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556 [lbo-talk] Polanski -- rank: 1000

No, I think we really need to workshop the Polanski issue, over perhaps the next month, say?

Document Size:	4430
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Oct 1 12:40:57 PDT 2009

557 [lbo-talk] Gadaffi the liberator -- rank: 1000

Here's Gadaffi with Anthony Giddens (who coined Blair's policy of 'The Third Way') that fearless interviewer David Frost and Brendan 'McWorld v Jihad'. Come to think of it, Gadaffi's Green Book offered up Islam as a 'Third Way' between capitalism and communism. Maybe that's where Giddens got the idea... Or perhaps it is a seance, with Gadaffi as Madame Blavatsky 'Gerry Healy, are you there? one knock for yes, two for no...' http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3478956&l=48ae3883f0&id=75 ...

Document Size:	5090
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Oct 1 09:29:11 PDT 2009

558 [lbo-talk] Brendan O'Neill on Polanski -- rank: 1000

My old comrade takes a harsher view of the pro-Polanski campaign than me: 'whatever you think of the usefulness of the arrest warrant against Polanski, and the motivations behind its continued pursuit by American law enforcers, it is not prudish to think that performing oral sex and sodomy on a drunk 13-year-old is unacceptable behaviour.' http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7464/

Document Size:	5062
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Oct 1 02:57:14 PDT 2009

559 [lbo-talk] Polanski -- rank: 1000

I argeed with most of what Joanna said, but I am not so sure about this: "The sexual abuse of children and adolescents by parents, family members, and friends of family is extremely common." I know these numbers are much bandied about, and sometimes controversial, but my reading is that sexual abuse of children by anyone is still a pretty rare event (although the other statistic that most abuse that does take place is from family members is sometimes misunderstood to mean the opposite) ...

Document Size:	5370
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Oct 1 02:54:48 PDT 2009

560 [lbo-talk] climate change -- rank: 1000

George - 'flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable as child abuse' - Monbiot jets into Toronto (http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091129/cda_climate_091129/20091129/?hub=TorontoNewHome ) Meanwhile 'SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. 'It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperatur ...

Document Size:	5532
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 29 23:17:32 PST 2009

561 [lbo-talk] What's the matter with... -- rank: 1000

"Is it really? Hasn't the (always very poor) hill country voted heavily for the anti-poor party ever since the welfare state began? They're against central government. And Big Government party is always, by definition, the poor people party. " There is a peculiar slippage in this argument, namely that the welfare state is good for poor people, and that therefore they are 'anti-poor' if they are anti-welfare state. But the welfare state is not good for poor people. It keeps them poor. A ...

Document Size:	5418
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 29 01:50:56 PST 2009

562 [lbo-talk] imperialism -- rank: 1000

Patrick writes about capitalism 'exploiting non-capitalist spheres' - I thought that Jairus Banaji dispensed with this argument some years ago, when he explained that just because capitalism had not reorganised production on capitalist lines, it did not meant that the peasant production (in the Deccan, in his example) fell outside of the capitalist mode of production. I think he was right that capitalism was a world-wide phenomenon by the 1850s, and that uneven development was a facet of capital ...

Document Size:	5735
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Nov 27 16:35:57 PST 2009

563 [lbo-talk] From another thread -- rank: 1000

Doug: 'Yup!' John Cage: 'I am saying nothing and I am saying it.'

Document Size:	4533
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Nov 27 16:22:46 PST 2009

564 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

SA writes: 'When I say that in 1964 much of the liberal elite privately thought a war in Vietnam was bad idea of highly doubtful necessity, I'm obviously not saying "therefore, there was no Vietnam war." Instead, I'm saying that we have to look for an explanation for the war other than "the elite consensus couldn't tolerate a third-world country leaving the capitalist system.' I think you misread the situation. In the abstract, the elite had no particular reason to want a war. ...

Document Size:	6520
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 12:52:54 PST 2009

565 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

Chris: "everything a politician says in public is tailored to influencing a particular audience in one way or another, such as in order to acquire votes." Yes, and that is what politics is, influencing audiences, making explicit, and giving a particular form to the underlying sentiments. When a politician articulates a public sentiment in a forceful way, he moves it on in a given direction. That is politics. Chis "Policy is not made in public." That seems weird to me. Policy ...

Document Size:	6381
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 03:04:34 PST 2009

566 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

SA: 'That's a typo, of course. Kennedy said that in 1956', yes, sorry, you are right, 56, hasty typing. The argument that what politicians say is not to be taken seriously, though, seems thoroughly daft, to me. When politicians speak, they are acting. Politics is, 99.9 per cent speech. What is *not* important in politics, politics being public acts, are the private thoughts of the politicians. What Kennedy or Wilson thought in private is of no consequence. What they did in fact, is. And amongst ...

Document Size:	5250
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 02:25:54 PST 2009

567 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

SA writes 'we're supposed to believe that US foreign policy was a machine that could no more tolerate a small country like Vietnam "withdrawing from the capitalist world system" than a PC can run Mac OSX. But in real life the people who debated foreign policy at high levels almost never talked about that stuff' and 'one argument never heard was: "Are you crazy? How will we defend the capitalist system if a small country is allowed to create a model of successful autonomous sociali ...

Document Size:	6234
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 01:43:21 PST 2009

568 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

SA writes: 'In keeping with the teachings of the New Left, we're supposed to believe that US foreign policy was a machine that could no more tolerate a small country like Vietnam "withdrawing from the capitalist world system" than a PC can run Mac OSX. But in real life the people who debated foreign policy at high levels almost never talked about that stuff.' Really? I wonder. Northern Ireland was my country's Vietnam, and the ruling elite certainly did say that it would be intolerable ...

Document Size:	6780
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 01:29:10 PST 2009

569 [lbo-talk] Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn't -- rank: 1000

Shane: 'And what, pray tell, was the Oswald assassination?' Crack-pot Trotskyist, turned 'lone nut' I am afraid to say. Alexander Cockburn used to say that we ought to laud Oswald as a hero, who took down the arch-militarist Kennedy - 'arch-militarist Kennedy' is right, but Oswald's act of individual terror took the place of a case against Kennedy that had never been made. My father sold the anarchist paper 'Freedom' in the pubs of Leeds in 1963. Their headline the day after Kennedy was shot was ...

Document Size:	5661
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 26 00:03:35 PST 2009

570 [lbo-talk] Britain's secret bank bailouts... -- rank: 1000

Bank of England tells of secret £62bn loan to save RBS and HBOS The Bank of England secretly lent £61.6bn to Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS at the height of the financial crisis to prevent their immediate implosion, it said on Tuesday. Telegraph 24 Nov 2009 Or, you could read the story five months earlier... "the government bailed out the failing banks, Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley, Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland through the Bank Recapitalisation Fund supported by £500 bill ...

Document Size:	5406
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 24 14:49:54 PST 2009