Too Many Words

We've Said Too Much Already

When Pharmakeus was fresh out of University with his Arts degree, he used to pontificate a lot on a whole bunch of subjects. He would talk at great length about the ins and out of Post Modernism as it was unfolding, or how fractals defined the very shape of life, the universe and everything. He was full of this kind of intellectual excitement. One day as we sat in a park bench he made the joke that a person only had a certain words in the that they could utter in a lifetime. His girlfriend of that time quipped "I'd better prepare your funeral for tonight then?" 

He didn't die that night - in fact he is still alive and well. Yet these days he communicates in brusque utterances of monosyllabic grunts. Maybe he did run out of words. 

Come Join The Fun!

Blues In The Key Of 18C

'The Right To Be A Bigot' Politics Truly Sucks

I don't mean to write a lot about politics or economics. It just ends up that way. I couldn't imagine being a real life political correspondent covering the comings and going in Canberra. I imagine it would be quite insular and tedious to begin with, but made worse by the rhetorical games and the not-answering-your-question-but-shoving-my-agenda thing that politicians do that makes bullshit out of important subjects and perhaps does more to obfuscate things rather than reveal.

The modern cadre of journo covering politics would have the added horror of having to follow politicians through social media as well as having to translate the politi-speak employed by the politicians into plain English. It's not an enviable job. Back in the day when Peter Smark, Peter Ellingsen and Alan Ramsey wrote for the Fairfax, you never got the feeling that they got too exasperated even when the going got silly or for that matter violent as it did in Tiananmen Square.

Then again, they didn't come up against the wall of bullshit that gets erected daily by our contemporary politicians. The wall of bullshit can get so high, it can get a man with no idea and no policies of merit, get voted in to become Prime Minister of the land. That's some steep bullshit.

I can't really imagine what it's like to be Katherine Murphy or Laura Tingle who have had to work the press gallery in Canberra during the Abbott Government, because some of what they've written lately betrays a quiet disillusion with government, politics and what politics can achieve in this country, given the calibre of people we've voted in. I mean, it's bad enough blogging this stuff. Doing it for work would suck.

That in a roundabout way brings me to this current brouhaha they are having down in Canberra to do with the Racial Discrimination Act part 18C. The Liberal Party claims with the highest possible ground can muster, that 18C interferes with freedom of expression. To recap, this notion exists because conservative commentator Andrew Bolt got himself into a spot of bother over vilifying somebody for not being Aboriginal enough. It's stretching things. This then gave enough impetus for the Coalition government to try and rewrite this little section that says you can't offend and humiliate people, and George Brandis infamously championed the cause of people's right to be a bigot.

If the great crusade for freedom of expression culminates with the right for people to be bigots, then you have to think maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere. Surely you'd think the moment those words left his lips, George Brandis might have thought, "hang on, maybe I'm giving ammunition to the wrong people?" After all, the first thing that sprang into my mind was the line from 'Catch-22':

"Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.”

If you're arguing for a special, specific spot to protect plain obnoxious assholes from the Racial Discrimination Act, maybe you're arguing too fine a point to be called 'freedom of speech'. If you want a special exemption from the RDA, and that exemption is to be allowed to offend people and humiliate them by calling them words like nigger, kike, wop/wog or spic, (or abo, boong, chink or gook too!), maybe it doesn't say much about the free press or freedom of expression in this country? After all, what kind of press is going to say, refer to Mr. Obama as a nigger and cite freedom of expression to allow it, and by extension, not to cop to the judgment and opprobrium such a description would earn them?

Maybe it just says more about George Brandis and his own tremendous, irrepressible desire to be a bigot? Is it really a win for freedom of speech if the upshot of changing this act is so that Andrew Bolt can use the bully pulpit of his radio microphone to vilify people without much of a voice in our community? Maybe this is simply too hard asking the party of "ditch-the-witch" to consider. Maybe it's just too hard for them to comprehend.

Think of all the things this government doesn't support, like a bill of rights. Or the things it chooses to censor, treating its own citizens like children. It goes after artists for fear their work might be paedophilia; it censors films that point to the corrupt nature of power, like 'Salo'; you can't argue this wowser government is doing everything it possibly can to protect freedom of expression. How can all this fixation and fuss over 18C be anything but the desire to be bigoted and not to be punished for it? One can't possibly take this bunch on their word about this principle.

So here we are, folks - a Parliament busily arguing the imagined merits of rewriting 18C. Read it and weep.

Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

Should We Be Concerned?

The Junior Murdoch Speaks Up

I always find it unlikely when a Murdoch stands up for freedoms, what with the generally casual fascist tone their editorials in their miserable newspapers take. Of course, one shouldn't be surprised that they do it when it suits them directly to do so, for maximum effect. And so it is with Lachlan Murdoch who is invoking his grandfather's reporting of the Gallipoli campaign.

Mr Murdoch said Australia's press freedom was under threat and had already fallen dramatically by world standards. 

"It might surprise you that today Australia ranks 33rd, just behind Belize, on the Freedom house index. 20 years ago we ranked 9th," Mr Murdoch said during the Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library in Melbourne on Thursday night. 

Mr Murdoch said the government was frequently asking Australians to trust them 'we're from the government', when attempting to censor the media. 

"But trust is something that should not be a consideration when restricting our fundamental freedoms. Our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not things we should blindly entrust anyone." 

Mr Murdoch singled out the government's national security laws that could jail journalists for up to 10 years for revealing "special intelligence operations".

Mighty fine sentiments on a night for orations. I have to say, it's still a bit rich coming from the scion of Rupert Murdoch, hardly an egalitarian or democrat. If Mao said justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the Senior Murdoch certainly has behaved like governments are born from the printing press. The senior Murdoch set about killing Whitlam's government back when he was junior's age.

The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch's involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg 

Entitled "Australian publisher privately turns on Prime Minister," the telegram from US Consul-General in Melbourne, Robert Brand, reported to the State Department that "Rupert Murdoch has issued [a] confidential instruction to editors of newspapers he controls to 'Kill Whitlam' ". 

Describing Mr Murdoch as "the l'enfant terrible of Australian journalism," Mr Brand noted that Mr Murdoch had been "the principal publisher supporting the Whitlam election effort in 1972 Labor victory". 

With a publishing empire that included The Australian as well as daily or Sunday newspapers in every Australian capital, Mr Murdoch's new editorial direction was seen as a critical political development. 

"If Murdoch attack directed against Whitlam personally this could presage hard times for Prime Minister; but if against Labor government would be dire news for party," Mr Brand telegraphed.

And so it was in 1975 that Rupert bent his considerable powers of the press to undermine and ultimately destroy the democratically elected Whitlam Government. It's pretty much in line with what Chris Boyce (the Falcon in 'the Falcon and the Snowman') told us all those years ago. The CIA took a great interest in undermining Whitlam's Labor Government. Rupert for his part obliged by unleashing his dogs - just as he did with Beazley, Crean, Latham, and ultimately Rudd and Gillard. It's almost the rule that the ALP should find every legislative means of limiting Murdoch's power because it is the largest opinion-maker as well as being totally anti-democratic and anti-social. He likes us to think of him as a contrarian codger. He's not. He's full-blown Citizen-Kane-type, trying to turn our democracy into his plaything.

In that light, it's really difficult to imagine that the son is any less meddlesome as the father. And by extension, he's not really standing up for journalists, he's standing up for his right to publish and report a scoop in the press without facing gaol time. I mean, yeah, that's really bold of you Latch. 

How Can They Call Their Rag 'News'?

While I'm on this topic, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey that lays out where the News Corp mouthpieces sit in the wake of Whitlam passing away. Here's the juicy bit:

The first person who might consider checking “the facts” is Sheridan. He asserts rather confidently that under Whitlam, “inflation got above 20% at one stage”. His confidence is misplaced. During Whitlam’s government, inflation as measured by the consumer price index peaked at 17.7% in the first quarter of 1975. Since the beginning of Australian Bureau of Statistics records, inflation has only exceeded 20% in three quarters, and in all three of them, it was Robert Menzies’ pyjamas that were tucked under the doona in the Lodge. (Perhaps Sheridan could let us know if “ruinous” is the right adjective with which to garland our longest-serving prime minister.) 

Things don’t get much better when Sheridan turns to the international scene, where he is apparently more of an expert. Here we discover (and though Sheridan generously allows that there was a tiny little oil shock to contend with) that on the question of inflation, “the outcome in Australia was much worse than in comparable countries”. This might have come as a surprise to Aldo Moro, the then-prime minister of Italy, where inflation reached 24%, or to Harold Wilson, who presided over a British inflation rate of 26.6%. 

Other commentators trying their hand at sacrilege fared no better. Thanks to Gough, Miranda Devine lamented, “half the ­nation is now on welfare”. In 2012, the last year for which the Department of Social Services has released data, only around a quarter of the population over 15 was receiving some kind of income support payment. A bit under half of these are old age pensioners. Presumably, sans Gough, we would have adopted work-for-the-pension schemes or simply euthanised the elderly to spare them the moral decay of Devine’s “culture of entitlement”. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt, making the daring argument that Kevin Rudd was merely Whitlam digested and reconstituted, credited the former with “the same debt blowouts” as the latter. When Whitlam left office, Australia had negative net debt. But did not Whitlam “lose control” of the purse, as Alan Mitchell wrote? Of the three budgets prepared by Whitlam’s government, two resulted in surplus; deficits accounting therefore for a third of his budgets. That fiscally continent duo Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, on the other hand, recorded 10 deficits from 13 budgets (about three-quarters in the red).
For all of the ruin occasioned by Whitlam’s supposedly disastrous programs, government spending has, as a proportion of economic output, never retreated to the levels seen before 1972. 

Whatever else the electorate might have thought or now thinks of the government he led, they have never really shown much interest in reversing the increase in the size of government he oversaw. In this sense, budgetary history since 1975 has been a remarkable vindication of Whitlam rather than an repudiation.

In other words, the Murdoch journalists are still banging on about the Whitlam Government, believing in their own crappy press which was all made up in the first place, for the sole purpose of destroying the standing of the Whitlam Government. Stuff most people would call mischaracterisations. It is mischaracterisation right now, as it was back then. So it's really just too rich hearing from Lachlan telling us how journalism should work. 

The Pinko Crisis

Pinko Blues

The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.

What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is

1. somehow intolerant 
2. leads to 'ethnocide' and that is 
3. tantamount to genocide.  

These thing are clearly big leaps. You can be tolerant of people having beliefs and still question the basis for their beliefs. This is not offensive in of itself - although let's be honest is is offensive to religious thinning to ask any questions, no matter how value neutral the question might be. All the same, asking questions of beliefs does not automatically indicate intolerance. If people are going to go around waving their beliefs, then it is legitimate that they get ridiculed for their silly beliefs.  It's just the split coin of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?

I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl  raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.

The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.

I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense  as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.

I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.

The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?

This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.

Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.

18C Changes Dropped

What Starts As Bad Politics Ends As Bad Politics

I don't know of many governments that come to power as out of touch with community values than the government we currently have in Canberra. This week they have finally abandoned plans to change 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Having taken this idiotic policy to the election and won the election, it must have made sense to them to push this agenda, but I can't think of a more egregious example of having misread the electorate. Having whipped up a shitstorm of hysteria about broken promises over carbon pricing and the mining tax, it was conceivable that the Coalition had some claim to having an electoral mandate to repeal the carbon pricing system - as stupid and counter-to-history as it is - but the Racial Discrimination Act has been around for a long while now. Pushing for changes to it was not really something the electorate might have considered an important policy platform. Especially when the sole beneficiary seemed to be Andrew Bolt and people who want to be bigots.

Which, for a moment brings us to Andrew Bolt who is still smarting from his court case, whose open support of the Coalition  led to the Coalition government trying to open up some space for Andrew Bolt to essentially say bigoted things under the guise of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not the victim in this - it's George Brandis' 'right to be a bigot' that essentially found a lot of hostility. It only takes a moment to consider that what the Coalition was asking Australians with non-white backgrounds was that Andrew Bolt should be allowed to bad mouth people from his bully pulpit and propagate views that are hurtful to their pride because this was freedom of speech. It's bizarre that they thought this was going to fly with the electorate. It was asking Australia to go back to 'Kingswood Country' with Ted Bullpit calling every immigrant a wog for laughs. You wonder how these people thought this was going to make them look good.

It's worse than that now. Having proposed the bad changes and explained it badly, it has given the electorate a "goes-to-character" assessment of the government. the assessment would include the notion that the Coalition government, on some level, wants to protect bigots if not wanting to be bigoted racists themselves. they're right back at when John Howard went and slammed the Asian community back in the late 80s, which is to say they haven't changed their stripes one bit. It's notable that the people wanting to do the change and are spitting chips about it today are white, middle aged, and private school educated. You wonder how they'd respond if you gave them the medicine of their own freedom-to-be-a-bigot asked them how many Jewish forebears they have hidden in their family tree, and if they felt tainted by that.

Free Pussy Riot

Cast Out Putin

I'm a bit of a stickler for freedom of expression. I just can't let issues of censorship go without a comment. It's too easy to let the powers that be go after pornographers or performance artists and say, well, my work is not going to infringe with the authority so I'm okay. Every creative artist, every creative writer, every composer or musician, painter, sculptor or actor, is a canary in the coalmine of culture. If one goes down, we have to look at it as they'll come for me next.

This is why I have a committed position in support of what the Nazis would term "degenerate art". My own credo is that if it's something the Nazis would have hated, then I'm on the right track. Equally, it seems if it's something Vladimir Putin hates, then we're on to something good.

Such is the case with Russian Punk Rock band Pussy Riot, who find themselves sentenced to two years in 'prison camp' as a result of their political stunt in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral. A lot of people are saying they got what they asked for and that they are undeservering of world attention. I beg to differ. We ca only surmise from the sentence that Russia is still a place with medieval sensibility about performance and art - that they should be things sanctioned by the state and church, never questioning authority. It  is ironic that the Soviet republic was once progressive and modern and would not have had a bar of this kind of reactionary thinking until Stalin seized control. Now we seem to have 'Putinism' which is just as reactionary in spirit.

There's no dressing up the verdict. The women from Pussy Riot are political prisoners f conscience, and thus it is the duty of every creative person to stand in solidarity with them. This injustice is intolerable to all of us who work within freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

And so, this is my little contribution in support of Pussy Riot: Free Pussy Riot

Freedom of Expression Blues

Freedom Of Speech In Retreat

I guess I'm cranky when I get the flu, and very impatient too.

One of the big issues for me at this blog is actually the freedom of speech issue, whether it be letting artists do their thing (like Bill Henson) or letting cartoonists do their thing, or letting authors do their thing - I mean, I want to do my thing, get into it you know? Like a Blog Machine. Count it in now! - yes, even let musicians sing about sex and drugs.

So here's an article in The Economist that's worth checking out.

TWO decades ago, on 14th February 1989, Salman Rushdie received one of history’s most notorious Valentine greetings. Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) calling for the death of the Indian-born British author in response to his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. Khomeini called on all “intrepid” and “zealous” Muslims to execute the author and publishers, reassuring them that if they were killed in the process, they would be regarded as martyrs.

Rarely had a book stirred up such intense feelings. Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator and William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, were stabbed and shot respectively, although both survived. Bookshops were bombed and the tome was burned in public across the world. Mr Rushdie, fearing for his life, was forced into hiding.

Horrific though these consequences were, many argued that freedom of speech itself was at stake. To cave in, by withdrawing publication or sale of the work, would represent the crumbling of a defining principle of liberal societies. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran over the threat to kill a British citizen. At no point did Penguin, the original publisher, withdraw the book. It remained possible to argue that Mr Rushdie’s intolerant detractors, despite their violence, had lost their battle.

Yet critics today, such as Kenan Malik, a writer and broadcaster, argue that the detractors have gradually won their war. Mr Malik and others suggest that free speech in the West is in retreat. Other publishers, faced with books that were likely to cause widespread offence, have been less resolute. In 2008 Random House was set to publish “The Jewel of Medina”, a misty-eyed account of romance between Muhammad and his wife Aisha. The firm reversed its decision after a series of security experts and academics cautioned them against publication (one American academic described the work as historically inaccurate “soft core pornography”) warning it would be dangerously offensive. Gibson Square, another publisher, took up the novel and saw its offices firebombed in September 2008, 20 years to the day after the publication of “The Satanic Verses”. “The Jewel of Medina” has since been released in America, but it remains under wraps in Britain.

There are always reasons people list that one shouldn't just write anything, because it might cause offense or that it might be vilification. Now, that is a very general thing. I don't condone vilification either, but I'm not willing to say one shouldn't make any negative critiques whatsoever. Part of having any blog is to call it like you see it, and you can't really be doing it under the threat that the Ayatollah of Iran might declare a fatwah against you or that they may burn effigies of you in those countries with turbans an angry bearded men. The world over knows they burn effigies of people at the slightest of perceived slights. Clearly they don't have better things to do, and it speaks to their station in life.

In any case, this paragraph irritated me.

Two decades after the fatwa was imposed on Mr Rushdie, it appears that many Western artists, publishers and governments are more willing today to sacrifice some of their freedom of speech than was the case in 1989. To many critics that will be seen as self-censorship that has gone too far. But a difficult balance must be struck: no country permits completely free speech. Typically, it is limited by prohibitions against libel, defamation, obscenity, judicial or parliamentary privilege and the like. Protecting free expression will often require hurting the feelings of individuals or groups; equally the use of free speech should be tempered by a sense of responsibility. But that sense should not serve as a disguise for allowing extremists of any stripe to define what views can or cannot be aired.

Did you notice they slipped in the word 'obscenity'? Obscenity laws are precisely the point at which artistic freedom of expression threaten to get shut down. Whether its the Tipper Gore-led mother of prevention trying to gag Frank Zappa, or the wowsers that hound Bill Henson, or for that matter the NAZIs with their label 'academy of degenerate art' to punish the Modernists, clearly get way too much say on the base of 'obscenity' laws. Hlf the time good comedy works through offending the common prejudices, whether it be racism or class snobbery or simply manners.That's how it's done: by risking obscenity.

It irritates me greatly that having argued that Freedom of Speech might be in retreat in the west, they throw artists under the bus. It's deadset wrong.