Anonymous cowards smear Tim Ireland’s children. Could Nadine Dorris get them to stop it?

Tories, Wingnuts
Published on

For more than a year now Tim Ireland has been subjected to an ongoing if sporadic internet harassement campaign, after he had gotten into conflict with several online Tory bigwigs. The party of Churchill being the natural home of the coward and bullyboy, it’s no surprise that some of the internet hard men and women tried to smear him, spreading false rumours about him being a stalker or a paedophile and fabricating all other sorts of accusations which could’ve turned very nasty if taken serious by the wrong parties. It’s not too long ago a tabloid-fed mob burned down a paediatrician‘s house after all… It all may seem fun and games until somebody loses an eye and it doesn’t get better when certain Tory MPs are, if not involved perse, at least seemingly condone this behaviour.

Recently things took a turn for the worse: now his children are smeared too:

…Recently, someone involved in this ongoing campaign of harassment began publishing material targeting my wife, my children, and other members of my extended family.

This has included false accusations aimed at my kids, making specific allegations of criminal behaviour that are not only entirely untrue, but extremely damaging (and, it must be said, upsetting).

It’s not yet known who’s behind these allegations, but one person who should be wondering how this reflects on her is Nadine Dorris MP, who has history with Ireland:

A damaging role has also been played by Nadine Dorries MP, whom Tim has attacked and satirised on numerous occasions. As as I blogged in May, Dorries retaliated by seeking to portray a mocking Tweet as some kind of death threat, and when she later closed down her blog she claimed that she had been advised to do so following the stabbing of Stephen Tims MP – the implication being that she was in physical fear of Tim. This was despite the fact that she had closed her blog down a week before Tims had been stabbed.

Far be it from me to allege she’s behind these smears, but as somebody who has at the very least encouraged such irresponsible and cowardly behaviour, she should now do her part to reign this in — before itnernet grandstanding leads to real life tragedy.

Nobody knew? No, nobodies knew about the dangers of Iraq

Anti-war, Madness of King George, Manufacturing consent, War on Iraq
Published on

Last Tuesday Glenn Greenwald was right to call out the Washington media on the stupidity of excusing their cheerleading for the War on Iraq seven years ago with the idea that “nobody knew” it would be like this:

I could literally spend the rest of the day quoting those who were issuing similar or even more strident warnings. Anyone who claims they didn’t realize that an attack on Iraq could spawn mammoth civilian casualties, pervasive displacement, endless occupation and intense anti-American hatred is indicting themselves more powerfully than it’s possible for anyone else to do. And anyone who claims, as Burns did, that they “could not know then” that these things might very well happen is simply not telling the truth. They could have known. And should have known. They chose not to.

While Avedon Carol is also right to notice that he had missed one particular high profile politician who had been arguing against the invasion from the start, somebody who should have been taken serious but wasn’t, because, well:

Oddly, Glennzilla does not mention in his list of people who predicted disaster if we invaded Iraq one of the foremost voices who was inexplicably dismissed and derided by the entire press corps, presumably because the man we had elected to be President of the United States is fat.

What both miss however is something much more important: “nobody knew” inside the Washington Beltway what a disaster the War on Iraq would become, but outside it, “nobodies knew” it was a bad idea from the start. At least fifteen million people worldwide demonstrated against the war back on the 15 Februari 2003, with the largest demonstration ever held taking place in London that day and huge demonstrations all over America and Europe, smaller ones in Africa and Asia and South America and Australia and even one in Antarctica (!)

All us little people outside of the loop and not professionally blind to the idea that invading a country on spurious grounds is in itself a bad idea were perfectly aware the War on Iraq was going to be a disaster. We knew that the best we could hope for was a repeat of the first American-Iraqi Gulf War, a US blitzkrieg that would once again kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians and deliver the final blow to an infrastructure that was never allowed to recover from the first war. Literally no one I spoke to during the runup to the war — family, friends, coworkers, passing strangers — no matter their political allegiance thought it was a good idea. And while the serious people would later grudgingly accept that we were right, they’ve never given us credit for it, prefering to think our opposition was just an emotional reflex rather than a reasoned position…

America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere

Life under Capitalism
Published on

Says Paul Krugman, as all our seventies doom science fiction dreams and fears seem to come alive in the New Great Depression:

jump you fuckers

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

[…]

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

Bad enough, but much worse is the fact that almost every European government seems bound to walk the same road. We’ve got Greece that on the one hand can’t be bothered to collect the taxes of the people who own all those nice villas just outside Athens, can pay off the banks to not collapse, but now has to pay for it by squeezing ordinary workers hard. Germany meanwhile is putting its nose in the air at Greece’s profligacy but is still planning to put the screws on its workers too. We all know already what the ConDem(med) coalition wants to do to the UK even if Cameron is still vain enough not to want to be milk snatcher 2.0, while the most likely coalition in the Netherlands is not so much divided on whether or not eighteen billion euros in spending cuts are needed now, but on where to cut…

A spirit is haunting Europe and it’s the spirit of undead neoliberalism, the last gasp of the freemarket fuckers, using this crisis to once again help themselves and their banker friends to our money.

QotD: The fringe was right on Afghanistan

War on Afghanistan
Published on

On the second to last day of the Dutch “mission” in Afghanistan, there is no more appropriate quote than this gem by Nick Mamatas:

Now, six, seven, eight years later, all one can do is take this as an admission that indeed, the far left was right in categorically opposing the invasion of Afghanistan, was right in categorically opposing the invasion of Iraq, was right about WMDs, “catching Osama”, the possibility of creating a stable Middle East or Central Asia powerbase, was right about virtually everything we claimed was going to happen in the wake of 9/11, and that all the Democrats who voted for war were wrong, all the people who voted for Kerry under his “you break it, you bought it” conception of imperial politics were wrong, and everyone who voted for Obama because he was against the “bad war” (Iraq) and in favor of the “good war” (Afghanistan) were wrong. Those kooky fringe people who waved the wrong kind of signs and booed Howard Dean and didn’t even argue “sanctions, not war” (i.e., slow starvation, not fast bombs) were absolutely right.

In Holland those “kooky fringe people”, even in 2001 numbered in the tens of thousands during the first demonstrations against the war as millions more people, ordinary people saw through the lies and excuses from the start. In the end, it did not matter much how we thought about it, or how much we opposed this war and the war on Iraq: our leaders had decided that those wars should be fought and our permission was not needed nor much wanted.