But than that’s the mailing list I got this link from: The Making of a Party? The International Socialists 1965-1976 which is a short history of the English International Socialists, later the much loved-to-hate scourge of the pseudoleft, the Socialist Workers Party.
I must confess I do have a eakness for the sort of Peoples Front of Judea/Judea Peoples Front history/gossip that makes up much of the British left’s history. Anybody having any good links for me?
There is once again a minor kerfluffle going on about Wikipedia, with the usual nonsense being spread about it. Some of the more egregious being spread by Danah Boyd:
On topics for which i feel as though i do have some authority, i’m often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia. Take the entry for social network: “A social network is when people help and protect each other in a close community. It is never larger than about 150 people.” You have *got* to be kidding me. Aside from being a patently wrong and naive misinterpretation of research, this definition reveals what happens when pop cultural understandings of concepts become authorities.
How serious can you take a criticism of Wikipedia which links to the simple English version of an article and never acknowledges this, even after this had been pointed out in the comments to the post. There’s a reason it’s called simple English.
What also pissed me off was having the following quote by Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia Britannica, added in an update:
“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
Note that this comes from an article written for FlackCentralStation, that noted bastion of fair and balanced reporting on various technological and political matters, last seen spreading lies about DDT use and malaria.
And like so much else coming from FlackCentral, this quote makes for a great soundbyte but is wrong in all particulars. Anyone can easily check the history of a wikipedia article, know exactly what the article looked during any given revision and can track the changes in it. Try this with any of the commercial encyclopedias.
In general, this article is an exercise in kicking in open doors: never trust a single source, many students are inclined to be lazy and many students are naive in their research. None of which, an astute observer may notice, is specific to Wikipedia.
It is not that there aren’t real problems with Wikipedia. There is for example, the question of Wikipedia’s systemic bias or the very real problem of it becoming a battleground between various groups of political and religious zealots. But these sort of worries do not make for easy scaremongering or easy sensationalism, so therefore we get these pseudo issues about trust.
Too good not to quote entirely, this wonderful proposal reported upon
by Charlotte Street:
A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world.
No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared
any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and
assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
A mushroom cloud like the ones which mysteriously failed to appear above the skyline of a major US city.
According to the Washington Post the search for those ever elusive pesky weapons of mass destruction ended last month, with a complete failure to find anything:
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to
Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration
officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S.
invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and
biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons
to use against the United States.Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official
said that possibility is very small.
And it only took them the better part of two years, uncounted (literally!) numbers of dead Iraqi civilians, well over a thousand dead US soldiers, quite a few more dead soldiers from countries stupid enough to follow the US into Iraq, billions upon billions of wasted money and Halliburton bribes, the renewed vigour of international terrorism to reach that conclusion. Gee.
What I would like to see now is those people who before the war rubbished anybody who dared to suggest that Bush and blair were lying about this publically apologise for their support of a war that costs some 100,000 Iraqis their lives (as a conservative estimate) and turned Iraq into a second Somalia. Well done.
Tom Engelhardt over at
Mother Jones has written an excellent article about the Untied States’ use of torture, the way it has become a religion with the current administration and the wider Republican establishment and how it intersects with the wider politics of the Bush administration.
A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee’s shoulders, so that the man “danced as he was shocked”; mock drowning or “waterboarding”; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee’s head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA’s secret prisons around the world.
Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses.
Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those “bad apples” manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.
The warmongers and the pro-war socalled left have from the first tried to deny both the truth of these
tortures and its severity, claiming, in the words of at least one well-known rightwing radio commentator, that these are little more than frat hazings. Having had Misha Glenny’s excellent book on the Balkans and its history for reading material lately though, I cannot help but notice the simularity between the above list and some of the descriptions of torture in that book. It’s easy to minimise these tortures if you’re not the one who has to undergo them, but I doubt any of these scoffers would like to trade places.
The larger point Tom Engelhardt raises is that the use of torture by the US government, either directly or indirectly is not new to the Bush administration; succesive Democratic and Republican presidents both had no qualms to use it when convenient. What is new however is the institutionalisation of torture as a political instrument and the legalisation of it. There is the Gulag Archipelago the US has now finished constructing in Guantanomo, Diego Garcia and in client states in Central Asia. There is the legal ass covering done by the man Bush now wants to be his attorney general, head of the department of justice. There is the propaganda that lies about the severity of the torture while not so subtly implying these people deserve it anyway.
It all seems like classic fascism, doesn’t it: the insistence that might makes right, that the leader
should be followed unquestionably, the idea that the current (neverending) crisis justifies extreme behaviour and above all the idea that there is an omnipresent enemy, easily identifyable yet shadowy, that is out to do us harm. It’s only a matter of them, I fear, before torture is going to be used against Bush’s internal enemies…