John Mortell’s blog

A lot of these have probably been seen by most of you but they caught my eye for one reason for another:

This line from the Economist in an article about how ‘green’ policies have become (at least in rhetorical terms) mainstream made me smile:

The shared level of commitment and wonkiness is, in its way, inspiring (though it must be a bit dispiriting for the Green party, which to stay distinctively unelectable has had to move towards a thoroughgoing social-justice agenda funded with tax increases no-one else would touch)

This is a really good graph showing how much the PIIGS economies owe to each other and to Britain, France and Germany. Really scary to see how much of the debt is owed even within Europe.

This Der Spiegel interview with Col. Gaddafi throws up some truly mad lines. Personal favourites include a strange burst of what appears to be sense (or at least a technically accurate statement):

I don’t think that Ahmadinejad means the violent destruction of Israel when he says this. I think he is thinking of a new democratic state structure to replace the current state of Israel — on the territory of what is geographically Palestine. No one is talking about throwing Jews into the sea.

but he quickly runs back to his regular self when talking about Angela Merkel

She is a strong personality. More like a man than a woman. But I have never had a conversation with her

and possibly the most revealing insight ever into somebody’s personality:

SPIEGEL: Where do you get your facts? Do you watch television? Do you read books?
Gadhafi: I get most of them from the Internet. I constantly sit at my computer

…. Gadaffi is basically an internet troll cast as world leader? The more you think about it the more sense it makes….

I recently came across this Anime from a friend’s facebook account. According to the wikipedia article the show is based off a manga comic that satirises politics with mahjong games used to decide international relations.

It’s completely barmy as you can imagine.

Some of the touches, like Kim Jong Il’s son having ‘mickey mouse’ ears are nice nods to real world events and definitely add to the strangeness of the episodes. Anyway, I’ve put up what I can find off youtube so enjoy:
Continue Reading »

From the Blasphemy.ie website:

“From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.

This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly. Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.

In this context we now publish a list of 25 blasphemous quotes, which have previously been published by or uttered by or attributed to Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Mark Twain, Tom Lehrer, Randy Newman, James Kirkup, Monty Python, Rev Ian Paisley, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Frank Zappa, Salman Rushdie, Bjork, Amanda Donohoe, George Carlin, Paul Woodfull, Jerry Springer the Opera, Tim Minchin, Richard Dawkins, Pope Benedict XVI, Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Ian O’Doherty, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Dermot Ahern.

Despite these quotes being abusive and insulting in relation to matters held sacred by various religions, we unreservedly support the right of these people to have published or uttered them, and we unreservedly support the right of any Irish citizen to make comparable statements about matters held sacred by any religion without fear of being criminalised, and without having to prove to a court that a reasonable person would find any particular value in the statement.

We ask Fianna Fail and the Green Party to repeal their anachronistic blasphemy law, as part of the revision of the Defamation Act that is included within the Act. We ask them to hold a referendum to remove the reference to blasphemy from the Irish Constitution.

We also ask all TDs and Senators to support a referendum to remove references to God from the Irish Constitution, including the clauses that prevent atheists from being appointed as President of Ireland or as a Judge without swearing a religious oath asking God to direct them in their work.

If you run a website, blog or other media publication, please feel free to republish this statement and the list of quotes yourself, in order to show your support for the campaign to repeal the Irish blasphemy law and to promote a rational, ethical, secular Ireland.

List of 25 Blasphemous Quotes Published by Atheist Ireland;

1. Jesus Christ, when asked if he was the son of God, in Matthew 26:64: “Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” According to the Christian Bible, the Jewish chief priests and elders and council deemed this statement by Jesus to be blasphemous, and they sentenced Jesus to death for saying it.

2. Jesus Christ, talking to Jews about their God, in John 8:44: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” This is one of several chapters in the Christian Bible that can give a scriptural foundation to Christian anti-Semitism. The first part of John 8, the story of “whoever is without sin cast the first stone”, was not in the original version, but was added centuries later. The original John 8 is a debate between Jesus and some Jews. In brief, Jesus calls the Jews who disbelieve him sons of the Devil, the Jews try to stone him, and Jesus runs away and hides.

3. Muhammad, quoted in Hadith of Bukhari, Vol 1 Book 8 Hadith 427: “May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their prophets.” This quote is attributed to Muhammad on his death-bed as a warning to Muslims not to copy this practice of the Jews and Christians. It is one of several passages in the Koran and in Hadith that can give a scriptural foundation to Islamic anti-Semitism, including the assertion in Sura 5:60 that Allah cursed Jews and turned some of them into apes and swine.

4. Mark Twain, describing the Christian Bible in Letters from the Earth, 1909: “Also it has another name – The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies… But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy – he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty… What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.” Twain’s book was published posthumously in 1939. His daughter, Clara Clemens, at first objected to it being published, but later changed her mind in 1960 when she believed that public opinion had grown more tolerant of the expression of such ideas. That was half a century before Fianna Fail and the Green Party imposed a new blasphemy law on the people of Ireland.

5. Tom Lehrer, The Vatican Rag, 1963: “Get in line in that processional, step into that small confessional. There, the guy who’s got religion’ll tell you if your sin’s original. If it is, try playing it safer, drink the wine and chew the wafer. Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!”

6. Randy Newman, God’s Song, 1972: “And the Lord said: I burn down your cities – how blind you must be. I take from you your children, and you say how blessed are we. You all must be crazy to put your faith in me. That’s why I love mankind.”

7. James Kirkup, The Love That Dares to Speak its Name, 1976: “While they prepared the tomb I kept guard over him. His mother and the Magdalen had gone to fetch clean linen to shroud his nakedness. I was alone with him… I laid my lips around the tip of that great cock, the instrument of our salvation, our eternal joy. The shaft, still throbbed, anointed with death’s final ejaculation.” This extract is from a poem that led to the last successful blasphemy prosecution in Britain, when Denis Lemon was given a suspended prison sentence after he published it in the now-defunct magazine Gay News. In 2002, a public reading of the poem, on the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, failed to lead to any prosecution. In 2008, the British Parliament abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.

8. Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath, in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979: “Look, I had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.”

9. Rev Ian Paisley MEP to the Pope in the European Parliament, 1988: “I denounce you as the Antichrist.” Paisley’s website describes the Antichrist as being “a liar, the true son of the father of lies, the original liar from the beginning… he will imitate Christ, a diabolical imitation, Satan transformed into an angel of light, which will deceive the world.”

10. Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1989: “In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: ‘Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.’ Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken.”

11. Frank Zappa, 1989: “If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine – but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good – and cares about any of it – to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.”

12. Salman Rushdie, 1990: “The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.” In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because of blasphemous passages in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

13. Bjork, 1995: “I do not believe in religion, but if I had to choose one it would be Buddhism. It seems more livable, closer to men… I’ve been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.”

14. Amanda Donohoe on her role in the Ken Russell movie Lair of the White Worm, 1995: “Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can’t embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages, and that persecution still goes on today all over the world.”

15. George Carlin, 1999: “Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!”

16. Paul Woodfull as Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly, The Ballad of Jaysus Christ, 2000: “He said me ma’s a virgin and sure no one disagreed, Cause they knew a lad who walks on water’s handy with his feet… Jaysus oh Jaysus, as cool as bleedin’ ice, With all the scrubbers in Israel he could not be enticed, Jaysus oh Jaysus, it’s funny you never rode, Cause it’s you I do be shoutin’ for each time I shoot me load.”

17. Jesus Christ, in Jerry Springer The Opera, 2003: “Actually, I’m a bit gay.” In 2005, the Christian Institute tried to bring a prosecution against the BBC for screening Jerry Springer the Opera, but the UK courts refused to issue a summons.

18. Tim Minchin, Ten-foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins, 2005: “So you’re gonna live in paradise, With a ten-foot cock and a few hundred virgins, So you’re gonna sacrifice your life, For a shot at the greener grass, And when the Lord comes down with his shiny rod of judgment, He’s gonna kick my heathen ass.”

19. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, 2006: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” In 2007 Turkish publisher Erol Karaaslan was charged with the crime of insulting believers for publishing a Turkish translation of The God Delusion. He was acquitted in 2008, but another charge was brought in 2009. Karaaslan told the court that “it is a right to criticise religions and beliefs as part of the freedom of thought and expression.”

20. Pope Benedict XVI quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor, 2006: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” This statement has already led to both outrage and condemnation of the outrage. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim body, said it was a “character assassination of the prophet Muhammad”. The Malaysian Prime Minister said that “the Pope must not take lightly the spread of outrage that has been created.” Pakistan’s foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence”. The European Commission said that “reactions which are disproportionate and which are tantamount to rejecting freedom of speech are unacceptable.”

21. Christopher Hitchens in God is not Great, 2007: “There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all… Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require… It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender’ as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.”

22. PZ Myers, on the Roman Catholic communion host, 2008: “You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god, and that this omnipotent being who created the universe can actually be seriously harmed by some third-rate liberal intellectual at a third-rate university… However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel.”

23. Ian O’Doherty, 2009: “(If defamation of religion was illegal) it would be a crime for me to say that the notion of transubstantiation is so ridiculous that even a small child should be able to see the insanity and utter physical impossibility of a piece of bread and some wine somehow taking on corporeal form. It would be a crime for me to say that Islam is a backward desert superstition that has no place in modern, enlightened Europe and it would be a crime to point out that Jewish settlers in Israel who believe they have a God given right to take the land are, frankly, mad. All the above assertions will, no doubt, offend someone or other.”

24. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, 2009: “Whether a person is atheist or any other, there is in fact in my view something not totally human if they leave out the transcendent… we call it God… I think that if you leave that out you are not fully human.” Because atheism is not a religion, the Irish blasphemy law does not protect atheists from abusive and insulting statements about their fundamental beliefs. While atheists are not seeking such protection, we include the statement here to point out that it is discriminatory that this law does not hold all citizens equal.

25. Dermot Ahern, Irish Minister for Justice, introducing his blasphemy law at an Oireachtas Justice Committee meeting, 2009, and referring to comments made about him personally: “They are blasphemous.” Deputy Pat Rabbitte replied: “Given the Minister’s self-image, it could very well be that we are blaspheming,” and Minister Ahern replied: “Deputy Rabbitte says that I am close to the baby Jesus, I am so pure.” So here we have an Irish Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.

Finally, as a bonus, Micheal Martin, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, opposing attempts by Islamic States to make defamation of religion a crime at UN level, 2009: “We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.” Just months after Minister Martin made this comment, his colleague Dermot Ahern introduced Ireland’s new blasphemy law.”

Having quoted the Blasphemy.ie blog post in full have I now committed Blasphemy? Furthermore, do my previous posts here, here, here and here now count as Blasphemy? I know I use images of the Prophet Muhammad twice but please don’t read too much into that. I consider all religions equally nonsense and happily now point you to material taking the piss out of Christianity here and here . Does this mean the Irish state is going to hunt me down and charge me with offensives that will cost me €25,000? I don’t have the money to pay that kind of fine. Is the Irish state going to destroy my life (financially) because some religious lunatic doesn’t like what I have to say? Finally, here’s an XKCD strip taking the piss: Continue Reading »

A while back I (like many others) was quite interested to hear that CCTV camera’s were not useful in solving crimes. But at the time, I had some people say to me that while they may not be great, they made people feel more secure. This post from the Adam Smith Institute seems to undercut that argument:

the rapid spread of CCTV cameras has gone hand in hand with a massive increase in crime, particularly violent crime. People demand CCTV because it makes them feel safer. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually make them safer. All it does is subject them to snooping and abuse. Local councils had to be told to cut back their snooping on people they suspected of leaving their wheelie-bin lids open, or letting their dogs foul the pavement. Other officials have used cameras to ogle female airport passengers. Given the number of people with access to CCTV images, it can’t be long before we find people being blackmailed over them, as has happened in the US. Maybe it’s already happened here too.

While CCTV images may give officials a thrill, the Met study confirms that they are utterly useless in prosecuting cases. Often, the images are not clear enough to make an identification that would stand up beyond reasonable doubt. More often still, the images are not securely stored – so the courts throw them out, on the grounds that they might have been tampered with.

Hat tip to Conor for the link

Interesting article from the BBC here that, if accurate, undermines pretty thoroughly the claims for the ‘surveillance society’:

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.
In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.

Gavin has a pretty strongly-worded post over on Public Inquiry and his blog. It’s pretty strong stuff and I encourage you to read it all but I’m just going to put the end here and it really covers one of the main reasons I just don’t care about politics in Ireland anymore and am more than seriously considering leaving a.s.a.p:

As a nation state, we are a failure. As a democracy, we have failed. As a country we are bankrupt, both morally and financially. We are the emerging market, banana republic of the European Union. Our political system is broken. It is beyond redemption.

Some will reply that I am a socialist, or other such attacks. I am actually right of centre economically, I just recognise what is standing in front of me for what it is. An almost incalculable political and financial mess – generations are being saddled with the debts of the oligarchs, and the taxpayer is being lied to by its own government.

The only hope is this: That the people, in whose hands all power rests, will realise the appalling vista of a broken Ireland – a country in need of radical political reform – and demand that it is changed.

If it is not, everything that has happened, will continue to happen, and we, the citizens, will continue to pay the price.

And not to be too pessimistic, but how likely is it that change such as the type Gavin asks demands of us is likely? For myself, in most elections where I have been eligible to vote I have found myself deciding by first eliminating people I cannot/will not vote for and then deciding who is the best of what’s left. In a country where the two biggest parties in Fianna Fail(ure) and Fine Gael are the same party effectively, which hardly a brain cell between them and with the third party of Labour being ineffective at best, where is the hope for this change?

At least Italy had its ‘Tangentopoli’ moment where the worst of a beyond redemption political class was thrown out, but is such a thing even possible in Ireland? Even looking at Italy today, despite a near-dictatorship at the top and half the country seemingly run by the Mafia, it seems that Italians have a media asking questions and a Judiciary that at least tries to do its job. Will Ireland ever even get to that lofty basic standard? Personally, I no longer believe so, but I hope that I am wrong.

Given Sarah Palin’s recent ‘I’m retiring… or am I?‘ presence in the news, I posted a twitter comment that covered my feelings in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if also honest manner. To quote:

Sarah Palin is gone! Woot! Tho now I’m worried that she’ll come back as a zombie politician…

Following this, I was asked on my facebook later why it is that I ‘hated’ the woman, with the same person also saying that he could not understand why so many people had such vehement hatred for her. But here’s the thing. I don’t hate Sarah Palin. I have problems with her politics as a general rule, and and as I said when she first appeared on the scene , I don’t believe that she’s the ‘maverick’ or ‘political genius’ that’s she’s been made out to be, but I will admit I find her commitment to her family and her pro-life beliefs to be an admirable characteristic at least.

Saying all of that though, brings me to the problem I have with her. Which isn’t really a problem with her, but rather with the narrative that exists around her.

(Full disclosure, I’m writing this post largely off my experience of two particular people I know who are strong Republican/Palin supporters, but I’m also trying to use my experience of what Republican followers seem to say anyway)

In this narrative, Sarah Palin is an honest, knowledgeable, hard-working politician who would have been a perfect Vice-President (and later in the narrative great future President) who, despite having as much, if not more ‘experience’ than Barack Obama, was not seen as a credible candidate with the reasons for this being either
A) That she was unfairly beaten down by the ‘Liberal (sneer when you say it for full effect) Media’
B) That she wasn’t given a fair shake because ‘Barack’s Black’ and he wasn’t questioned on things by a biased media/political class
C) Both of the above
D) She’s a woman
Etc.

And the thing is, this narrative continues. What bugs me about this, is that it’s not based on any objective facts. For example, was Palin given a hard time with regards to her CV? Yes. But in fairness, when the best Fox could come up with for her foreign policy skills was ‘she can see Russia from Alaska’ (see bottom of the linked post), what do you expect? Had John McCain even tried to run a campaign of two halves saying: ‘I’ll handle the International ‘stuff’, the VP is here for domestic’, the effect still would have been the same, as really the main thing Palin had was that she was doing an ‘ok’ job as a first term Governor. However, that is not a ringing endorsement for such a major job as Vice-President especially given that Palin really had no major strength’s as a domestic politician either.

Now, did Barack Obama have a CV that was as (if not even more) empty? Yes. Probably. But, and it’s a pretty big ‘but’, he managed to avoid gaffs like the Couric Interview and for the most part seemed to have the presence and knowledge that would be required for a national leader. I mean compare these:


I mean, interviews where Palin came across looking like she had no idea what she was talking about, where she can’t answer questions that really should be answerable by somebody running for the second most powerful job in the world do not exactly inspire confidence. And her attempts didn’t inspire confidence when you look at the results of the U.S election.

Now what about the points A, B and C? Firstly the ‘liberal media’ point.. This is a point I have never understood. Essentially it seems to be that any media that makes the case for liberal politics, or questions the Republican ‘view’ or even just asks questions is ‘liberal’. To a large extent it seems to be simply part of the persecution complex of many Republican politicians. I mean, look at this quote from the BBC article on Palin’s resignation:

At the same time, she said the response in the media to her surprise announcement was “most predictable” and “detached from the live of ordinary Americans”.
“How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country,” Mrs Palin wrote.

“Detached from the live (sic) of ordinary Americans”? What does that even mean? That ALL of the American news coverage of her has ‘attacked’ her on some level? Surely asking why a person resigns before the end of her term is a legitimate question?

B – the ‘Barack got an easy time of things because he’s a Black Man’ line. I’ve seen (otherwise sensible) people seriously use this argument which generally seems to run something to the effect of ‘Liberal guilt meant people elected an incompetent Black Man rather than a competent White Woman/Barack wasn’t asked ‘the hard questions because he’s black/etc.

I think I’ve covered this line pretty well in the rest of the post – but I will ask, if Barack was given such a ‘free ride’ by the ‘Liberal Media’ why couldn’t all the people who voted Republican the previous eight years see through the ‘Liberal bias’ and see how ‘useless’ he was? If he was given such a ‘free ride’, why wasn’t Hilary Clinton able to poke holes in his ‘obvious’ weaknesses?

And what about the coverage of the Jeremiah Wright affair? Essentially, Barack Obama was able to convince people that he not only knew what he was talking about, but that he was a good man capable of leading the United States. These arguments for Palin often seem to end up taking a very ‘anti-democratic’ element as the eventual stance of her supporters is that ‘the people’ ‘didn’t know what they were doing’.

The final, and biggest problem I have with Sarah Palin though, is this. She never pretended to even represent ‘all Americans’, but only those whose world-view was similarly narrow, religious and conservative. Though she eventually apologised for the comments, it is hard to not believe that they reflected pretty accurately the reality of how she viewed a lot of her fellow countrymen (and women).

Personally, I think that people that complain about how Palin was ‘treated’ miss the point. To me, their bitterness over the fact that Barack Obama ran a better campaign, and won a fair election has blinded them to many of Palin’s flaws. A woman who tries to claim that people who bomb abortion clinics AREN’T terrorists, who nearly seems willing to claim that anybody who isn’t a Republican isn’t an American, who runs a campaign that is designed to appeal to a very specific section of the population and who claims that everything negative said about her is down to media bias is NOT a national politician. Rather she is a sectional politician with national coverage.

Do I hate Sarah Palin? No. But I have find it hard to take seriously a woman who still seems to be claiming to have national ambitions, despite seeming to have no interest in educating herself as to international politics. A woman who has resigned from a high-profile (in political terms) Governorship before her term is finished and for no apparent reason. A woman who believes that media coverage that asks questions is ‘biased’ and regards not believing what Republicans tell you as ‘being anti-American’. I don’t believe asking these questions or saying these things are unreasonable, or show ‘hatred’ for the woman.

Unless somebody can tell me why I’m wrong?

As I said to my supervisor last week when having a quick meeting about my dissertation, the most unexpected problem I have encountered is not a strictly ‘academic’ one but rather, that the topic itself, namely the Lebanon war of 2006 is quite depressing.

I don’t mean ‘depressing’ in a sort of existentialist way of ‘war is hell’ or ‘why can’t people just get along’ sense, but rather that I’m finding it very hard to read about many of the (mostly Israeli) actions that have tremendous human impact and the general human suffering involved, and either maintain some feeling of objectivity and, more importantly (at least for my personal sanity) do not leave me with an unhelpful feeling of anger or disgust directed at the Israeli state..

In many ways this feeling come from several different areas.. Which for my own health and sanity I want to break down to see if I can make sense of the constituent parts:

For starters, I am not exactly what you would call pro-Israel. I generally believe that the Israeli state is sectarian, racist and generally quite unpleasant in its dealings with many of its neighbours and ‘Arab’ citizens (also with ‘Jews’ that don’t make the cut for whatever reason, like the Russian immigrants or the ‘African’ Jews). The main problem I have here is that I can accept that some of my prejudices are just that, and that the alternative states in the region are not exactly ‘good’.. But that still doesn’t excuse or block the fact that for me, the persistent, consistent and obvious abuses committed by Israel.. at the very least make it hard for me to maintain my objectivity.

As an example, one of the things that have gotten to me most in reading about the war is that Israel, in the last 48 hours of the conflict, while negotiating a cease-fire dropped cluster bombs on Lebanon. Apparently, just to kick the Lebanese population ‘while it was down’. Given that I’ve seen articles on the BBC talking about the civilian deaths from this war, there use seems to just be a means of terrorising the population.

So, solution to problem one – find (reasonable) sources, that can explain to me, without using the mindset that they’re ‘just filthy Arabs’ why Israel’s actions are correct or moral.

Problem two – the fact that I’m being bothered by the morality. I’m having a hard time distancing myself from the current situation. While writing this would probably be easier if I could just ‘turn off’ any political senses I have, the general current historical proximity of the events makes this pretty hard, if not impossible.

The other major problem I have is that I’m having a hard time finding a focus in this topic. Partially it is because there seem to be no books on anything to do with the Middle East in which you do not at the very least find gross distortions or lies. But mostly it is just the problem of finding something that I can sink my teeth into enough without getting .. dragged down perhaps? As an example, anything pro-Hezbollah, skirts dangerously close at times to ‘evil hooked-nosed Jews came and ate my baby’… While things like Robert Fisk often spend quite a length of time discussing how ‘this old woman lost her entire family to a disproportionate Israeli attack’… But as I’ve sad in my ‘problem one’, finding anything that isn’t basically the ‘Faux news’ version of the world that supports Israel is nearly impossible.. In terms of my focus, this is making it very difficult to find a focus that I can feel comfortable with.

On the other hand, speaking of my prejudices, I’m not certain that they are a problem. Mainly because I am willing to acknowledge that I have them? But on this factor, I’m not certain.

Anyway, apologies for the rambling, and (probably) incoherent nature of this post, but I had it suggested to me that doing something like this may at least get other people to give me helpful suggestions, or would at least help me sort it out in my own head..

Very good stuff here, nice to see Stewart back on form & the interview with Jim Cramer is pretty fascinating & rather disconcerting… :

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I realise I haven’t been posting really at all lately, the joys of two jobs, a masters and trying to decide whether to do a phd and avoid the real world for a bit longer or try to find a job (some chance, you say) have proven to occupy my time somewhat. Heading to Brussels next weekend to see the EU parliament and some other stuff there, so I’m wondering, what would people recommend to see/do there? Bear in mind I’ll only be there for two and a half days so…