At Digby’s:
A friend went to the anti-war rally in St. Paul last Sunday and saw this sign:
Vote Democrat!
Spineless is better than being evil!Maybe the party could use this as their slogan in 2008.
Midwest Meg | 10.01.07 – 11:01 pm | #
Activism
Europe Against Fundies
Of course Europe isn’t against novelty pants – but it made you look. didn’t it? Actually, the Council of Europe is directly challenging creeping creationism:
PARIS Council of Europe to vote on creationism next week
(Reuters) – Europe’s main human rights body will vote next week on a resolution opposing the teaching of creationist and intelligent design views in school science classes.
The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly will debate a resolution saying attacks on the theory of evolution were rooted “in forms of religious extremism” and amounted to a dangerous assault on science and human rights.
The resolution, on the agenda for October 4, says European schools should “resist presentation of creationist ideas in any discipline other than religion.” It describes the “intelligent design” argument as an updated version of creationism.
Anne Brasseur, an Assembly member from Luxembourg who updated an earlier draft resolution, said the vote was due in June but was postponed because some members felt the original text amounted to an attack on religious belief.
Only minor changes have been made to the initial draft.
You can contact your MEP to voice your support for the resolution here.
Comment of The Day: Praise Reality and Pass The Ammunition
PZ Myers has written a cracking polemic suggesting, in short, that we atheists should all become a lot more aggressive in attacking the root of religion, unreason.
Go read it, it’ll give you a little Monday morning backbone to face another week of dumbassed people. It prompted Jim Heber to comment:
When I am tempted to become mesmerized by the brainpower spent on erecting the magnificent edifice that is theology, I remind myself that a lot of smart people can speak Klingon.
They even wrote dictionaries about it.
But you know, it’s still made up!
Just because a subject has lots of information written about it and just because it’s internally consistent doesn’t mean it’s real, or true.
Posted by: Jeff Hebert | September 17, 2007 1:43 AM
That one’s going right into my own personal anti-unreason armoury.
I Predict A ‘Riot’
Another form of protest is making Sydney police look like idiots – no protest at all.
Here’s that list of predicted APEC rioters in full:
As of yesterday afternoon, APEC-related arrests in Sydney have encompassed 11 members of a comedy troupe, a man who squirted tomato sauce on a pro-US banner and another individual who apparently used bad language.
There’s a peaceful protest planned for today and I’m willing to put good money on it that something kicks off suddenly about 4pm .au time as the thousands of frustrated riot police who were promised a bloody good hippy-kicking by their superiors realise that if they want a riot. they’ll have to start one themselves.
How else will they get a chance to play with their nifty new paramilitary anti-personnel weapons?
(BTW, That’s a fine collection of overeating, beerguzzling jowls they’ve got there. Are they a badge of petty fascist rank or something?)
Do They Think We’re Stupid? (That Was A Rhetorical Question)
Although it keeps getting taken down from Youtube for unspecified terms of use violation, here’s footage of peaceful protesters stopping police provocateurs from starting a riot at the Stop the SPP protests in Montebello Quebec. CEP President Dave Coles confronts men armed with rocks and sticks:
Black bloc my ass.
The police say they know nothing and have launched an internal investigation and that the police officer was given the rock by a protester. Ho hum.
It’s good to see the bastards shown up for what they are for once but this sort of thing makes me begin to seriously doubt the efficacy of set-piece protests. The Heathrow Climate Camp, for instance, may have generated lots of publicity and I’m sure it was invaluable for networking and movement building – but I bet it was also one of the best intelligence-gathering events that Special Branch (or whatever the latest euphemism is) has had in a long time.
Protests are now like dissident window shopping for the police; anyone who protests in public these days is permanently recorded as having done so – do it more than once and you’re a potential terrorist. “I’ve got a little list…”
On the other hand protest is useful agitprop: they do security theatre, we do protest theatre. It’s all circus and gets media attention, provided there are no missing white girls to occupy their airtime.
But circus was most useful in the nineties when it was a new tactic-we’re now in the time of the ‘war on terror’ and as this incident and those at the recent G8 in Germany show even sleepy provincial PC plods now ape the tactics of their US peers and treat even peaceful, legitimate protesters as terrorists.
Daily Mail hysteria notwithstanding, protest isn’t a cushy option for hippy middle-class gap year students stick-on dreads or benefit scroungers with piercings, tatoos and mysterious habits; these days it takes guts to protest. But terrorists?
When you protest publicly, however legitimate your grievance, you are automically presumed to be a criminal. You’ll have a record, although you’re a perfectly law-abiding person. For speaking your mind in public you’ll be followed, CCTV’d, videoed and/or arrested, so that as much info about you as possible can go into an intelligence dossier (spooks have performance targets too). Subsequent to this you may well find your own communications and that of your colleagues, associates and friends monitored. You may even find yourself banned from all UK airports and environs merely for having a subscription to a conservation charity.
That’s quite a lot to ask of people, however noble and peaceful the cause, particularly in times when anyone can be arrested and held incognito and without charge for months on end, without anyone knowing where you are or what happened.
The left arned that the ‘war on terror’ would be used to label protest as terrorism. That the police and intelligence services act as agents provocateurs is nothing new: these suspiciously well-dressed ‘anarchists’ (those bandannas still have shop-bought creases) turn up at every antiglobalisation event, bent on disruption and aggression, the general idea being to get a spurious “attack” on police onto news footage, so that legitimate protest can then be described as violent riot and protestors as terrorists, so peaceful protesters can be attacked with impunity by armed riot police.
Protest isn’t all pink tutus, dogs on strings and rainbow flags: it can be fatal. Remember Carlo Giuliani, shot in the face, his head split like a melon by the wheel of a police landrover at Genoa? That’s what our democratic police are capable of when governments and elected representatives won’t listen and citizens feel forced to take to the streets to exercise their right to protest. The Canadian cops in the video above were particularly inept, but it still took a lot of courage for Dave Coles to face them down.
As I’ve said before, I’m becoming more and more enamoured of entryism as a practical political tactic as time goes on and state repression against all forms of democratic expression other than those officially approved by the state gets even heavier. “Is discretion the better part of political valour? Discuss.”
Nevertheless, despite the increase of international surveillance and repression of peaceful dissidence the fact that political change is happening is undeniable; political positions that we anticapitalists took and were derided for holding only five years ago are now so ingrained in the public conciousness as to be thought common wisdom – fast food bad, Bush BAD, sustainability good, slavery bad, climate change BAD… we’ve always thought that way haven’t we?