Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Stupid,
Ian, that’s a Lesley MacLean, one of her best screen-prints :-)
Okay, I'm gonna curate a Lesley Maclean gallery for Audioculture. Needs to happen.
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In today's really dispiriting news, all but one of the activists who took the video of the aftermath of the chemical attack have died from the exposure. I can't help but think of them as journalists killed on the job.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
The same could have been said in the 1970s about punk.
Not really. Punk was shortform, emotionally direct, consciously youthful. The Miley song just seems like unfocused drivel produced by middle-aged men.
And I'm not saying all contemporary pop music. Just the machine stuff.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Russell, think the link to the nethui video is munged?
Ta. Fixed now.
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The Clean Vehicle t-shirts are in stock.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Did she invite her biological grandparents too? :P
Oh, please. She's only slightly younger than my younger child.
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On a lighter note, you can test yourself against the rest of the internet in this find Damascus on a map game.
I was 64 miles away, which I thought was okay on such a small map.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Somewhere between 250,000 and two million people died after Britain withdrew from India/Pakistan in 1946. Should they have stayed on as colonists in an attempt to avert this? Would it have done any good?
That's not a good comparison with Rwanda, where the US (and the UN) had explicit forewarning of a campaign of literal genocide. They knew who was doing it and who would be killed, but they dithered. It does seem that for want of a few thousand peacekeeping troops a million people were murdered in a relatively short time. I don't think "just leave them to it" was the correct moral response in that case.
But that's not a good comparison with Syria, either.
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This on-the-ground Le Monde report seems to explain a lot more as to how and why the regime might use chemical weapons:
A chemical attack on the Jobar front, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, doesn't look like anything much at first. It's not spectacular. Above all, it's not detectable. And that's the aim: by the time the rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army who have penetrated furthest into Damascus understand that they've been exposed to chemical products by government forces, it's too late. No matter which type of gas is used, it has already produced its effects, only a few hundred meters from residential areas of the Syrian capital.
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Hard News: In the red zone, in reply to Rob Stowell,
A little reminiscent of scenes from around Chernobyl. But so much closer to home.
I was actually thinking more like parts of Detroit. That's one place where neighbourhoods are going back to the wild.