Norm Geras is still a dick

Numpties, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
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I haven’t paid much attention to old stormy Normy in years, but the warmad professor has not changed a bit. Blustering against a Guardian columnist skeptical about the War on Afghanistan, he goes for his old trick of defining acceptable and unacceptable dissent

Now, here’s something else it’s not at all difficult to understand. If P opposes C, not by giving due weight to the magnitude of the evil that is E, but by referring to it in belittling and sneering ways, as though anyone like R who takes E seriously, and disagrees with P about the advisability of course of action C, must be either of low intelligence or of dubious moral character or both, then she, P, might be thought by others not to have a morally serious attitude to the scope of the evil that is E, using evasion and mockery where a person of mature judgement would refrain from doing this in a matter of such gravity.

To use the War on Iraq as an example of how one should honourably disagree is sheer genius in its brazen cheek. It was after all his side, the people who wanted the war who “belittled the reasons or the motives or impugned the character” of anybody who did not share their passion. There was no reasoned argument, just all the sneering and belittling, evasion and mockery Normy wants his opponents to be guilty of. It’s just the teeniest, tiniest bit of projection going on there…

Roy of the Pilgrims?!

Comix, Football
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Last week Plymouth Argyle played its first match in League One after having been relegated last year and actually won the game, but there was something else strange about the game as well: no press photographers allowed at Southampton. So The Plymouth Herald got amateur cartoonist (and city historian) Chris Robinson to do the reporting instead. One of the results you see above — not bad at all, with a nice old skool Roy of the Rovers feel to it. Not quite an coincidence that, as Robinson says he let himself indeed be inspired by that strip. And it’s not only a nice piece of nostalgia and a clever solution to a stupid club rule, but also a great refutation of Scott McCloud’s idea that you can’t have sequential art in a sequence of one…

Love and marriage…

posts interesting only to me, video
Published on 7 Comments on Love and marriage…



Television warned me about it, but I’m going to try it anyway. Dutch bureaucracy and medical realities willing S. and I will get married in the next two weeks. Not so much from a deep seated romantic need for a marriage as an symbol of our love (though that is nice) but to make sure our legal situation is stabilised just in case. As y’all know, S. has been going through a very rough patch this year after the kidney transplant what with opportunistic infections and other calamities, so now that she’s fully recovered from the previous bout the doctors want to schedule a long overdue cleanup operation. I won’t go into details, but the idea is that if the operation is succesful it will break the cycle of infection-recouperation-reinfection, by tackling several sources of infection at the same time. It’ll mean S.’s basic health level will be up, helping her cope better with the anti-rejection drugs while still able to fight off new infections. But it’s heavy duty surgery, things can go wrong and we want to make sure that if somethings happen, everything that needs to be arranged can be arranged with the least amount of legal hassle. It’ll make it that much easier to actually undergo the operation, scheduled for less than two weeks from now…

The hospital has been incredibly helpful, the doctor in charge having contacted the city council to help arrange an emergency wedding, which could be held in the hospital itself, and I have an appointment first thing monday sharp to see if we got all the paperwork to actually be able to marry, something already complicated as the Dutch bureacracy seems to ask for certain documents actually unknown to their English counterparts. Oh well, my job the last few years has largely been about convincing well meaning but rulebound civil servants to things my way, so how hard can it be (famous last words).

So no flowers, no ring, no big party, just get it done and dusted, get S. out of hospital hopefully to not return there soon and we’ll see about a proper party sometime next summer, when her family can be there as well (we hope).

German millionaires not impressed with Gates

class war, Life under Capitalism
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It seems I’m not the only one unimpressed with Bill Gates’ robber barons for a better tomorrow initiative. Der Spiegel gauges the reaction of various German millionaires, interviewing Hamburg-based shipping magnate and multimillionaire Peter Krämer, who echoes my criticism:

Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.

SPIEGEL: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

Even if done without ulterior motives, philantropism on such a massive scale is troublesome when it’s a small elite deciding which cause is worthy enough to support. It remains just another way in which somebody like Buffet or Gates can exercise their power. Far better for society as a whole if it was made impossible to garner such huge wealth in the first place. A large part of the fortunes of these billionaires is after all build on the very backs of the people they are now wanting to help.

Sueing nazis told to fuck off

Fascists, Law in action
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The owners of the extreme right clothing brand Thor Steinar have lost their court battle against anti-fascist parody brand Storch Heinar:

Storch Heinar

Media Tex had alleged that the brand had been damaged by the humorous label. But Judge Horst Rottmann said there was no danger that the two could be confused.

Furthermore, Storch Heinar creator Mathias Brodkorb, an MP for the centre-left Social Democrats in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, was protected under the country’s freedom of speech laws, the court said.

Sehr gut.