Video

One more day…

'08/12 Election, Madness of King George, US politics, Video
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Communist fellow travellers sing red propaganda song at Obama inauguration party shock!

My first political memory is of hearing Carter lose the election to Reagan on the radio when I was six. Since then the US has never really had a president you can be proud of. Reagan was a shambling corpse held together by cuecards and tons of makeup, Bush 41 was a charmless CIA bureaucrat who barfed up his dinner in the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Bill Clinton had his charms but no substance, a bit of a clown and finally Bush 43 was a smirking fratboy asshole and a (not so) dry drunk to boot. But Obama just looks good, like a regular human being, not warped by too many years in Washington yet. Bush was hyped as a regular guy you’d like to have a beer with, but Obama actually fits that description and what’s more, you could see him as an actual leader, not just in the White House, but equally well
in a local neighbourhood activist group or something like that. In all the coverage of the election campaign and after, I’ve never seen him look uncomfortable or anything other than himself. He just looks like a proper president.

And yes, appearances aren’t everything, and yes, as a socialist or any sort of leftist he’s sure to disappoint us, he’s not going to get the revolution started, he’s not going to change the system. But dammit, it’s been so long since there actually has been any president who is even capable of disappointing us.

2008 is pissing me off again: Oliver Postgate died

Culture, Kittens!, Video
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As the BBC news puts it:

Bagpuss creator Oliver Postgate has died aged 83, his family has confirmed.

Mr Postgate, who lived in Kent, created some of the best-loved children’s TV series including Ivor the Engine, the Clangers and Noggin the Nog.

His work, screened on the BBC from the 1950s to the 1980s, was often in collaboration with the artist and puppeteer Peter Firmin.

(And why isn’t the BBC showing these programmes anymore when they’re so beloved, hmmm?)

Have some Clangers to cheer you up

And a QI tribute:

Capital, it fails us now

Capitalism, Economy, Life under Capitalism, Video
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This crisis has been a real eye opener, hasn’t it, in that it made visible how much of the world economy was based on credit driven overconsumption, both on a consumer level as in the more rarified air of Wall Street. Ever since “communism” was “defeated” we’ve forgotten how wasteful capitalism is. we’ve been conned into believing there was no alternative, that we could not control its dexstructive tendencies and at best we could hope to only migitate some of its worst excesses, but that ultimately we were locked in a race to the bottom that would however somehow bring us untold riches someday, if we followed the rules of the free market. The fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the death knell for the perverted version of “communism” practised in the USSR, could this recession bring the same for thriumphant capitalism?

Because one thing is certain. We do have the resources, the abibilty and the ingenuity to make everybody in the world rich without destroying the planet and without engaging in the danc eof mutal assured destruction that is free market capitalism. But it would mean the end of the priviledged classes and they’ve never given up their power without struggle. One good suggestion to start the struggle comes from Ian Welsh, on how to stop the obscene bonuses and salaries managers and CEOS have awarded themselves over the years:

The simplest thing is to just count all income equally, tax it all at the same rate, don’t allow deductions beyond a ertain level (50K or so) and tax all income above, say 1 million at 90%, 95% for all income above 5 million. Don’t allow too much income deferral and there you go. Slap on some “in kind” rules for corporations (yes, if your corporation pays for your car, that’s salary) and while there will always be loopholes, you’ll still rein in the worst excesses.

This of course presupposes a government anywhere in the western world on the side of the workers, rather than the rich, which might be a problem…

Last post on the BNP’s troubles (for now)

UK politics, Video, Wingnuts
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The only mashup of Der Untergang worth watching. As funny as it is to see Hitler blowing his top about being banned from Xbox Live or something in that grand tradition of Web 2.0 creativity, there was always a tension between the humour and its vehicle. But Chris Applegate’s re-imagination of him as a BNP supporter shitting himself the neighbours might find out is sheer brilliance. In his own words:

In writing the script (slightly shonkily, I admit), my aim was to portray Hitler as a typical BNP supporter: frustrated, sensing something “is not qute right”, feeling rejected and as an outsider, but without the wit to direct it at anything beyond the “immigrants” bogeymen conjured before their eyes. Believing themselves to be the ordinary man in the street, they are desperate to seek strength (or rather the illusion of strength) to compensate for their weakness. So they fall in with the fascists and become part of their gang. They’re not your skinhead darkie-bashing thug who make up the party hardline, but the ones who stand a few yards back happy to cheer him on while he’s doing it, all the better to drown out their sense of unease and rejection. That’s the aspect of the BNP’s support that’s almost as sad as the ideology they fawn over.

[…]

The entire point of why it’s funny (and slightly shocking) is the contrast between the banality of the subject matter and the gravity of Hitler’s situation. We recognise the man in front of us as Hitler but the comic lines printed beneath it are so far removed they might as well be in on a different planet. Once the real Hitler becomes everyman then the contrast and thus the joke is lost.

On a more serious note, but in the same web 2.0 tradition, Alex has put together a series of post analysing the membership data. First he provided a a graph showing the number of BNP activists per 100 people per region, then he proved that the swamping myth of people turning to the BNP because of being “swamped” with migrants, isn’t true and finally he attempted to relate BNP membership with various other metrics only to find no correlation whatsoever. Alex’s tentative conclusion is that “a gratifyingly small percentage of people are completely fucking stupid and pig-ignorant, that this is normally distributed in the population, and it’s essentially a matter of chance what pig-ignorant fucking stupidity they get up to“. Some people are numpties and some numpties are racist idiots and join the BNP.