‘There’s only one man I’m afraid of.’

‘Who is he sir? Name the devil.’

‘It’s you, Charles.’

I saw Treasure Island today after a family friend was kind enough to get us tickets. It’s a superb show and if you can muster the time and money I highly reccommend it. It wasn’t quite a musical yet wasn’t quite a straight adapation (although a good deal of the original dialogue was maintained, much to my delight) and the weird mid-way point it reached was most satisfactory.

So sword fights, singing and swashbuckling. Even ninjas could not have improved it.

Militant Islamist group al-Shabbab (”youth”) have outlined their international intentions to be executed once they’ve completed the conquest of Somalia. They begin reasonably enough:

We are fighting to lift the burden of oppression and colonialism from our country … We are defending ourselves against enemies who attacked us…Once we are successful with that we will fight on and finish oppression elsewhere on earth,

So far, so standard.

We wish to tell Bush and our opponents our real intentions.

Well, mention him all you can while he’s still there, I suppose.

Then they get ambitious:

We will establish Islamic rule from Alaska and Chile to South Africa, Japan, Russia, the Solomon Islands and all the way to Iceland, be warned, we are coming.

My immediate thought is that if they pooled their resources together and cut down on the kalashnikovs for a week or two they could probably afford Iceland. A fitting outcome for a nation seemingly entirely dependent upon the kuffah economics of usury.

Also, one has to wonder what the darling Solomon Islands have done to come to al-Shabbab’s attention. Still, it was nice to give such an unlikely target plenty of forewarning. Its perhaps the only one on the list (save perhaps the sparse sub-Arctic tundra of Alaska) that is near to managable for the Islamic guerrilas.

Jennie Rigg (better known as The Yorkshire Gob) cries foul over Sunny Hundal’s removal of her reply to this post. In its comments section some harsh words are said on each sides before the post is re-instated. Douglas’ ideological response to the spat is to be found here and I have little to add save the quote “I am a communist because I am a liberal”, which I came across in Peter Clarke’s excellent Hope and Glory.

Regardless, from a more tactical perspective I hope that this issue doesn’t drive the issue apart. Liberal Conspiracy is far from fun enough as it is without losing perhaps its best writer. Much as my personal enjoyment of that website is limited I can easily see the value in having an influential and well read blog of that both unites the left and acts as a forum for its intellectual splendour.

As for the post removal: well its not my place to tell the clearly more competent (or at very least far more successful) Mr. Hundal how to run his site, but speaking as a sporadic reader I wouldn’t describe the blog as overwhelmed by a deluge of posts without remorse or let up. Indeed, if it was perhaps I’d be a rather more regular reader. I think that bloggers have yet to bear in mind what television producers have been aware of since soon after the outset of that medium: it is, above all, motion that catches the eye.

A static blog is an infrequently visited one.

This considered Jennie’s reference to Hundal telling “us” (those within the LC writers clique, presumably) that they should post more often is understandable. Additionally, this makes it curious that a lengthy, distinct and in-depth post was removed.

Since Culture 11 survived its drama so to should the LibCon. I hope that Sunny adopts a more laissez faire approach to posting henceforth. Or else just switches off the “writer” accounts and has done with it.

Pornographic photography, ‘free’-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda - no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them.

- Llwelyn H. Rockwell, inadvertantly nailing the reason that libertarianism was never for me.

Apologies for the absence of the SES assured post on this one. I may manage to write something at some length in the near future, but for the time being:

• We could hope for no better steerer than John McDonnell, an obvious visionary who most (or at least enough) can agree upon as awesome.
• The G20 might not have been the best early target. I understand that this is a momentum gaining exercise, but both interest and the scope to have an immense impact is low. I am all up for a foray into internationalism, though.
• The whole “Editorial Committee” thing is probably neccessary but the implementation could be problematic: who gets on it? What are their guidelines? What material gets rejected?
• When he mentioned that no groups were going to get excluded my mind couldn’t help but wander to my dear comrades, the CPGB(ML).
• Just getting a room together as we did was an achievement, one that needs to be built upon and repeated.
• Annoyingly the fact that the next time that that’ll happen being on the 12th means I won’t be able to attend. ;_;
• Miller really should have come to the pub. I’m sure somebody would have fed him and I feel sort of annoyed that I didn’t recognise him and say hello when he was sitting right next to me.
• Penny Red’s housemate looked much like I imagined one would.

The tiresome smears of Chavez are seemingly endless. Here he is conflated with the far more dubious dictator Raul Castro and described as “obviously no democrat” (which is why he honoured a referendum he lost by less than a percentage point). A sterling response by Cleve Jones was issued and Andrew Sullivan excidedly describes him as a “Vicious homophobe.”

As ever, the evidence provided is precisely nil. The bizarre dedication of various figures to declaring Chavez a dracon is most odd. I have seen far fewer state the same about the president of Mexico, who rests upon a far shakier mandate. Yet someone who has reigned triumphant in a series of elections by vast margins is to be treated as a totalitarian.

Something to do with his approach to oil, perhaps?

I’ve edited the fuck out of my response to Penny Red’s heralding of the highly undercelebrated anniversary of women’s suffrage. It still says much the same conceptually, but now hopefully does so with superior clarity. Tomorrow I imagine I’ll do much the same to the rest of the posts I’ve made today (including, perhaps, this one).

Why oh why am I incapable of getting these things just right the first time around?

Culture 11, the conservative website that honoured no sect and cherished no party, has effectively ended. In its place stands Censor 11, an altogether more shoddy replacement.

Joe Carter explains his paltry excuse for reasoning here, the offending post in question is rather bizarrely stored here. Apparently so foul & heinous that Joe doesn’t mind it posted under his name. The strongest response yet (besides Will Wilkinson’s, in comments) is here. To that I have only to add that this part of the reasoning was by far the most telling:

I myself have been scarred by the behavior that Ms. Gray defends [therefore] the defense of it is not something I can condone on Culture11.

Note the assumption that simply because dear Joe’s experiences with “hook-up” have been poor, the same will be true of everyone. It is impossible to have encounters which lead to outcomes distinct from his own, and from his annecdote we can extrapolate the outcome for every human that would attempt acts of such great “moral stupidity”.

All patricians see themselves as physicians, though, and Carter is no exception. He knows sickness when he sees it and if he needs to quarantine a post or two to stop it spreading then that’s what he’s willing to do. Disregarding patient consent he springs into action and starts purging.

Why is it that so few conservatives can come up with a non-deranged position on sex?

Edit: It would seem that David Kuo has sprang into action. Too late? Perhaps not. Then I’d have to start arguing with feminists and liberals again…

Meet The Furry Conservative. I’d heard rumours of Furry Cons (not conventions, obviously) existing for a while (I believe I once saw their LiveJournal page, closer inspection and some confused googling shows me that it’s called, as I should probably have predicted, ConFURvative, an interesting instance of capital letters making phonetics a superfluity) which I found impressive given the obvious ideological difficulties of arguing for the preservation of culture much as it is while favouring the obliteration of firmly and long lasting dissapproval over species rigidity. But since there are even NaziFurs, although apparently they thoroughly purge any genuine bigotry (which would be pretty hilarious if it was permitted, given that furries are the most oft abused and reliably sexually deviant group to be found on the internet) and furries with a fetish for shaving (surely making their status entirely redundant in short order) I suppose that it isn’t too remarkable.

But somehow there being a genuine British Tory who dons a fursuit, enjoys fraternising with a bunch of people pretending to be wolves and tigers (and it really is mostly wolves and tigers) or at very least likes imagining that he closes his eyes and has paws, brings me a strange sort of pleasure.

Look, I tried, I really did. But when she referenced Christabel…

Penny Red heralds the 90th anniversary of women voting, a worthy event but not one reached by the activities of some she praises in connection with it. Indeed, it’s likely that it would have happened a lot sooner had the suffragette leaders not firstly engaged in the practice of intentionally getting themselves arrested (how can we tell? They arranged a press conference before the first occasion even happened) amongst other low class stunts and acts of street thuggery and then abandoning their struggle once the First World War began to engage instead in the practice of shaming the underage and industrially occupied men of Britain into the trenches.

Not that we should be surprised that a gaggle of misandrists didn’t give a fuck about male life.

The Pankhursts were a pack of needlessly and counter-productively provocative loons. Their treatment by the British state was draconic, but their methods hardly helpful towards any goal save self-publicity. Although they did not mastermind the brutal excesses of the suffragette’s movement nadir (smashing windows and arson were tactics that seemed to originate from the base and then were adopted by the leadership, instead of being imposed from above as you’d expect in an organisation with as totalitarian a structure as the WSPU) they certainly did nothing to rein in the militancy, and in face seem to have been engaged in a sick game of catch & match.

Why exactly she would herald a young woman who let her elderly mother faced constant arrest and the aforementioned abuse while she swanned around safely in Paris concocting anti-utilitarian slogans such as “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men” is especially beyond me. In The Great Scourge C. Pankhurst depicts men as nothing other than a threat, in stark contrast to the entirely rational and sane arguments put forwards by many other writers of the time, both male and female. The Pankhursts, of course, permitted only the latter in their movement, clearly more interested in brewing a war between the genders instead of fully uniting them. The Pankhurst agenda was one of increasing gender divisions and exacerbating baseless tensions, not alleviating and relieving them. Their methods set the movement back untold years, alienating would-be and former supporters and allowing only a quasi-Leninist coterie of the pure (or rather, the obedient) get stuck into the joyous carnage. Christabel was nothing other than a prototype for the foul anti-sex crusaders radical feminism would later by typified by.

Not that the suffragists should be tarred with the suffragette brush, mind. Their achievement was a sterling one which other nations took far longer to reach and I have nothing save respect and admiration for the peaceful and well reasoned branch of early feminism, who carved a hard-won path through the thickest of stone.

But let’s not pretend that a cadre of fools smashing windows was productive, especially not when those have-a-go militants then did their best to aid the real military and adopted handing out white feathers instead of tossing bricks the moment the First World War started.