alanjjohnstone
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There is actually an anarchist pamphlet on football. It wasn't online but perhaps it is now. I transcribed a chapter on my blog http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2007/06/anarchist-football.html There was a time when the party had enough younger members and sympathisers to form a football team…Edinburgh branch Sunday League team "Capital" during the 70s The Gaelich Athletic Association also incorporates many socialistic/democratic principles . Again see a post on my blog http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2009/03/socialism-of-gaelic-athletic.html And for the reasons for my desertion from the Tartan Army and criticism of the Scotland National team see here http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2007/05/blood-upon-grass.html
Medialens has several posters who take the side of Assad purportedly because they were critiquing the mainstream news narrative but they ended up offering apologies for his acts of atrocity. They failed to apply the same critera they demand of the western media from the Assadists. The latest is their acceptance of two freelance journalists reporting that some locals blamed the terrorists for the chemical attack and that it resulted from inexpertise in handling such weaponry supplied by Saudi . Perhaps it is true but where was the evidence except hearsay relayed third hand. The hard evidence was supplies supposedly found by Syrian troops but where is the chain of evidence that they demanded of the West's possession of evidence or proof that they were actually used and not simply stored. . A plague on both houses is indeed an impossibility for some people. And, of course, everything is a conspiracy. Our position is clear…So what if one side or another used chemical weapons. The manner of dying is irrelevant. Neither usurping Assad or defending Syrian "sovereignty" is worth innocent workers blood. Well aware that we cannot influence events, all we can do, as the interview suggests is plod away with debunking the commonly held "truths" that one side has right on its side. In a way it may be the same as in the Spanish Civil War, regardless on intent, it degenerated from the possibility of the anarchist collectives protected by CNT militias to NKVD Stalinist execution squads running the show. Too many foreign interventionists (and pretend non-interventionists) taking control of the situation.
A very interesting interview with a Syrian anarchist here.http://truth-out.org/news/item/18617-syrian-anarchist-challenges-the-rebel-regime-binary-view-of-resistance "the US wants "Assadism without Assad." They want the regime without the figure of Assad, just like what they got in Egypt, when Mubarak stepped down but the "deep state" of the military remained… ….The left has been very hostile to the Syrian uprising, treating the worst elements of anti-regime activity as if they are the only elements of it, and accepting regime narratives at face value. What I’d ask people to do is to help set that record straight and show that there are elements of the Syrian uprising that are worth supporting. Help break that harmful binary that the decision is between Assad or Al Qaeda, or Assad and US imperialism…."
Thats a very poor window display, sorry to say. If it hasn't improved since the following is my opinionated opinions. Surely we can afford some proper accessories and dress it up a bit better. If i recall correctly we got actual shop-fitters as members. A few books isn't enough.What happened to that thingy hooked up to pictures and a computer.What about some flashing led lights signs …i know they are down to a few pounds in cost for customised versions. They can be useful informing whats on at the HO. or just sloganising I can't see any of our promotional ware such as the cups displayed.I'm sure some members with Marx parphenalia such busts of him and Fred could *lend* them to the party as some donors do to museums just for them to be seen. Inside head office, what about a cabinet display of First Editions. Archives can provide a few but i'm sure the bibliophiles in the party can help out too. Take a lesson from capitalism…capitalise on every thing we got going for us and SELL ourselves by ADVERTISING ourselves. Draw the passing trade into HO or at least to stop and look and Clapham High St has a heavy pedestrian traffic rate. It is not overnight success as lit stall operators will tell you , but patience and perseverance bears fruit. Make ourselve a visible fixture on the street so that when passer-bys give strangers directions it is " Carry on til you pass the Socialist Party office and then turn a right" Make ourselves INTERESTING, take advantage of how UNIQUE we are.Will someone compile a "10/(20) Things You Didn't Know About The SPGB" list for the blog please. DarrenO, you left-spotting anorak , where are you?As i said many times before, we have that bracket for hanging a sign to catch the eye, too, since we cannot agree about the colour of a flag hanging out from a flag-pole, make use of it. Every crafts fair has a stand where someone burns a house name into a piece of wood…simple and basic as that…no need for an ad-hoc sub-committee and EC approval. It is a daunting never ending task the premises committee has, like painting the Forth Rail Bridge but the advertising committee needn't restrict itelf to placing newspaper adverts and widen its activities.. Certain covers of the Standard IMHO could be blown up and turned into trendy framed wall posters for the Clapham student population. Some can be made into placards and handed out on demos.All these ideas don't involve huge sums, nor require hordes of volunteers, just a bit of temporary re-ordering of the priorities of those who are doing all the hard work anyways. Let a thousand flowers bloom is just the old fashion way of saying lets crowd-source ideas and suggestions.
Why if they do attack , they will not bomb the poison gas dumps. U.S. bombings of Iraqi munitions factories in January 1991 released a plume of sarin gas that travelled more than 300 miles to affect American troops in Saudi Arabia, a study shows. The Jan. 18, 1991, bombings of the munitions plants in Nasiriyah and Khamisiya blew a plume of sarin gas high above a layer of cold, still air — also called the boundary level — and into a swift wind stream that carried the gas to Saudi Arabia, said the study conducted by researchers Robert Haley and James Tuite and published in the journal Neuroepidemiology. Since no troops died at the time from exposure to the gas, and the munitions factories were so far away, U.S. forces and their commanders assumed something else had set off the chemical alarms. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/13/sarin-gas-gulf-war-veterans/1766835/
ALB wrote:"You're a nasty shit underneath, aren't you? "It took you this long to realise that? Next it will be apartheid and bantustans , KKK segregation and walled ghettoes, all justified by his "science" . Next eugenics and euthanasia, and then finally on to the gas chambers and genocide for those not deemed racially superior or possess a genetic flaw like Down Syndrome. Most socio/psychopaths usually display a high level of intelligence, as Hrothgar, and also the arrogance of superiority, as Hrothgar. But he did reminded me of something …i shouldn't bother engaging him in debate, i leave it up to those who can cope with banging heads against walls
"In practice it is of secondary importance whether theories and hypotheses are correct so long as they lead us to results that are in accordance with the facts." W. Rucker Opening Address at the Natural Science Congress in Glasgow, 1901.Quoted by Paul Lafargue http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1913/v1n13-mar-29-1913.pdf I thought i would throw that in to stir the pot.
A delusional psycho-path in denial "…when people talk about the shadow of Iraq lying over this debate it's not really, in this case, an issue to do with what happened before we took military action in Iraq or in Afghanistan. It's not really a trust issue,… It's an issue to do with the difficulty we encountered afterwards…if we'd intervened in Iraq, got rid of Saddam and the whole thing had calmed down, we wouldn't be having this debate today."…….IF….IF … http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/06/tony-blair-iraq-vote-syria The Bliar's weasel words to ecsape his criminal culpability.
The questions the BBC, Guardian, Independent should be asking raised by http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/05/322265/kucinich-10-unproven-prosyria-war-claims/ I am also reminded that Press TV was removed from satellite and cable television for being a state sponsored bias source!!
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/09/05/multimedia/100000002421671/syrian-rebels-execute-7-soldiers.html Since the UK/US place so much trust in social media video in their Syrian intelligence sources , i await the issue of an international arrest warrant for the Syrian rebel commander clearly identified committing a war crime in this video. I await the rendition of him and his unlimited detention in an off-shore prison without trial. Fat Chance Along with those who executed priests and bishops on video , who eat human flesh on video, no repercussions.
My unusual lack of tolerance and expressed ire is that I find it tiresome to argue with a "scientific" racism. As I indicated earlier i have engaged in pointless debates with some who camouflage their bigotry and prejudice under the cloak of libertarianism. Without disparaging my comrades, I no longer have the patience to indulge your charade of objectivity and your ever so reasonableness replies. I see through your act. If people do want to cite genetic differences, they need to explain why genetic differences seem to be larger within races rather than between races. We are all one species. We are all humans. We have all been evolving for the same length of time. We are all one species, Homo sapiens, with one shared genome. A species can be defined as a group of organisms that are biologically similar enough to breed and generate viable progeny. Humans of every "race", nationality, ethnicity, religion, skin pigmentation, hair style, diet preference, etc., can, and do!, successfully interbreed and generate viable progeny. Thus, barriers that distinguish human groups—whether we rightly or wrongly refer to such groupings in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, political party, etc.—are unquestionably socially-significant, however they are biologically insignificant "Scientific" racism is anything but scientific. It is bias dressed up. You claim tribalism (read racism) is hardwired into us by genetics. But the tribalism of catholic and protestant in Northern Ireland or parts of Scotland (intermarriage etc) cannot be put down to a religious DNA. Species that are genetically uniform are more likely to be plagued by parasites that need to evolve only a single strategy to capitalize on their host’s genetically-unvarying vulnerabilities. Species with wider variation in their gene pools present multiple challenges to parasites, bacteria and viruses. Indeed, it is possible that it was only due to crucial variations in the human gene pool that Homo sapiens avoided extinction at the hands of the Black Death or other near-extinction crises. You won't be impressed by such arguments, you will side step them, and you will continue to seek justifications for your pre-judged attiitudes when it comes to the colour . pigment, shade of someones skin. For you, it is Blood and Honour. In the claims, of any pseudo-scientist, we find correct statements jumbled up with half-truths and total inaccuracies, and we are never able tell which is which; once a pseudo-scientist gets the bit between his teeth everything is interpreted in a single-minded and simple-minded fashion and what doesn't fit gets swept away out of sight.
ALB – I remembered that the word ‘Sassenach’, normally an abusive Scottish term for the English, is derived from the Gaelic word ‘Sasunnach’ for Saxon, was originally applied by the Highlanders to all non-Gaelic speakers, be they Lowland Scots or English who were, in the eyes of the Highlanders, indistinguishable and both equally foreign.
Going further back in time to the Kosovo war , the late disreputable Alan Clark wrote this. "The assertion that human rights within the boundaries of a sovereign nation are best defended by a sustained bombardment of its own civilian population is, to put it most kindly, Orwellian. The notion that because a war is 'just' (by the aggressor's definition) it can be prosecuted immediately, and without deference to international opinion is highly dangerous. It is to prevent exactly this that the UN's Security Council mechanism came into being. Nato was conceived as a defensive alliance, its terms of engagement narrowly drawn; not as a 'policeman' surrogate for the UN; never as an apparatus for intervention in a civil war. What amazes me about the Yugoslav crisis is the credulity of the Left, and of progressive thinkers, who seem to get a vicarious thrill from seeing B52s taking off from Fairford. I address them: How have you swallowed whole the CIA-funded propaganda that demonises the Serbs? Are you not familiar with the duplicity and intimidation of United States foreign policy? That Ambassador Walker, in charge of monitoring forces in Bosnia, was financing the Contras? Have you no recall of that 'Free World' crap that embraced Battista, Noriega, Syngman Rhee, Bao Dai, Lee Van Thieu and Sukarno? If you read Michael Rose's Despatch you will see that the Bosnians mortared their own bread queue for a horror shot. If you talked to British soldiers you would learn that the KLA are gangsters indistinguishable (my analogy) from any warlord in Mogadishu. In Yugoslavia there is a civil war. British soldiers are not mercenaries for one side or another where there is no threat to our citizens. The safest rule in such circumstances is, stick to humanitarian aid. What do you imagine so far is the cost? How much aid might this have funded?……..This is a US-driven operation and the US never intervenes objectively. It may be that the pressures of domestic politics oblige the President, as a distraction, to order the obliteration of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. Or it may be that considerations of oil brokerage, the 'Seven Sisters' and projected pipeline routes, prevent attention being paid to, or even mention made, of the genocidal Turkish campaign against the PPK. … There are risks as well as humiliations in Britain doing always what the US instructs…." http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/may1999/yugo3.htm
There is a long thread on Libcom on Heinrich and TFROP which you may also wish to skim through http://libcom.org/forums/theory/heinrich-contra-law-falling-rate-profit-10042013
The selective nature of our war propaganda is what is deemed quotable informed sources. Apparently if France, UK and US intelligence says something based on opinion and interpretation not actual evidence, it qualifies to be be included in the news. If discredited ex-politicians like Blair or Ashdown or Owen comment, it deserves to be given air-time. However if Russia declares a finding , it is not reported or perhaps at best given a less prominent place in the news. Russia released its 100 page report on the Aleppo chemical attack and you will find it difficult to find a reference to it on the MSM news.http://rt.com/news/chemical-aleppo-findings-russia-417/The findings of the report are “extremely specific,” as they mostly consist of scientific and technical data from probes’ analysis, the ministry stressed.I have not yet heard a politican explain what the red line means and its implications if it is found that the rebels have used chemical weapons. …you bad bad naughty boys…don't you ever ever do that sort of things ever again or we will be very cross with you and stop your pocket-money until you promise to be good little boys for mommy and daddy…
