Friday, August 29, 2008

We're all terrorists now pt 534

Well, it's been a busy old week for the Guardian's home affairs editor Alan Travis

On Tuesday he wrote an article which revealed that...

"A Whitehall counter-terrorism unit is targeting the BBC and other media organisations as part of a new global propaganda push designed to "taint the al-Qaida brand", according to a secret Home Office paper seen by the Guardian."

(Lord Patel has already posted on this story and whilst the news is not particularly surprising it is depressing to see confirmation that there are publicly-funded astrotrufing twunts out there who think in terms of brands rather than ideologies - the same kind of bloodless sociopathic twunts who started the Al Qaida 'brand' in the first place)



And last Thursday Alan wrote an absolute corker which revealed that

"MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian."

The classified report concludes that domestic Islamic Terrorists are...

- not religious (!?)
- not mental
- not stupid
- ethnically diverse

In fact, the only thing they all appear to have in common is that they have shit jobs

There's no reason to think that MI5 are leaking this stuff to Alan simply because he's a nice guy. So, it's only sensible to conclude that there are some twisted, Machiavellian reasons for doing so

In the case of the terrorist profiling story it would seem to be just another step in the process of gradually expanding the public perception of what constitutes a terrorist to include anyone with a loose tongue who's fucked off with the state of the country and has a shit job - which by this time next year should cover about 20 or 30 million people

There's the distinct possibility of a class war looming on the horizon and virtually everyone is going to be invited

And even though the terrorist profiling story is deliberately leaked Mi5 bollocks, it's still a slap in the face for all the supposedly left wing and progressive commentators and bloggers out there who have been faithfully parroting any old establishment crap about the nature of the TERROR threat whilst posturing as legitimate opposition to that establishment

All in all, a handy little link to refer to next time you encounter some twunt posing as a passionate opponent of the encroachment on our civil liberties, whilst at the same time putting the boot into Muslims for somehow being responsible for all the shit that's going down

.

27 comments:

Shahid said...

Or as The Antagonist once said:

"We're all Suspect Pakis now"

Anonymous said...

OK, but when is it jigaboo time again? This isn't how it's done!!

paul said...

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Anonymous said...

Funny thing:

I use "Adblock Plus" in FireFox 3 (Macintosh) to block all kinds of unwanted shit (like google analytics) spying after me. On your blog, I block (beside other things) clustrmaps. Once this shit is blocked, it tries to load "http://www.meetomatic.com/images/clustrmaps-back-soon.jpg". So I block this too. And now the party really starts: The javascript tries to load this meetomatic jpg over and over and over and over again. 750,000 times, over a time of about a minute. My CPU cooler starts spining up and I am not happy browsing your blog.

This needs to stop. Don't include shit from other websites. (Bad enough that Google/Blogger is collecting data like hell).

I guess, I will need to block javascript on your blog too...

Anonymous said...

The firefox add-on NoScrip does a good job getting rid of the javascript round here :-)

Anonymous said...

I meant "NoScript".

Wolfie said...

You used the "C" word again, tut-tut...

Stef said...

and, as if by magic, cluster maps disappears...

Stef said...

@wolfie

yes, but in a spirit of utmost inclusivity

the smart money's on the middle class being the new revolutionary class in the not too distant future

Stef said...

some bedtime reading whilst waiting for that bright new revolutionary future...

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

Stef said...

"“The Middle Class Proletariat — The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.”

— ‘UK Ministry of Defence report, The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036’ (Third Edition) p.96, March 2007

Stef said...

see also Gorgeous George Monbiot venting his frustration at his class not towing the party line

Anonymous said...

You introduced me to Michael Hudson Stef, so perhaps you might like this...

Super Imperialism
Mike Whitney Interviews Michael Hudson, 29/08/08 "ICH"

Stef said...

thx

I still haven't figured out which conspiraeconomist sounds more duck like - Michael Hudson or Max Keiser

Keiser definitely sounds drunk more of the time

Anonymous said...

LOL. Battle of the Ducks.

Aaaah. I suddenly feel nostalgic for Stweart Hall.

Wolfie said...

You know, I think Monbiot has a very different definition of the Middle Class to you or I. Certainly today the definition has become troublesomely broad to the point of useless. Besides I thought that it was always the Middle Classes that were behind agitation, they just rarely got involved with the blood letting.

Anonymous said...

Finally, the truth!

http://blogs.america.gov/rumors/2008/08/22/world-trade-center-7-mystery-solved/

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_videos/wtc_videos.html

Now we can sleep easy while out soldiers kill innocent people in far away lands.

Stef said...

@wolfie

As I think we've discussed before this class business is a tricky thing

by education and, on occassions, by income I am arguably middle class

by background, upbringing and mindset I am not

there are plenty of people like me out there

does this mean that class distinctions in the UK have become expanded and blurred to a point where there are meaningless?

bollocks does it

the education and support I received as a student is a thing of the past - education for the lower orders is now merely a mechanism to turn them into debt serfs before they have even started to comprehend how the world works

and even though I was the recipient of a middle class education and career I never developed that innate sense of entitlement and self-importance which characterises the classic middle-class stereotype and which pisses off those of us who don't have it so much

and just because I try to treat people as individuals as I meet them I still believe that class differences are real - as real as any generalisation can be

maybe things would be clearer if we used different terms to describe our class system

maybe if we talked in terms of...

- The Elite
- Those who administer and manage the wishes of the Elite in exchange for a few sugar-coated crumbs
- The Rest

...the terminology would be less contentious from the PoV of the administrative class

A class which thanks to new technology has now outlived its usefulness, is way over-manned and is in the early stages of being downsized considerably

and no, in my book, the middle classes were never the agitators, just the tools

Anonymous said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2628415/Civilians-given-power-to-issue-on-the-spot-fines.html

Thought you might enjoy the badge they'll have Stef - http://i37.tinypic.com/f2mvpy.jpg

sory, wrong badge! this is it - http://i38.tinypic.com/2crrj2s.jpg

And here's a list of the powers these unaccountable civilians will have - http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/police-reform/accpersonpowers?view=Binary

No scope for abuse there then!

Stef said...

Thought you might enjoy the badge they'll have Stef

Oh yes, very SStylish

Stef said...

Now we can sleep easy while out soldiers kill innocent people in far away lands

Ooops, got caught out by that one - I only realised that blog post wasn't being sarcastic until I got to the end

/ silly sausage

/ slaps forehead

Anonymous said...

The adminstrator class honestly thinks they will get promoted to elite when the downsizing starts. :)

Wolfie said...

You know Stef, for someone who can be depended upon for his razor sharp observations and intellectual resilience it saddens me that you still cling to such anachronistic constructs. Every time someone like you invokes the spectre of class war a New Labour cyborg somewhere shits his or her pants with glee and the bastards who want to consign everything wonderful about the world that European man has contributed towards gets closer to the rubbish bin of history.

Being an arsehole is a trans-class character trait and if you think a world without the what you call the middle-class white man would be a tolerable place for anyone to live, you're wrong.

This is the next phase in a long ideological war and the "middle class" are in the cross-hairs for a very good reason.

Paul, sadly very few are actually doing any thinking about the long-term future at all. If they did they would have realised a long time ago why women are being infantilised so aggressively.

Stef said...

@wolfie

from direct personal experience, some of the most vocal exponents of anachronistic class war are, of course, firmly middle class mockney twunts

but I think you've alluded to that already

Nu Labour tried playing that anachronistic class war card in a recent by-election and got a richly deserved kicking in the process

Open up rags like the the Mail and the Express and you'll see that the old trick of pitching the bourgeois against the plebs still has plenty mileage - there was an ad for the Daily Mail bingo on tele last night and the strapline, delivered in a suitably snotty tone, was 'a better class of bingo'

The class war I want to see is the one that has the 99.9% percent stringing up the 0.01% and not being fooled into fucking each over instead - if you can come up with terminolgy that comes with less baggage I'll take it

Stef said...

and PS I starting referring to this anachronistic terminolgy round about the time of the publication of the MoD report I linked to above

It's not me who's advocating contingency planning for war against the UK's 'Middle Class Proletariat', it's the government

Anonymous said...

British TV programmes funded by the government -- propaganda and brainwashing exposed

http://www.theinsider.org/news/article.asp?id=2720

Stef said...

@lwtc247

cheers for that link, I hadn't seen it

not what you would call a surprising revelation is it