大象传媒

IN AT THE DEEP END

Mark has raised a fundamental issue. I suggest that in the cry: 'free beer' we are into 'human failing and the causes of human failing' - a hare I consummately fail to set running, repeatedly, on this blog.
Confining myself to Britain: we have a country riddled with 'soft corruption' presided over by a very odd subset of humanity under a succession of quintessential oddities. Why?
Unless we investigate (as Jaded Jean does from her special perspective) THE CAUSES OF INDIVIDUAL HUMAN FAILING (something Joseph Rowntree adjured us to attend to years back) we will get nowhere. Not in the UK, the UN, the world or THE FUTURE. Anyone giving a damn can find my two-penn'orth on the web.

Why should anyone want to boycott "Made in Israel" goods and not even consider boycotting "Made in EU" or "Made in USA" goods? The problem we have is that, to a large extent, the information we receive about most situations is so limited and (often skewed) that it is impossible to come to a decision about the "correct" course of action. For example, I regard myself as being very well informed generally but I am not confident that I could explain all the rights and wrongs of Zimbabwe. I do of course know evil things are happening.
As regards boycotting EU or USA goods, is it not the case that unfair terms of trade are, at least partly, causing the impoverishment of relatively poorer countries?
See the problem, who can tell us the answer?

Mark I always listen to what you say and that may not sound like a huge compliment - but it is given my views on the media.

I never ever saw you as a rebel (for the right cause). Good on strategic issues. Not a rebel.

I suppose its the Fred Halliday influence at the LSE?

I sadly tend to agree with you that people today tend to judge the general situation on how much their cafe late costs. Sacrifice would be paying 5p extra.

I sincerely hope that life allows people to adapt their ideas before "severe reality" makes them adapt them ..

That said I support a free Tibet- but the Western media has underplayed the historic relationship with China.

If we compared US actions in Central America - say Chile in the 70's or El Salvador in the 80's - the US is not occupying them now or then. But it would be slightly trite to say that the US was any less imperialistic or aggressive than China when they feel their sphere of influence is affected by another power or ideology. Look at the rhetoric against Chavez. What would we say if the Chinese said something similar about Vietnam?

US free shopping days?

Come on.

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"It's not as if the student radicals of 1968 'won' in the broadest sense, although they did of course play a role in America's withdrawal from Vietnam. And if you want to go the whole hog - thousands went to fight for the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war, hundreds of them dying, but their side lost to the fascists.

Today, in the case of Tibet or Zimbabwe even sporting embargoes seem unlikely."

The student radicals just ushered in the fre-market. They were useful to Trotskyites in that respect.

As I see it (and as I keep pointing out in case anyone still doesn't) 'we' appear to be used to undermine big government wherever it appears and I suspect the primary agenda from Hayek's, and von Mises magum opus onward has been to keep the home fires of anarcho-capitalism burning, and that all the sniping at Middle Eastern, Chinese, Burmese, Zimbabwean, Uzbekistanian, N Korean, and Russian (at times given many there seem to long for its more structured past) human rights violations is primarily just a tool to keep statism and market regulation at bay back at home.

Looking at where we seem to be headed demographically (and socio-economically), I can't help but fear that we've got it all fundamentally wrong, or that there are those abroad (and here at home), who have engineered matters very cleverly over a very long period to most of our long term disadvantage.

Such outpouring is encouraging.

There are cycles in the mood of the times, and perhaps selfish hedonism is now yielding to some concerns of idealism?

Were the anarchists so motivated?

Is Obama an exemplar of this trend?

Keep it up, Mr. Urban, but try to be more concise!

Free Tibet Yes Please. Free Beer why? MAKE IT YOURSELF and it just about is, Same with Whiskey or any other spirit. Its H.M. crap govt that makes it expensive. I can just about understand the apathy with uk muslims but throwing the toys out of the pram and bombing innocents/innocence to bits is a little Nasty and Wrong dont you think. On the other hand UK Taxpayers fund uk and international terrorists and their lawyers. Now then, just what is that? No one who pays UK Tax can complain if they or theirs gets blown to bits they have paid for it. (bring it up with a human rights lawyer)You reap what you sow dont you? ( That kind of seed I try not to sow) Mind you how many uk taxpayers bullets have killed/wounded uk Jihadists among others in Iraq/Afghanistan? The butchers bill is higher for them than it is for the uk soldier..... perhaps? You cannot/will not beat Good sKILLS eh.
will try in future not to buy anything from china. FREE TIBET and R Biggs

I remember well the Reading Festival in the early 90's jumping along with many people my age to Rage Against The Machine. I admit that I was getting into it because how great they sounded but if I had asked anyone nearby (mostly middle class kids like me) what it was they were shouting along with the band about, I reckon most would have said "well it's about something to do with unfairness isn't it?". I always had the sense that if you make any cause fashionable enough and any big band endorse it, people will really just go along with it without really thinking about it properly. How many people singing along to Radiohead really know what they were singing about? Saying they like the Dali Llama doesn't count.

While the ethical questions raised in this column are very interesting, they tend to deflect attention from the hard realities.

For example, the declining influence of the Soviet Union in the eighties opened up the possibility of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the establishment of democracies in eastern Europe. From then on, the collapse of the USSR itself became pretty much inevitable and, with it the end of the unlawful occupation of the Baltic States. Similarly, the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights cannot be ongoing because, without agreement, there will be no overarching regional stability program. Some political ambitions have an historical inevitability about them which make them realisable.

Others, however, do not. What nation in it's right collective mind can afford to risk confrontation with China given it's influence in the global economy. It may very well be that, mid term, the economic liberalisation in that country will lead to increasing political freedom and eventually some degree of autonomy for Tibet but simply mouthing platitudes about 'freedom for Tibet', however well meaning, is simply whistling in the wind.

A Palestinian state now seems inevitable but does anybody seriously believe that there will be, say, an independent Basque region or an autonomous Kurdish state in Turkey? Of couse not.

My point is not that people should stay silent on any issue which concerns them - perish the thought - but to counsel that there are things which can be brought about by public pressure and others which are best left to history.

I write this post from Hungary and I can't help wondering whether this would have been possible if the interventionists had had their way. Some things are best left to the march of time.

One seeks to distinguish between the mob-like lemmings responding to the "cause of the week" and the potentially effective pressure of other groups.

An unexpressed premise among our pundits seems to be that "China is bad", "Iran is worse" etc., and what the pundits see, hear and say is processed through these predisposing filters.

Some contrarian investigative reporting might change these biases.

Xie_Ming (#13) I agree - but, sadly, given Newsnight's recent track record, I'd be extremely (pleasantly) surprised if anything like that will be commissioned.

One would have thought that a neutral presentation of the case both for and against (say Zanu-PF's, the Uzbek or Burmese government's) policies would be what unbiased producers would wish to provide their audience.

"One would have thought that a neutral presentation of the case both for and against (say Zanu-PF's, the Uzbek or Burmese government's) policies would be what unbiased producers would wish to provide their audience."

How about a fair and balanced case for Hitlers final solution? (and thats a not a serious suggestion mods!). Its merely to highlight the fact that some policies are so ludicrous that 'neutral' presentations would in effect be statements of support. The 大象传媒 would be saying O.K some bits might be wrong, but......

I have a big problem with the 大象传媒's idea of balance in general. Their idea of a balanced report on the risk of MRSA was to give Andrew Wakefields single paper 50% of the time and the collected works of every single other researcher in the world (2500 papers at last count) the other 50%.

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#17. The holocaust isn't a debatable issue... my granddad liberated Belsen. It happened. Whether 6 million or 4 million Jews were gassed its still horrific beyond words.

I don't know why evidence about Katyn was fabricated to discredit the nazi's- the germans found the bodies and it was done by the Russians.

if you seriously think that the Red army stopped its advance to fabricate Auschwitz however you're sorely dilusioned. Stalin was as a big an anti-semite as hitler and having lost 20 million russians in the war he didn't need to fabricate any evidence to make the Germans look any worse.

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#20. I dread to think what your definition of 'death camp' was.... the bodies were stacked 10 feet high in places and needed bulldozers to get rid of them. You could smell the place from miles away. Indeed my grandads company knew something was very wrong around belsen because of the smell.

Typhus spread (by fleas) because of the grotesque overcrowding in the camps. It was compounded by zero laundry facilities. To blame allied bombing is ridiculous, unless you suggest we were dropping bio-weapons. Frankly carpet bombing the camp would have been a humanitarian act.

Delousing with Zyclon B makes about as much sense as delousing someone with burning petrol. There are plenty of delousing agents that don't cause death in humans. They'd been around since WW1. Zyclon B is Prussic acid which is rather more effective on humans than insects. Indeed the Germans developed Sarin etc FROM insecticides. germany had a monopoly on anti-insect organo-phosphates.

Rations were at sub-starvation level. This is shown by the camp records and by the accounts of many British POW's (SOE, Commados etc) who were sent to concentration camps. Start with Wing Commander Yeo Thomas (who incidentally stopped Otto Scorzeny being hung at Nuremberg). I presume you're not going to claim he was a soviet agent?

rebuilding the german economy was a direct consequence of what we foolishly did in 1918 onward... bankrupting and humiliating Germany post ww1 caused WW2. At least we learnt from our mistakes.

Equally regarding stalin's anti-semitism, its worth pointing out that he described all victims of the liberated camps as 'Soviet citizens', not 'jews'. Frankly after what happened in the seige of Leningrad and Stalingrad he didn't need any more anti-nazi propaganda. If I'd lost 20 million Russians I'd have been pretty keen on some vengance at Nuremberg too.

In actual fact we sacrified a handful of very guilt people to Stalin and kept a lot more equally guilty (starting with Werner von Braun who decided 1000 calories a day was plenty for his workers at Nordhausen) and gave them jobs at Nasa. Trotskyism must have been very prevalent... Stalin bumped off about 30,000,000 of them.

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Sorry, for "in the 1930s is not that much less than it is today" please read "in the 1930s was not that much more than it is today".

That is, it rather suggests that they may just have moved about a bit (see links elsewhere to fertility rates, exacerbated perhaps by the highest carrier (1/3) and expression (1/27) rate of the CYP21 polymorphism and resultant NCAH in this group which may slightly feminise males and masculinze females cognitively, and also slightly increase sensitivity to stress?).

THE NEW LEFT: (PRONE TO MOVE ABOUT A BIT)

"Isaac Deutscher may well have been a second conduit by which the ideas of Trotsky reached EP Thompson. A veteran of the early years of the Trotskyist movement, Deutscher emigrated to Britain in 1939, where he wrote his famous three volume biography of Trotsky. Deutscher became a sort of godfather to the first New Left, and published frequently in its journals. He was a close friend of Ralph Miliband, one of the most active figures in the circle that published the New Reasoner. "




They don't seem all that keen on (big) government, so watch out NHS, the Civil Service, and anything else national and regulatory (anything to do with proper government in fact). Instead, we should expect lots more 'freedom' (aka anarchism) - e.g. lots more London stabbings etc....

Perhaps some will notice that the 大象传媒 has begun to recognize (again) that Iran exists apart from the Iraeli propaganda version.

Strangely, it appears that Justin Webb has begun this process.

Perhaps others may join in and provide us with facts and views not supplied by the Israeli Foreign Ministry or its sympathizers here?

THE SI: TROTSKYITES WITH A MAKEOVER?

Hoodwinked by clever PR?





They're SI (Socialist International), the lot - New Labour here and the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe.

Is it really any surprise that the opposition to Stalinist/Maoist parties in Africa turn out to be essentially Trotskyite/Neocon/Miliband types eager to establish a 'Workers' Democracy (i.e. removal/replacement of one 'elitist' ruling class by/for another?

Worth pondering in the context of some of my recent (and older) posts on endogamous groups, the protection of discrimination law yet statistical over-representation and hegemony?:

ON THE OTHER SIDE

"Mr L. resigned from the Berlin police after being assigned to quell a May Day demonstration of left-wing anarchists 鈥� 鈥淚 realised I belonged on the other side,鈥� he said. Since then he has been active in the punk and squatter scene; since February he has been a care worker. His girlfriend Yvonne said: 鈥淚鈥檓 really proud of him. I鈥檝e been furious about Hitler for days.鈥�"



Hitler, like Stalin, was a left-wing socialist (as Von Mises and others reminded us after WWII) He just wasn't an extreme 'left-wing' anarchist/free-marketeer. I guess he wouldn't have liked anarchists like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair who played to a generation steeped in such nonsense all in pursuit of deregulation and general destruction of the state/family life?

And speaking of Axes of Evil, how about a piece on the evil 'vivisectors/germ-warfare' mongers in Iran?



We haven't heard much about the 'evil-ones' recently (although N. Korea got a mention by proxy - Mugabe and his Fifth Brigade).

Weary subliminal message: "Don't vote/fund Old Labour: Private/third sector good/free - public sector bad/nazi - keep voting for less and less government, you know it makes sense".

Interestingly, the Supreme Leader of Iran has, some time ago, issued a religious order (fatwah) forbidding the development or use of nuclear weapons and gave his reasons.

Why do you suppose that this has not been more widely reported by the 大象传媒?

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