In Which The Author Drinks Seven Beers Then Makes Strategic Proposals For Concluding The War In Afghanistan

Charlie

Britain could have stationed aircraft carriers offshore in order to suport operations in Jugoslavia...

FlyingRodent

Britain could've stationed Mecha-Godzilla offshore in order to support operations in Yugoslavia, to roughly the same effect, i.e. none whatsoever.

So went the chat at the cheerful Hey, Let's Stage a Complete Renewal Of Progressive Politics Right Here In The Church Hall! website Liberal Conspiracy this week, on the subject of multi-million pound military hardware and its utility in modern warfare.

It's an urgent issue, given the casualties British forces are taking in Afghanistan right now. Newspaper articles I've seen today have called for more helicopters and better armour, especially troop transports.

Well, British squaddies have been getting killed in Afghanistan for seven years now without any noticeable progress or the government taking any serious flak about it, so I think it might be time to make a suggestion of my own.

It's a question of What Could Be Done In Theory versus What Can Actually Be Done In Reality. Why spend a fortune on armoured vehicles when we could use the Earth's natural resources?

Check this out, for example...

From what I can tell, this has been the standard order of battle for British forces in Afghanistan for at least five years, i.e. being airdropped onto a Helmand plain or the side of a mountain to provide the Taliban with something to shoot at.

Well, the problem we have here looks to me like the famous - and probably apocryphal - story of how the Americans tried to solve the problem of writing in space. Remember, pens can only write because gravity pulls ink downwards, and there's no gravity in a vacuum. The urban myth I heard says that the Americans spent a million dollars on a pen that would force ink downwards artificially - the Russians, on the other hand, were alleged to have said Fuck it, we'll use pencils.

We have the same story here. There's a form of armour that would offer British soldiers 100% bullet and blast-proof cover that military strategists have overlooked. I call it "The Curvature Of The Earth," and the secret to protecting our boys is to make sure that there's at least a thousand miles of rock between British soldiers and the enemy. We could do this by staging a tactical withdrawal to, say, Aldershot - very popular with squaddies, in my experience.

By way of demonstration...

Readers might think this is inappropriate and flippant stuff to be posting in a time of war, but I would argue that my idea a) will work and b) will not cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

On that basis, I commend it to the MoD.

Note: This proposal is conditional on several factors, the most important being that I'll go back to the drawing board and start from scratch if the Powers That Be have, at long last, come up with some kind of detailed proposal or set of commands for achieving victory that doesn't involve dropping squaddies into the middle of nowhere and letting the Taliban take potshots at them. I'm no expert, but I believe military strategists call it a "plan".

Note2: The Soviet-Afghan war produced the Russian version of Full Metal Jacket - it's a very dodgy film on several levels, in my opinion, but it provides a primer for taking on potentially-unwinnable conflicts. Let's not talk about The Beast Of War.

Note3: Anybody else notice how the word Vietnam stopped cropping up in the press since President Obama got elected?

Politics Is Simple When You're As Cuntish As Possible About Absolutely Everything
by Bill Fuffkass, Ordinary Hard-Working Blog Commenter

There was a time when the nightly news used to frighten and intimidate me. Every day, I'd sit down in my favourite chair to catch up with domestic and world affairs, only to be presented with an incomprehensible babble of impenetrable jargon, rampant criminality and bloodcurdling atrocity.

None of it made sense - wars, famine, death, plague... It felt like the world was a terrifying vortex of unaccountable power, random chance and purposeless violence. It's only been since I started being as cuntish as possible about absolutely everything that I've realised how simple politics really is.

Take poverty, for instance. It's a hellishly complex issue affected by international and local economics, education, social conditions... any number of factors, in fact, enough to fill a lifetime's painstaking study. Your average person, confronted by an online discussion of the issue, might think hard before pronouncing their opinion on the matter.

If you're a smug, self-satisfied arsehole like me, however, it's a no-brainer - poverty is the inevitable result of benefit dependency created by the socialist nanny state and the feckless indolence of today's bone idle youth. After all, I work hard, and I'm not poor. See?

Or try crime. Some joker at Leftopia.typepad.com was asking what, if any, effect does alcohol and drug dependency have on rates of criminal recidivism? Why, absolutely none whatsoever! There'd be no crime at all if we brought back flogging, castration and hanging, and I bloody well said so.

Of course, they said they had evidence that indicated low correlation between the death penalty and crime rates in first world countries. Well, they would say that - it's touchy-feely do-gooding liberals like them that have turned this once-great country into a Gestapo toilet filled to the brim with filth and horror with their so-called "evidence" and their PC "human rights" and their government-funded Playstations for paedophiles.

Oh, they wanted me to read and respond to their points, of course. Fuck you, I'm right! How's that for a response, dickheads?

And don't get me started on immigration. Trust me, if you were an incurious, self-righteous bigoted cunt like me, you'd find that my kind of inflammatory, racist propaganda practically writes itself!

The police force? Deskbound idiots more concerned with fiddling the murder stats than stopping the blacks from stabbing your kids. Doctors? Blundering incompetents on the make. Social workers? PC stormtroopers, more like! Judges, criminal-coddling scum! Teachers, a bunch of timid woofters too scared to get a real job! "Experts"? Fuck 'em!

Everything's so much simpler when you stop worrying about right-on, modern follies like "reason" or "proportion" and just let the contents of your paranoid id run rampage in a reeking spew of ignorant bile.

Yes, I have to say that being as cuntish as possible about absolutely everything has made me the man I am today, and I'm not afraid to leave an anonymous comment on your web page telling you so.

You make me sick.

Say, This Sure Is a Nice Highly Trained, Well Paid Workforce You've Got Here
By Diageo Plc.

Hey there, friend. What you up to?

Just distilling a bit of whisky, eh? Johnnie Walker, nice blend, nice little earner.1

Say, this sure is a nice workforce you got here. Highly trained, well paid, productive... Full maternity and sickness pay, I imagine?

Yes, this is some nice, sweet workforce you've got. It'd be such a shame if something happened to it.

What? Oh no, I don't mean nothing by it. It's just, you know, sometimes employees get so tied up spending their high wages, taking advantage of a generous annual leave package, that kind of thing. They forget what their interests are. Forget who their friends are, you know.

Why, one carelessly-worded salary negotiation later, a workforce like this could find themselves booted onto the dole queue, quicker than you can say "knife". Could find some nice luxury flats where your factory once was, eh? Turn 'em into a bit of extra pocket change. 2,3

Well, I'm not saying anything... But you know how it is. Fifers'll be happy to work for three-quarters of the price. 4 Your average Chinese prison slave, now, he'd work day and night for a bowl of rice and a kick up the arse. 5

What's that? You got the government to pay Diageo Plc off £2.6m for "refurbishments" already? 6 Well, sort of. That was just fire and theft, really, cover you for little accidents. Stubbed toes and such. Nice workforce like this needs comprehensive coverage.

Now, don't running your mouth about the government - we've got an arrangement with them. 7 It's a globalised market now, son. A workforce needs to look after itself, or something nasty might happen.

"Fair?" Of course it's not fair, mate, but "fair" never wet anyone's beak now, did it? 8

You're sure? Think about what you're saying here. Diageo Plc will fuck you like Dirk Diggler on a coke and Viagra binge, mark my words.

Right, son. You'll be hearing from us soon enough, and you'll rue the fucking day you crossed Diageo Plc (LSE: DGE; NYSE: DEO). 9

-----------------------

1. The Johnnie Walker brand makes Diageo £1bn per year.

2. Diageo is showing its gratitude by sacking 900 Johnnie Walker workers in Kilmarnock and Glasgow.

3. The Daily Record reports that Diageo has secretly applied for permission to knock down its Kilmarnock factory, then build luxury flats on the site. So far as I know, this wouldn't have become public knowledge unless the Record had reported it.

4. Diageo claims it will hire up to 400 workers in Fife. No news on salaries and conditions for new hires yet, but Diageo chief executive Paul Walsh was paid £3.6m per year for his expertise (Guardian, 2008). If it pays its new workers the same as it pays the ones its sacked, I'll eat this laptop.

5. I've got a tenner here says a major Scotch whisky label will shift production to the People's Republic of China within ten years.

6. The Daily Mail reports today (not online) that the Scottish Executive paid Diageo £2.6m in 2000 for "refurbishments" at its Kilmarnock and Leven facilities. To date, Diageo has not paid any of this money back.

7. The Grauniad reported in 2008 that Diageo pays £43m per annum in corporate taxation - a mere 2% of its profits. (Update - John B in comments reckons this is utter bollocks. Cheers, Guardian writers).

8. Diageo estimates that its downsizing move will save it £120m. Diageo's annual turnover exceeds £7bn.

9. This is what the boss class means by "flexible labour" - it means "Bend over while we convert the jobs you've held for decades into a few grand unearned income for our wealthy investors". The next time you hear some blue-blood ideologue complaining about "wealth redistribution", remember that the last thirty years have been one long redistribution project - just not the kind of redistribution that boils Tory blood.

Medical Breakthrough Promises Infertility Cure, Extinction of Humanity

Ye gods, scientists have successfully made some human sperm, and are being quite frank about the possibility that it could lead to a "Jurassic Park scenario".

Well, this is the straw that broke the camel's back. Making sperm is pretty much the only productive activity I'm good at, and a load of dinosaurs battering about eating cars and chasing children around kitchens is not going to make the job any easier.

Whatever will these eggheads think of next? Glow in the dark bollocks? A swarm of psychotic beavers that build nuclear weapons out of logs and shoot napalm out of their arses?

Honestly, I don't know. One minute we're sending men to the moon, and the next thing you know there's a pack of Velociraptors feeding on your entrails. It's madness, I tell you.

The More Things Explode, The More They Stay Blown Up And On Fire

"President Johnson authorised new air strikes on North Vietnam in early December. Reports circulated overseas that targets overlapped civilian neighbourhoods. The Pentagon said that was absurd. Then the first accredited American correspondent to visit Hanoi in twelve years, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, wired back his eyewitness accounts. The first ran on December 25 on page 1. Merry Christmas, Mr. President:

A Visitor to Hanoi Inspects Damage Laid to U.S. Raids

President Johnson's announced policy that American targets in North Vietnam are steel and concrete rather than human lives seems to have little connection with the reality of attacks carried out by U.S. planes.

Salisbury ended up publishing twenty-two pieces on the subject that winter. He reported eighty-nine civilian deaths in one town, forty in a second, twenty-four in a third - and that, in this "brushfire war," more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam since 1966 than the entire tonnage dropped on Japan during World War II. In Nam Dinh, North Vietnam's third-largest city, he wrote of "block after block of utter desolation." He said the targeting of civilians was going on "deliberately".

The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were came from the Communists' deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. Or from the necessity of jettisoning bombs when attacked by MiGs. And that the eighty-nine deaths were evidence of "rather precise" bombing. Spokesman Arthur Sylvester - he called Salisbury's paper the "New Hanoi Times" - said if Salisbury doubted them, he should take a gander at the anti-aircraft guns up the street of Nam Dinh, right by the railroad tracks. Salisbury, who'd been covering bombings since the London Blitz, said he'd already been there and had found only a destroyed textile factory.

Lying about Vietnam: it had become a Washington way of life..."

(Nixonland, Perlstein, Simon and Schuster, p.169)



In tribute to Robert McNamara, 1916-2009.

Nazi Sympathies - Ur Doin It Rong

Bernie Ecclestone's PR team will be pulling their hair out tonight after the pint-sized F1 supremo bravely took on the idea of democracy and bigged up Adolf Hitler.

Bernie obviously hasn't got the message - in Britain, famous people who give props to fascists and white supremacists get pages and pages of denunciation as every joker with a newspaper column lines up to put the boot into them for their idiocy.

The way to do it is to be an average nobody like the rest of us, and then vote for the still-living fascists and white supremacists of the BNP. That way, every joker with a newspaper column will line up to stroke their chins, sympathise and justify your idiocy by bleating about multiculturalism.

See, anyone can call Bernie Ecclestone a twat and a dunce, and be lauded for recommending that the public laugh at his stupid opinions. Mind, if there was a mild political benefit to be gained by urging the government to listen to Ecclestone's Very Real Concerns About Immigration And Integration, half the papers in the country would be doing so.

Green Ink Word Salad (Updated)

I've got a half-written post floating in Blogger limbo asking the question - what's the stupidest/most repellent statement you've ever seen anyone attempt to smuggle under the proviso "I know it's not politically correct, but..."

That was prompted by my certainty that, the longer you arse about online, the higher the chance of stumbling across some joker asserting something like I know it's not politically correct to say you'd like to herd gypsies into camps and gas them like badgers, but...

Well, that one struck me as an exploding, spring-loaded man-trap of a question1, so let's resurrect it in a different form - what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?

Bear with me here, because the story begins with Matt Taibbi's long, involved article cursing Goldman Sachs in this month's Rolling Stone. (Link to an unreadable format here - Rolling Stone doesn't like the internet).

Taibbi's thesis is that Goldman deliberately inflates market bubbles, profiteers during crashes, and uses its political influence to insulate itself from the consequences of its misdeeds; that the the planet-fucking, Wall Street banking behemoth is, in short, a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.

To my amateur's eye, it looks like a well-researched, well-argued indictment of cutting-edge high finance, but I'm nobody's economist. Goldman's response?

"[Taibbi's] story is an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories... Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F. Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing."

To be clear - Goldman are saying that the suggestion that the world's leading financial whizzkids may actually have known what they were doing when they turned every financial disaster of the last decade into their own non-stop cash bonanza is a conspiracy theory on a par with faking the moonshot.

Well, fine. If you buy that, I think you actually have to buy the idea that every piece of fiscal fuckery from the Dotcom collapse, through Enron and Worldcom then up to the current financial horror movie, were all amazing, unforseeable, once-in-a-lifetime events... A completely unpredictable and barely conceivable bug that just seems to recur every couple of years, rather than an intrinsic feature of the system.

So what else is a wild, unbelievable conspiracy theory?

Iran

I notice that anyone who suggests that the CIA or MI6 might have any involvement in recent events in Iran is instantly regarded as a loony. In fairness, the only people I've seen say so are anonymous commenters who sound like they'd blame Mossad lizardmen if they contracted a dose of the squirts, but still - what do people think spies actually do?

Iran is a barking theocracy run by religious throwbacks who have repeatedly threatened to do all kinds of harm to the UK. We've had military bases camped right next door to them for most of the last decade. If MI6 aren't devoting serious time, money and effort to fucking with the Mullahs, then I for one want to know exactly what they're doing to earn their salaries.

Iraq

David Aaronovitch notably didn't include the Iraq invasion WMD scam in his conspiracy theory study Voodoo Histories2, but he clearly thinks that the Blair lied thesis is one. Plenty would agree. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, but Government launches creative advertising campaign to sell unpopular policy to sceptical public doesn't sound like the wackiest piece of conjecture ever concocted.3

Neo-liberal economics

I've always thought that Reaganomics and Thatcherism were hilariously obvious scams designed solely to enrich their proponents and their friends. After all, Advocates for an economic system based on self-interest may tell lies if they believe it is in their interest to do so doesn't strike me as a ridiculous proposition, yet try telling people who work in finance that and they'll look at you like a stonking great pair of gonads just bulged out of your eye-sockets.

And what's this? Why, it's an op-ed in the Financial Times about how almost all of the benefits of a neo-liberal economic system flow to the super-wealthy, while almost everyone else stays where they are or has to spend themselves into crippling debt to keep up. Capitalism's Dirty Little Secret, the author calls it, as if he were revealing some deep insider information.

All of which brings me back to the original question - what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?

Note - 9/11 was already a conspiracy, and doesn't need to be loaded up with invisible missiles and thermite explosions to make it more exciting. I'm thinking more polite lies that grease the wheels of profit and policy than I am OJ made Capricorn One to expose NASA's lies.

1. I decided against putting up the political correctness post after a certain pro-war website asked what racist names the horrible leftists that live in their skulls would call President Obama, should he continue his predecessor's idiotic policy of trying to blast, shoot and torture some respect into random foreigners. Cue a gaggle of middle-aged wingnuts throwing gangsta-hands and calling each other "Nigga". Chilling.

2. The Aarowatchers have Moar here, here and here.

Update!!

3. While we're talking about Decent Dave, let's note the reaction to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares. It's still never been screened in the US, as far as I'm aware, and has been attacked over there as an anti-American hatefest that implies that George Bush is more evil than Osama Bin Laden.

Curtis made lots of good points, but one of the main ones was that Al-Qaeda isn't SPECTRE. It's a group of headbangers in a cave in Pakistan that has links to a lot of extremists in other countries. It's definitely not a planet-crushing secret cabal with multi-million pound mountain-bases filled with supercomputers, tank-killing lasers and Islamic ninjas. I think time has shown that his analysis was bang on the money.

Note - at no point during the film did Curtis say or imply that Al-Qaeda did not exist, or that they didn't pose any kind of threat.

But fuck me, what's this? Why, it's David Aaronovitch blasting Adam Curtis for saying and implying that Al-Qaeda is a non-existent, imaginary threat - blasting Curtis for being a conspiracy theorist, as it happens.

Curtis's is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.

A conspiracy, and one involving the fingering of the Illuminati at that. Lordy, them tinfoil-hatters is everywhere once you start looking.

Student Sees Spade, Correctly Identifies

Scene: Tut-tutting, it were all fields round here when I were a lad, now it's all just lesbians, vibrating buttplugs and the Muslims culture war blog, popular with angry wingnuts and lunatics. Alarming levels of paranoia and self-pitying resentment make Richard Nixon look like a level-headed rationalist.

Background: Some A-level students have got low scores in an exam because they were confused by the word "despotic" in the question; Charitable reading of the situation makes their objections seem reasonable, while ignorant, desk-pounding reading of the situation makes them look like idiots.

Dramatis Personae: Cackling cavalcade of torn-faced, middle-aged ballbags; representatives for Kids-These-Days.

The Set-up: Torn-faced, middle-aged ballbags diagnose death of civilisation, bemoan stupidity of Kids-These-Days.

The Money Shot: Despite his or her tender years, blog commenter AngryStudent nails the modus operandi of 95% of bloggers, 100% of wingnuts with the following diagnosis...

I've learnt from the boards I've read and posted on that unfortunately the majority of adults are hugely ignorant and stubborn. They read it in a paper and immediately take that side of the story, without hearing us out first. What it comes down to is that they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, but because they read it in a paper they now view themselves as world experts on answering A-Level questions. And some of them have the cheek to say the country is doomed, when it is their generation who has led us into a depression. Woops!

Hats off to AngryStudent - he or she may struggle with the difference between a despotism and a tyranny - may, for all I know, be completely daft in every other respect - but that's one hundred words of teenaged Perceptiveness WIN.

Thanks due: Band.