The Cheek Of It!

A revolution without dancing or pretty underwear is a revolution not worth having, if you ask me; especially when said nice pants cock a snook at the same time. Via Andy Worthington:

…With exquisite timing, lingerie darlings Agent Provocateur unveil their latest product, a pair of Guantánamo orange knickers emblazoned with the message “Fair Trial My Arse.”

Conceived after consultation with Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, the project arose after the farcical Case of the Contraband Underpants last August, when Clive Stafford Smith and Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve were accused of smuggling underwear into Guantánamo for two of their clients, Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident and Chadian national, who was just 15 years old when he was picked up in a random raid on a mosque in Pakistan, and British resident Shaker Aamer, a long-term hunger striker, who has been held in solitary confinement at Guantánamo for two and a half years.

More…

I can’t believe I didn’t notice those knickers (though maybe knickers is slightly too robust a word for something quite so diaphanous) back in February; my antenna for political luxury lingerie is usually quite acute.

That said, I doubt anyone who buys them will wear them; the associations aren’t exactly erotic. Not unless your name’s Mosley.

Gone Native?

I know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but fine words butter no parsnips…

I’ve always admired Shami Chakrabarti, but it can’t just be me who’s noticed how soft the Liberty director seems to have become towards the Metropolitan police and other anti-terror types recently.

Although she’s never been a firebrand,

Chakrabarti takes pride in having converted Liberty from a “Labour front” into a respected, politically independent organisation that is equally critical of government and opposition. She is now also a governor of both the British Film Institute and the London School of Economics.

Recently she’s become positively emollient, honey and fine words, and lots of the best butter too.

Take this morning’s discussion on the Today programme with a senior Metropolitan Police officer and Blue Peter’s Olympic torch carrier Konnie Huq about yesterday’s anti-China demonstrations for example; Chakrabarti positively glowed with effusive praise for the Met and the wonderful job they do.

Although she did bring up the general point that the police’s job yesterday was to ensure public safety generally, not play security detail for the Chinese government, Chakrabarti seemed unwilling to even discuss larger issues about the police’s direct silencing of dissent at the protests, though she had much to say for the Met’s skill at ‘facilitating demonstrations’. Yes, the Met are successful, at least in the sense of coralling crowds of us plebs safely:

12.30pm Bloomsbury Square

Thousands of protesters are corraled into a “protest area” penned by security fences. One woman says she is told to place her banners in plastic bags after police judged them to be inflammatory. The torch and its security staff retrace their steps and climb on to a bus to be driven 200 metres to get past protesters, before re-emerging in front of crowds waving Chinese flags.

Safety is being increasingly defined in political terms by officers on the ground. Yesterday police ordered pro-Tibet protestors to remove anti-China t-shirts; arbitrarily labelled groups of people as ‘protestors’ or ‘celebrants’ and restricted them accordingly; and allowed a team of China’s security goons to physically intimidate and bully protestors, participants and runners alike, even to the point of skirmishing with Met officers themselves.

Chakrabarti was asked by the presenter whether banning t-shirts and banners like this was acceptable. Surely the director of an organisation dedicated to upholding civil liberties and the right to dissent would start from the premise that it wasn’t?

But no – instead she said that it depended on the T-shirt and its tendency to incite violence – in effect agreeing that yes, the silencing of dissent by police officers is acceptable.

The people who make the judgement whether a slogan or image on a t-shirt has a tendency to incite violence – which certainly seems like a political decision to me – are the police, and it’s fine and dandy with Liberty now for if the Met police the slogans on T-shirts according to their personal political perceptions. Shami just said so.

As I said earlier I was already wondering whether Chakrabarti (who was formerly a Home Office lawyer) had finally succumbed to the lure of the media spotlight – always a danger for young, photogenic female lobbyists – and the discreet charm of cosy Establishmentism. Has she finally reverted to Westminster type?

I was and still am prepared to be convinced otherwise, despite her acceptance of a CBE, but one sentence of hers this morning tends to demolish any lingering hope I might have had of her ever truly standing up to the police or government.

When the director of the nation’s foremost civil liberties pressure group pointedly refers to senior policemen in public as “My colleague” they’ve definitely gone native.

Much as I admire her let’s face it, despite seemingly being everywhere in the media and picking up a gong and honorary doctorates galore, Chakrabarti hasn’t had an enormous amount of actual success in opposing New Labour’s draconian laws, or against rendition or torture or the repeal of habeas corpus, has she?

Yes, she’s telegenic and articulate; yes, she’s scarily clever and very committed; and yes, she’s very nice and a role model for other young women. But the fact that she is so popular with the public and Establishment alike should tell us something; that, rather than a campaigning non-partisan political pressure group, Liberty is in danger of becoming the Shami Show.

A civil liberties pressure group should be a thorn in the side of the Establishment, not a cosy colleague: courtesy is one thing, capitulation is another. Civil liberties are about more than the cult of personality. Maybe it’s time for a change.

So You Think Hillary Will Be A Secular President Who’ll Kick Out The Fundies?

Think again:

Hillary Clinton: I believe in the father, son, and Holy Spirit, and I have felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions in my years on this earth.

Reporter: Can I ask you theologically, do you believe that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened, that it actually historically did happen?

Senator Clinton: Yes, I do.

Reporter: And, do you believe on the salvation issue — and this is controversial too — that belief in Christ is needed for going to heaven?

Senator Clinton: That one I’m a little more open to. I think that it is, as we understand our relationship to God as Christians, it is how we see our way forward, and it is the way. But, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve asked every Sunday school teacher I’ve ever had, I asked every theologian I’ve ever talked with, whether that meant that there was no salvation, there was no heaven for people who did not accept Christ. And, you’re well aware that there are a lot of answers to that. There are people who are totally rooted in the fact that, no, that’s why there are missionaries, that’s why you have to try to convert. And, then there are a lot of other people who are deeply faithful and deeply Christ-centered who say, that’s how we understand it and who are we to read God’s mind about such a weighty decision as that.

Reporter: And your attitude toward the Bible about how literally people should take it.

Senator Clinton: I think the whole Bible is real. The whole Bible gives you a glimpse of God and God’s desire for a personal relationship, but we can’t possibly understand every way God is communicating with us. I’ve always felt that people who try to shoehorn in their cultural and social understandings of the time into the Bible might be actually missing the larger point that we’re supposed to take from the Bible.

Full transcript… Audio…

Via Pharyngula

Comment of The Day – Pickles For Prez!

ElsafromIndy commenting at the Guardian makes a incidental yet frightening point that should make American voters quake in their boots:

Hillary rode into the US Senate on the coat tails of her husband. She is no feminist although she likes to talk the talk. Her “experience” is just more lies and distortions.

What this means is Laura Bush can come striding out claiming experience to be the next president as well. What can of worms has Hillary opened by her false claims of experience?

Well, quite.

The problem with the Evita syndrome is that the succeeding spouse need not have any real talent or solid political achievement behind her or him to aspire to high office. The media sycophancy and special treatment they’ve had as VIP partners is sufficient to convince them that they are indeed special, important, powerful, the potential saviours of their country and planet.

Who knows who’ll stand next?

Pickles For Prez! Cherie for Chequers! They could sell them to the electorate as The Good Bush and Blair. Why the hell not? It works for Hillary.

Oh Deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer

This has to be parody, because surely nobody can be so up themselves and live.

From the Albany Times Union arts pages:

Accidental human
C. Ryder Cooley pushes notions of life through music, art, trapeze acts

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer

I should’ve stopped when I saw the word trapeze, but no i had to go and read the whole thing. Bigger fool me.

There’s plenty of people who take themselves and their silly artistic affectations seriously, but not many do so as assiduously as does wannabe multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley. And when a wannabe multimedia artist meets a journalist willing to take them at their own self-inflated valuation, well then there’s disaster in the making.

Multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley thinks she has had better incarnations. But she’s trying to make the best of this one.

“I started working with animal themes probably before I was born,” said Cooley. “I think I just was an animal. Somehow I accidentally turned into a human, and I’m trying to get back to my animal.”

[…]

For the past few months, she’s been working on her thesis performance, titled “Animalia: Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure,” which will include elements of video projection, aerial performance and the accordian.

Call it an interspecies fairy tale.

Call it what you like, but how’s it going to play in Peoria?

“I like looking at animals for evidence of different structures of living,” said Cooley.

Don’t we all? Personally, I’d love to be a squid, but I can’t see me making a living decking myself in bits of rubber hose and a bodystocking and flying through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring notsosyoung blogger on the flying trapeze, just to make the point that water’s wet and squid live in it and humans don’t.

With her earth-toned clothing, childlike voice and haunted eyes, Cooley looks more like someone out of a storybook than someone likely to be standing right in front of you. She looks out of place in the 21st century. Or maybe it’s that she looks out of place as a homo sapien.

Or maybe she looks like someone you’d take a running punch at… but no, that would be animal cruelty.

Interspecies deer

Most people who have seen Cooley perform locally associate her with a deer, as she is often seen wearing antlers or a cut deer head strapped to her back.

The deer, she says, is her “East Coast animal,” a creature she began feeling an affinity for shortly after she moved from San Francisco to the Capital Region.

I wonder what her West Coast animal is..?

“The deer heads I have are trophies that were killed by hunters. By putting them on my body, I can bring them back to life and be their body for them,” she said. “And there’s a certain perceived gender to wearing antlers. I become a cross-gender, interspecies deer.”

No, sweetie, you become an overeducated, underdisciplined, spoiled western madam with a stinking deer carcase on her back and outstanding gender issues.

It’s that reinterpretation of the gendering of animals that appeals to Cooley.

“How people deal with gender in animals is even more intense than how they deal with it in humans,” she said. “It’s hard to find research of animals that isn’t based on hetero-normative mating behavior.” In other words, even nonhuman animals are not as set into their gender roles as humans want to make them out to be.

Oh, Cooley, Cooley, Cooley. It’s not illegal to have a fetish you know. What should be illegal is you boring others silly dressing it up a fetish as art and worse still, using an accordion and a trapeze to do it.

Just go buy a Furry deer outfit and get yourself to a Con. Free your antlers, and your ass will follow.

Then go back to campus, get your faunsuit on and have sex with your roommate. You know that’s what you really want.

Much more about Cooley’s deer carcase/accordion/trapeze masterwork here, if you can stand it.