Monthly Archive for July, 2005

Indulge in life, undermine those who seek to stamp it out

Published
by
Christiaan
on 5 July, 2005
in Imperialism
. 0 Comments

Russell Brown reflects on a great win by the All Blacks over the weekend and notes that he doesn’t hold much hope for Live8.

I’m afraid I can’t quite muster the expected hand-waving enthusiasm for Live8. I’m unconvinced when I see Mariah Carey, her life awash with money and waste and the demands of a diva, pleading for an end to poverty. Or when performers in Philadelphia get $US12,000 goodie bags for their trouble, or wristbands that carry the branding of sweatshop giant Tommy Hilfiger.

People like to feel they’re involved somehow in a good thing - and what more pleasant and less onerous way to get involved than going to a concert in Hyde Park, or wandering around Edinburgh on a sunny Saturday afternoon? I hope it has some concrete effect, but I’m not sure it actually will.

I think he’s on the button, maybe more so than he realises. One of the greatest potential problems with these sorts of actions, including, say, the largest protest in human history, is that it can lull people into a false sense that everything’s taken care of. Afterwards everyone goes home to dinner feeling good about themselves that they’ve “done their bit.”

In fact to be effective such actions need to constantly build upon each other, and they need to culminate into the one strategy that has proven itself time and time again throughout history to be effective in challenging the rich and powerful: undermining and threatening their wealth and power. Get a million people to the G8 summit this week who are ready to go head-to-head with the police and threaten the G8 leaders very ability to operate and then you’ll know you have the inertia of something effective. Fuck “pleasant and less onerous,” what better way to indulge in life than to undermine those who seek to stamp it out?

So next time you see a masked protester going head-to-head with the police on your television screen, just remember they’re the ones challenging power using a proven tactic, and indulging in life to boot.

The USA PATRIOT Act (the Bush gang’s answer to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) makes provision for, amongst other things, the legal right of the U.S. government to secretly snoop on the library records of U.S. citizens. American librarian Jessamyn West has five “technically legal” signs for librarians to hang up in libraries around America to help warn U.S. citizens.

As the number of American and Iraqi deaths continue to rise in Iraq the International Federation of Journalists is calling on the U.S. government to investigate three new cases of journalists killed in Iraq over the past week—all of them at the hands of American soldiers—bringing the total number of journalists and media staff killed by U.S. soldiers since the invasion to seventeen.

Hugo Chávez, according to Mike Ceaser of BBC News, is talking it up.

Mr Chávez’s warnings that the US, which buys most of Venezuela’s oil, might invade, have resonated with his supporters. They have been suspicious ever since Washington rushed to endorse the April 2002 coup which briefly unseated the president.

Of course Chávez has every reason to be wary, after all he’s a leftist, which means he is a threat to the One Way. As Sean Donahue observed, writing for NarcoNews back in April, such an attempt to overthrow Chávez would most likely be pursued using Colombia as a proxy. Reader Bill Conrey responds by pointing out that the most effective way to repel the Bush gang would be to start their own gang, a united South America.

And on a final note I found a great website this weekend. Check out StumbleUpon. It takes a little bit to set up but it’s definitely worth it if you’re on your own machine (you’ll need to use Firefox if you’re on Mac OS X). Must go to bed now…

Great New Zealand Argument

Published
by
Christiaan
on 2 July, 2005
in Aotearoa New Zealand
. 0 Comments

Public Address have been outdoing themselves this week:

Russell Brown launches his first book, Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves, which is based on this weblog. You can get it in local bookstores in NZ, or online if you’re not in NZ. I have one on order so I’ll fill you in once I’m done.

David Slack continues with ‘a virgin’s guide to tax cuts’.

As the calculator demonstrates, as soon as you implement a cut of any heft, you need to abolish entire government departments to get the savings you want. That doesn’t just banish the analysts who might or might not be wasting space, it means you have to start throwing overboard the people who do the uncontroversial stuff as well. The ones who pay the pensions, stamp the passports, pay the teachers and the police, and keep an eye on minor issues like foot and mouth disease and mutating avian flu viruses.

But don’t just take my word for it. Ask someone who’s run the Treasury …

Tze Ming Mok gently mocks Don Brash’s absurd comments on “mainstream” New Zealand.

It seems redundant for me to comment on this ‘excluded-from-the-mainstream’ outrage issue when the demographic status of most people in this country renders Brash’s comments absurd. All I want to ask is this: When the hell did people start being so proud of being mainstream?

And something makes me think Alastair Campbell has ditched the Lions and decided to work for National: Frogblog comments on more divisive politics from National; but not only are they divisive, they’re also a bunch of bald-faced lies.

It’s deviously intelligent and intelligently devious. It also pollutes New Zealand’s political discourse. It’s National’s Iwi/Kiwi billboard, which suggests Labour has given beaches to iwi, and National would restore them to Kiwi ownership. Quite apart from the fact that this suggests, as Steve Maharey points out, that members of iwi aren’t Kiwis, the billboard is quite simply false advertising. It’s a bald-faced lie.