Wingnuts

Neocon hubris still causing trouble years later.

Anti-war, US politics, Wingnuts
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redrawn map of the Middle East at the height of neocon illusions

Remember the above map? It was drawn up by Infinite Star Armchair general Ralph “Blood ‘N Guts” Peters back in 2006 in the last flourish of neocon thriumphalism as the way to create a “better Middle East”. The idea apparantly being that since these borders were drawn up almost a century ago by a bunch of European imperialists and have caused a lot of trouble since, what better way to end this trouble by letting another bunch of imperialists, American this time, draw up another set of borders according to their prejudice and idee-fixes, because that worked out so well last time. Also, to stop ethnic cleansing by pre-emptively ethnic cleanse these countries. At the time it seemed like a joke, if a sick one made palatable by the idea that Peters is such a loon he would be too over the top even for Dr Strangelove.

Guess what? The joke’s on us:

NEW YORK: A redrawn map of South Asia showing a truncated Pakistan, reduced to an elongated sliver of land, has sparked fear among military planners in Islamabad who think India and Afghanistan are “colluding” to destroy the only nuclear powered-Muslim nation with the US help, a media report said on Sunday.

The map, first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles, has fueled a belief among Pakistanis that what the United States really wants is the breakup of their country, the New York Times reported.

Pakistani people have reason to be paranoid about the USA’s intentions for their country, considering their mutual history, which includes enthusiastic American support for succesive Pakistani dictators, CIA backed meddling in Afghanistan during the eighties which helped destabilise Pakistan as well, not tomention the recent American airstrikes on Pakistan itself. It may look absurd now, but an invasion of Iraq looked absurd too back in the nineties. That Obama will be president in January is no guarantee: Democrats are just as prone to stupid foreign policies: even Carter supported Somoza.

Found via Randy McDonald.

More on that BNP list

Funny, UK politics, Wingnuts
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Hands up if you feel your human rights threatened

I can understand why various “respectable” socialists blogs have done no more than gloat about the leaking of the BNP membership list and been careful to caution their readers not to draw conclusions or act against the people on the list, but I’m still glad others have been less careful. The list has now been bitttorrented and can be found at the Piratebay and Mininova, but more impressive is the very web 2.0 BNP proximity search. Enter your postcode and see if there’s a BNP member living near you…

We shouldn’t shed too many crocodile tears about this leakage by the way. These are people who have not just decided to vote for a racist party, which can –barely– be excused as protest voting, but are so hardened in their racism as to join the BNP. These people are not just a theoretical danger: they act on their odious policies and the BNP has always had ties to fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18. If you’re Black or Asian or gay or in some other way a target of the BNP, this list is a godsend, as it can help you avoid these people. Thanks to whoever leaked this lists these fascists can no longer hide themselves. And they’re very upset about it, as this commen thread on Northwest Nationalists shows.

Schadenfreude, part 3: BNP edition

Funny, IT is not magic pixie dust, UK politics, Wingnuts
Published on 1 Comment on Schadenfreude, part 3: BNP edition

Via Lancaster Unity: entire membership of the BNP online:

Not only does the data, now available online, include the entire membership list with full names (and former names where there have been changes for any reason), addresses, contact numbers, email addresses and in many cases the member’s age, particularly where those members are under eighteen. Yes, that’s right. This list includes members as young as fourteen, male and female. Where a family membership is bought and paid for, the whole family is listed.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the notes that are attached to many of the entries leave a lot of the members open to difficulties in their jobs, some of them being in the armed forces or the police and the BNP too – an illegal combination, and where not illegal, frequently frowned upon. Other members are noted as construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, police officers, company directors and teachers among many others.

Like this wasn’t enough, the BNP has also listed hobbies or interests where for some reason they are deemed relevant. Thus we have short-wave radio hams, amateur historians, pagans, line-dancers and even a witch (male).

Whoops.

As Lancaster Unity says, there are “strict limitations” on what you can say about this in the UK, so they don’t link to the list directly, but for anybody with a modicum of Google skills it can be easily found…

UPDATE. You know the best thing about this? The BNP and/or allied organisations have for years been spying on and outing British leftists on their R*dw*tch site, which in the past has led people to be beaten up because they were featured on it. It must be karma that this is now happening to themselves. Of course, despite the BNP always wanting to play the persecuted victims, the likelyhood of BNP members being beaten up because they appeared on this list is small. But I think a lot of people in sensitive positions will have some explaining to do.

Way to ruin our fun, Alex

US politics, Wingnuts
Published on 1 Comment on Way to ruin our fun, Alex

Alex is a big partypooper and interrupts our previously scheduled gloating with a serious post about poverty and why feeling schadenfreude at the misery of even such an obvious dickhead as Du Toit is wrong:

The whole point of everything from some way to the right of centre – Bismarck or thereabouts – leftwards is that IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good christian, a loyal subject, a committed rebel, if you work harder, if you’re especially competent. Even if you’re rich; European history is littered with the monuments of elites who thought they could buy their way out at the last. We survive if everyone else does.

Poverty and misfortune are not, generally, held up by individuals’ decisions; they roll over the landscape, driven by shifts in huge statistical aggregates and channeled by tiny ripples of random chance, just as a flood begins with a rise in average rainfall and ruins one street that’s six inches closer to the water. When you think that so-and-so went bust because of their own immorality, and therefore they join the undeserving poor, you’re signing on with the other side. They will tell you that the system is entirely OK; it’s the ones who failed it who are the problem. They didn’t believe in it enough.

As per usual, Alex’s got a point. In our defense I would like to argue though that we’re not laughing at Du Toit’s misery so much as at the large disconnect between his actions and his beliefs. An internet hard man who ranted about “the pussification of the American male” but who confused talking the talk with walking the walk. Being kind to him won’t change his philosophy or make him understand what Alex is saying here. In his head he will always believe that because he has the right kind of politics the world owes him a living, that while he is struggling heroically to feed his family everybody else in the same situation as him is just lazy and deserves to be poor.

In this he apes his own leaders, the people who’ve been using him and millions more like him, but less high profile. Every wannabe Mad Max sitting in the Monday morning traffic jam listening to Limbaugh, every twentyseven percenter still believing in Bush, every third rate wingnut calling for a leper list of Republicans who were mean to Sarah Palin, all of them had been willing tools of a small elite of cynical manipulators who used them to plunder the country. All of them believed that they themselves were part of that elite, were equal to the Roves and Bushes and Limbaughs and all of them got a rude awakening this past month. First the credit crunch metastatised, then their next big hero, Palin, failed to win the elections for McCain and suddenly the real powerbrokers abandonded them.

What happened to Du Toit and his family is what’s been happening to faithful Republicans and wingnuts all over America. Only a few years ago he was a hero of the blogosphere, riding high while Bush stole another election, part of a seemingly unstoppable coservative movement that would rule America for ever. Now? Just another smalltime loser thrown to the wolves.

Which, as we have seen before, is a dangerous development. One of the biggest challenges the American left, from the centrist part of the Democratic power taking power next january all to the tiny “lunatic fringe” of real socialists that still exists faces in the next four to eight years is how to face the anger and hurt of these millions of “useful idiots” now abandonded by the movement that created them. We desperately need a new, broad leftwing movement that takes the anger and hatred of these people and channels it towards targets deserving of this anger, rather than let if fall into the familiar ruts of xenophobia and resentment of blue America.