That new Greek government seems kinda fascist

Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, fascists
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Mark Ames shows were certain of Greece’s new ministers are coming from:

See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.

With all the propaganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “austerity” government being staffed by non-ideological “technocrats,” it may come as a surprise that fascists are now considered “technocrats” to the mainstream media and Western banking interests. Then again, history shows that fascists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the austerity medicine.

Because the elected Greek government could not be trusted enough to act against it’s population’s interests, the EU has now installed a new “technocratic” government with added fascists. Poetic, really. As Ames also shows, the Greek military meanwhile is bought off with new toys: tanks and warships beause austerity doesn’t mean having to stop buying unnecessary weaponry.

CotD: the benefit of the doubt fallacy

Comment of the Day, Manufacturing consent
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In a Crooked Timber thread on a dumber than usual Russ Douthat column, one commentor calls bullshit on Douthat’s defenders:

It is sweet, though, that virtually every mendacious reactionary hack** given an elevated media platform to spew sophistry all over us lesser folks has a cadre of online defenders. They usually embrace some common themes: suggesting that the blogger in question is engaging in behavior beneath ver by pointing out the latest episode of bullshittery; pulling out scattershot quotations that purport to completely negate the plain reading of everything else in the article; and above all, implicitly or explicity demanding that we evaluate every work sui generis, with no consideration whatsoever of the track record of the author or vis peers. I wonder if someone has made a benefit-of-the-doubt bingo card.

You don’t just see this sort of behaviour in defence of rightwing hacks against their own hackery, but much more dangerously, also is something you see a lot of in the socalled mainstream media. Take the War on Libya for example, which when proposed was quite obviously a clusterfuck waiting to happen for those of us allowed to remember the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, but which for some reason few serious commentators were able to discuss in this context.

BBC self censoring Frozen Planet for the American market?

BBC Bias, Climate change
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Remember back in 2007, when it turned out the Dutch broadcaster which put out David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals had removed all traces of evolution from the series? That at least had been done behind the BBC’s back, without their or Attenborough’s consent. Not so for Attenborough’s latest series, Frozen Planet, where the BBC allegedly has started to self censor by selling it abroad without the episode on climate change:

British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man.

However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes.

The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore.

[…]

Over 30 networks across the world have bought the series but a third of them have rejected the choice of the additional two episodes, including the one on climate change.

[…]

Viewers in the United States, where climate change sceptics are particularly strong group, will not see the full episode.

Instead, the BBC said that Discovery, which shows the series in the US, had a “scheduling issue so only had slots for six episodes”, so “elements” of the climate change episode would be incorporated into their final show, with editorial assistance from the Corporation.

Shocking though not surprising to see such cowardice from the BBC. Money is again more important than truth.

Don’t Kubeba!

Africa, Election Skullduggery
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Zambia had elections recently, in which the ruling party, having been in office since independence more or less, was trounced by the opposition, who used a novel way to deal with bribery by telling their supporters to take the bribes but still vote for them, just don’t tell anybody:

Certain things are ubiquitous during elections, and often the most evocative of the mood are party slogans. One slogan more than any other has dominated Zambia’s 2011 elections, the PF’s ‘Don’t Kubeba!’, or ‘Don’t Tell!’. It lies at the heart of the PF’s seemingly successful campaign to negate the benefits of incumbency enjoyed by the MMD. It appeared on posters, on the lips of cadres and at rallies. Dandy Krazy’s ‘Donch Kubeba’ [J1] (with appropriate shushing dance move) has been one of the most popular tunes heard out and about during the last two months. In essence, it encouraged voters to take the chitenge, maize meal, oil, or even bribes offered by the government, even attend the rallies, but not feel they couldn’t vote against them anyway. As a way of upholding the secrecy of the ballot, and running a campaign against an opponent with resources far in excess of your own, it is a risky, but clever strategy. Indeed, the EU Observer Mission stated that unequal access to resources meant a “level playing field” was distinctly lacking during campaigning. Despite this, it appears “Dont Kubeba!” paid off.

Clever.

The Great Law ‘N Order Swindle

Abortion, UK elections
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At Blood & Treasure they’re discussing Nadine Dorris latest attempt to force her own socalled morality on England and how the economic realities the coalition is enforcing on the country actually makes abortions more likely than less, despite Nadine’s best efforts. Justin hits the nail on the head on why this failure won’t deter people like Dorris from promoting more and more draconic measures:

From one point of view though, it’d work, because an quantifiable increase in the number of abortions would mean the policy wasn’t tough enough and would need to be toughened further. And round and round it goes.

I’m not being particularly cynical: that’s the way in which law ‘n’ order policy had been shaped over the past thirty years or so, in the US even more than the UK, and it shows no signs of failing to work (in the sense of losing votes, or discouraging its adherents) just as it shows no signs of actually working.

Now if we bear in mind that economic policy is increasingly a branch of law ‘n’ order policy – simply a matter of personal fault and personal failure – then we can see how little the question of rationality has to come into it. All you have to do is hit the bad guys. And if it doesn’t get results, then so much the better – hit them harder. Because we know who they are.

Both Labour and the Tories have always imported political ideas from America, but this wholesale adopting of hard right practises, following the GOP playbook of riling up the base and distracting the opposition with social issues while ramming through neoliberal policies is new, isn’t it?

As Justin argues, the beauty of pushing these sort of policies in the current political climate is that they can never fail, only be failed. If your hardline approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough, not because the policy itself was wrong.