wingnuts

Ten years of Eschaton and all I got were these lousy wankers

US politics, wingnuts
Published on 1 Comment on Ten years of Eschaton and all I got were these lousy wankers

Time flies when you’re having fun: Eschaton is ten years old today. I must’ve been one of the first people to put Atrios on the blogroll back then, having barely been blogging for a month myself; no idea how I even found him — probably via Avedon? Back then the closest thing to a liberal (let alone leftwing) voice in the American blogosphere was Andy Sullivan, he who accused the “liberal elites in their coastal enclaves” of treason while the bodies were still falling out of the WTC. The only real progressive bloggers were people like Avedon and other science fiction fans, small voices lost in a wilderness of howling rightwing insanity.

And then came Atrios and he quickly became a focal point for all those people disgusted with these wingnuts and warbloggers, inspiring quite a few others to start blogging while, certainly in these first critical years, he himself was also very good at promoting new, interesting bloggers. For better or worse, he was crucial in the establishment of the liberal blogosphere, in providing pushback against the insanity of both the warbloggers and the wankers in the socalled professional press.

To celebrate, he has put together a list of the Ten Greatest Wankers of the Decade, a veritable treasure trove of assholes and douchecopters:

Some are more active these days than other, many other worthwhile candidates were skipped (where are Glenn Reynolds or Anne Coulter?), but this parade of horrors is still a sadly accurate view of a decade that’s been more bad than good.

Keep feeling vaccination

sciencebollocks, wingnuts
Published on 2 Comments on Keep feeling vaccination

As the number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children grows in the US, so does the number of pediatricians who refuse to treat them. Over at the inevitable comment thread at Metafilter, one pediatrician explains the realities of vaccination and the risk your children run if they’re not vaccinated:

Sometimes I work with families for whom the reality of the morbidity and mortality of these diseases is extremely limited. In my education, I do focus on morbidity because families will not hear that they are putting their children at risk to die. The injuries from these diseases are often more concrete, even minor injuries like the significant scarring of varicella, or persistent airway disease from pertussis. Refusing MMR exposes male children to infertility risk, all children to acquired heart defects. Refusing HiB, even if your child does not die from meningitis, will surely result in acquired neurological, cognitive, vascular, and extremity injury once heroic efforts have saved the child from meningitis death. In the case of HiB, many currently practicing providers lived through the complete horror of internship and residency in children’s hospitals’ meningitis wards where babies were dying all around them that could not be saved. My current attending talks about the weeks when HiB vaccine was, then, introduced and the wards closed up, one by one. And he gets freaking teary-eyed about it, even now. Refusing pneumococcal vaccines like Prevnar opens all of us up for more of the same–the current Prevnar 13, for example, covers for 48% of invasive meningitis.

Families do not believe they are accountable to their own children–that they answer for their scars and acquired disabilities. But they do. Injury from actual vaccine is an incredibly small and fully reported risk. Any parent can go to the CDC site, at any time, and monitor vaccine injury. But the risk of acquiring a preventable childhood disease by refusing to vaccinate is nearly certain in that child’s lifetime. It’s as if a family made the decision to let their infant lay across the backseat, unbuckled, without a carseat, because they decided they would simply just drive very carefully.

My sympathies all lie with the doctors, though I can spare some pity for those parents who, genuinely wanting the best for their children, are taken in by one of the bullshit merchants preying on their fears and insecurities, their greed masqueraded as concern. But vaccination is not new, not controversial and has been used for a long long time, has slain some of the greatest childhood killers: smallpox is gone completely, polio almost, measles in rich countries is an inconvenient childhood disease, nothing to be worried about. That very same success ironically now makes continuing vaccination programmes vulnerable to indifference as parents wonder what the point is, if these disease are gone or under control. But they are still necessary and not vaccinating doesn’t only put your own child at risk, but other people’s children too…

Those who forget their past are doomed to bullshit endlessly about it

Decentists and other ex-lefties, War on Terror, wingnuts
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Stormie Normie Geras is one of the last of the Decent Left deadenders, still a true believer in The War Against Terror. It’s a given that when presented with an article in The Guardian calling for spending cuts in the ministry of defence he’ll won’t be totally honest in his refutation, shall we say? Misrepresenting and misreading it in the worst possible way is all very much to be expected here, but what struck me was how good Normie is at not remembering recent history when it’s inconvenient to his arguments:

Do not do anything like invading Afghanistan again. Or, as he puts it, ‘Are we, pliant planters of the Nato flag anywhere in the world the Pentagon prescribes, going to get involved in another Iraq – or, worse, another Afghanistan? Of course not, says bitter experience.’ So, were Britain ever to be on the receiving end of a 9/11-type of attack, prepared from a country hosting an organization dedicated to carrying out such attacks against it, and resulting in the deaths of thousands of people in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh or some other British city, the government of the day should just ‘pass’ on the idea of a military response.

What actually happened was that the UK invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and then the “9/11-type of attack” took place, with the people responsible explicitely stating that it was these invasions that motivated them. Something war supporters like him having been trying to wish away ever since, but the truth remains that invading “a country hosting an organization dedicated to carrying out such attacks” did not make Britain safer but instead made it a target for people who before these invasions had no reason to attack Britain. Note also that the UK never found it necessary to invade the Irish Republic to end IRA terrorism or attack the main source of its funding, a certain terrorist loving country called America…

From Wilders’ mouth to Breivik’s ears

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, wingnuts
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I’m with Ken MacLeod

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. It has now led to a massacre of the children of the one of the most moderate labour movements in the world.

Two things have to come out of this: first, the mainstream left and labour movements have to take seriously security and self-defence; second, the mainstream right must be made to pay a heavy political price for this atrocity.

In a Dutch context this means that we need to be honest about Geert Wilders and his responsibility for Breivik’s actions and what this means for our political system. Wilders isn’t the only one who has been banging the drum about the Muslim menace and Eurabia and treasonous leftwing multicultural elites, but he is the most influential mainstream European politician to have done so. Wilders is unique in Europe because he has managed to get his programme into the mainstream of Dutch politics, with the current minority Christian Democrat/neoliberal government being dependent on his support to survive, hence not inclined to oppose him, if not quite actively supportive of his politics. Which in turn means that he has had the opportunity to make true on some of his rhetoric, the cuts in arts funding (“leftwing hobbies”) being one example.

Wilders has also been quite succesful in exporting his brand of Islamophobia, through e.g. the Fitna movie, the controversy about the initial refusal to let him speak in the UK and not unimportantly, his ties with fellow extremists in Europe (EDL) and elsewhere (Pam Geller). He’s a central pivot in the conveyor belt of rightwing extremism. Ideas that originate in the fringes of the rightwing, in the sordi little blogs and forums, shitty thinktanks and neonazi and fascistoid fringe groups are picked up by him and made respectable, because he is a serious, respectable mainstream politician, even if we don’t agree with them. Meanwhile his rhetoric, his talk about being in a “hot war with Islam” and how leftwing/social democratic parties have betrayed their countries in turn, fires up this fringe even more, justification for even more extreme opinions and ultimately, as in Norway this weekend, action.

But our mainstream politicians and commentators, those who thought to fight fire with fire and wanted to address the very real concerns of the white working classes/real Dutch people about the excesses of the Islam in the name of more votes, those who wanted to declare multiculturism dead and buried, a failed experiment, those who agreed that art is a leftwing hobby and the Dutch weather institute dangerously partisan because it takes climate change seriously, those politicians and commentators also have the blood of Oslo and Utøya on their hands. They are not completely innocent either of having created a political climate in which such atrocities were made possible.

The military wing of melanie phillips

Islamophobia, War on Terror, wingnuts
Published on 2 Comments on The military wing of melanie phillips

The guys at Blood and Treasure are discussing the Norway Attacks and how the ideology behind it sounds so familiar. Ken MacLeod sums up:

Familiar indeed. ‘Cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School, feminism and political correctness as the root of the problem, the EU apparat as its enforcer, Muslim immigration and terrorism as its consequence or indeed as its weapon … now where have we heard these ideas before?

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. And it overlaps mainstream right-wing thinking.

There have warnings that this sort of atrocity would happen sooner or later in Europe. It’s not just the rhetoric that came along in the wake of the The War Against Terror, but also a slew of incidents in which rightwing extremists were caught with enough explosives to kill a small town, or massing guns, or with chemical warfare equipment, largely going unreported in the media. Remember the ex-BNP members and their weapons cache that nobody wanted to call terrorists? In the last decade there has been a climate in which Islamophobia and fear of “Eurabia”, the susposed clash of civilisations have become mainstream, in that these are no longer extreme opinions to hold, but arguments that can be seriously debated by serious mainstream commentators. In that climate, when day in day out you have certain politicians (Wilders not being the last example to come to mind and loonies in the media foaming at the mouth about the life and death struggle “Islam” and “the west” are locked into, it should not come as a surprise one of the internet hard men ranting about striking a blow for civilisation actually did.