Chomsky talks about the latests Wikileak (and other stuff)

Democracy Now! have spoken with Noam Chomsky on a range of topics related to the cables leaked by Wikileaks. It covers a range of topics, notably the nature of the cables consistently supporting USA biases. If they are legitimate Chomsky points out that while Arab leaders, who are dictators to a man, may see eye to eye with the US in wanting to attack Iran the actual Arab populace not only view Israel and America as far bigger threats a majority, 57% actually view the prospect of a nuclear Iran positively. For some reason Arabs think only Israel having nukes in the region is dangerous.

A lot of other excellent points are made and he draws inferences and connections between various things that are obvious when he says them but very unlikely to occurred to most of us.

Please watch it: Part 1 and Part 2

thanks jonny

As an interesting post script the wikileaks twitter highlighted a cable from the leaks describing Prince Andrew. He seems like an absolute fucking idiot.

May death come swiftly to his enemies.

Red Ken has been selected again by the Labour Party to be their candidate for London Mayor where he will take on the utterly worthless sack of shit posh boy Boris Johnson. I'm no nationalist but it still is embarrassing as heck to live in a country whose capital and largest metropolitan area is governed by him. Seriously the reason Johnson is known to most people is because he consistently makes a tit of himself on have I got news for you:


Now this is almost certainly an act, fake affability to appeal to the voters but the depressing fact is that it worked. After eight years as mayor doing what certainly seemed to be a good job, introducing landmark schemes such as a the congestion charge Red Ken was ousted by Johnson, the silly man off the telly.

I hope to goodness Livingstone wins this time around or I might have to seriously re-evaluate my position on vanguardism.

Questioning democracy.

A concept that was quite alien to me was introduced to me yesterday, in a thread in LF by Dead Ken (he who created the greatest of all quotes*) he brought up the fact that democracy, especially liberal democracy is the symptom of a specific type of government and is not nearly as universaliseable or as inherently desired as it is portrayed to be. This does beg the question is the kneejerk Democracy (or at least "good" democracy as defined by foreign policy requirements) = good?

I honestly don't know and it is something I will likely be devoting a fair bit of thought to from now on. Certainly while the type of democracy we currently have now is flawed and deeply problematic what to replace it with is the big question, if the governed don't have some kind of input or right of reply to their rulers then they will be exploited and used. Then again they kind of are now. Still the lack of an immediately obvious alternative to democracy wont come to mind if, like me, you haven't thought that democracy as it is now is not what you assumed it to be.

Anyway, wondering about this caused me to do some googling and I found this transcript of a public discussion between Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou about the problematic nature of democracy and the problems of its' current sacred cow status.

Edit: turns out the guy whose blog that transcript was posted on is a major fraudster and is on the run from the police in several countries. I don't think the transcript was false but given he holds some pretty hardcore libertarian views who knows? Details about his fraud and a link to a BBC current affairs program about him (that anyone can access) can be found here



*"Science is a debased form of Marxism"

Aristocrats in deed and bank account.

Naked Capitalism asks Should be leery of the generosity of the uber rich? making the convincing point that aside from this being a nice PR move they are taking on the traditional aristocratic pursuit of noblesse oblige which I suppose was an early modern PR system but essentially it is both an act and philosophy that by giving the poor some crumbs they deserve some fabulous wealth.

Even if this isn't the case one has to wonder if the charities founded by the super rich and controllable by them will move towards worthwhile goals, given how deeply undemocratic they are. Imagine a charity controlled by Steve Ballmer.

link found via http://www.archein21.com/