Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?
Showing posts with label you're either with us or against us. Show all posts
Showing posts with label you're either with us or against us. Show all posts
I'm guessing that once the French started shooting down tanks and military vehicles in the 'no-fly zone' over Libya members of the Arab League began to realise that they'd just been Tango'd and that they were being treated to an object demonstration of what's in store for them if they don't run their franchises more efficiently
Anyway, this latest round of 'just' slaughter serves the Libyans right for falling out with each other and threatening Western resource hegemony just before a monster earthquake hits Japan and initiates a huge unwinding of dollar positions
"Welcome back though – you’ve just come back for next week’s violence haven’t you – you miss it really, don’t you. Last week I was thinking of taking a day off and attending the violence personally, but my foot has put paid to that. I also would not be able to run away from the violence properly. Will your Wednesday/Thursday be flavoured with violence, mano-mano, on the streets, with a camera?"
I think it's fair to say that anyone who has used the Internet has been sucked in by at least some disinfo bullcrap at some point in their surfing
There is, after all, an awful lot of it about
Mind you, there's awful lot of it about in the longer-established media.
I had a jaw-dropping conversation with a couple of people just before Christmas who patiently explained to me that the reason why Jean Charles de Menezes got shot was because he jumped over a ticket barrier and ignored repeated challenges from the police to stop running. They absolutely refused to accept anything different from me
And they never use the Internet
As it happens, I personally believe that the majority of 'serious' mainstream news coverage qualifies as disinformation to some extent or another
but back to the Internet...
I raise the subject of disinfo because I received a couple of emails from chums yesterday morning pointing me towards a video nasty of the alleged aftermath of an Israeli bombing attack in Gaza
The video struck me as being suspect for several reasons
- it was pixelated as fuck - there was no supporting information about who allegedly took the footage, or where, or when - the accompanying text on the original hosting site said 'copy available for download spread'
Because I'm a person who has never felt comfortable about giving or receiving commands, the thought of anonymous fuckers who I don't know from Adam urging me to spread/ duplicate/ forward something has the uncomfortable air of a chain letter about it to me
What the Internet was invented for...
As a general rule, if a video clip, or creepy letter, is strong enough I am perfectly capable of deciding whether I'm going to circulate it or not, and to who
Lebanon 2006 - before and after 'shopping'. As you can see the impact of the Israeli air attacks has been exaggerated to an outrageous degree by visual trickery
It's a funny game this disinfowar business. Expose a little photoshopping of the aftermath of a Israeli bomb attack and all those cluster bombs, cluster bombs which are still killing people two years on, simply melt away
We should, however, be thankful for the efforts of Little Green Footballs, the Hasbara crowd and all the other shills, cheats and trolls out there.
They're doing us a favour
They're reminding us not to be gullible fuckwits Just because someone is making noises you want to hear or offering up material that seems to support your pre-existing beliefs that is no reason to throw your critical faculties into the toilet.
If you don't trust this video
...then why the f*** should you trust this one?
If you don't apply the same level of rigour to your own beliefs as you apply to those beliefs you disagree with then you're allowing yourself to become a hypocrite and a fool
And I'm not excluding myself from the list of potential fuckwits.
Like I said, we've all been there and will almost certainly be there again
When I was a kid I was, as many teenage boys are, fascinated by the history of warfare. I read the books. I watched the films. I made the models. I played the games.
If I had devoted as much time and energy to something useful I'd probably be fluent in about five or six languages
Of all the campaigns and wars I studied, one conflict struck a particular chord in my impressionable, totally fucking naive teenage brain...
The story of the plucky state of Israel...
The three million against the two hundred million.
A handful of desperate refugees, armed with nothing but some rusty WW2 surplus, living with the constant threat of being wiped off the face of the Earth by the Communist-armed Arab hordes
A nation of citizen-soldiers who just wanted to grow oranges but who, in a stroke of righteous irony, reluctantly mastered the techniques of Nazi blitzkrieg to save themselves from ultimate annihilation
From an indoctrinated teenage war geek's point of view, the Six Day War was an impressive and inspirational feat of arms
Especially when you remember how those pesky Arabs were preparing to douse Israel with rockets armed with poison gas
now where have I heard that one before?
I totally bought it 100%. Hook, Line and Sinker. The whole myth
And why shouldn't I?
I didn't know any Muslims or Arabs and the Jews I knew seemed alright to me
And all the books, films and television I saw told the same story
But when I got a little older I started asking myself some questions the books, the films and the television didn't seem to cover...
What had the Arabs to do with the Jewish Holocaust?
What right did the Israelis have to Palestine in the first place?
Why was it that Jews, of all people, thought that recreating Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glane in Palestine was the way to go about solving anything?
Wasn't the expression 'Never Again?' supposed to apply to everyone?
and so on and so on
It also started to become clear, as I did some more grown-up study, that the Israelis weren't quite as outgunned as I was told they were, quite the opposite
And then I found out about stuff like the King David Hotel Bombing, the attack on the USS Liberty, the Lavon Affair, the Balfour Declaration and all the other staples of Anti-Zionist lore
Much of that anti-Zionist lore stands up to critical scrutiny a lot better than any of the Zionist bollocks I was fed as a kid
I still feel, years later, like a complete dick for believing so much propaganda
The news, after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, that the executioners had been trained by Israelis was just the icing on the cake.
After all, the Israelis have had sixty years of solid experience of really getting to the heart of what it takes to prevent terrorism. Anyone who doesn't want London to have that carefree, at ease with itself, Tel Aviv vibe just has to be bonkers
Short of some kind of Apocalypse, the state of Israel is not going away (and yes there are some loonytunes Christian Zionist whackjobs who are banking on just that eventuality)
But, personally speaking, I don't want to see any Apocalypses or the annihilation of nations.
Some small, tiny little, tweaks to the way the Israeli state goes about doing things; such as losing the racist apartheid shit and not bombing the crap out of people as part of some deranged, futile exercise in collective punishment, would be just fucking peachy though
Like all intelligent people, I greatly dislike Christmas. It revolts me to see a whole nation refrain from music for weeks together in order that every man may rifle his neighbour’s pockets under cover of a ghastly general pretence of festivity. It is really an atrocious institution, this Christmas. We must be gluttonous because it is Christmas. We must be drunken because it is Christmas. We must be insincerely generous; we must buy things that nobody wants, and give them to people we don’t like; we must go to absurd entertainments that make even our little children satirical; we must writhe under venal officiousness from legions of freebooters, all because it is Christmas – that is, because the mass of the population, including the all-powerful middle-class tradesman, depends on a week of license and brigandage, waste and intemperance, to clear off its outstanding liabilities at the end of the year.
- George Bernard Shaw
An interesting man, Shaw, and a nice example of how, if you're not careful, pursuing a lifelong belief in social justice and equality can end up with you supporting, and making excuses for, some right shits
Still, it's better than having the Tories back in power...
Shaw was also flat wrong about the 'all powerful middle-class tradesman', who have never been any more powerful than they have been permitted to be
The reason why I have such a very big problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is the leading spokesperson for Darwinist Evolutionary Theory. As it happens, I personally have many strong objections to Darwinism. However, some of my best friends are Evolutionists yet I feel absolutely no need to direct abuse at them
Nope, it's not the Darwinism thing that pisses me off about Dawkins
It's the fact that he represents the perversion of what now passes for popular science which has little to do with the idealised scientific method and a lot more to do with advocacy, case-building, lawyers tricks and politics
Science shouldn't be about amassing whatever evidence you can find to support your ideas
It should be about seeking out the material which most strongly challenges your theories
The perfect scientist says to himself every day 'I don't want to be wrong so I'm going to come up with everything I can to prove myself wrong'
Some common clues which suggest that someone posing as a scientist might actually be behaving like a Dawkins-style scientician include...
Cherry picking of real data and the rejection, or editing, of anomalous data
Any attempts to force people into 'you're with us or against us' style false choices
Any claims that the science of any subject is 'settled once and for all'
Attempts to depict anyone with opposing points of view as a nutter
The problem is, of course, when faced with a fundamentalist pulling these kind of stunts is that it's difficult not to be drawn into a similar pattern of behaviour and respond to foamy-mouthed advocacy with foamy-mouthed counter advocacy
I've had a couple of recent exchanges with some chums on the subject of man made global warming
They send me links about temperatures going up. I send them links about temperatures going down
They send me links about polar bear numbers shrinking and pictures of cute baby bears stuck on ice floes. I send them links about about polar bear numbers not shrinking and pictures of ice breakers stuck in ice
and then I remembered visiting Athens this year, a few days after it had been covered by six inches of freak snow
and then I remembered a mate spending the night in my place after visiting China with a suitcase full of flip flops and chinos only to walk into the worst snowstorms in fifty years
Here in the UK we've just endured yet another spectacularly shitty summer, with the BBC covering up for that other bunch of propagandist stooges at the Met Office, who fucked-up their summer forecast yet again, by downplaying how bad the summer was and knocking out articles suggesting that there was nothing unusual about this summer at all...
I can't find any reference to that fact on the State Broadcasting Company's website but I did find an old article bigging up the implications of sunspot activity four years ago (link corrected), when sunspot activity was consistent with the global warming myth. The article ends with the most outstanding horseshit I've seen labeled as science for at least a week...
'This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.'
When the language of climate change gets so screwed up that the Sun is referred to as having an 'indirect impact on global climate' (as opposed to the presumably ever so direct impact of that devil gas CO2) you can be pretty sure somebody's trying to sell you a serious lemon
Coelacanths are, of course, popularly known as 'living fossils'
The oldest Coelacanth fossils have been dated as being about 400 million years old. The youngest fossil Coelacanths have been dated at about 70 million years old
And, for a while, palaeontologists and evolutionists thought that the coelacanths could possibly have been the first fish to develop legs, take the first tentative steps on land (presumably whilst holding their breath until they evolved a set of complimentary air-breathing lungs) and started the land-based evolutionary branch which culminated in the birth of Richard Dawkins
There wasn't actually any direct evidence that leg-sprouting fish have ever actually existed but they would fit nicely into a particular story and so evolutionists have allways been keen to find, or draw, some
Fantasia (1940) - leg sprouting fish make their appearance @1:48
Unfortunately for the coelacanth's place in evolutionary history, the coelacanth had to be taken off the list of possible candidates when people started pulling living examples out of the sea from the late 1930s onwards...
which raised all sorts of interesting questions such as...
Where had they been hiding for the last 70 million years?
How is it that a fish that was once identified as being the possible ancestor of all land based tetrapods, which is a fair old slab of evolution by any measure, didn't actually evolve very much at all?
According to the Coelacanth page on Talk Origins that's because -'The theory of evolution does not say that all organisms must evolve. In an unchanging environment, natural selection would tend to keep things largely unchanged morphologically' ...except for when things do change
which is another way of saying that evolutionary theory is a great way of 'explaining' things after they've happened but crap at predicting what will happen (cf. Nostradamus)
(things must have been very quiet around the waters off Japan, where this character lives, for the last 550 million years)
More walking fish - this time courtesy of Guinness
Coelacanths do, however, clearly have a sense of humour and are aware that humans used to draw pictures of them walking around the sea bed on their fins, rehearsing their conquest of Land
Because, whenever anyone points a video camera at a coelacanth, they swim around doing cute little vertical headstands, keeping their feet fins as far away from the sea bed as possible...
So, in the context of the coelacanth, the term 'living fossil' is another, shorter, way of saying...
'we used to think this creature was long dead and thought we could get away with making up all sorts of fairy tales about it but then the fucker turned out to be still alive and left us all looking like gimps, the bastard'
The Coelacanth - My Fish Selection of the Month, August 2008 - learn more over at...
NB Richard Dawkins is currently appearing in Summer Season over at Channel 4 - and for someone advocating such a supposedly unassailable case his compulsion to tell one or two whoppers in the process is quite perplexing
These are interesting days over at The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' site
First there was Charlton Brooker's smug and excruciatingly unfunny piece on 9/11 Conspiraloons which drew 1,778 warmly appreciative comments in next to no time...
And now there's David Milliband's equally smug, but slightly funnier (unintentionally) piece, on why the Labour Government isn't really an unholy incarnation of Pure Evil...
Forget about oil and gas shortages, if things carry on like this we'll reach Peak Tinfoil long before the hydrocarbons run out
Though, in fairness, there was a division of opinion between Loon and Anti-Loon in the comments underneath the 9/11 article
No such division of opinion underneath the Milliband piece Everyone is fucked off with David and the Labour Party
Even members of the Labour Party
The penny has finally dropped
It would seem that calls to support the Labour Party, however wicked its actions, simply because it isn't the Conservative Party just won't cut it any more
which makes for an interesting situation
Even in their worst days, previous fucked up administrations retained at least a core of loyal, grassroots supporters
Not so this time round
So,
Who do you vote for when you finally realise that you're living in what is effectively an unrepresentative single party state, or do you just not bother?
What do you do when you just can't pay your monthly bills any more?
And what are the guys who run that single party state going to come up with to preempt your decisions?
-
and whilst on the subject of past fucked-up administrations, fellow blogger Merkin made a couple of amusing comments underneath the Milliband piece; including one which made reference to 'Stand Down Margaret' by The Beat
Stand Down Margaret - released 1980
Margaret - stands down 1990
Ah, the power of popular music
Here's a clip of ex Beat member Dave Wakeling doing an acoustic version of SDM last year. There's a little sliver of ad libbing at the end which nicely captures that sense of 'what the fuck was that all about?' now being experienced by a lot of people who worked so hard to help the current government into power
Already the holder of a Conspiraloon Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award for the simple, yet brilliant, idea of giving The Protocols of the Elders of Zion a new lease of life by doing a quick 'search (Jew) and replace (Muslim)' in her favourite word processor, Melanie Philips has now earned a tinfoil cluster to add to that award with her brilliant and incisive take in Der Schpectator on what's really going on in Scottish politics...
A Caledonian caliphate? (25/6/08)
"...Tomorrow, the Scottish Islamic Foundation will be launched in Edinburgh in Salmond’s presence. But as the invaluable Centre for Social Cohesion tells us, the leading members of this group and many of those who lead its events are closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is the Islamisation of Britain and Europe.
Its chief executive Osama Saeed, who has worked as Salmond’s researcher and is the SNP’s parliamentary candidate for Glasgow Central, is an Islamist and leading light in the Brotherhood front the Muslim Association of Britain...
...The Salmond/Saeed axis is not merely a disturbing sign of Salmond’s own prejudices. It has a potential strategic significance that goes beyond Scotland. The Brotherhood’s strategy for Britain is to promote separate Islamic development, declare sharia-only enclaves and infiltrate mainstream institutions as a springboard for Islamising the entire society. Since Salmond’s aim is to make Scotland independent from the rest of the United Kingdom, with one leap the Brothers could achieve an Islamised country on England’s border."
The sneaky bastards
though, as single leaps go, it would have to be on the largish side
Glasgow 2020?
and it's all the more fiendish and cunning a plan for the total subjugation of England when you consider that Muslims currently make up less than one per cent of the population of Scotland .
A little follow up to my previous post about David Davis' freedom campaign being given support by a PR agency which thrives on the kind creeping authoritarianism which Davis apparently dislikes so much
A snippet from PR Week (dated 17th i.e. the day after my and Lord P's post on the subject)...
"Fleishman-Hillard behind David Davis civil liberties campaign
David Davis has brought in Fleishman-Hillard to support the rollout of his controversial 'David Davis for Freedom' campaign, officially launching today. Fleishman-Hillard’s digital head Paul Borge registered the domain name for Davis’ campaign website, which went live this afternoon and includes web 2.0 applications like a Twitter feed and Facebook group.
The agency is known to have good connections within the Conservative party, although this new campaign will see Davis break away from traditional Tory policies. The website will support Davis' civil liberties drive following his high-profile resignation as MP for Haltemprice and Howden last week after the 42-day detention vote.
F-H chair Kevin Bell said the agency's digital team had been involved in website design, adding that he has known Davis for twenty years. He said he would not rule out further PR support down the line should Davis need it."
There's a simple reason why the fuckers who are changing our world for the worst have had the upper hand for so long...
They are smarter and, yes, sneakier than most of the cattle out there
Bred for taste - not for their problem solving abilities
And as I mentioned in a comment underneath my original post
"...imagine McDonalds is your biggest client and some one-man band outfit strolls into your office wanting to promote a campaign which conclusively proves that burgers give you cancer. What are you going to do?
Come to think of it, what's the one-man band outfit doing approaching you in the first place?"
And whilst on the subject of Troof Seekers and Conspiraloonery, last week’s defeats for our governing political party gave rise to multiple threads/ discussions all over the InterTut asking just why it is the Labour Party received such a kicking
Amusingly, if you read Labour.org you'll find yourself thinking that the number one reason was the recent smoking ban. A lot of working class Labour supporters were really f**ked off about that one
Personally, I think we’re witnessing something slightly more significant than a smokers’ revolt at work here
What we’re witnessing is the expiry of a long-outdated political fairy tale which cannot even pretend to explain how the world works any more
The fairy tale in question is the nonsense that people can be roughly split into two carefully, pre-prepared political belief systems called ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ and that all the really big stuff that goes on in the world happens more or less by accident
And, sooner, or later if you do keep pretending that stuff like the price of food or botched occupations of other peoples’ countries are essentially the product of mistakes, accidents and uncontrollable forces you come to a point where you have to shrug your shoulders and admit that you understand, and therefore can do, fuck all about fuck all
Conspiraloons on the other hand, whilst not blind to the hand of the Earth Mother and stochastic forces, do believe that a fair old bit of the shit inflicted on us is either deliberate wickedness or a by-product of deliberate wickedness; usually on the part of people who have accumulated so much money and power that they are plain bonkers
The thing is, if you are a Conspiraloon who believes that the world is being deliberately moulded to serve the interests of finance capital and The Few and that threats such as terrorism and global warming are being hyped up to assist that moulding process, you can easily knock-out an enormous manifesto of positive change that could be implemented to make the world a better place for 99.99% of us
And crucially, much, if not all of that manifesto could be formulated in a way that totally ignored Left vs. Right, divide and rule bullshit
A few examples off the top of my head…
Cease the creation of hyper-inflationary quantities of worthless money
Legislate against speculators fucking around with the prices of essential commodities, especially food, by implementing a simple requirement that anyone buying food, or oil, or whatever forward is actually in the food, or oil, or whatever, business.
(There are plenty of operators in commodity markets who are driving future prices up but who always sell-on their holdings before they have to accept physical delivery. It really would be amusing to see someone delivering 10,000 tons of grain or rice outside the head office of a London or New York based hedge fund every once in a while)
Withdraw forces from Iraq – the argument that we have a moral obligation to stay until things somehow get better is profoundly flawed. No-one would advocate that a wife-beater should continue living with his Mrs until they work things out. Well, no-one I know anyway
End private monopolies over essential utilities such as water
End public subsidy of private monopolies
Bring in legislation and a tax regime which favours creation of mutual financial institutions
Apply the same ludicrously low burden of proof and high sentencing to political and corporate corruption as is currently applied to terror suspects
Make honesty pay. Create financial incentives for the investigation and conviction of political and corporate corruption - in the same way that people who investigate low-level benefit and tax fraud are given incentives
Open up a few dozen new coal mines, quickly
Apply and grant public access to the same level of surveillance and data mining applied to politicians and corporations as is applied to ordinary, law abiding citizens. Scrap any system or law which does not apply equally to citizenry and establishment
Inclusion of ‘None of the Above’ as a candidate in all elections. Election of ‘NotA’ would automatically trigger a new election from which all previous candidates are barred
For every new law made, scrap at least two
You could carry on all day. It would practically write itself
Alternatively, you could stick with non-Loon views and keep supporting the current political paradigm and politicians who when faced with widespread public concern about crippling inflation, the gradual meltdown of our financial system, the costly consequences of pre-emptive wars of aggression and the seemingly endless erosion of civil liberties come up with this blinding solution to all those concerns…
Sounds like the mother of all election winners to me
Remember, this guy is an idiot, just like other idiots such as George Bush and Tony Blair. Everything this guy will do in office will be because he is an idiot and not because it is part of any coherent portfolio of elitist objectives. Do not forget that, ever
There's a point I've tried to develop in a couple of posts about the recent London mayorial election which goes something like this...
Now that it is likely some Tories are going to get re-elected to high office, all sorts of allegedly Left Wing, Liberal, Libertarian and Progressive types are going to start noticing all sorts of disgraceful things which have been in plain view for the better part of 10 years or more
... not that this crowd is any better equipped to comprehend these disgraceful things than when these things were 'invisible'
Anyone who would like to participate in this magical discovery of disgraceful things which will become visible now that the Tories will start to administer them could do a lot worse than starting with this new site...
...inspired presumably by the phenomenally successful Blair Watch site which managed to reduce war criminal Tony Blair's tenure as Prime Minister to a humiliatingly short ten years; through a carefully crafted strategy of effectively supporting the Nu Labour party, regardless
For their sakes I hope that the people who will comment on Boris Watch can manage to avoid espousing any thoughts or observations which sound like conspiracy theories (i.e. anything based on the premise that extremely rich people sometimes get together to fuck over less rich people) otherwise they'll end up accusing each other of being mental
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