Race – Page 15 – Prog Gold

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.

Magical Negroes and Visiting Blondes

Published on January 6, 2007

For movie lovers heartily sick of the sight and sound of bloody Renee bloody Zellweger and her breathy brand of self-centered cultural bloody imperialism, this is my comment thread of the week.

When I read this Joe Queenan article on the movie Blood Diamond I had a feeling Steve Gilliard would have something to say about it and he certainly did.

The comments thread to his post turned into one of the most interesting cultural discussions I’ve read in a while ; not only well-informed and written but wide-ranging, civil and virtually troll-free. Here’s a snip:

“Subtly brainwashing?” Nothing subtle about it. But it is also true that as someone pointed out above there is a strong tendency in *all* american films and sit coms as well to americanize, masculinlize, white-ize and “familiarize” characters and settings as though the universal viewer they are aiming for is a single, fat, white, suburban guy who has never gotten out of his barcalounger to even peek out the window. They moved the g-dMN “Little Princess” to New York, for g-d’s sake, because, what, London wasn’t both exotic and homey enough?

But no one has brought up the “tragic mulatto” motif which bleeds nicely into the MLK motif in which the main non white character *never reaches the promised land* so the remaining “real” white characters can grieve and move on. That might be bagger vance, which I couldn’t stop gagging enough to even try to buy a ticket for. Isn’t “the green mile?” another one of these. In addition to black-guy-as-buddha we’ve always had a rash of “cute black kids in white families” and, of course, “cute midgets playing black kids in white families” and, of course, saintly retarded people revealing meaning of life to harried white guys in hospitals who are forced to rethink their priorities when they meet saintly retarded or black people.

So I think the ideal message movie would be white guy/woman comes to teach at a school entirely composed of midget, retarded, black kids and whips them into a basketball team of surprising strength that comes together and beats the nazis before expiring and leaving behind no trace of their victory but the white characters looking longingly at the trophy.

aimai

Mem to Hollywood: in addition, please, no more mining our British childhood heritage for star-vehicle biopics or safe Christmas blockbusters. CS Lewis, Virginia Woolf… what’s next, Johnny Depp does Postman Pat? George Clooney as Roald Dahl?

Oohh, I know, Paris Hilton as Princess Diana….

Read more: Films, Movies, Hollywood, Race, Culture

The Gaping Wound

Published on December 14, 2006

Zimbabwe is Britain’s dirty not-so-secret; its people’s current terrible plight is the end result of our imperial endeavours in East Africa. British rule consisted essentially of our exporting the then Rhodesia‘s wealth back home to Blighty via a colonial administration that worked hand-in-hand with the nation’s white landowners (though nation is a misnomer, since we drew the border. Ditto the rules on land ownership.).

Cutting a very long story short, British colonial rule culminated in the eventual election of President Robert Mugabe, probably the only time the man has actually had a shred of political legitimacy. Mugabe is now well on the way to making himself President for Life, the better to finish the job of utterly destroying his fellow citizens.

How bad is it in Zimbabwe now? Could it get any worse, after the mad schemes of Mugabe, the torture and the murder and the AIDS and the home bulldozings and a life expectancy of 34?

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings found out how bad it is for women when her eye was caught by an article on sanitary towels:

“SHE has been arrested 22 times, tortured so badly that her front teeth were knocked into her nose and had an AK-47 thrust up her vagina until she bled. Thabitha Khumalo’s crime: to campaign against a critical shortage of tampons and sanitary towels in Zimbabwe, one of the least talked about and most severe side-effects for women of the country’s economic crisis. (…)

So desperate is the situation that women are being forced to use rolled-up pieces of newspaper. Zimbabwe already has the world’s lowest life expectancy for women ‘ 34 ‘ and Khumalo believes these unhygienic practices could make it drop to as low as 20 because infections will make them more vulnerable to HIV. ‘It’s a time bomb,’ she said. The shortage is forcing schoolgirls to stay at home when they start menstruating.

The Zimbabwean TUC has been trying to help by importing sanitary products to distribute free:

This, I suppose, is why the latest consignment has been seized by the police and the Central Intelligence Organization, rather than by the customs officials. Opinions about the Zimbabwean government’s motives vary: opposition to the ZCTU, general mean-spiritedness, what have you. For my part, I have never found it very worthwhile to ascribe any coherent motivation at all to the people who run Zimbabwe. Your mileage may vary.

It’s a shocking article, but if you’re male and see the words ‘sanitary towels’ and think it’ll be boring women’s stuff, don’t skip it (and the very illuminating comments) because it isn’t. This is about how, as Hilzoy puts it:

…there are so many different ways in which people who are desperately poor get screwed; ways I had never ever thought of.

Quite.

Read more: Women, Periods, Menstruation, Zimbabwe, Mugabe, Poverty, Unions

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.

But Some Are More Equal

Published on June 30, 2006

Watertiger :

Oh yeah. That’s punishment

fitting the crime:

A New Orleans judge sentenced three people who looted liquor from a grocery store after Hurrican Katrina to 15 years in prison, saying he wanted to send a message.

and yet:

Two men each have been sentenced to a year in prison, a $5,000 fine and two years of supervised release in a Hurricane Katrina fraud case, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said.

I’m not even going to speculate on the skin color of the people involved. That would be irresponsible, no?

more here.