February, 2010
Jody Mcintyre's Life on Wheels - Friday, February 19, 2010 12:00 - 0 Comments
Week 57 – Imprisoned
By Jody Mcintyre Sometimes, I can’t help but to sit back and wonder why I spend so much of my time on the road. With loving friends and family back home, I could be living a comfortable life, without a care in the world. But nothing is as sweet as the taste of freedom. The […]
Politics - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 10:30 - 0 Comments
How to protect civlians – The Nato Way
This morning, the BBC reports on the progress of the Nato offensive against the Taliban insurgents. One never stops being surprised at the straight-faced reporting of civilian deaths as mere “accidents”. If you got “accidentally” mugged every time you left your home for an entire month, you would start looking into the “accidental” nature of the phenomenon, just […]Blogs, Ceasefire Bites, Politics - Monday, February 15, 2010 9:59 - 0 Comments
Targeting Iran (an inch closer)
This morning, the US Secretary of State and hawk-in-residence Hilary Clinton has taken another step in the rhetorical circling around Iran, the argument now is: Iran has turned into a military dictatorship in all but name; the Revolutionary Guards are the de facto power brokers regardless of who’s in charge politically. All of which, for those of […]Blogs, Ceasefire Bites, Politics - Friday, February 12, 2010 11:20 - 1 Comment
Fukuyama does it (wrong) again
Francis Fukuyama, him of “End of History” fame/infamy has a new essay published in, of all places, this week’s Spectator magazine. After suffering from two decades of sneering at/mocking of his grandiose early 90s predictions, Fukuyama jumps into the midst of it all with a new “paradigm”: democracy is not just about passion and ideas […]Arts & Culture, Books, Features - Friday, February 12, 2010 5:59 - 0 Comments
Book Review: “The Cleanest Race” by B.R. Myers
Brian Myers is an American academic based in Pusan who has a remarkable and original (at least in Anglophone scholarship) thesis regarding what North Korea "is". The standard media line is that North Korea remains the last hardline Stalinist dictatorship in the world. Indeed, whilst China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba remain as constitutionally communist regimes, they are relatively mild in their human rights abuses, and they are to varying degrees pursuing economic reform along Neoliberal lines. Many scholars continue to refer to pre-Soviet collapse North Korea as a "National Stalinist dictatorship", with its own Korean eccentricities certainly (the bizarre personality cult for one).
Blogs, Ceasefire Bites, Politics - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 23:46 - 0 Comments
On the importance of stating the obvious
The Appeals court has confirmed today that it rejected the UK government’s attempts to keep secret, information relating to the torture (or “alleged torture” as the BBC has it) of Binyam Mohamed whilst in US/Pakistani/British custody. What is really interesting is that this is hardly a debate over the facts, pretty much everyone agrees that […]Arts & Culture, Books, Features - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 11:41 - 4 Comments
Samuel Beckett: The politics of vegetables
By David Prescott ‘Gardening. No hope for the future.’ Franz Kafka ‘At least he had gardening.’ Samuel Beckett At a time when words mean whatever powerful people want them to mean, it seems futile to believe in their (I mean words’) ability to bridge the chasms of loneliness between people that lead to war. But […]
