Posts by Tom Semmens
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Iisn't one Mr. Garth George also the letters editor of the venerable NZ Herald? Or is that just scuttlebutt I read once?
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And I see Garth George has waded in today with a bit of a rage against reality and an extraordinary piece of outright denial - "This scaremongering, doom-saying global warming industry is shaping up to be the biggest rort of the decade and, if it goes on much longer, of the 21st century." I wish he would retire, the man retards debate in the countries largest paper. I can't understand why fundys who profess love for God's earth and their fellow men past, present and future are so opposed to global warming. At first glance, you can just write it off as a part of the reactionary anti-science and anti-enlightenment trends in Christianity coming out of the United States - the same people who believe in evolution usually also don't believe in global warming. But still, its a funny coalition, the God botherrs with the disingenuous spin meisters of out-of-control capitalism. But then again both groups share a belief system that says a finite resource - Earth - can furnish invite growth and wealth for us all, either through faith that God provided the Earth for man to use, or faith in the market to provide all answers.
I don't really know how to counter such out right denial. Its seen as a mental disorder by most pychologists, should climate change deniers be reasoned with in the same way a pyschoanalyst teases out issues with a patient in denial?
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"Modern warfare is much more civilised inasmuch that fewer soldiers are actually killed; which stops the nation from complaining sooner. (But America finally seems to be waking up to their Bush folly)"
Oh if only this was true!
Millions died in Vietnam; A million Iranians died fighting in the war with Iraq. The only reason that fewer OF OUR SIDE get killed is because Western armies have got the firepower and third world armies have got the manpower. War is an exercise in attrition; The length of the attrition phase is set by the relative strength and determination of each side. Thus, where the will is sufficiently determined - the North Vietnamese, the Iranians against Iraq - human life is used to even up the attrition phase and make it a fight between steel and dollars on one side and human flesh on the other.
Modern weapons might speed up the mutual industrialised massacre of the attrition stage between two evenly matched sides, but they won't lessen the numbers killed. To think otherwise is to fall into the mental trap that saw Europeans failing to think the battle of Omdurman through to its logical conclusion.
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Ohhhh, having just read the Derbyshire diatribe, I ahve to observe - it doesn't make sense. Firstly, he seems to think that everyone getting killed is a more a desirable outcome to everyone going home -
"...It is the job of a Royal Marine to fight, and if necessary suffer and die, for his country..." Quite the armchair warrior then. But I am sure it isn't the job of a Royal Marine to get needlessly into a hopeless firefight when your only cover is an inflatable boat and the other side heavily outnumbers you and has much bigger guns. The he seems to think that one should only bow to the trivial (wearing a headscarf) after a suitable drawn out period of torture. Why one can't acknowledge that wearing a headscarf is eminently preferabl to having your fingernails pulled out and THEN wearing a headscarf is a lapse of common sense that baffles me.
At the end of the day, U.S. commentators like Derbyshire have a disturbingly fascist bias towards the glorification of violence as an end unto itself. The attitudes expressed are disturbing not in the laughably childish logic behind his reasoning, but the way in which what he writes so spookily mirrors the attitudes one so often finds in reading the memoirs of ex Waffen-SS soldiers.
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I don't know how outraged opinion has been in the U.K. over this sailor thing. I assume its split along partisan lines with the Telegraph demanding that gunboats be dispatched to treat the beastly Persians to a lesson in Her Majesty's justice, and the Independent and Guardian insisting on a diplomatic solution.
But I do that amongst a lot of my friends,across the globe, the response has been curiously muted.
And the reason for that, I think, is when you see the R.N. prisoners sitting about eating in a group, and compare them to shacked, hooded and sensory-deprived men shuffling from one isolations cell to another you lose the right to moral outrage.
I am uncomfortable as hell that the "other side" treated its illegally detained prisoners with more humanity than "our side" treats its one.
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The primary "crime" of the left has been its failure to uncritically accept the imperial exceptionalism of the Bushites as a justification for ex-judicial rendition, systematic torture and contempt for due process and any other principle or rights that underlay a democractic and free society. The critics of the left would have us swallow a Manichean world view where we must accept that our fascists are not as bad as their fascists, since our ends justify the means and theirs do not. Quite simply, the left refuses to accept the Heinlein-like propostion that we are locked into some kind of Darwinistic war between Arab arachnids and American humans. To reject both Wahabism and the new American project is exactly what the left should be doing.
Secondly, the likes of Cohen appear to make little attempt to discern the difference between anti-neo conservatism and anti-Americanism. Bush and the neo-cons enjoy the support of around 25% of American voters - the rest either didn't vote or voted against Bush. Those who did support Bush often represent a strain of uniquely American extremism that is as repugnant to liberal and progressive people as the utterances of any Taliban mullah. To say that being against Pat Robertson and the corporate cronyism of Cheney and the rest of the new Southern Confederacy is anti-American is a complete load of arse. the fact of the matter is the entire world was united behind the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 - NATO invoked for the first time Article of the Washington treaty - and the most spectacular achievemet of the Bush administration has been the squandering of that goodwill.
In summary, the left is entirely consistant in its simultaneous rejection of both the neo-fascist exceptionalism of the current US regime and idea we must accept are engaged in genocidal cultural war, since both ideas are contrary to the basic principles that make a socialist a socialist.
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One thing no seems to be considering here is the wisdom of lodging these charges in the first place, given not just the difficulty of securing a conviction but also the impact on the victim of a not guilty verdict. Surely, to be through a media circus like this and then have the defendants found not guilty, with the subsequent claims the victim lied from the defendants and misogynists (a la the crazy wingnuts over on kiwiblog), is to re-traumatise the victim? The police must have known that securing a conviction would be difficult, especially given that the defendants both know how to work the system to their best advantage and are quite prepared, it seems, to indulge in the necessary cynical pervsersions of justice to get the right result for them.
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Well if that isn't denial I don't know what is.
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To me, to argue pornography is a harmless thing is a non sequitur when when you consider the nature of the business itself. I guess the biggest problem I have with porn is with the way that so many reality based, intelligent, left wing progressive types who wince at the exploitation of a whale construct a mental fiction about the exploitation of often the most vulnerable young women in the porn industry. I dopn't buy the "they love their job" thing. For every porn star who pronounces she loves her job hundreds or thousands of young women are groomed/coerced into things that they don’t really want to do and – thanks to the digital revolution – will forever be available for viewing. Pornography can be very addictive. Sometime when I listen to people defending porn, I wonder how much of it is the guilty addict talking, worried their secret might get taken away. So for me, porn isn't primarily a sex issue issue at all. Its an issue of exploitation of many thousands of women. I cannot see how you can watch porn and not feel at guilt at enjoying the sometimes very clear expolitation of a fellow human being.
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I thought it was a case of pills being palmed of as legal are in fact being made with all sorts of legal and illegal crap in them? It wouldn't surprise me if this was the case - the profit margins in this business are huge. It would make pefect criminal sense to make up some shit, put it in packaging that makes it look like a legal product, and bang - whole new market. Whatever the case is, I am totally pissed off with the way the police and party pill manufacturers are playing politics over this. The cops seem more interested in half arse half truth press releases trying to link BZP with illegal drugs than they are with protecting the public. The party pill manufactureres seem more concerned with pointing out the error of the police PR than they are with informing the public if bung pills are being sold as legal BZP products.
Lost in all this is the public's health. For Gods sake, if a bung pill is out there then just fucking tell people. The police have a duty to tell the community the colour, name, and general description of any pill that has hurt or killed anyone. If the pills are being packaged and sold as "legal" and the STANZ knows anything then they should tell people. No one should be crippled or killed for a $50 high just so people can play politics over BZP.