frandroid: Québec City Nordiques NHL team logo (québec)
The first five people to request it in the comments will receive 5 questions from me. (These questions came via [profile] ioklopon)


1. Who is your favorite pirate (real or fictional) of all time?

I think Blackbeard's depiction in Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides is my favourite.


2. What's your favorite recipe to make?

Ohh, interesting question. There's a vegan belgian carbonnade that I make which is quite tasty, made with seitan and brown belgian beer. It's a bit of work so I don't make it too often. A more regular occurrence is this dish, Aloo Tama Bodi, which we discovered at a Nepalese restaurant ages ago. It's a creamy curry with potatoes, bamboo shoots and black eyed peas. Also recently I've started making my own seitan/okara sausages, and I'm trying different flavourings every time. It's a fun recipe to work on.


3. If you could have one dish ready-made that you could eat whenever you want with zero effort and zero expense, what would it be?

There used to be this falafel place in Vancouver named Desert Falafel. I think it was run by Israelis. Anyway, white people and definitely not Arabs, which is rare. This is where I had my first falafel and it remained the best falafel I ever had for years. At some point they moved to Commercial drive and became Oasis Falafel. They also made a latke pita, and if you wanted to be extra special, you could get the falatke pita, which had 2 falafel balls and half a latke patty. It was amazing. I miss it. The best falafel I've had in recent years is from Falafel Yoni in Montréal, also run by Israelis. But really, I'm a sucker for falafel (with a side of crispy fries and a can of cola) and could eat it very often. I actually did eat it all the time when I first moved to Toronto, as I was living close to Sara's Falafel on Bloor, and there a dirt cheap place that made a lemony falafel close to work, and there was Akram's (Syrian) with his tiny and uniquely flavoured falafels in Kensington Market. I ate so much falafel that year that I had to take a months-long falafel break at some point, because I was getting sick of it.

There are at least 5 falafel shops within walking distance of my place but none are top notch, so I don't indulge too much. Maybe I will next summer. I'm realizing that I should be having way more falafel than I'm currently having. Falafel shops that don't sell French fries are stupid, even if they sell awesome garlic potatoes.


4. If you had a 10-minute segment on national TV to cover any topic you wanted, what would it be?

It would be on the Kurdish liberation struggle. I find that most mainstream reporting on the issue is superficial. I know 10 minutes isn't that long to get into it, but that would be my thing. Or I would get into it with radical lefties who oppose arming Ukraine...


5. What's your favorite hockey moment?

It's funny because my parents weren't into hockey at all, but in 1984, 1985 or 1986 they put me in front of the TV at the start of the playoffs and I was hooked. There was this intense Nordiques/Habs rivalry and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. Back then we had divisional playoffs and both the Habs and the Nordiques were in the Adams division, as well as the perpetually bad Hartford Whalers, the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres. I think that first year the Nordiques beat the Whalers, and again a year later, but they didn't go further. But I recall watching these series intently. Then I recall watching the Stanley Cup finals in 1986, Habs versus Calgary Flames, and even though I "hated" the Habs I could only admire this team that included many French Canadians, including le casseau.

After that follow a long drought at the bottom of the standings for the Nordiques, resulting in first picks Joe Sakic, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin and Eric Lindros, so I had to fall back on watching Mario Lemieux carry the Penguins on his shoulders and win two cups in 1991 and 1992.

Then in 1993, with their young star players (though maybe Sundin had been traded to Toronto for Wendel Clark already at that point? I don't think so but can't be bothered to check) and the returns from the blockbuster deal that sent Eric Lindros to Philly, the Nordiques were competitive again, and qualified for the playoffs. Their first round opponent was the Habs.

The first two games were won by the Nordiques, good victories, so everything seemed to go well. Then the third game came, started, and the Nordiques were on fire, completely obliterating the Habs. They were everywhere on the ice. Then at some point Owen Nolan fired one of his famous slapshots but missed the net, and his shot smashed the glass pane behind the net, and everything fell apart. It took something like 10 minutes for the ice to be cleared of broken glass and a new pane to be installed. That break took all the wind out of the wings of the Nordiques. When play resumed, the Habs finally got their act together and eventually swept the rest of the series, 4 wins in a row. They then got a lucky break when Mario Lemieux's hand was broken by a Rangers player, so the Rangers could beat the Penguins. Then the Islanders beat the Rangers, but the Islanders were also the only team that hadn't won its regular season series against the Habs that year, and they once again couldn't beat them in the playoffs, so the Habs ended up playing Wayne Gretzky and his LA Kings in the final. They won the cup by playing the trap, ensuring that hockey would be boring for the next 15 years to come.

Two years later, the Nordiques were sold to Colorado and then promptly won the cup (after acquiring Patrick Roy from the Habs, something that would have been amazing had that happened in Québec City, since Roy was from there), making me boycott hockey for the next 15 years.

Chris Kreider broke Carey Price's wrist in the 2014 playoffs and I'm getting somewhat sick of Rangers players winning series that way...


Bonus questions, also from [profile] ioklopon, from an earlier post!


6. Quel est ton livre préféré (qui est écrit en français)?

Oh wow. Way to call me out, I don't think I have anything good to report. :P J'ai pas mal arrêté de lire en français à l'âge adulte parce que les livres sur l'anarchisme que j'étais capable de trouver étaient en anglais, en ensuite j'ai déménagé à Vancouver et ça a continué comme ça. Quand j'étais adolescent j'ai lu Ça de Stephen King en français, d'une traite, je pense que ça m'a pris 22 heures, et c'était une drôle d'expérience de lecture, être complètement immergé dans l'histoire comme ça. Comme la fois à l'automne 2000 où j'ai lu l’hexalogie de Dune d'un coup. Mais ça c'était en anglais. Mais les deux fois, j'avais l'impression d'être gelé (high) tellement j'étais dans l'histoire. Un peu plus jeune, j'aimais la série Les Inactifs de Denis Côté, de la science fiction dystopique pour adolescents avec un personnage principal qui était pas mal un calque de Mario Lemieux. :) Mon auteur Québécois favori est Mordechai Richler mais il écrivait évidemment en anglais. (Les souverainistes haïraient cette idée que cet anglo pourrait être l'auteur Québécois favori d'un francophone.... :P )


7. What is one thing I should do the next time I'm in Quebec?

If you mean the province, I would say attend the yearly Montréal Anarchist Bookfair, it's an amazing event, the booksellers are awesome, many of the visitors are hot as hell in a punk way, and it's queer/trans as fuck. There are also awesome workshops on various topics relating to anarchism, and a dance party of some sort. It's usually held in May but was held in August this year, probably due to the pandemic. I'm going to bet that it'll come back to its May slot. Don't wait 10 years to visit--the original organizers have moved on and the new crew has less energy than before, though they're still putting on an amazing fair. Cindy Milstein helps organize from all the way over in SF, which gives you an idea of the change. (She's an amazing person to be getting help from though.)

If you mean Québec City, obviously visiting the old town is a must. You visit the old town, check out the shops, and then when you've had enough, you walk down l'escalier casse-cou to la rue Champlain and the Old Port. There you can visit the Musée de la Civilization (!!!), a decent popular museum. Some of their exhibits are great, some are shit, but it's a cool building. They have one or two good permanent exhibits about Québec culture. Otherwise you can visit the antiques shops or visit the maritime museum; I haven't been to the latter in 25 years but I recall it was nice. Then when the sun comes down, you get on the ferry to Lévis just so you can catch views of the old city from the St-Lawrence. You don't get off at Lévis; you just get back on the same ticket you boarded on. Another thing you can do from the old port is walk along the linear park along the St-Charles river, which used to be a concrete canal that has been renaturalized. It's impressive.

Then you go back uptown to rue Saint-Jean or rue Saint-Louis, inside or outside the old city, to one of the amazing bars like Le Drague or Le Temps Partiel. I can't recall if you're veg or not but it has a great meat-oriented restaurant scene and it really sucks for vegans, though it's getting a bit better on that side.

On the other side of Old Québec, uptown, at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, one can see Jean-Paul Riopelle's L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. It's a 40-foot long spray-painted, goose-stenciled triptych. I'm biased because he's my favourite painter, but it's awesome. (Apparently there's construction on a new Riopelle pavilion so I'd check availability first before attempting to visit.)


8. How did you get into zines?

I think I had heard of and maybe even seen a couple zines before, but when I moved to Vancouver in late 1998, one of my favourite haunts was the Spartacus Bookstore, a volunteer-run anarchist bookstore. They had a small zine section, of which I bought a few. Above that was the magazine section, which was sporting the final issue of Factsheet 5, the zine-reviewing bible of the 1990s golden age of zine publishing. They were getting so many zines to review that they limited themselves to only review great zines since they could spare neither ink nor paper for the bad ones. So in this issue there was probably a few hundred glowing zine reviews from around the world (though mostly the U.S.). I ordered a bunch of zines and I was like "wow, this is so awesome". I had been part of electronic/online underground scenes since the early 1990s, was a subscriber to the first ISP in Québec City within its first few months of operations, was part of the very first wave of people getting on the web, had moved to Vancouver due to my contact with some of these scenes, but this paper-based scene was still extremely attractive to me. I wanted everyone to read the zines I was getting but I obviously couldn't just buy tons of zines and just give them away willy-nilly. Then I discovered that people were running zine distros, i.e. sold zines at fairs and sometimes had online zine stores, so I decided I would do that, and the rest is history.


9. What your favorite thing thing you made/did with code/computer skills?

Back in the early 1990s I ran two BBSes, one after the other. I really enjoyed that time. There was very little coding involved but a fair bit of modding, which would be the textmode equivalent of web design/systems administration today. I was an ANSI artist so that was kind of my thing. More recently I just thoroughly enjoyed working for thestar.com because it's the biggest paper in the country and among its largest liberal/progressive media organizations, but I don't have particularly salient accomplishments there.

One of my early low-skill programming projects was Stationary Groove... An acquaintance had manually surveyed passengers at every subway station in the city to see what music they were playing, and wanted to produce an interactive map showing that. I ripped off the transit company's own code from its site, and also built a barebones Rails app to handle all of the song tracking to put them in a DB, and then used all of this to generate this map. There was very little skill involved but my acquaintance was a good PR person, and got a front-page story on the Star (before I worked there) out of it.

I also used to hand code all of my HTML (and there was no CSS back then). My two biggest publications were Operation Rescue, an ANSI art reviewing site that published reviews of monthly art packs for a number of years (I took the name from the Bad Religion song of the same name, not knowing it was the name of a pro-life group they were critiquing!!), and later on I also hand-coded my zine distro's site. If I had properly learned backend programming back then I would probably be somewhat wealthy now, it was a great time to get into that stuff.

So huh, that's a lot of me here!
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of literal torture and domestic violence, and metaphorical sexual violence. No graphic description of either, but discussion of both.


I had promised a podcast transcript which I thought I would post last Friday, but it was long and I could not finish it off then. Then as I was transcribing it I started to sour on it. This is an interview done by Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is a Ukrainian philosopher and host of this Explaining Ukraine podcast, of Marci Shore, who is an associate professor at Yale where she is teaching modern European intellectual history. Shore is Timothy Snyder's wife, the Yale history prof who teaches about the Holocaust and Modern East European history. I have just finished listening to his Ukrainian history course's lectures. His whole teaching is wrapped around imperialism though it's not particularly Marxist, but it's really good. I'll make a post about that series later. I've also listened to Shore on a number of podcasts and she's always giving the same interview, which is a summary of her 2014 book Ukrainian Night. It's about how she fell in love with the partly failed Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2013, where both times Ukrainians managed to push back against Viktor Yanukovych and Russian influence, but not against oligarchs and corruption. (She also guest-lectured in her husband's course where she taught the same course/interview.)

So here Shore gives more of her back story of how she, an American bougie suburban Jewish woman became an East European scholar. I enjoyed it but I don't particularly recommend that you listen to this hour-long interview. However there was this striking conclusion which kind of blew my mind, and then later on made me really annoyed. She thinks it's a great feminist gotcha that Belarusians discuss President Lukashenko as a metaphorical perpetrator of sexual violence on the population through his authoritarian reign. There is a liberalism to her that really gets under my skin, it's hard to put a finger on it but it's more salient here. Amusingly though unintentionally, the host debunks this, saying that this politics as sexual violence discourse is routine in Eastern Europe. Maybe I missed the point. But anyway I still thought it was interesting, though more about authoritarianism in Russia, and I'm still struggling to figure out how and why she made the transition from authoritarianism to torture and domestic violence, but it's intense. She is big on Hannah Arendt, who I haven't read, so maybe that makes sense to other people. I've slightly edited this to eliminate repetitions and remove some of the "hum" type sentences of spoken word.

The Interview )

This interview: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/150292985

Shore's lecture on the Maidan: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/149147534

Another interview where she expands on the same discussion as this post, in case it grabs you: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/145505577

---
#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
CANADALAND - (Détours) - Le coût de l’expression

(Podcast in French--I'm writing in English for French context to anglos, and writing in French for English context to francos, and then I just keep going in French I guess :))

In 1968, Pierre Vallières, a noted Québecois author, published "White N----- of America", a complaint about the state of French Canadians and a foundational primer for Québec sovereignty. In the last year or two, three people with our national broadcaster (CBC/Radio-Canada), Wendy Mesley (discussing the book off the air with her producers) and two French broadcasters (on the air) mentioned the book while pronouncing the whole n-word.

Mesley s'était fait demander de ne pas utiliser le mot, mais se défendant que le livre était historique, elle l'a ré-utilisé plus tard. Certains de ses collègues se sont plaints, Mesley s'est fait enlever son poste d'animatrice lors d'un remaniement, et est finalement partie à la retraite. C'est toute une débarque pour celle qui était l'animatrice de fin de semaine du National et qu'on a longtemps pensé allait remplacer Peter Mansbridge, l'animateur-monument du National.

On the French side, two hosts used the full book title on the air to discuss the case of a University of Ottawa prof who was reprimanded for using it in class. Some people complained, which led the CRTC (comms regulator) to investigate both cases. Then the CRTC published its report, which said that CBC should issue a formal apology. This made a bunch of boomer journalist personalities in Québec publish an explosive public letter demanding that R-C appeal this report. In turn, this generated more discussion on TV, radio and newspapers of all kinds, which almost all repeated/reprinted the book's title in full, while discussing "Freedom of speech."

Dans tout ce débat, il manque les voix des personnes racisées et des journalistes plus jeunes. Émilie Nicolas, qui est chroniqueuse au Devoir, à la Gazette, contributrice chez Canadaland (une rare chroniqueuse culturelle qui traverse les deux langues et trois contextes (Québec franco et anglo, et Canada anglo)), invite Vanessa Destiné, une chroniqueuse qui est familière avec la culture interne de Radio-Canada. Deux femmes noires qui discutent du problème sous plusieurs angles intéressants, sans avoir à répondre aux questions d'interlocuteurs blancs qui sont obnubilés sur la question de la liberté d'expression, et ne pensent pas du tout aux conséquences.

Un segment particulièrement intéressant discute de la sursolicitation de certains chroniqueuses noires lors de débats sur la race, l'harcèlement auquel elles font face en ces moments, et une reconnaissance de celles qui sont "tombées au combat", qui ont dû arrêter de commenter sur ces questions dû à ce harcèlement trop intense.


Commons: Mining - The Crying of Lot 8

Canadaland's Commons podcast did a series on the Canadian mining industry, which is more or less the HQ of the global mining industry due to lax legal oversight. The last episode is a particularly good exposé of the kind of murders, rapes and other abuses committed by Canadian mining companies abroad. The episode also goes into difficult efforts and successes for activists trying to sue companies in civil courts to account for their actions.



The East is a Podcast - Dr. Salman Abu Sitta & Visualizing Palestine in Conversation (2019)

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is the creator of the Visualizing Palestine project. Here he is on a panel being interviewed about the project, how it came about, how they go about obtaining information from multiple archives, and great insights that came about in the course of the project.


Métis In Space - Generation Energy Science Interview

Another panel recording! A scientist turned poet, an alternative energy engineer and the manager of a long horizon research organisation discuss climate change and doomsday scenarios in an indigenous context. That was fascinating.


I have lots more podcasts to feature but when it's been more than a week I've listened to them, my memory fades and I can't really write a good summary...
frandroid: A large sandworm in front of the fremen invoking him (Dune)
David Barsamian: Your office here in a new building at MIT is opposite another new one that's called the Center for Learning and Memory. One can only speculate as to what goes on there. But I'd like you to talk about memory and knowledge of history as a tool of resistance to propaganda.

Noam Chomsky: It was well understood, long before Orwell, that memory must be repressed. Not only memory but consciousness of what’s happening in front of you must be repressed, because if the public comes to understand what’s being done in its name, it probably won’t permit it. That’s the main reason for propaganda. Otherwise there is no point in it. Why not just tell the truth? It’s easier to tell the truth than to lie. You don’t get caught. You don’t have to put any effort into it. But power systems rarely tell the truth, if they can get away with it, because they simply don’t trust the public. And this happens every minute. What we were talking about is an example; the appointment of Negroponte is a perfect example. And it just goes on and on.

On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record.

Right at this moment there is a prosecution of Milosevic going on in the international tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can’t find direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milosevic to any atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose a document came out from Milosevic saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble. Anything that flies on anything that moves." They would be overjoyed. The trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences–if it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair. But they can’t find any such document. In fact, nobody has even found a document like that connecting Hitler to the Holocaust. Scholars have been working on it for years. I can’t remember an example of such a direct order to carry out what amounted to a huge massacre, way beyond the level of anything we call genocide when other people do it.

Was there any reaction to the Nixon-Kissinger transcript? Did anybody notice it? Did anybody comment on it? Actually, I’ve brought it up in talks a number of times, and I’ve noticed that people don’t understand it. They understand it the minute I say it, but not five minutes later, because it’s just too unacceptable. We cannot be people who openly and publicly call for genocide and then carry it out. That can’t be. So therefore, it didn’t happen. And therefore, it doesn’t even have to be wiped out of history, because it will never enter history.

In your essay "On War Crimes" from At War with Asia, that came out in 1970, you cited Bertrand Russell from the international war crimes tribunal on Vietnam. Russell says, "It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know–or care–about circumstances in the colonies."

I disagree with him about care. I think they do care, and I think that’s why they’re the last to know. They’re the last to know because of massive propaganda campaigns that keep them from knowing. Propaganda can be either explicit or silent. Silence is a kind of propaganda. So when you’re silent about your own crimes, that’s propaganda, too. And I think the reason for the propaganda, both kinds, is that people do care, and if they find out, they’re not going to let it happen.

In fact, we actually see that right in front of us. You won’t read it in the headlines. But take, say, the recent events in Fallujah in Iraq. There was a marine invasion of Fallujah. They killed nobody knows how many people, hundreds, let’s say. We don’t investigate our own crimes, so we don’t know the numbers. The U.S. had to back off and they won’t say it but effectively conceded defeat and turned the city over to what amounts to the former Saddam army pretty much. Why did that happen? Suppose that there had been a Fallujah event in the 1960s. It would have been settled very simply with B52s, massive ground operations to wipe the place out. Why not this time? Because the public won’t tolerate it now.

In the 1960s, executive power was so extreme, it could get away with just about anything. The public didn’t know, maybe even didn’t care, because it was just taken for granted that it’s our right to massacre and destroy at will. So there was virtually no protest against the Vietnam War for years, and operations like this went on constantly. Not anymore. Now the public won’t tolerate it. Therefore, that’s one major reason why the U.S. cannot carry out the kinds of murderous operations that it was easily able to carry out. I think it’s because the public does care.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at declassified documents. You take a look at secret documents from the U.S. or, to the extent that I know, other countries. Are they protecting secrets? In a sense, yes. But who are they protecting them from? Mostly the domestic population. A very small proportion of them have anything to do with security, no matter how broadly you interpret it. They primarily have to do with ensuring that the major enemy, namely, the domestic population, does not find out what power systems are doing. And that’s because people in power, whether it’s business power or government power or doctrinal power, whatever, simply are afraid that people do care, and therefore you have to, as Bernays said, consciously manipulate their attitudes and beliefs–for their own good, of course, always for their own good.

[Interview also available here.]

* * *

First of all, I'm one of the few people who don't agree that the United States lost the war in Vietnam. The United States didn't win its maximal objectives, but it did achieve its major objectives--a substantial victory. There is no way for a huge, powerful state to lose a war against a defenseless enemy. It just can't happen.

A major concern in the late 1940s right through to when Kennedy launched the full-scale war was that an independent Vietnam could be a successful example to its neighbours, such as Thailand and Indonesia, which had major resources, unlike Vietnam. By the mid-1960s, though, South Vietnam, which was the main target of U.S. intervention, had been virtually destroyed, and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared. As Bernard Fall, the respected military historian and Vietnam specialist, put it in 1967, there was every possibility that Vietnam would become "extinct" as a cultural and historical entity.

* * *

Is this new? In the case of Vietnam, we literally do not know within millions the real number of civilian casualties. The official estimates are around two million, but the real number is probably around four million. As far as I know, there's been only one public-opinion study in the United States that asked people to estimate the number of Vietnamese casualties from the war. The mean answer was a hundred thousand, about 5 percent of the official figure. It's as if in Germany you asked people how many Jews were killed in the Second World War and they said three hundred thousand. We would think there was a big problem in Germany if that's what Germans were thinking.

* * *

You are often asked about possibilities for the future. One source of hope in the world today for some people is the World Social Forum, a gathering of tens of thousands of activists from around the world each year. The theme of the forum is "Another world is possible." I'm interested in this formulation. It's not a question but an affirmation. What might another world look like that you would find attractive?

You can start with small things. For example, I think it would be an improvement if the United States became as democratic as Brazil. That doesn't sound like a Utopian goal, does it? But just compare the two most recent elections here and in Brazil. In Brazil, where there are vibrant popular movements, people were able to elect a president, Lula, from their own ranks. Maybe they don't like everything Lula's doing, but he's an impressive figure, a former steelworker. I don't think he ever went to college. And they were able to elect him president. That's inconceivable in the United States. Here you vote for one or another rich boy from Yale. That's because we don't have popular organizations, and they do.

Or take Haiti. Haiti is considered a "failed state," but in 1990 Haiti had a democratic election of the kind we can only dream of. It's an extremely poor country, and people in the hills and the slums actually got together and elected their own candidate. And the election just shocked the daylights out of everyone, which is why in 1991, there was a military coup, supported by the United States, to crush the democratic government. For us to become as democratic as Haiti doesn't sound very Utopian. For us to have a medical care system like Canada's is not reaching for the stars. For us to have a society in which the wealth of the country isn't concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite isn't Utopian.

And you can go on from there to much more farreaching goals. Many of the basic institutions of our society are totally illegitimate. Do corporations have to be controlled by management and owners and dedicated to the welfare of shareholders instead of being controlled by the people who work in them and dedicated to the community and the workers? It's not a law of nature.

* * * end.



Of course, even though I was trying to find an online transcript from the start to avoid transcribing everything, it's only until I reached the final quote that I found it.
frandroid: A faroher, emblem of the Zoroastrian religion (faroher)
Certainly thought-provoking...

Demographics and Iran's imperial design Sep 13, 2005
Why the West will attack Iran Jan 24, 2006 (!!)
Why war comes when no one wants it May 2, 2006

Spengler is big on demographic pressures informing the reasons behind military and political conflicts.
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
From Harold Pinter's Nobel prize acceptance speech:
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'


* * *

I need a new Bush/imperialism icon.

* * *

Rumsfeld also took a swipe at Annan, saying: "He's never been to Guantanamo Bay," whereas representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross "stayed there, lived there 24 hours a day" to observe conditions.

"That place is being run as well as any detention facility can be run," he added, his voice rising.

"It's absolutely beyond comprehension," he said, that calls for closing Guantanamo Bay can be based on allegations of mistreatment and torture by the prisoners, whom Rumsfeld said are trained to lie.

A UN report issued earlier this week said some of the treatment of prisoners amounts to torture.


So since Rumsfeld is saying that Annan doesn't know what he's talking about since he hasn't been there, the U.S. will surely invite UN observers to visit the camp in order to observe that it is in concordance with all articles of the Geneva Convention, right?

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frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
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