The “Nitty Gritty” on Tonight’s Debate

* this post has been cross posted at A la Gauche

Ever wonder the origin of the phrase “nitty gritty”?

How ’bout “flippin’ a bird”?

Or “ok”?

And who hasn’t wondered about “balls to the wall”?

I don’t know how, but I somehow came across a page explaining all these phrases and more. If you have nothing better to do, check it out: www.yaelf.com/questions.shtml. I didn’t watch the debate tonight, but I have been reading about it here and there. One interesting little tidbit I came across concerned the inequity in time given to the eight candidates.

Look who the top three are: Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. This can serve as evidence piece # 353,298,424 that the MSM is as corrupt as can be. This is, for a great number of Americans, one of their only chances to see the eight candidates and form an opinion as to how to vote.  It’s almost become impossible for me to even remember being shocked at occurences like this one. From an AP story on the debate:

Clinton declined to say whether she would use military force in Darfur, saying she didn’t want to “talk about these hypotheticals.”

That just about makes me sick. She will vote to send American teenagers to Iraq to die, but she can’t say what, if anything, she would do to end the genocide in Darfur. Our inaction in regards to the slaughter going on in Darfur, is enough on its own to declare our nation morally bankrupt, without mentioning the U.S. governments inaction here at home. I think this might be the first election in which I don’t vote.

Linking online war to real war

For me, blogging and getting interested in politics came about the same time. My ideas and outrage at the way the world was going seemed to find an outlet in a blog that was originally meant to be a news source for my writer’s website. And as such, I have a soft spot for online activism.

The Internet is a rapidly growing medium and the media is seeing a shift in the way we read news. Slowly, the profit-hungry media corporations are losing a grip on the monopoly of news and knowledge that they hold so important to keeping the political current flowing in their direction. Blogs and independent online journalists seem to be gaining a hearing amongst those looking for alternative sources of news and increasingly, online gaming has even been tapped into by a dedicated band of activists looking to get their message heard.

One such activist is Joseph DeLappe, who has intervened into a multiplayer military simulator, America’s Army with the pseudonym ‘dead-in-iraq.’ America’s Army is an online multiplayer game funded by the U.S. Pentagon with the aim of recruiting gamers into the army to fight a war DeLappe is against.

As soon as he enters the game, he enters a command to drop his weapon and as an allusion to the cannon fodder that civilians are turned into in Iraq, he offers himself to be killed with no means of defence. Then, as the session continues, he begins to type names of the 3,500 American soldiers that have been killed in Iraq since Bush invaded on the basis of lies. He has taken screen shots and posted them to his website to record his protest.

The unique intervention manages to piss off a lot of right-wing gamers as they’re confronted with the names of people who’ve been economically drafted to die for their fucked cause. But it also confronts those who’ve been sucked into the idea that this is all just a game and sucked into going into the real deal, killing real people and risking their real life.

It’s the ability of reaching people online and making a connection to the real world that makes DeLappe’s intervention so powerful. Also, for other anti-war activists and those against the war, it’s inspiring to hear that activism can find outlets in so many creative ways and that it might inspire others to get active.

“Barbarism”

Oliver Kamm writes about Kurt Vonnegut in The Times today.

“These [the firebombing of Dresden and nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima] were catastrophic acts committed under the necessity of defeating barbarism. But man is not equally culpable, and history not a record of symmetry in brutality. It merely seemed that way to a particular generation at a historical moment: the Vietnam War.”

We have a particular picture of “barbarism” which we aim at our enemies:

“Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic…” – President Truman.

“The Sandinista dictatorship of Nicaragua, with full Cuban-Soviet bloc support, not only persecutes its people, the church, and denies a free press, but arms and provides bases for Communist terrorists attacking neighboring states. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense and totally consistent with the OAS and U.N. Charters.” – President Reagan

“This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” – President Bush

Although, it might not be that black-and-white:

“If terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?” – American Conservative Pat Buchanan

“Instead, the enemy is characterised as “jealous of our way of life”, “hateful of freedom”, and so on. Hence President Bush, no less than the Islamic terrorists, uses the language of religious war: we are on a “crusade”; the military operation was initially called “Infinite Justice”; and the enemy is “evil itself”.

“Along with this is the belief that the pax Romana/Americana is the only “reasonable” way to live. In the American case, we have a military and economic empire that views the world as one big happy market, and believes that everybody needs to come on board. We – that is, global corporate consumerism – are the future, “progress”.

“If the “barbarians” fail to share this vision, they are “medieval”; if they resist, “evil”. Most historians see a relationship, in the case of Rome, between its internal decay and its susceptibility to invasion. By the fourth century, if not much before, Rome had lost its central value, the legacy of Greek culture, and was effectively existing for the sake of military and administrative purposes.” – Morris Berman in The Guardian.

So was the Iraq War another exercise in “the necessity of defeating barbarism” or was it barbarism in itself?

On North Korean Famine

Capitalist Famines Also Kill.

“In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, a book in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen’s interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. He believed that there was an adequate food supply in India at the time, but that its distribution was hindered because particular groups of people—in this case rural labourers—lost their jobs and therefore their ability to purchase the food. In his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production whilst down on the previous year was higher than in previous non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems. These issues led to starvation among certain groups in society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person’s actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers’ negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.” – Wikipedia

More Die In India.

“The famine only began to approach India’s year-in, year-out toll (in proportionate terms) of infant mortality and deaths from malnutrition or starvation which I only mention because the media’s recent habit of depicting Kim Jung Il’s frolicking among a heap of starved cadavers.” – Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country.

Conclusion: it does not help your cause using this as a lever in a smear campaign.

“I have no respect for a man who starves his own people” – George Bush, on Kim Jong-Il

“We banqueted with Kim and a group of grumpy old men… Outside, the people starved.” – Chris Patten

(These sources have nothing but praise for India’s leaders, who allow a system which starves far more, by the same logic.)

“Flood and drought have hit South Korea too. Some people drowned, and more lost property – yet nobody starved. That is the difference between sensible socio-economic systems, efficient and flexible, and stupid ones.” – Asia Times

“North Korea has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since 1995, when its agricultural system collapsed after decades of mismanagement.” – CBS News

(North Korea is still the most industrialised country in Asia, with a minimal “agricultural system” which collapsed temporarily thanks to many years of natural disasters. It cannot buy food thanks to US-led sanctions.)

Conclusion

No one is stopping India pissing its money away on nuclear weapons whilst its people starve. But its people are free to be millionaires, if they happen to be born in the right place at the right time, so it avoids the “axis of evil” treatment.

North Korea’s economic system is still stupid. Its foreign relations are based upon blackmail. It still has Stalinist surveillance systems, secret police and GULAGs. Its leaders are still corrupt. Its country is still full of human rights abuses. Its leader is so unmarketable that he was made a Bond villain (see also Rupert Murdoch).

So why the hell does the media/do politicians need to pick the North Korean famine as the damning evidence? It’s as close to spin as death gets.

Blog Against War and Racism

It’s clear that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the racism that surrounds it, are key issues at the moment. The majority of people in most countries, including Australia, the United States and Britain oppose the war in Iraq. The FLBU is calling on all bloggers to express this opposition by posting a picture of you holding a placard/sign expressing your opposition on your blog. Trackbacks should picked up your post but just to be sure, email me – benjamin [at] benjaminsolah [dot] com – your link and I’ll add it to a list at the bottom of this post. Include the details of your local anti-war or anti-racism rally and encourage others to take a stand against the war.

Rally details can be found at the following websites:
United States: A.N.S.W.E.R.
United Kingdom: Stop the War Coalition
Australia: Stop the War Coalition – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane

Join the bloggers who have already taken a stand against war and racism!
Benjamin Solah – Sydney, Australia

Stop the war

US propoganda denies the plight of Gitmo detainees

Guantanamo suicides ‘acts of war’, smh.com.au

The latest suicide of three detainees in Guantanamo Bay are no surprise. And further still, the comments from US authorities come as no surprise either. They call these clear acts of desperation an act of war! They can’t look from behind their fucking stars and stripes for two minutes and see that this is not an attack on America. They are innocent victims of something far from any ‘War on Terror.’ The actions of the American government are clearly a war being played with terror. Nothing is off limits. Torture and Nuclear weapons, something once thought insane are now justifiable under Bush’s nationalist crusade.

Gitmo is a torture camp and for the detainees, there’s no escape. They don’t see a future and they don’t see justice being done. Gitmo needs to be closed and the ‘War on Terror’ needs to end now!