets plop through the box just as UKIP is entertaining me with visions of a gigantic purple octopus eating the Houses of Parliament, before consuming a trawler as a kind of after dinner snack. It’s a spectacularly badly advised metaphor. “The Octopus” is the hard core conspiracy theorist’s term for the great plot that links all other plots together in a meta-plot complex. Maybe they were just channelling.

UKIP mean to give us so much stuff from our “refund” for leaving the EU that our contribution must be about four or five times GDP. They were offering everything except free magic mushrooms, presumably because they’d scoffed them all. They also had Rustie Lee on immigration:

Hey, I got in – fuck you!

Meanwhile the Lib Dem candidate for Blackley, a fellow name of Donaldson, tries to out glum Graham Stringer. He’s pictured standing on a patch of waste land, a picture of existential agony under a lowering sky, an hand extended to point at nothing. Otherwise it’s boilerplate stuff: metrolink extension, save the post offices, and, bizarrely, complaints about the council’s taste for fatuous and self-aggrandizing abstract public statuary. Just the thing to set pulses racing in New Moston. No mention of I**q. I think Mr D is basically pushing the Lib Dems drive to get more council seats in North Manchester. First they came for Gorton, now Harpurhey trembles.

For the Tories, Amar Ahmed gives us a bit of a treat – a leaflet in Urdu, printed in Pakistan in the full Bollywood style. Amar’s on the cover, pictured on a surf board gunning down terrorists while singing to a busty lady in a sari and leading an elephant covered in garlands. Actually, no: he’s just grinning like a maniac. Nice job, though. And again, despite obviously being targeted at the Asian part of the constituency, I**q doesn’t get a mention.

In fact the only candidate to mention I**q has been the sitting Labour MP. Honestly, these New Labour types need to stop going to so many dinner parties and meet more real people.

sufficiency, necessity

In re: the Attorney General's advice. John Kampfner gets it right, I think:

As with weapons of mass destruction, there is no need to accuse Blair of outright lies. The chronology of events speaks for itself. He committed himself to war at Bush's ranch in April 2002. From that point he was in a bind. He had to make the facts fit. These were actions of a desperate man, who blundered into one of the worst foreign policy decisions of modern times.

From Kampfner's Blair's Wars.

For all those around Blair, the bottom line was defence. When Blair was working on the draft of a new Clause Four for the Labour Party, Mandelson saw that there was no reference to defense. He is said to have scribbled on oine version: "won't TB fight wars?"

Lord save us from a weak man who wants to be thought strong. I say that as an atheist, of course.

bring me the head of research and development

Now that Iraq’s barged its way into the election, here’s a question. Who is the major ally of the United States on the ground in Iraq?

America's second largest ally in Iraq isn't the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army. They are the battalions of foot soldiers in Thomas Barnett's sys-admin force -- connecting Iraq to the US and the world.

This role converts CEOs into generals/colonels in the US globalization machine (leaders of new entrants in the rapidly expanding long tail of warfare). They are now legitimate and highly prized targets.

Privatized warfare, black gangs and systempunkts: a John Robb special. And here’s a thought.

Frankly, a CEO is an excellent strategic target as well as a tactical target. As a rule of thumb, I would consider all CEOs that reside/work within a nation-state at war with non-state guerrillas at risk. Under almost all measures of this new method of warfare, CEOs are better targets than government or military officials.

Remember, in this flat world, it is easy to pull up a CEO's name, address, credit history, and even a satellite photo of his/her home from a Cyber Cafe in Peshawar.

Here’s a for instance. Tesco is the leading provider of food and domestic necessities in the UK. Its distribution system is massively dependent on road transport – on petrol, in other words. So what would happen if there was a major infrastructure strike on, say, Saudi oil production facilities combined with the kidnapping or assassination of Tesco’s Chief executive? I don’t think Britain’s had a food riot in hundreds of years, but that’s not to say that it can’t happen again.

Well, there’s always ASDA.

like a TV shopping channel

Well, it's decision time for Take a Break Woman. This week's issue contains an election roundup under the admirably cynical yet right on the money headline: Votes for Sale.

It goes on:

It's getting like a TV shopping channel auction. Politicians are bidding for your vote as we enter the election countdown...

...and continues with various pledges. All this seriousness nestles amid the following:

loser Lorraine lusted after my lover's loins

(Nice, that. very Hollywood Confidential)

dad of eleven does a runner

THE MUM ON CRACK

A bit pedestrian overall. But Chat and That's Life make up for it:

a face full of acid from a stranger full of hate

I gave birth to twins as MUM WENT OFF WITH MY MAN

my Jim's other bird is fowl

KNICKERS TO HIM - why I hid his lottery ticket in my thong

BLACK, SOFT, FURRY - and caught in my hubby's chest hairs

And that's what British women are reading about this week.

that Guardian article

The one about the bogus ricin ring. The one the government forced the Guardian to pull from it's website. Below the fold.

via

inflatable mallet

It looks like we're not going to get the actual Olympics. Maybe we should go for this instead:

Thousands of Shanghai residents have turned out to a city park to watch a herd of pigs compete in what organizers are calling the "Pig Olympics."

They run over hurdles, jump through hoops, dive, and swim in shows twice a day.

The pigs, a midget species from Thailand, begin training soon after birth and can begin performing professionally after about a year....

The show is mostly watched by families with young children.

In addition to stroking and petting, the children are also given a chance to hit the winners with an inflatable mallet.

A great day of wholesome pig taunting fun for all the family.

following my nose

Simon Jenkins, from yesterday:

If on the other hand you want a continuation of the present Conservative Government, vote Blair. Former Tories have been doing so for eight years. They should not shackle their hero Mr Blair by voting Conservative and thus running the risk of a hung Parliament. In such a Parliament the Liberal Democrats or the Labour Left could veto Mr Blair’s right-wing programme. This would endanger such policies as no higher taxes on incomes and lower ones on motoring and drinking. It would jeopardise more selective schools, more private hospitals, more prisons, a national police force and no change in the drugs laws.

Under Mr Blair conservatives have cheered as workfare has been introduced, welfare scroungers tackled and the incapacity racket threatened. Judges have been ordered to heel, more than even under Michael Howard’s time at the Home Office. Civil liberties have been eroded and liberal lawyers enraged, delighting the wildest Colonel Blimp. High-spending local councils have been capped. Mr Blair has even revived middle-class subsidies to house-buyers and freed land for property speculators.

via

Francis Beckett, from today:

Most of us joined Labour not out of some ideological fervour about socialism but because it was the party of the underdog. It still was in 1992, and it isn't any more. If you voted Labour in 1992 - the last time the party was led into an election by anyone other than Tony Blair - then you voted for a party that was fundamentally different from New Labour. Unless your views have changed along with those of Labour's top brass, you can hardly vote for them now with any self-respect.

Self-respect is really the issue when it comes to wavering lefties. “How can you live with yourself if you vote against Blair and Michael Howard becomes prime minister” versus “How can you live with yourself you vote against your own beliefs and Tony Blair returns as Prime Minister?” Will the picture on your ID card, carried at all times, have slightly shamefaced look about it?

The main choice is a good cop, bad cop double act between two conservative parties, the bad cop being slightly to the right of the good. “Personally I abhor the use of violence. But my associate, Mr Howard, has no such qualms…heh, heh, heh.” In Singapore these things are done more directly. Constituencies that vote against the legitimate party of government are simply starved of public funds. Perhaps that’s to come.

And of course there’s the vote Blair get Brown argument. We have Tony Blair’s personal word of honour that he will step down before the next election. What’s that worth, precisely?

Beckett continues

If you do not have a sitting Labour MP who rebelled over Iraq, then for heaven's sake vote for a candidate who says some of the things you believe, especially if that candidate might just win.

And even if he or she doesn’t, I’d add. I’m sick of meta-campaining and dark warnings about unintended consequences, and I don’t want to vote for entirely negative reasons, so I’m going to vote for the idea that’s been shoved before the public that I happen to like best. That happens to be the citizens basic income idea, which commits me to the Greens. Actually, it probably doesn’t because Blackley isn’t crusty-friendly territory.

Well never mind. Blood & Treasure says: vote crusty. They could do with a few more meat eaters.

How about you lot, then?

socialist worker envy

I’m wondering about whether the current appalling outbreak of decent-itis in Bethnal Green has any roots in what you might call SWP-envy.

Personally, I never much enjoyed political activity and was able to give it up fairly easily, pleading hangovers to nurse, football matches to attend and similar pressing public duties.

Other people I knew found it a bit harder. They felt like deserters, had acquired moral obligations and friendships that were hard to abandon, or believed that the subjects of their campaigning needed them to keep on keeping on. These circumstances make it harder to slip back openly into a decent apathy.

Unless you have an excuse. And the excuse I remember best for people who were sick of holding their end of the banner but didn’t want to admit it was “hijacking”. It’s hard to say that you’re not going on the march because you can’t be arsed. It’s much easier to say that the whole event has been “hijacked” by some fringe group or other, and that your can’t-be-arsedness is in fact a stand on a point of moral principle. And since the SWP seemed to throw themselves at the head of every cause going – they practically invented banner advertising in its pre-digital phase – it was usually the SWP that provided the hijacking excuse.

Now I’m sure that the SWP have a pretty ruthless way with committee work, in which they resemble every other political organisation I ever heard of. But that in itself doesn’t really change anything worthwhile about the causes that the Trots supposedly hijack. It does provide an opportunity to give up on said causes, pleading Trot contamination. Well, whatever gets you a free afternoon. This way, you can also claim an ongoing, generalised commitment to Good Things without a boring, specific commitment to sitting in draughty rooms above pubs having meetings, stuffing envelopes, signing petitions and doing other stuff that makes you feel vaguely like a total loser. In fact you can have a good laugh about the Trots and their endless plots, fantastical resolutions and flatpack campaigning structure, taken from cause to cause, assembled and then packed away till the next outrage comes along.

And then came Iraq, which, as ever, the SWP threw themselves into, thinly revealed under the guise of the Stop the war Committee. At first it looked like the usual thing on a slightly bigger scale, maybe a bit more promising in terms of recruitment than before, but nothing to set the word on fire. Then it turned out that the Trots had – finally and at long last – hit the jackpot. They helped organise the biggest demonstration the UK had ever seen. They had the punters banging on the door and climbing through the windows.

Me, I felt rather pleased for them. After all, they’d put in a lot of the work on stuff like this over the years. And it seemed like an excellent joke on the complacent. What, that bunch of losers? Yep, that bunch of losers, with a big parade to lead for once.

I don’t think this goes the whole way to explaining the remarkable degree of enmity with which the pro-war left has conducted its business over the past couple of years or some of the hysterical nonsense currently doing the rounds in the East End - think of George Galloway stamping on a human face forever! - but I think it’s somewhere there back in the mix.

But I’m being too cynical. It’s not spite – it’s decency.