Nature: the latest excuse to deny Chagos Islanders their home

Environment, Imperialism, UK politics
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Seven years ago already I first read about what had happened to the Chagos Islanders, kicked out of their home so the US could have their Diego Garcia base there. The inhabitants were a security risk you see. The Ilois, as they call themselves, were therefore dumped in Mauritius, with many of them eventually settling in the UK as well. Over the years and then decades they have always fought for their right to return home, against succesive British governments, both Labour and Tory and in recent years they actually started winning their legal battles. Unfortunately, getting their claims honoured in courts and getting the UK government to do the same is not the same thing… Again, both Labour and Tory governments have done everything to stop or delay their return.

And the latest trick the current government is trying now might be the dirtiest: turning the Islands into a nature reserve:

This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.

The Ilois of course protested:

Today, Chagossian supporters accused the government of duplicity. “The British government’s plan for a marine protected area is a grotesquely transparent ruse designed to perpetuate the banning of the people of Mauritius and Chagos from part of their own country,” said Ram Seegobin, of the Mauritian party Lalit de Klas, in a letter to Greenpeace seen by the Guardian. “The conservation groups have fallen into a trap. They are being used by the government to prevent us returning,” said Evenor.

They were backed by Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights group Reprieve, who has challenged the UK government on the use of Diego Garcia by the US to render suspected terrorists. “The truth is that no Chagossian has anything like equal rights with even the warty sea slug. There is no sense that the British government will let them go back. The government is not even contemplating equal rights for Chagossians and sea slugs.”

The environmental groups supporting the proposal of course deny they’re part of a greenwash, but it is typical of the divide on the left that they could allow themselves to be used this way. They’ve only looked at their own interests and didn’t consider the islanders until they were forced to.

Mythologising Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Decentists and other ex-lefties, Islamophobia
Published on 1 Comment on Mythologising Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Aaronovitch Watch reports that Paul Berman, the most tedious of the Decentists has decided one of his tedious essays wasn’t dull enough and therefore has expanded it into a book. This would be awful enough, though ignorable, had it not been for the sucking up Berman recieves from Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, which contains this collossal and quite likely deliberate error:

“Hirsi Ali, who described her decision to leave Islam in 2007’s Infidel, was subsequently driven from her refuge in Holland by death threats that followed her from Somalia. And by the murder of her friend and supporter, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose slashed and bleeding body was found with a note that called Hirsi Ali next to die. ”

No… Just no…

She left because it came out she told fibs about her real background, wasn’t actually Ayaan “Hirsi Ali” at all and the then minister for Deporting of Brown People (Rita Verdonk) still had a personal score to settle with her and attempted to take away her Dutch citizenship for it. Ayaan then left parliament in a huff and buggered off to America to her wanktank job. Nothing to do with death threats, certainly none that followed her from Somalia. In reality, nobody gave two figs about her until she jumped on the anti-Islam bandwagon.

The above quote is a typical example the mythology build up around Ayaan Hirsi Ali by writers like Rosenbaum, mostly for US and UK consumption. She’s supposed this brave fighter for the rights of women oppressed by Islam, a liberal freethinker refusing to bow down before terrorism. But again, she was silent about all of this until after “9/11” changed everything, until there was a market for this image. In the Netherlands she’s largely seen as a hinderance rather than a help in emancipating Muslim women, as her rhetoric puts the back up of those she’s supposed to help, while any real practical engagement by her remains elusive. But for those who regard The War Against Terror is the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Times this is more of a feature than a bug, as witnessed by Rosenbaum’s judgment on a Decentist villain, Tariq Ramadan:

The problematic nature of Ramadan’s moderation can perhaps best be illustrated by his call for a “moratorium” on the stoning of women to death in Islamic societies for “honor” violations. The fact that he called for a “moratorium” at all has been hailed by Western, particularly European, intellectuals as a comforting sign for those concerned about women’s rights in the growing Muslim communities of the West.

The fact that he did not condemn the practice outright or call for its outlawing, and instead only called for “debate” with Islamic scholars and theologians on the matter during the “moratorium,” is not entirely reassuring to others.

Leave alone the twisting of Ramadan’s words, what comes across is that Rosenbaum rather would’ve had him make grandiose but futile pronouncements that make them feel good, than offer a practical, face saving measure that might just stop stonings because it offers conservative, suspicious theologians and the governments that employ them a way to change their religious laws while claiming to be completely orthodox and true to Islam. You don’t convince genuine believers by loudly denouncing their faith and demanding they should adjust to your moral worldview immediately. Or to put it in words even Decentists should understand: you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Metal Monday – Carcass & Cannibal Corpse

'Eavy Metal, video
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Calvin and Hobbes

Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…

At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…

Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot

Reek of Putrifaction:



Exhumed to Consume



Cannibal Corpse is just as extreme in its lyrics, but perhaps somewhat more honest in their motivation:

“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”

Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.

Meat Hook Sodomy:



Butchered at Birth



So… Metal classics or just noisy filth?

Chatroulette: old skool internet

geekdom, IT is not magic pixiedust
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Says danah boyd:

I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for.

This is the one thing I miss the most about the idea of Usenet (as opposed to the current reality of it, a cesspool of obsessives and spammers). Usenet’s structure was a topdown, subject based hierarchy of groups: if you hate Barney the dinosaur there was only one place to go to: alt.barney-dinosaur.die.die.die, so you were forced to mix it up with all kinds of people, some which you liked, some which you didn’t, some you hated. It didn’t matter, they were all part of the same community, something you don’t have as much with blogs, let alone Facebook and such.

It’s not entirely black and white of course: Usenet groups did often evolve into semi-closed communities which you had to adjust to to fit in and you can have inter- and intrablog dialogues on something approaching the same scale as was possible on Usenet. But it still seems to me that online socialising has become much more splintered and individualised, with online public spaces now (part-)privatised.

Wait, what?

Comix, video
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Nobody told me there was going to be an Adèle Blanc-Sec movie!

Bonus: Tardi at the drawing table:



Adèle Blanc-Sec is one of those series that should be a lot better known in English speaking countries than it is. I mean it’s got a feisty heroine, dinosaur monster, strange albinos, weird science and crazy scientists, all set in turn of the century France. Perhaps the movie will chance this relatively obscurity.