Month: January 2011

I

never


liked

the idea of Baroness Ashton running EU foreign policy.

Now blogger and Telegraph journalist Bruno Waterfield is gunning for over her invisibility during her first year in place:

Lady Ashton does not possess the political nous or commitment of an elected politician. Apart from one or two months last year, she has shown herself to be unwilling to travel or work over weekends. Working Monday to Friday might be fine for a jobsworth public official or serial quango/Lords appointee but it’s not good enough for an EU foreign minister. People who want to change the world have to give up prosaic ideas like the work/life balance.

And here’s Ronny Patz:

when you are in Brussels, a lot of people complain about the way EU “foreign minister” Ashton works….

I doubt that with her limited amount of involvement into the core Commission work (represented through her participation record) she really was having her voice heard

Maybe Maimed: prejudice is the media equivalent of pollution. I agree with this, and it goes far beyond porn:

Porn companies are companies, and they have a product. What makes their product different from, say, a steel mill or a coal mine is that their product is largely cultural, not material. They operate in a completely different arena; they do not have to deal with resource scarcity or distribution in the same way, for example. But this does not mean they do not pollute. They do. Kink, Inc. is a massive polluter.

In October I mentioned that French news website Rue 89 was being sued for defamation, because of an article which used my

Panama database

to link French businessman Eric de Sérigny to firms in Panama.

The case has now been dropped.

Rue89 has given Sérigny a right to reply space, presumably as part of the deal. He concedes that the original reporting was ‘serious’, but still denies the allegations, and suggests it’s a case of identity theft.

So that’s something of a relief. Props to Rue 89 for standing by their story, and to David Leloup for writing it in the first place. I wince to imagine the time and money it must have taken to defend the article.

I still have no idea what all the fuss was about; the original article seemed well-documented but not exactly damning. Now it’s all blown over, at least so far as I can tell from over here.

LJ memes, I discovered today, have a pen-and-paper forerunner from the 19th century. ‘Confessions’ were series of meme-like questions (‘your favourite book?’, ‘your greatest regret?’) — often in book form, so you could inflict the questionnaire on multiple friends and collate the answers.

Sadly, the only online traces I can find are from when Famous People got involved. Marx’s daughters liked them, so we have a set of answers from daddy, and another from an impressively bad-tempered Engels.

Vanity Fair

doggedly maintains one once answered by Proust, and Mark Twain* was typically caustic about a printed variation on the theme.

All those examples are fairly dull, to be honest. But there must be thousands more buried in obscure archives, and among them presumably some with interesting questions and/or answers. It’d be a nice small project for somebody to dig a few out, transcribe them, and reanimate them for the web. Think of it as the meme equivalent of Jurassic Park.

Also: ‘asking friends a list of questions’ is the kind of fad that must have been tried in lots of different contexts. What other forms did it take, in other times and places?

* Mark Twain:

Nothing could induce me to fill those blanks but the asseveration of my pastor that it will benefit my race by enabling young people to see what I am, and giving them an opportunity to become like somebody else. This overcomes my scruples. I hâve but little character, but what I hâve I am willing to part with for the public good.

[further teleological Victoriana: readthroughs, wargames]

Here is a potential project for the weekend:

If you subscribe to the NYT’s RSS feeds, you can actually watch the headlines evolve as the story is updated throughout the day. It’s really quite interesting, though I’ve never seen one specifically de-sexualized.

Historical rhetoric of the left is, as a rule, a thousand times better than the current stuff. Even when it’s basically content-free. Jim Cannon, via Ken MacLeod

That is the realistic perspective of our great movement. We ourselves are not privileged to live in the socialist society of the future, which Jack London, in his far-reaching aspiration, called the Golden Future. It is our destiny, here and now, to live in the time of the decay and death agony of capitalism. It is our task to wade through the blood and filth of this outmoded, dying system. Our mission is to clear it away. That is our struggle, our law of life.

According to the New York Times*, there’s lately been a rash of single-person protests in Moscow.

Demonstrations require authorization, which often isn’t given. A single person, though doesn’t count as a demonstration, and so can stand anywhere they like, holding a placard with impunity.

Or almost with impunity. Counter-protesters (in this case, government supporters) have a kamikaze option. They join the protest, with a placard giving the opposite view. Now it’s an illicit two-person demonstration, and all participants can be arrested:

Under a quirk of Russian law on rallies and protests, so-called individual pickets are legal without permits, which the opposition rarely obtains. Single protesters, standing 30 feet or so apart, may hold signs in public. As the Russian police were interpreting the rules, two protesters standing together were grounds for arrest — even if they came from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

* all the reports I’ve found on this lead back to the New York Times or Washington Post; I’ve not found anything on Russian blogs, etc. I don’t

think

it’s been made up, but I’m not going to spend long checking.

Tagged


russia

Have been reading posts by/about refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. There’s some great stuff out there; the one constant seems to be black humour

Mo says when we can finally work his friend can get me a job in McDonald’s. I’ll remember to wear a suit for the interview. Why don’t you go for the job, I say. It’ll take your mind off the goat. He looks at me angrily and leaves.

4:30 p.m. It turns out the goat was a decoy for worse news. Apparently Mo’s great aunt has testicular cancer. An incorrect translation, I hope.

5 p.m. Back in the room I try to cheer Mo up by reminding him he is twenty years younger than me and has a great future. But I am not sure he appreciated me as a gauge for his achievements. After all, the boy has dreams. Maybe one day he’ll make it to Hollywood. They are always looking to fill those crowd scenes.

I’m not entirely convinced by Bruce Sterling’s love of Cibelle. He says of the ‘Abravanista’ movement around her:

So the Abravanista crowd are a kind of “oh fuck off” counterculture who have gone into a vibrant, post-traumatic creative scene. It’s this air of surreal nihilism that puts some iron in their bones. It’s why I take them seriously and consider them global-scale trend-setters as an art movement.

Also entertaining is that she’s very firm about being based in Dalston — in the same way as artists of other generations might emphasise being in the Castro, or the Greenwich Village, or the Left Bank. Queue laughter from all my father’s generation

Think Ed Miliband is passive, useless? Wrong. Jim Jepps understands: he has ascended to such mastery that he can alter history with the slightest motion:

Meanwhile Miliband watches, as if to say “I am stone. As life comes and goes about me, I am rock. Let rivers rage and thunder crash, what are these ephemeral twitiches to the aeons?”

As libraries shut, offices close, unemployment rises and riots flare across the streets all we see are Lib Dems and Tories racing round setting light to schools, and urinating on our armed forces (but only the living ones, never the dead).

Of course, Labour’s ranks are not all schooled in Miliband’s teachings. Some cluck and splutter “Do something!” They shout “Call someone a bigot! Announce a policy initiative! Issue a press release! Do something!”

Miliband stops breathing, a hint of a frown crosses his face, but just for a moment. Holding up one finger he silences them. A deathly quiet falls. “Listen.” One brave Labour acolyte steps forwards, and trembling asks “Wh… what is that sound? It’s cutting me to the quick… horrible…” she breathes, eyes wide.

“It is the weeping of my enemies.”

Also via Jim, a rant about protest organizers in London:

the left are not to blame for the brutal police tactics, they are not guilty of kettling anyone, and they are not responsible for arrests. Nonetheless they are responsible for unnecessarily putting people in situations where these things inevitably happen.