As an aside, he is under the delusion – and this is not unique to him – that we currently have a left wing government. Perhaps it is forgiveable gibberish, since I’ve even met a few New Labourites who inexplicably believed themselves to be left wing, but it is undoubtedly a sign of Weak Mental Faculties whoever believes it. Either that or there is something in the water round Westminster way – acid, or perhaps something really strong like DMT.

Meanwhile Guido is against authoritarianism but admits to adopting a ‘tabloid style’ in his postings – a style that has developed over the years largely in order to transmit the crazed authoritarian fantasies of journalists intent on rousing authoritarian tendencies in their readers (ban this, ban that, make a register of them, hang them, throw them out, LOCK EM ALL UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY). The way it works is to bypass any attempt at reason or good argument in favour of SENSATION and RAGE, thus justifying any exercise of power that follows. Guido doesn’t seem to notice the purpose of the style he has adopted, or if he notices he doesn’t care, which makes me wonder how deep his libertarianism runs.

Above all however, his claims to being libertarian are constantly betrayed by his attempts to stay embedded in the Westminster Village, as close to power as he can get. It is clear he gets some strange thrill from being around the movers and shakers, even though according to his philosophy, they should not be moving and shaking at all but should be leaving the moving and shaking up to the people.

Where does this leave us with the diagnosis? the man is so mentally confused, so incoherent in his view of the world and so dedicated to the cause of…whatever it is he feels like this week, that his case is a tough one. However the Sheikh has seen cases like it before. It is a matter of his heart rebelling against his head. Intellectually he wants to be a libertarian, but his heart is infatuated with the idea of power, of being close to power, of power over his readers, of power over the politicians he pretends to despise but secretly wants to be, of power that could one day be his to do with as he wishes. He is a hypocrite of the highest order and plays to a gallery of politics-watchers so inured to hypocrites that they have no idea how to spot one any more.

In short, I diagnose Guido Fawkes with being a cunt. There is no known cure.

It’s the ‘every little helps’ school of environmentalism, or Tesco environmentalism as I call. The thing to remember about Tesco’s slogan ‘ever little helps’ is that while Tesco gives you a few special offers, they are still screwing you over. And so it is with Tesco environmentalism. It doesn’t matter how many light bulbs you change or how many extra trees you plant in cities. Our vehicles still run on oil, and most of what we buy is still shipped across the world, and we still waste a vast percentage of energy we produce because no one cares enough to force real energy efficiency on industry or construction companies.

Tesco environmentalists argue that these small changes to our consumption patterns help raise awareness of environmental issues, but that’s because they hang around with other ‘green’ people and feel smug about how many people agree with them. If they talked to people outside their little circles they’d realise that these silly ideas make environmentalism a laughing stock. How can people take you seriously if you’re obsessing about whether or not to have Christmas lights while outside your house plumes of carbon dioxide rise up from the road?

I once went on a short training course where a true die-hard collected all the 20 or so teabags we used in a little box so she could take them home and put them on her compost. I’m afraid I didn’t admire her for it. I just thought ‘What a waste of your energy’.

No one has infinite energy, and that includes eco-warriors, so what they choose to do with that energy matters. Worrying about Christmas lights is just not worth it. Not while the whole city you live in is lit up, night after night, by streetlights and adverts and empty offices. Compared to the real environmental issues around how we live, Christmas lights just don’t matter. Worrying about them only makes you look like some kind of self-denying monk who can’t see that no-one cares about his self-denial. It puts people off environmentalism and I can’t say I blame people for being put off.

Added to that of course is the little problem that if most people want to buy eco-friendly Christmas lights, they’ll probably get in the car, drive to Tesco (have you noticed how many supermarkets leave their lights on all night?) and buy some LED lights that were shipped from China, where they were made in a factory fueled by China’s coal, probably in some highly polluting process that no one is allowed to talk about. Another reason to call it Tesco environmentalism.

‘Every little helps,’ I hear someone say. Well, it’s sort of true and sort of not. Tesco still shafts you, and the global environment is still being fucked. Every little helps, but not so as you’d notice, and not so as the climate will notice.

The one good thing about the slightly mad teabag lady was that I knew she was living a genuinely green lifestyle and didn’t shop at Tesco. Her obsession was at least consistent. Most Tesco environmentalists can’t even achieve that, and people know this. They look at such people and see people worrying about raindrops overfilling a bucket – while the bucket sits under a running tap. What a bunch of idiots, they think.

And they are right.

In 2008 more than 1 in a 100 Americans were incarcerated.

This is the kind of number that should send a ten thousand volt electric current through anyone thinking of copying American politics. This should set off alarm bells.

This figure signals not just one political failure, but a whole series of massive political failures that have not even been properly recognized in the US and are nowhere near to being solved. The Land of the Free imprisons a higher percentage of their population than anyone else in the world. By a long way.

It’s the kind of thing I think should be sorted out before anyone thinks about importing American political rhetoric, and before anyone talks about getting ‘tough on crime’. Because another notable thing about that high prison figure is that it doesn’t help.  It doesn’t win the war on drugs, it doesn’t stop murders, it doesn’t end gang culture, and it certainly doesn’t stop people re-offending.

Call this Sheikh a cynical, untrusting old assassin if you will, but surely if the politicians are going to copy someone else’s political model in this country they should copy a model that, y’know, works.

The most damaging paranoia about science at the moment is in relation to climate science. Millions of people seem convinced that tens of thousands of scientists are conspiring to convince the world of the reality of climate change.

Another paranoia is the idea that mainstream medicine is a conspiracy against public health and that alternative medicine is always going to be better than mainstream medicine.

This latter case is an interesting one because I think it has an element of truth. That element of truth relates to drugs and drug companies. People have begun to cotton onto the fact that the purpose of drug companies is not to increase public health but to make a profit. This should not have been a surprise, since every corporation has one and only one goal, but I’m glad people are finally catching on anyway.

Many drugs should be viewed with suspicion. It recently emerged that a lot of studies of SSRIs were suppressed when they didn’t give the right result. The influence of the drug industry on medical science as a whole should also be viewed with suspicion. It is bullshit that you can go to a GP, say you are depressed, and they’ll shove drugs at your without attempting to get you into some form of therapy that might deal with the issues.

However, to leap from suspicion of drugs and drug companies to dismissal of all mainstream medicine, as many people do, is not a logical step, and many millions of people will testify that mainstream medicine has helped them. If we want to increase its effectiveness then rather than dismissing it all as nonsense why not put public money into non-profit research so we don’t have to be so suspicious of the results?

But back to climate science. I am not aware of any conspiracy of misinformation among scientists in the whole history of science *except* those that were funded by corporations (tobacco industry, oil industry etc).  I’d love it if someone could point me in direction of such a precedent, but I don’t think they can.

Until then, I’ll view corporations – who have a track record of conspiracy – with much more suspicion than I view scientists, and I find it odd that it is the scientists who are accused of conspiring.

Which side are the corporations on in the climate change debate? From wikipedia:

“The British Royal Society conducted a survey that found ExxonMobil had given US$ 2.9 million to American groups that “misinformed the public about climate change,” 39 of which “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”.

It’s not much of a surprise to anyone who ever read the paper.

If you want a glimpse into the quality of journalism at the South London Press check out this classic front page – it was an entirely invented story lifted from humorous speculation on a local website:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/112087519_b83fdcc4f3.jpg

I know someone who did a bit of work for the paper. After a street survey that had failed to render the data they wanted she was encouraged to make up some quotes so the paper could write the story they had intended to write all along.

Maybe there was a time when journalism was an honourable profession and local papers were vital institutions but if so it was a very long time ago and we are as far from there as Oz is from Kansas. I can’t bring myself to mourn the loss of producers of gibberish like this.

Written blandly like that it sounds innocuous enough, but it would require governments and professional decisionmakers to give up their right to make decisions, and to give up the idea that they know best. We live in a society governed by an elite who believe very strongly that they know what is best for people they have never met – it is considered bad manners to admit this but it shows constantly in their actions. In response a lot of the attempts by lobby groups to change government policy, no matter how well meaning, are merely attempts to change the minds of the elite, because really, it’s not worth the bother of changing the minds of the little people.

Green campaigners are some of the most guilty parties in this. They believe that the urgency of their cause means that changing the minds of the decisionmakers is more important than changing the minds of the people. They rarely admit to themselves how anti-democratic this is, and if they do notice, they see it as a necessary evil.

Well, maybe, but they have no right to be surprised if it comes back to bite their arses in the form of, say, riots against green taxation that will discredit their movement for a generation.

It is difficult to believe in democracy, because we must believe in something we have never seen. In a society like ours with an elitist tradition rather than a functioning democratic tradition it is very difficult to believe that people really can make decisions for themselves, because undemocratic societies keep their subjects in ignorance and so their decisions are made in ignorance.

It requires a leap of imagination to conceive of an educated population who have always been involved in the debates about matters affecting their lives. Only imaginative people believe in democracy, and that excludes our politicians, our civil servants, our journalists, our professional commentators, and our professional lobbyists, whether green or any other colour.

For the disease of lack of imagination the Sheikh of Alamut recommends a small block of this multi-purpose squishy brown substance. If it doesn’t make you believe in democracy I can at least use you for my missions. Better to be an honest assassin than a phoney democrat.

Their slogan is: “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”

Which, frankly, is asking for trouble, since people are bound to say things to *them* that they don’t want to hear.

Things like: most of the bloggers and commenters seem to imagine themselves to be left wing in some sense and there is certainly significant support for New Labour on the site. But given how often they slag off left wingers many of them would probably admit to being on the right wing of the Labour Party and probably feel comfortable with that – and even if they don’t it’s still true. But here’s the thing: Labour isn’t a left wing party any more, it’s a centreist party. And if you are to the right of a centreist party, then you are just, well, plain old right wing. Sorry. Harry’s Place is a right wing site that supports Gordon Brown. Suck on it.

Or things like: the expressed RAGE against militant Islamists, some of whom admittedly hold highly offensive views, seems so constant that they barely have a moment to draw breath before again descending into the Red Mist of rage against those bad people. And there’s nothing wrong with getting angry at bad people, but there are many bad people and many bad things in the world, many of them worth getting angry at. And there comes a time when we must calm down, take a deep breath, and assess the situation a little more rationally. The Red Mist at Harry’s Place is all about one thing and one thing only, and it is so omnipresent that there is never a moment of taking stock, of calm thought in which to think about  the discourses they are part of.

As for their never-ending posting of extremist Islamist views (acting as a justification for the relentless pursuit of terrorists by invading countries with nothing to do with terrorism and bombing shepherds) it amounts to Islamophobia for one reason that should be quite clear to many of the contributors. I could grab a bunch of quotes from Jewish religious extremists and violent settlers in Hebron, post them up on a webpage and talk constantly about backward Jewish extremism and how it is an evil force that must be resisted. It would certainly play well to a certain crowd on the internet who would flock to hear how evil and sinister those Jews are. I don’t do that, because it wouldn’t be honest, and I know who I would attract.

If the main bloggers at HPs manage to succeed in distinguishing between extremist Islamism and Islam (something I am in doubt about, but let’s say they do) they only need to read their own comments section to see that many in the gallery they are playing to do not.

But apparently the real slogan of Harry’s Place is: “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear, and also what they do want to hear, very selectively, with certain biases behind it that play to the prejudices of the audience.”

But it’s not as catchy I suppose, and might blunt the purity and simplicity of life in the Red Mist.

The US Army pays the Taliban tens of millions of dollars a year. Knowingly. And has been doing so for years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/us-trucks-security-taliban

Throughout the Afghan war the allies have constantly taken short cuts and taken the easy option in the short term, thus destroying any chance of long term ‘success’, whatever that would have looked like – the possibility is now obscured by entire cloudbanks of stupidity and exists only in some alternate universe where the people who run wars aren’t complete twats.

Time to leave Afghanistan. If it achieves nothing else our exit will at least cut some of the Taliban’s funding.

Well, I couldn’t give a fuck either way. Really, I mean it. Here’s why:

Climate change, if it is real (and I suspect it is) is just one of the environmental problems that we have created. There is a huge thousand-kilometre wide sea of floating plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Personally I think that’s so shocking it should be the headline item on the news every day until we find a way to deal with it. Habitats containing plant and animal species we don’t even know about, with unknown benefits to humankind are being wiped out every day. Every day the deserts across the world grow bigger, and we know for sure a lot of that is due to human activity. We’ve eaten all the goddamn fish in the world, for Christ’s sake, or very nearly.

It all springs from a couple of problems. Firstly, the world’s resources are finite while our capacity to consume them seems to be as close to infinite as makes no difference. Secondly, those who destroy the environment are not held accountable for it, mostly because the law that constrains most of the really powerful organisations in the world (corporate law) is such that those organisations are legally required to pay attention only to profit and never mind any side-effects. This is considered to be the most efficient way to do things. And it is, if by ‘do things’ you mean ‘fuck up the world for ever’.

Behind the argument about whether or not humans are causing climate change is the assumption that if we are causing it, then we need to fundamentally change the way our economy works, and if we aren’t causing it, we can carry on as usual. You know, with the big seas of floating plastic that don’t contain fish any more and the deserts growing and growing until they swallow us all.

Hopefully my point is beginning to make sense now. If global warming doesn’t get us, something else will, because our pretence that the planet’s resources will last for ever is putting absurd strains on global ecosystems. In the end something really important will break, even if it’s nothing to do with global temperatures.

So why not cut short the debate on global warming and get on with learning how to live on the planet without eating it and shitting it out? Oh yeah, cos those big organisations are very big, and they band together when threatened, and then they are bigger than any government in the world, and they want things to stay just the way they are thanks.

I suppose I’ll be pathetically grateful if global warming turns out to be untrue, or if it is true and governments manage to pull us back from the brink. And then I’ll start worrying about what will go wrong next – because something will, until we get those big organisations under control and rewrite their rules to prevent them shitting all over our present and our future.

How do we do that? I don’t know, but perhaps we can get some clues from what people did last time a bunch of big unaccountable organisations got out of control (national governments). People forced them, by persuasion and by force, to submit to a greater degree of democratic control, and to become more accountable to those whose good they supposedly serve.

It doesn’t seem like a bad idea…

I’m glad there’s increased debate about it, because it has been screwed up so badly that the sooner we leave the better for everyone, but there are a lot of assumptions behind the debates that go on, particularly the debate about whether the war is ‘winnable’ (a debate for morons in itself, since there is only one answer, and everyone knows it who doesn’t have an interest in defending or prolonging the war).

The main assumption is that we are in Afghanistan (and let us not forget Pakistan) fighting ‘terror’, or from time to time we are assumed to be there for humanitarian reasons, for the good of the Afghan people. This latter angle was sold at the start of the war but is referred to less often these days as the idea that the allies are acting in the best interests of Afghans has become less and less tenable. If we were there for the good of the Afghan people it would show in the massive aid, infrastructure and employment programs that would be required to turn Afghanistan into a place able to trade with the surrounding countries (its position giving the country one of its few economic advantages). The non-appearance or half-heartedness of such programs had made it very clear to Afghans, even if not to British people, that the allies are not there to help them.

While there have been days when I’ve thought such a humanitarian intervention might have been possible, I then came to accept that while, yes, in theory it could have been done, it was never ever going to be an option for the worthless politicians who launched this war.

As for the fighting terror angle, at most that would have required a few weeks blitz to destroy the Taliban and training bases and then out again. Sure you could argue that a vacuum might have been left in which militant groups might appear again. Except that that happened anyway, with a vengeance. If the allies really believed they were fighting ‘terror’ then as soon as they noticed they were catalysing more militant groups than they were defeating they should have left. They didn’t, and why didn’t they? Because as well as wanting to fight ‘terror’, it was very, very important to the politicians in charge to appear to be fighting ‘terror’.  Incidentally I put ‘terror’ in inverted commas because it is a bogus over-simplifying term for an awful lot of complicated ideas, tactics and organisations.

We are staying in Afghanistan for the sake of appearances, because within the rhetoric established in the Bush-Blair era a retreat from Afghanistan would be a retreat from fighting ‘terror’, even though our presence there makes the likelihood of real terrorist incidents greater in the long run.

Since we are only there for the sake of appearances, it follows that the debate about whether or not we can ‘win’ the war is a red herring. There’s no logic for us being there at all. It also follows of course that the soldiers who have died there recently have not given their lives for the nation, as the sombre speeches told us yesterday, they have given their lives for a bunch of career politicians, and for the sake of appearances.  And the many, many Afghans and Pakistanis who have died also died for the sake of appearances.

Although it is true that the war is ‘unwinnable’, there is only one real reason to get out of Afghanistan, and that is that people should not die for the sake of politicians, and they should not die for the sake of appearances.