bigotry – Page 10

Linky, Linky

Published on January 18, 20071 Comment

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Quite.

Published on January 5, 2007

Annoyingly up the arse of Gordon Brown as it currently is, The Guardian’s at least had the good sense to employ Zoe Williams.

Here she is on the removal of British Asian world champion boxer Prince Hamed Naseem’s MBE:

There is honour among (white) criminals

Zoe Williams

Friday January 5, 2007

The Guardian

Some reasons why Naseem Hamed might have been stripped of his MBE for speeding, where acknowledged wrong ‘uns Jeffrey Archer, Shirley Porter and Mark Thatcher kept their honours. First, he was speeding. This might encourage other titled Britons to speed. Conversely, most lords are unlikely to organise an African coup, or any Porteresque vote-rigging, on account of how their chamber is unelected, so votes hold no appeal for them. Two, Naseem is not a real prince, and awarded himself the title gratis. This irked many peers, who paid good money for their meaningless titles. Three, he is not white. Almost all interiors of public offices were designed to match white people. Four, non-respectable behaviour is only accepted from the respectable classes. You wouldn’t expect a boxer to understand.

Read more: UK Media, UK Politics, UK Honours system, UK+racism

That closet is getting another airing

Published on December 19, 2006

PZ Myers, commenting on the latest outed gay fundie leader:

We should have known, I think. The bright lights, the adoring audiences, the singing, the showmanship –being a pastor at one of these fundie megachurches is just like having a hit show on Broadway.

The Daily Star Ate My Burqa

Published on October 25, 2006

This story, about how the National Union of Journalists prevented the Star from deliberately inciting racial hatred, is one I heard late at night last week on the BBC and I had planned to follow it up when it suddenly disappeared from view. I must admit other things caught my attention this past week and it slipped below the blog-horizon.

So much obliged to Lenin for this excellent precis of the kind of tabloid race and religion-baiting bollocks that New Labour is tacitly encouraging with its public statements on veil-wearing and its MP’s continued attacks on one particular religious group:

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
It was the NUJ wot won it.

posted by lenin

The National Union of Journalists took action several days ago at the Daily Star to prevent a racist spoof, purporting to show what the paper would look like under shari’a law. This newspaper is, suffice to say, a hideously misogynistic piece of shit that made itself notorious in 1989 when it published a front page picture of a fifteen year old schoolgirl holding her hands over her nipples. The paper informed readers that when she was sixteen, they could see the nipples. It does not, of course, purport to tell you a great deal about the news. It’s target audience is apparently working class and lower-middle class men, to whom it offers a cheering up after a horrible day at work with some semi-pornographic pictures, celebrity gossip and humour: the sort of inconsequential shite that one can recite to mates without any controversy (“here, listen to this, Katie Price has gone and had her baps deflated, hur hur hur”). To put it another way, the Daily Star is not a champion of women’s rights.

The paper’s first reaction to Mr Straw’s bogus “veil” controversy was to exclaim: “Get ‘Em Off!” This in a big headline, mark you, in case any passing Muslim women might have missed the instruction from Whitey. Had it not been for action from the NUJ, there would have been a “Daily Fatwah” page devoted to explaining “?How Britain?s fave newspaper would look under Muslim rule”. The spoof headline was to be “Death to all Infidels”, and there would have been a page 3 called “Burqa Babes”. I referred to this kind of fantasy about Muslim women as ‘Veil Fetishism’, but the reality is that it is simply another way in which non-white women are specifically targeted for oppression and, let’s be blunt about it, rape. The newspaper that encouraged readers to crouch over their rags, cock in hand, awaiting the appearance of a sixteen year old girl with her nipples displayed, is not terribly scrupulous about encouraging fantasies about rape, even of minors.

Trade unionists have often been at the forefront of challenging both Islamophobia and sexism. In this case, the NUJ struck a blow against both. If you feel like commending them, contact your MP to support George Galloway’s early day motion, and also send messages of support to the NUJ.

From the radio reports the paper’s lawyers actually cleared the issue for publication and it was only concerted effort by and repeated heated phone calls from the Star’s NUJ chapel that stopped it.

What were the lawyers thinking? The issue might’ve been technically within the law (though I admit I haven’t checked)but morally they hadn’t a leg to stand on. If tht issue had been printed we’d’ve seen riots, and understandably so.

Only white people count

Published on June 6, 2004

For the Republican Party, as
Avedon Carol details:

Not quite real Americans, and not quite real voters, either. So that would explain why it’s okay to do things like, oh, just casually remove millions of them from the voting rolls, as they have in Florida and elsewhere. The continual use of the kind of rhetoric Josh is talking about is certainly meant to suggest to the public that Democrats gain elective office by use of illegitimate votes:

They’re blacks.

They’re redskins. And of course,

They’re criminals.

As Josh points out, it seems like it wouldn’t need saying that if a segment of a party’s constituency were removed from the picture, it would reduce their turn-out and thus their representation. But why belabor this point? Are we supposed to respond by asking whether Republicans could win office if white racists and corporate criminals were eliminated from the picture? Isn’t that the obvious inference?

But I don’t think that’s where they’re going. The right takes for granted that it is racism rather than blackness that is properly “American”.