Motley Moose – Archive

I’m only now beginning to catch up on the latest round of self questioning launched by Allison Benedikt’s reflective piece in The Awl about being a Jewish American growing up in Ohio, attending Zionist summer camp, visiting Israel, watching her sister move there, then dating and marrying a Non Jewish American.

There’s little doubt this piece has stirred the debate, intensified by Peter Beinart in his essay last year ‘The Failure of the Jewish American Establishment’ to another level, but that’s too big a topic to be covered here. And besides, what can I, as a non-American, non-Jew, say about it?

And herein lies the problem….

So it’s happened. Despite protests from the Pentagon, Obama has announced his intention of making the surge of two years ago truly a surge, and to draw down 33,000 US troops from Afghanistan by September next year.

The current Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just welcomed the news.

“The Afghan people’s trust in the Afghan army and police is growing every day and preservation of this land is the job of Afghans…. I welcome the decision of the US president today on pulling out [some of] … its troops from Afghanistan and I consider this a right decision for the interest of both countries.”

The news has created an unusual consensus and been welcome by the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as well as NATO, and the governments in London, Paris and Berlin.

Following on from Mr Blask’s excellent ruminations on population growth and Sci Fi dystopias it failed to deliver, forgive me if I busk for a moment on another Sci Fi theme; partly as a rehearsal for a brief talk today for a Futureworld Event at London’s Science Museum Dana Centre.

To show how seriously I take this subject, I’m going to kick the talk off with a British ad from the 1970s for a synthetic mashed potato product.

Wonderful news for any of us who followed the horrors of the break up of Yugoslavia,  and witnessed hundreds of thousands killed in the nationalist wars that followed. The Yugoslav wars were  mainly inspired by the Serbian Leader Slobodan Milosevic, his henchman Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia, and his key military leader, Ratko Mladic.

The last key figure of that evil triumvirate, responsible for mass murder, rape and ethnic cleansing, has been arrested in Serbia.  According to Belgrade’s Blic Newspaper

Ratko Mladic was arrested five hours ago by the Security information Agency (BIA), reports the Serbian daily “Blic”. Mladic, who was arrested in Lazarevo, near Zrenjanin, has been using false papers and identified himself as Milorad Komadic….

“With his arrest we ended a very difficult period and removed a stigma from Serbia and Serbian people, wherever they are. I think that this operation shows that the institutions of the state of Serbia made this country safe and secured the rule of law”, Mr. Tadic said.

This is also great news for the people of Serbia who, with this last arrest, have a pathway to join the EU and acquire the norms of the civil society, probity and free elections contained its protocols. As Serbian president Boris Tadic has just said

On behalf of the republic of Serbia, I inform you that Ratko Mladic was arrested this morning … The extradition process is taking place.

Mladic will be extradited to the Hague where he’ll face the following charges from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Count 1: genocide

Count 2: complicity in genocide

Count 3: Persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds

Count 4: Extermination

Count 5: Murder

Count 6: Murder

Count 7: Deportation

Count 8: Inhumane acts (forcible transfer)

Count 9: unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians

Count 10: murder

Count 11: murder

Count 12: cruel treatment

Count 13: inhumane acts

Count 14: attacks on civilians

Count 15: taking of hostages

For those of you too young to remember the Bosnian War, the continued freedom of  Mladic – who personally directed the murder of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the UN safe area of Srebrenica, the worst civilian massacre in Europe since the Second War – was not only an insult to international law but […]

A hopelessly short diary to celebrate having your President over at my place today. I’d write more, but I’ve been busy. Just see how many chairs I had to put out.

Everyone has a 9/11 story. I won’t bore you with mine. But I’ll just remind you all of the hundreds of non Americans who died at ground zero including 69 Brits, more than have ever been killed in any other terrorist atrocity, more than the 7/7 London tube bombings in 2005

NYC is a capital of the world. It belongs to the world. And our whole lifestyle, liberalism and internationalism were under attack. It was literally an attack on modern western secular values – and we all have a stake in them.

But while I can’t forget those 3,000 victims, the spiral of reaction and counter reaction has amplified those deaths many times over, all the victims of other Al Qaeda atrocities in Bali, Madrid, Baghdad, Lahore, Tanzania. And of course the civilians caught in the cross fire of counter-insurgency and invasion, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’m happy this morning, but I don’t feel like partying. I feel like breathing again…

It feels like a ten year nightmare might finally be over…

Though I’m a committed anti-Royalist, and agree with everything Wilf Self says in this week’s Prospect Magazine, Why the Monarchy Must Go – I can’t deny – as a dramatist – I enjoy the pure theatricality of the Royal Wedding (particularly the music, historic costumes, fashion parades, historic architecture)  for about 20 minutes. Then I’m bored.

Just a shame it’s the people who already have so much in their lives get more.

But hey – check out the highlights

Welcome to the Wild West, a personal Lord in the Flies Experiment in Flame Baiting and Anarchy

(PSST. Is this snark?)

This diary is a combination of several things, partly a response to Kos’ recent update on both the software developments on Daily Kos, and his comment on moderation. But it’s also a wider reflection on what’s happened to the principles of online activism, fundraising, citizen journalism and advocacy.

First off, this isn’t a gripe about the software redesign of DK4, or all the hard work put in by Kossacks and the IT team.  On the purely visual level, it’s a stunning overhaul and most of us would feel a real downgrade to to back to DK3. This is about something deeper than active tags or group functionality. It’s about the principles of civility and online citizenship.

Neither is it an attack on the site’s founder. I have no personal gripes against Kos. Hell, I spend a lot of time on his blog for free (hope he gets some ad revenues). DailyKos is certainly the best looking, most active and advanced blogging platform I’ve come across. No other site on Left Blogistan compares with it, and UK equivalents look lumbering and antediluvian in comparison.

Though I’ve heard Kos is some kind of left libertarian, this is mainly directed to a wider set of  ‘Technolibertarians’ who somehow believe that online networking will solve many of the political problems of our future.

So, no mon hypocrite lecteur,  my opening line isn’t entirely snark. This has felt like the Wild West since the launch of DK4,  like being a character in Lord of the Flies. What happened? Are there any lessons to be drawn from it? Will I get gift subscriptions? And is there any end to pie?

Thank God. Finally. Having come to office with a promise of healing divisions, and being faced with an obstructionist opposition veering increasingly to the zero tax anarchy of the Libertarian Right, your President finally came clean. No he isn’t a corporate tool. (Hell, if he was, wouldn’t he have taken those Wall St job offers rather than a meagre community organisers job?). Yes, he went there, and picked on that 1% which Joseph Steiglitz has so graphically depicted as enriching themselves in the last two decades. For those who haven’t read it: here’s his opening premise:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided.

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous-12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades-and more-has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

My emphases