If you haven’t noticed how superb music has been this year then you haven’t listened to a lot of it.

Things started off well, with Mars Volta releasing Bedlam in Goliath to high acclaim. It doesn’t top their 2005 opus France the Mute but…Well…France the Mute is the best musical work in history, so we can forgive them that. Goliath contains their typical proggish glory, but constitutes a development insofar as they demonstrate their ability to write a song that lasts less than ten minutes. Indeed, the results are so good that they got nominated for a Grammy:

Dan le Sac versus Scroobius Pip released the hip-hop album of the decade, Angles:

But that wasn’t enough to get them onto the X Factor:

An interesting development in this years music is the total disintegration of the division between dance and rock. Always a flimsy one it has now dissolved entirely, as the following videos should demonstrate:

Dance bands playing rock? Rock bands playing dance? Nobody can tell, nobody important still thinks it matters.

Another remarkable phenomenon is the sheer weight of fantastic albums released. All of the videos above come from strong albums, with large amounts of great songs instead of the tiresome strong single/filler set-up. Especially worthy of mention here are Late Of The Pier, who with Fantasy Black Channel made one of the most playful and exploratory albums I’ve heard in a long time. It also manages to stage a sonic approximation of an orgasm:

Foals put out quite magnificently, with Antidotes a well crafted, inter-connected piece of tightness which didn’t disappoint despite the (in hindsight not so) absurd expectations built up around it:

Speaking of which, Portishead. How were they supposed to impress after having been away for that long? By released an album like Third.

An even greater surprise than Portishead finally putting out was Mr. Trent Reznor going from “That guy that takes a decade to perfect one drum loop” to “Prolific” in the space of a year. How? Releasing five albums.

Admittedly much of this could have been a consequence of Ghosts not exactly being what the majority of his fanbase wanted (although I for one adore the ambient, abstract moments on Downward Spiral, see them as the highlight and wish that there had been more) but frankly…He’s releasing this stuff for free now. We are in no position to complain.

Slipknot didn’t release their best album by a long shot, but ooh, new masks:

The Kills, however, did:

And then of course there’s Crystal Castles, the band that add further evidence to the theory that Canada must be the origin of the best new band every year, without fail (see also: Arcade Fire, DFA 1979, etc…)

Turning up hideously late to things is rather my calling card, as at least one of my collaborators is fully aware. Accordingly it was with some concern that I turned up to the protest against the recent and on-going Israeli action against the Gaza Strip, which was held for the second consecutive day outside the Israeli embassy, was agains yesterday at 2PM will be held for the fourth time at the same time.

The crowd was largely Muslim, with a heavy grouping towards the centre pressing against the police who seemed to be pretty much devoid of any other faction, excepting a single person waving a red flag marked with the hammer and sickle. I was in conversation with a late middle aged Asian man who wryly remarked “Which one?” when I mentioned the presence of the “Communist Party” the flag announced, alerting me to the fact I was speaking to a kindred spirit. Apparently he had been a part of a collectivist group in Iran, as well as one of the endless legion of left wing groups in Britain (I confess that I have forgotten the name of both, quite shockingly, although I believe the latter might have been the SWP).

He told me that he thought the reason no group would ever get anywhere was their excessive bureaucracy and absolute alientation with their membership. It is impossible to implement socialism, he said, without a democratic organisation attempting to introduce it.

Although they find it impossible to get anywhere beyond a miniscule groove the far-left groups in attendence also show a remarkable tendency to avoid death, as evidenced by somebody offering me an edition of Newsline. This, as I was told when asked, is the organ for the Workers Revolutionary Party. The WRP that still exists, that is, after for a time there was a split were neither was willing to lose either name and there were a pair of WRPs producing two Newslines.

I wasn’t certain if the survivors were the loyalists to the notorious molester embezzler who used to run the joint and probably should have asked.

In addition to those old timers though there was also a group I’d never heard of, and if there’s a British far-lefty group I’ve never heard of its generally because they haven’t existed for a very long time. That is certainly true of The Commune, who were founded in August/September (”There were only ten…” was the excuse given). The person handing me the leaflet described himself as a “Libertarian Socialist”, a term I had only ever heard as a euphamism for “Anarchist”. He rejected that term due to its connection to historical ideologuary, wanting to steer clear of “Bakunist faction”, “Proudhon faction” stuff, which is a tendency I often share and can appreciate entirely.

He was friends with a member of AWL, a group he left after being expected to recant his “Troops Out” views, presumably under the tenants of Democratic Centralism. His friend knew well Robin, another member of the AWL who I’d met in Cambridge during a dire Marxist note reading session which I’d expected would be more of a talk on the socialist take on global warming (something that actually interests me). Anyway, point is: the far-left is a small world.

(I could tell you about my encounter with a New Communist but to be honest they aren’t too interesting. Besides their celebration of a new Mao Museum their paper was Stalinism at its least shocking and least amusing. The man I spoke to told me that his Communist Party was the only real Communist Party, didn’t have much of an answer as to why a party with that name that had been around since 1977 hadn’t changed it yet and described Zimbabwe as “A difficult one”. Does any of that really surprise you? No, didn’t think so.)

Making my way to the other side of the protest I came across the Jews Against Zionism, a rather striking bunch given the context, but perhaps undeservedly so. Before we can get onto them, though, I should deal with the crazies:

Anything involving Israel involves the Jews and when the Jews come up certain people are utterly insane. There were four examples of this, the first being a 9/11 truther who was possibly not all that anti-semitic but was certainly a nut-job. He told me that “It was an inside job” and when I asked how exactly that was relevant to the matter at hand he replied “War on Terror”. I pointed out that the Gaza attacks were not per se part of that at all and he replied that they certainly were and…Well, it was all one big inter-connected tapestry that I couldn’t see properly. He sprouted a view events (1977 Israeli attack on USS Liberty, 9/11insidejob, Gaza attacks) and expected me to draw links, which is rather a minimalist approach to conspiracy theories really, or perhaps just a little lazy.

The second was trying to insist to a rather bemused Muslim man that they use a slogan which told the “Ruling class” Jews to return to their homes, their homes being Eastern European. Apparently having converted in the 7th century they weren’t real Jews and had no claim to Israel. He had a photocopy of an Encyclopedia Brittanica page which demonstrated as much.

The third was perhaps the most obviously deranged, wearing a rather twisted looking depiction of Christ crucified on his back dropped an early hint of this. He handed out a leaflet asserting that the “leechers” were responsible for all the wrong doing in the world and featuring on the front page a black and white photo of the IDF bundling away a crying Palestinian child. The back made a rhyme about how the “leecher usurers” had killed Christ. When I asked him to define the word “leecher” he played it coy and asked me if I knew what it meant, before saying that they were someone that would “Drain the life out of you” and that I could well be a target.

The fourth was engaged in trying to convince one of the anti-zionist jews that the bankers had caused all the woe of the world, and met with some resistance both from him and me. I pointed out that if this was all some elaborate scheme it clearly wasn’t running on course given that the financial sector is presently imploding and she replied that there are a lot of people making a lot of money out of it.

Eventually we warded her off and got talking. The perspective of the anti-zionist was that until the coming of the Messiah Jews have no claim to be the ruler of any nation. He argued that atheist zionists had “brain-washed” people into falsely believing otherwise and stated that what jews should do when people wished to purge them was to send their elders to try and convince the leaders of the area otherwise or else submit and depart.

The jews were a little aloof from the rest of the protest, in their own separate sphere. They were clearly not unwelcome though, and their presence confounded the notion that these affairs are a gaggle of frothing mouth jew-haters.

Things were not entirely peaceful, with flaming cones (filled with Socialist Workers? an AWL member speculated) being passed to the front and then promptly extinguished. But there wasn’t blood on the pavement or anything. I also suspect that the chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” which broke out briefly, but broadly, unsettled the two staters present.

Eventually once things ended I headed with the protestors who still seemed keen on protestors, who got edged by the police down the street. For about half an hour ample opportunities to block off the whole high street abounded and were all missed. We eventually moved down the High Street until finally a combination of riot police and horseback mounted coppers (along with the standards) got us boxed in against a shopfront and refused to allow us to leave.

Robin took the opportunity to being discussions with some Muslims, including a white convert. He struggled to understand how someone not indoctrinated from birth (indeed, a former atheist) could believe such stuff. “Look around you, this is God’s creation”, we were told. We looked around us and saw a circle of policemen hemming us in.

Some idiot through a firework at the coppers but fucked it up, an Iranian film crew with an Indian presenter was harassed by the youths, implictly for being a woman (”Come on, show us your emotional side…”) and explicitly because “Mumbai was a inside-job”. After numerous attempts she finally managed to get a decent take done and was loudly applauded by all present save the police.

Eventually we were filmed, had personal details taken down, were thoroughly searched and allowed to leave. In some database or other there is now film of me asking under what pretext I could be arrested if I refuse to be filmed, which strikes me as quite delightfully meta.

Then off to the pub. With popcorn, a libertarian socialist, two Allied Workers and (sadly, but predictably) zero Muslims.

Protests for this week are as follows, please do come along:

• Wednesday 31 December, 2 - 4pm outside Israeli Embassy

• Thursday 1 January 2 - 4pm outside Israeli Embassy

• Friday 2 January 2 - 4 pm. Outside the Egyptian Embassy, . 26 South Street, London, W1K 1DW. Call for Egypt to open the border immediately.

• SATURDAY 3 JANUARY. DEMONSTRATION AND RALLY. Assemble 2pm Parliament Square, W1. Nearest tube Westminster

The Salisbury Review has harsh words for Singer, calling his foundations “filth” and also for the work of Bentham, dubbing his felicific calculus “crude” (perhaps the strangest insult imaginable for anything so elaborate…)

However they seem to struggle with actually presenting anyreason that their own premise is correct. It is true that “human exceptionism” is what they base their ethical code around. But has it entirely passed them by that their ideology could be rotten the core?

The answer to this would seem to be an unfortunate negative, which is a great pity. I am interested in seeing this matter debated and this promising article is a distinct failure, simply asserting their core assumptions firmly and doing nothing at all to fend off the attacks made. Indeed, it serves solely to demonstrate quite how devastating Singer and Bentham’s thought is to their viewpoint, with the absence of any adequete engagement perhaps acting as implicit admittance that they are incapable of self-defence.

In the entire paragraph in which they attempt to describe what “Humans are…” they demonstrate an immense ignorance of Singer’s work, which even with the very light reading which I have done personally I can detect. Singer attacks humanism at its weakest point: not all humans share the capabilities which are the norm.

If it is do to a certain set of traits rather than the inherency of humanity then those humans who lack those traits (those suffering from severest defect of or damage to the brain) are no longer human. If it is only our “advanced facility with language enables”, our “‘I’-thoughts, ‘you’-thoughts, ‘he’, ’she’, ‘we’ and ‘they’-thoughts” then how can those humans lacking these capacities truly be considered “us” at all?

This issue is not addressed by the Salisbury editorial, and this is immensely telling. They worsen affairs by remarking in passing that rights given to animals would be ones “which animals cannot defend themselves”. This is the case of with children and the infirm as much as it is with a bull or parakeet. I see very little heft behind this observation.

Having made a major attack upon a minor remark perhaps I should offer one of my own as a closer: if the argument that “Other animals, even our closest relatives, are incapable of doing these things” in reference to a list that includes the word “Sing” is made entirely in earnest then I (nocturnalist though I am) would advocate that the Salisbury Review’s editors start getting out of bed earlier.

There’ll always be yet another far-left group to laugh at.

Check out the fraternal criteria for MonkeySmashHeaven, a website pointed my way by a “Libertarian Socialist” yesterday during a Gaza Protest (which I will write up later today). I assure MSH that any snideness in what follows is simply a consequence of embitterment at us clearly not being fit for fraternity.

This bunch seem to be intent upon agitating the international proletariat, by which they mean “Third Worlders”. Their take on the American working class poor can be found here. Their “Gender Line” is here and here. In the last document they do at least admit that “We need to be more skilled at projecting our voice to the international proletariat.”

How exactly they managed to avoid the realisation that projecting to the third world poor via a weblog might not have been the best of ideas, though, is beyond SES.

This one’s easy, it’s just a matter of who wants it.

Israel: Purges the settlers from the West Bank, withdraws to 1967 boundaries.

Palestinians: Stop breaking shit thenceforth.

Hamas has offered a decade of peace along those lines, Hamas are in power and hugely popular. The only obstacle is the Israeli Right being far too strong and about as keen on settlement removal as the Minute Men are on Mexicans.

Consequentially Israel is demographically unstable insofar as shortly they will have a majority of people within the state who don’t want it to exist. At that stage Israel is left with three options:

1) Self-determinate themselves.
2) Deny arabs votes, begin apartheid.
3) Ethnically cleanse.

So what’ll it be?

We haven’t linked glowingly to Johann Hari in a while now. Today seems worth resuming that habit temporarily:

The world isn’t just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide-vests or rockets. Israel’s leaders have convinced themselves the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

Too true…

David Axelrod, Senior Adviser to Obama:

“He’s going to work closely with the Israelis. They’re a great ally of ours, the most important ally in the region.”

Just when change would have gone down well…

Why does anyone think that bombing someone will make their neighbours better disposed to them?

Israel ought to understand this. Its civilians in Sderot have their lives made a misery by rocket fire from Hamas. They’re scared and can’t live secure lives - so demand action. Understandably.

And yet the Israeli government doesn’t seem to expect Gazans to behave in the same way. But, of course, they do; they too are scared and threatened by the bombs, and have very likely seen someone killed or injured by them. They see that Israeli planes dropped the bombs, and so blame Israel - in the same way that citizens of Sderot blame Hamas for the rockets. Someone who’s forced to cower from the bomb that fell down the road must find it very hard not to take that as an attack on them, whoever the target was.

These Gazans become understandably angry at Israel. They demand action to stop the bombs, and move towards actively resisting Israel. Some, inevitably, will be drawn to the group whose rhetoric most aggressively assaults Israel; Hamas.

So every bomb that falls acts as a recruiting beacon for Hamas. It doesn’t matter that the Israeli military hopes to decapitate Hamas. For every bomb that kills a member of Hamas, yet more join because of that bomb.

People on both sides of the border suffer the same emotions when an angry man in a uniform hurls several tons of high explosive with the intent to kill them. They don’t like it, and want it to stop. Why does doing the same back seem like a good idea, then? Those caught up in the retaliation will feel exactly the same way - because they don’t want to die, and they don’t want their families and friends to die either.

I genuinely don’t understand how that could be missed. The premise that “I am human, they are human, therefore they’re as unlikely to enjoy watching their aunt bleeding to death by a roadside as I” is simple. Either that those firing the explosives either don’t think of the others as fully human, haven’t thought at all, or actively want the slaughter on both sides to continue.

Unfortunately, I suspect all three are true to varying degrees for various groups…

A key argument of apologists for the slaughter in Gaza is that Hamas are a collection of armed thugs (they are) who force themselves on the Gazan people.

They acknowledge that the Gazans have little or no control over Hamas. How can unarmed civilians and children overthrow men with machine guns and rockets?

They then defend dropping high-explosive on those unarmed civilians on the grounds that Hamas hides itself amongst them. The civilians can’t control Hamas, yet suffer in their hundreds from the retaliation.

Large explosions kill indiscriminately. The Israeli military know this, and so know civilians will be killed. Because the Hamas gunmen live amongst the civilians.

They do not know how many, if any, members of Hamas will be killed by each bomb. They do know civilians will die.

How can that be justified without resort to the denial of an oppressed Palestinian’s basic humanity? They did not choose for a Hamas gunman to live across the gutter from them, yet they die because of it.

How can you justify that?

Any party that can contain both this writer and this one is clearly worryingly divided (to put it harshly) and pleasingly diverse (to put it how I would). Unfortunately this rather supports the most biting criticism that has been made against the party: that they lack any core meaning or convictions.

I would suggest instead that the disparity is a consequence of the future of liberalism often being one of dour men who hated income tax  and therefore appealing to certain people with a historical understanding of the term. Meanwhile the immediate history of the party is that of being the one which advanced its vote substantially during the last election under an anti-Iraq and pro-tax on the rich platform.

In addition to this there is the rather curious history of the party, which came about as a fusion of the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party. The former are probably the type which Ms. Gore feels most at home in but the SDP were only moderates in their day because the Labour Party seemed likely to be taken over by a coterie of Leninists. We have degenerated so thoroughly in this country that presently being a committed social democrat (instead of the kind that implements social democratic policies only when forced to accept the abject failure of “pure” capitalism by the brute force of reality) is enough to render you on the “far left” of the Labour Party.

So its understandable the Liberal Democrats are ideologically at a loose end, and although I’d much prefer the present arrangement to their being two small parties constantly rowing over third and fourth place they will always strike me as aesthetically aberrant.