Nice little video of Iraqis voting in Shepparton (Victoria, Australia).
The California Aggie Twitter account, from the student newspaper at the University of California’s Davis campus in Sacramento, is reporting live news from a protest by University students. The account has already included reports of beatings and taser use, tear gas, and bean bag pellets.
The protests are part of a wider day of action against likely cuts and fee rises in US universities.
UPDATE:
A YouTube video from a local news station reporting on the protest can be seen here, and more live details on the UC Davis protest can be seen using the Twitter Search site
1009 AM AEST
The same Twitter account says the protest disbanded about 9 minutes ago, 4PM California time.
Whaling hypocrisy to end? Details and links to sources on the IWC’s proposal to re-authorise whaling
Reports are hitting the media about draft amendments to international whaling rules that are meant to bring Japan, and other whaling nations, back under the rule of the International Whaling Commission. The amendments in effect will allow nations that are already killing whales to keep on doing so with the approval of the IWC, provided that they limit the numbers of whales they catch. The exact limits are yet to be decided, and of course will only apply if the draft amendments pass.
The legal structure is this:
The International Whaling Commission is established under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. There is a Schedule to the Convention – that Schedule is where the current rules about whaling are written down.
The draft amendments were written by the Support Group to the “Small Working Group” of the IWC. The “Small Working Group” meets from March 2-4 2010 in Florida, where the changes will be discussed. The exact changes that are proposed can be downloaded here (pdf file). The Small Working Group’s report will be discussed at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the IWC to be held in Morocco from May 27 – June 25 2010. The full Annual Meeting would need to approve any changes to the Schedule.
The proposed changes add a new chapter to the Schedule, Chapter VII. While the ban on commercial whaling in Chapter III of the Convention is not explicitly overturned, the proposed Chapter VII will allow whaling by countries that caught whales in 2009. The key is the proposal for paragraph 33:
In order to improve the conservation of whales, the number of whales taken for each of the years indicated above shall not exceed the catch limits shown in Table 4.
[Table 4 hasn't had figures added yet - presumably these figures will be negotiated if and when the IWC meeting next week agrees to the general principles in the draft plan]
No Contracting Government will unilaterally authorize any whaling in excess of the limits shown in Table 4 or outside the provisions of chapter VII.
[Meaning that countries agree to no longer carry out "scientific whaling", which is carried out under Article VIII of the Convention]
If the results of the established management procedures indicate that a catch limit should be lower than the number in Table 4, or if there is a significant event that negatively affects the status of any population, the Commission shall reduce the number of whales taken for each subsequent whaling season during the currency of this chapter, in accordance with the advice of the Scientific Committee.
Catches from the stocks included in Table 4 shall not be authorized by Contracting Governments that did not authorize whaling operations in those areas in 2009.
[So only countries that caught whales in 2009 will be able to catch whales under the new quotas]
Table 4 allows whaling to happen in the Southern Ocean. The Australian Government has rejected this already, and issued a counter-proposal which calls for whaling to end in the Southern Ocean in five years’ time.
It seems that the proposed changes to the Schedule are a temporary fix. The changes are planned to end in 2020 and the Report containing the changes says:
This would provide a period of stability during which the Commission will be able to undertake a review of other matters and further work on the reform of the organisation. These matters would include, inter alia, research under special permit [that is, "scientific" whaling], the commercial whaling moratorium and objections and reservations.
If this plan ends the ridiculous hypocrisy that is “scientific” whaling, so much the better. There is no reason that whales should be treated any differently to any other resource. Whales should be managed properly, so they aren’t recklessly driven extinct, but there’s no good moral reason to privilege the “rights” of whales over the right of humans to hunt them.
The Climate Resistance blog, despite its rather odd-sounding name, is one of the better anti-climate-alarmism sites around. Instead of diving into the nuttier depths of the “It’s a UN conspiracy to take over the world and hand it over to the Jews bankers” arguments, it tackles the real issue in the climate debate head on.
A recent post there, “It’s all in the Head…lines” points out the shallowness of the alarmists’ position:
Sachs and Corner, like many alarmists, are continuing to hide behind the idea that the climate debate divides on a single point of difference: “Climate change is happening” versus “climate change isn’t happening”
and
The argument is really about how climate ‘science’ turns into ethical imperatives and politics. Our argument here is that ‘catastrophe’ is the premise of climate politics, not the conclusion of climate science.
The post also criticsises some people skeptical of the idea that drastic slowing of human activity is the only way to deal with global warming:
With arguments like this emerging from academia, it is no surprise that people sense the snake oil, and head for the science as the object of the debate. We’ve said before that this is a mistake that sceptics make. They mirror their counterparts such as Sachs and Corner, who believe that the debate begins and ends in “the science”. As we point out, probably too often, the politics is prior. It is Sachs and Corner’s politics which stinks. “The science” is an afterthought.
It’s been argued here before that this is the most important factor about the global warming debate. Even if humans are causing the climate to warm – even if that is an undisputed scientific fact – that fact doesn’t mean that the “science” can tell us what political decisions we need to make. The response to global warming is a political one, not a scientific one, and once the scientists have described what is happening, they have no more authority than any other reasonably well-informed citizen.
An article that’s worth discussing is Fukuyama’s What Became of the Freedom Agenda?. It’s based on a United States Institute of Peace working paper which was released on January 21.
Fukuyama withdrew his support for the war in Iraq as soon as things became difficult, yet at the same time he continues to acknowledge the reality that the US can’t afford to keep cozying up to the autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
He manages to quote Bush (2003) with approval:
“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom . . . did nothing to make us safe. . . . As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.”
But he continues to oppose what he calls ” return(ing) to the loud trumpeting of promises for support of regional democracy that we cannot keep” and ignores the fact that in Iraq, the US has kept exactly that promise. Instead he tries to argue that the overhrow of Baathism in Iraq can only be seen as a setback for “democracy promotion” because it “undercut (the) credibility” of that policy, and in his view increased Arab hostility toward America.
He rightly points to the way in which the autocrats of the region continue to get away with justifying the repression of opposition groups by saying that this is necessary to keep militant Islamists out of power and then goes on to call on Obama to “recommit the United States to peaceful democratic change”
What he wants the US to do now is to follow a policy of “working quietly behind the scenes to push friendly authoritarians towards a genuine broadening of political space in their countries through the repeal of countless exceptional laws, defamation codes, party registration statutes and the like that hinder the emergence of real democratic contestation.”
The article is quite extraordinary in the way it makes no attempt to analyse the impact of the changes in Iraq, apart from maintaining that it damaged US credibility in the region. I don’t know how anyone can purport to be writing a serious article about the prospects for democratic change in the Middle East, without writing in some detail about the one country in which democratic change has actually happened! The thing which will do most to force (not gently “push”) the autocrats of the region out of power, is the move from fascism to democracy in Iraq. Fukuyama may disagree with that, but he doesn’t even address the issue.
The Australian Federal Court ruling in favour of Larrikin Records has raised again the issue of ‘Intellectual Property Rights’. For overseas readers, the case concerns the borrowing or adaptation (or ’sampling’ to use a hip-hop term) of an old riff, written in 1930, from a song about a kookaburra, adapted by the Australian band, Men at Work, in their international hit, ‘Down Under’. The author of the kookaburra song died in 1988 and the song was purchased by Larrikin Records after her death. Men at Work had a hit with ‘Down Under’ in 1981/82.
There’s a lot of discussion happening about this ruling, and public opinion is generally favourable to Men at Work and against the Court ruling.
People understand that music -- and culture in general -- does not develop in isolation. As Helen Razer put it in today’s (February 6th) ‘Age’ newspaper: “The history and the advancement of all artistic endeavour rests on borrowing; on using and changing leitmotifs”. I’d add that there’s more to it than that (for example, there are the revolutionary leaps, the breaking of the rules of musicality and rejection of tradition as found in Thelonious Monk’s dissonant harmonies), but it’s a valid observation in terms of the Court ruling.
The point that none of the commentators has made, as far as I’m aware, is the question of a social system based on private property. The singular focus is on how to improve the law, make it more in keeping with the times (when new technologies have made ’sampling’ commonplace).
The law should certainly be reformed -- but what does this case say about private ownership of culture, of music, and what does it suggest about the alternative, social ownership as the basis for production?
A common argument for capitalist property relations is that they favour individual creativity, that culture is experimental and flourishes under them. Yet how true is this when a riff, in music, can be owned privately (by a company -- one, incidentally, that had its origins in the ‘left’ nationalist folk scene)?
Where music has developed, progressed, under capitalism it has tended to be in spite of the system of private ownership. The development of rock music, and all the 1960s pop rock bands (for example), owes more to the fact that the shuffle of Bo Diddley and the riffs of Chuck Berry were never patented. Had they been, the countless great bands, including the Beatles and Rolling Stones, would have been up on ‘theft’ and crushed from the get-go.
Despite capitalism, ‘everyone’ owned Bo Diddley’s shuffle, as surely as everyone owned the basic twelve-bar-three-chord blues progression that emerged from the mists of time. (Okay, I’m being melodramatic about the mists of time -- it’s just that I love that old blues stuff).
Eric Burdon once remarked of Jimi Hendrix that “He took blues music from the Mississippi Delta way up to the planet Venus”. This could only happen because the structure and style of Mississippi Delta blues was not owned, patented, by some big capitalist outfit.
The proof that social ownership is more conducive to creativty and musical development and innovation is thus found within capitalism itself; in its antithesis, which exists within it, waiting to break free. And to go places way beyond Venus.
Iran students protests in teheran dec 7 2008
I’ve just received the following message from “Where is My Vote? Melbourne”
——————–
Subject: HUMAN CHAIN Against Brutality and Execution in IRAN
In the eight months which have passed since the rigged presidential elections, we have witnessed elements within the Iranian regime reacting with brazen brutality against people who seek to have a voice in the country’s government. Many have been killed and hundreds imprisoned and tortured. Protestors have recently been executed or received the death penalty in recent trials
We cannot just stand by mutely, so people around the world are gathering to bear witness. Iranians around the world will stand together on February 12 in solidarity with their brothers and sisters inside Iran to show them that they have not stopped caring.
We in Melbourne on Friday 12/02/10 from 7-8 pm, will form a human chain over Princess Bridge along St. Kilda Rd to take part in this global action against injustice, and to condemn recent executions and unfair trails. We will hold a 200m-long green scroll with our slogans written on it.
We want you to be there to echo our voice.
I think those of us who are in Melbourne should go along.
A new blog, SA Votes 2010 Uncensored, will defy new South Australian laws banning anonymous political speech at election time. The blog will mainly post links to stories about the SA election but will allow anonymous comments on the election, without forcing commenters to publish real names or postcodes, and without forcing commenters to provide their address to the blog publisher.
The new law means that anyone commenting on a “journal”, including journals published on the Internet, must leave their real name and postcode, and the journal must collect and hold for six months their name and address. This law is so easily defied that it can easily be made unworkable, which is the point of the new blog.
Writing in the The Guardian last Thursday, Seamus Milne explicitly linked the rise of anti-Western terrorism to US policy in South-West Asia:
Decades of oil-hungry backing for despots, from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia, along with the failure of Arab nationalism to complete the decolonisation of the region, fuelled first the rise of Islamism and then the eruption of al-Qaida-style terror more than a decade ago.
The article was based on the Egyptian Government’s continued co-operation with Israel to keep the people of the Gaza strip oppressed.
From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world.
Of course, The Guardian can’t break away from its oppostion to the overthrow of the fascist dictator Sadaam Hussein, even though that overthrow has led to a representative democracy being set up in Iraq:
the disastrous US-led response was to expand the western presence still further, with new and yet more destructive invasions and occupations, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
However, this might not be important. Milne immediately goes on to say:
the Bush administration’s brief flirtation with democratisation in client states such as Egypt was quickly abandoned once it became clear who was likely to be elected.
The fact that plenty of pseudo-left liberals adopted Kissingerite language and attitudes, claiming that Bush’s destabilisation of Iraq was a shameful failure of US policy, means that it’s not just Bush who’s to blame here. However, if liberals are now going to start demanding democracy in places like Egypt, there’s a chance to agitate for democratic revolutions again. If the liberals can get over the fact that this means – as Milne points out – that the Islamic Brotherhood would almost certainly win a free election in Egypt, then maybe some progress can be made in getting Westerners to support democracy again.
Australian Trotskiyist blogger John Passant thinks so. In an article published today on his blog, “Should the left oppose whaling?“, he argues “There is nothing about whales that means humanity shouldn’t eat them.”
Passant argues that the actions of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are elitist reformism:
There is one truth and that is that killing even one whale is evil and the Sea Shepherd will do anything to prevent that.
Well not quite anything. Their activity does not extend to agitating among Japanese or Australian workers as workers, in particular those in the ports and on the boats. They have contempt for workers.
Their approach involves substituting themselves for the mass of people. This is reformism on a grand scale. Leave it to us; we know better than you; we’ll solve the situation by harassing, attacking and even sinking boats.
Passant also argues that the Australian Government’s opposition to whaling appears to be linked to Australia’s imperialist claims over the Australian Antarctic Territory and its adjacent sea waters. I’m not so sure about that (although the imperialism seems clear). It seems to me that the Government’s anti-whaling stand is more opportunistic pandering to majority opinion than it is a scheme to reinforce its Antarctic claims.
EDIT: Since this report was written, there are new reports that the Sea Shepherd boat has in fact sunk. These reports are as yet uncomfirmed, and if they turn out to be true they still come two days after the ABC reported unconfirmed facts as if they were confirmed, and after Sea Shepherd attempted to salvage the still-afloat boat.
END EDIT
Yesterday, the Australian ABC reported that the Sea Shepherd boat Adi Gil was “sunk” by a Japanese whaling vessel.
Today, it emerges that the Adi Gil has not in fact been sunk, but seems likely to be salvaged. Did they ABC note on its report that the facts had changed, that they had got the story wrong by accepting Sea Shepherd’s word at face value, and apologise?
Hell no! They just changed the headline on their report!
Here’s a screenshot I took yesterday afternoon of the ABC report showing the headline reporting, as fact, that the Sea Shepherd boat had been sunk. The headline reads “Whalers sink Sea Shepherd boat”.
And here’s a link to the same ABC News report as it currently stands. As you can see, the headline now reads “Whalers hit Sea Shepherd boat”. Here’s a screenshot of the story as it stands at 1215 AEST. No acknowlegement that they got it wrong or that the story has been changed.
This confirms the bias of the ABC towards the Sea Shepherd and the unwillingness of their reporter and/or editorial team to give the Australian public the full facts of this story
The headline of the story reads “Whalers sink Sea Shepherd boat”, and a caption of a file picture of the Adi Gil in the story reads “The Ady Gil was at a standstill in Australian waters when the Japanese whaling ship rammed into it”.
The article contains five quotes or assertions attributed to Sea Shepherd, including this statement from Sea Shepherd spokesman Chris Aultman:
“The vessel was dead in the water. It was completely and absolutely a wilful act,” he said.
and one statement from the Japanese Fisheries Agency. The article contains not a single word of the statement made by the Institute of Cetacean Research (pdf file), a pro-whaling organisation, which claims that the Adi Gil attacked the Japanese whaling vessel the Nisshin Maru for two hours today:
In a manner similar to their 23 December attack on the Shonan Maru No. 2, at about 0300JST [Japanese Standard Time, 2 hours behind Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time and 9 hours ahead of Universal Time] the Ady Gil came to collision distance directly in front of the Nisshin Maru bow repeatedly deploying and towing a rope from its stern with the intent to entangle the Japanese vessel’s rudder and propeller. Further, the activists onboard the Ady Gil recurrently shoot a green laser device aiming at the Nisshin Maru crew and fired butyric acid-containing ball-like projectiles with a launching device. One of these projectiles landed in the Nisshin Maru’s deck.
A far more balanced report is on the SBS News website, although it still appears to report the sinking of the Adi Gil as fact without independent verification.
A statement on the Sea Shepherd website claims that the Japanese boat’s attack on them was unprovoked and captured on film. As of the time of writing no video substantiating this claim was present on the Sea Shepherd site’s main video page, or on the video page documenting their current operations against Japanese whaling vessels in 2009-10. Such video will be posted here or linked to if it is later posted on the Sea Shepherd site.
UPDATE: This video, provided by Sea Shepherd and shot from the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker, shows the collision:
– END UPDATE
The next two videos were released by the Institute of Cetacean Research. The first video shows the Adi Gil trailing a rope:
The second video shows a collision between a whaling ship and the Adi Gil:
EDIT – You can read the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea here. The rules have come up in comments on this video. – END EDIT
The Sea Shepherd statement says the alleged sinking took place at 64 degrees 3 minutes South and 143 degrees 9 Minutes East – click here for a Google Map.
This video, also released by the Institute for Cetacean Research, shows the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin colliding with a Japanese whaling vessel in February 2009:
It’s clear that the ABC has failed to report both sides of this story and is acting in this case as Sea Shepherd’s propaganda arm, rather than seeking out the statements presented in this post and giving people the information they need to start making their own conclusions.
UPDATE: The Ambit Gambit blog also criticises the media coverage of the story, while anti-whaler Andrew Bartlett blogs about the history of Australian public and government attitudes towards whaling.
END UPDATE
Time to Take Sides
Ha! George Monbiot got one thing (almost) delightfully right in his recent article: The rapacious will not give up without a fight
“Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits.”
I had to insert ‘almost’ in my introductory sentence above, because the split is still between reactionaries and progressives. The ‘expanders’ are the progressives, and the ‘restrainers’ are the reactionaries, doomed to run behind, shouting and gesticulating.
In his article, Monbiot is clear that economic growth must be curtailed. In order to Save the Planet, humanity must “redefine itself” and reject the idea that there will “always be another frontier” because “perpetual growth cannot be accomodated on a finite planet”.
Well, we still have at least a billion years before changes in our Sun begin to make the planet uninhabitable. (And by that time we’ll have spread into other parts of the universe anyway.) Given that it’s only a few hundred years since all of humanity was dependent on a carbohydrate energy economy (ie we depended entirely on human manual labour, augmented by animals, such as horses) , and in too many parts of the world that is still the case, it seems very odd to say that we are about to reach some sort of limit. The reality is that we’ve only just begun.
Industrialization, and the economic growth made possible by that, is essential to human liberation . For most of human history, life has been brutish, nasty and short. Even at the best of times, the vast majority could only just manage to subsist by spending almost every waking hour engaged in some from of back-breaking toil. The industrial revolution changed all that and provided opportunities and possibilities which were not even dreamed of in the past. And we’re still only at the beginning. A huge part of the planet has yet to industrialise. Those of us who are already on the way, want to continue.
Continue reading ‘Technology, development and c..c..c..climate change.’
Water has been discovered on the Moon. Ho hum. No mention in the mainstream media, as far as I’m aware. No headlines. No general thrill or excitement at the potential in such a discovery.
I just found out about it via spiked on-line in an article by Sean Collins. Sean says this is “one of the most important discoveries of our lifetimes” and ponders as to why there’s not great excitement about it. His article can be read in full here.
The NASA press release, dated 13 November, can be read here.
What gets me is how we’re supposed to be living in this social system that is supposedly so dynamic and encourages individual and group enterprise, yet something as huge as this is barely mentioned.
It’s not hard to see how, under a different set of social relations, with science and innovation socially owned and geared to social need, exploration for its own sake and fun, and no longer privately owned and geared to private profit, something like the discovery of water on the moon would be front-page news with people rushing in with ideas on how to make the most of it.
Reflecting the historical reality that we’re living in a system that has passed its used-by date, the ‘popular culture’ is generally negative and pessimistic, obsessed with celebrity gossip, Hollywood blockbusters about how ‘the end is nigh’ (unless we live more subserviently to Nature). On television, I’ve noticed a tendency to detective series that have at least a few autopsies performed each episode – is this symbolic of a ruling class foreseeing its own dissected corpse?
(Of course, the popular culture is not all like that, but there’s a definite trend).
A most important point in the article relates to the disjuncture between the “elites” lack of response/excitement in public commentary on one hand and the great interest, via the Internet, on the part of the general public, on the other.
Sean says: “I was surprised to learn that, according to Yahoo!, ‘water on the moon’ was the sixth most searched item in UK news in 2009… This would indicate that the public is more interested than the intellectuals in the punditocracy, who haven’t lifted a finger to type a word on the topic”.
Even the greens, who can be relied upon to oppose any further lunar missions and developments (lest we wicked humans damage the ‘balance’ in the moon’s environment by changing it signficantly) have been very quiet about it.
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