Bin Laden seen at science fiction convention?

Bit of a blast from the past this one, but here is a fun/bonkers hypothesis from the archives of surrealpolitik, again from The Guardian from way back in 2002.

Fun/bonkers, yes – but obviously wrong I think. For a start, as I understand it from commentators like Adam Curtis and  Jason Burke, the term ‘al-Qaida’ was first used in a US court room in the 90s by the US security service based on what is now considered to be an unreliable witness statement and the term has no direct link to Bin Laden whatsoever. Indeed, there is strong evidence to suggest that al-Qaida is largely a fictional organisation and is really just a Neo-Con wet dream to help sell the threat of Islamism. The  similarities between al-Qaida and Asimov’s Foundation are fairly nebulous and almost certainly coincidental. The tactics of revolutionaries and terrorists over the years are of course going to be fairly universal and I see little in the Foundation books that don’t have some historical precedence.

Equally parallels between the fall of Rome, the US and the potential fall of any hegemony aren’t exactly a new idea. I’m sure similar things were said about the fall of the British empire too in its day. It is well documented that there is a clear adoption of ideas from radical Marxist doctrine by modern Islamism and Sartre is probably much more influential upon the movement than hard-SF ever was. Also I’m sure bin Laden might have also been slightly influenced by the Quran, at least just a little bit…

But the similarities between the Foundation series and real world politics probably do show that SF is often on the money at discussing socio-political concepts. Another space opera that has always reminded me of the current schism between the West and Islam is Iain Banks’ Consider Phlebas, although I guess that it mainly had the US/USSR schsm in mind at the time that it was written.

What does she want? A letter written in BLOOD!

I must admit that I don’t normally have much sympathy for our illustrious leader and PM Gordon Brown, but the shody treatment of him in the Sun today and yesterday, who are freely exploiting a stupid woman’s grief over the death of her equally stupid son, does rise my heckles in support of him. Actually I lie, I do feel sorry for Brown lately: nothing goes right for him, every decision is the wrong one and, in Cameron, he has an opponent who can verbally knock him all over the place till at will: he could gaff for Britain! But this and this nonsense takes the biscuit (just don’t mention biscuits to Brown!). If I had a conscience then I’d have every sympathy for this stupid vengeful woman, but I don’t: so I don’t. Neither do The Sun who are determined to exploit this idiot’s grief and to make this non-story into a means to personally attack the PM and the beleaguered Labour party.

Let’s look at this objectively: Jacqui Janes received a hand written letter of condolence from the PM for the death of her son. Frankly, I’m surprised! He does that for all our dead grunts! I wonder if the Presedent of the US does the same? Maybe, I don’t know – but I’d be surprised. On the BBC News last night one dead soldier’s mum said she found her letter to be a great honor for her departed son, but another said her letter was to impersonal! Let’s face it whatever Brown does in this circumstance will be wrong for some body. Too formal and it’s look like a stock letter printed out from a template, too casual and it’ll look like a note for the milk man. The fact that it hasn’t been word processed and spell checked to an inch of its life surely makes it more personal in my eyes. Looking at the letter, I have to say that I’m fairly dubious about the reported extent of the mistakes. His hand writing is poor (but so is mine), but there is little a half blind man can do about that (so get over it), so it is hard to say for sure if that’s a ‘n’ or a ‘m’ for fuck sake! Yes, it’s messy, but it’s certainly personal and more extensive than I would have thought. What does the stupid old cunt want, a hand written apology for her son being stupid enough to join the army and to be killed in his own blood, then for him to perform harri karri live on the Six O’clock News in penance? Okay, I’m no supporter of the War, but surely if you join the army you do so with the expectation that you might, just might have to fight and that you might, just might die! News flash, fuck-wits!

Anyway, I’d have thought that the letter and the money that she’s received from the Sun will be of considerable more worth than her little boy ever would amount to.

I have a feeling that this non-story might back fire on The Sun: Brown’s disability is well known, the woman is obviously racked with vengeance and grief, and The Sun is a fucking joke.

No sex slaves please, we’re British!

Been meaning to update this blog with an occasional rant or two for a while, but being incredibly lazy I couldn’t be arsed. But the brilliant article ‘Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution’ by Nick Davies in the number one rag for champaign socialists The Guardian (found here) makes fascinating reading.

The tag line for this picture in The Independent read: 'Prostitutes cover their faces during a raid on an illegal brothel. Many women are forced into the trade each year in Britain by human traffickers,' but the truth is very different!

In a nut shell Davies has dug a little deeper into those government figures from a few months ago saying that: ‘Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves,’ figures which are wrong. As usual small matters of truth and reality have failed to have been considered by the ever lazy media-wub, feminist groups and the Christian right and have been banded about ever since.

So what’s the truth to the human trafficking of sex workers in the UK? Well, Davies explains it better than I ever could:

Those figures credited Pentameter with “arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society”. But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked “restricted”, suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as “the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking”.

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

Although police described the operation as “the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved”, the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged.

Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been “rescued” as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN’s Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK’s 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter’s 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

Two of them — Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang — had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

The other three, Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan, were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: “The facts speak for themselves. I’m not trying to argue with them in any shape or form,” he said.

He said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. “What we’re trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here,” he said.

“It’s not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there’s a trafficked individual.

“There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air.”

Presumably the truth of these figures is actually known by the government, but the myth is more appealing, leading to the usual panic and reactionary statements we have come to expect from, the then Home Secretary and feminist idiot, Jacqui Smith. So now we’re in a situation where the law is being changed because of totally hypothetical (I’m being kind) statistics! Davies goes on to say:  ‘Parliament is in the final stages of passing the policing and crime bill which contains a proposal to clamp down on trafficking by penalising any man who has sex with a woman who is “controlled for gain” even if the man is genuinely ignorant of the control.’  So in reaction to what is – at the most -  a fairly niche problem (and possibly a near non-existent one, if such a thing is possible) we will in effect criminalize every man who uses the services of a prostitute.

All this reminds me of the date-rape drug scare from a few years ago, where the perception that rohypnol-cocktails were being served up in every student uni in the country was widely propagated by the media-sluts, the government and the police… until a few years later it turned out that there hasn’t been a single proven rohypnol-induced rape in the country!  At least the laws weren’t changed to accommodate that non-existent menace! And yet, despite the real statistics, I’ve met many a woman who swears she’s been spiked! Just more cases of media-induced auto-suggestion I’m afraid. I know that the women’s groups will point to the low conviction rate of rape in this country, but the fact is that surely drug-induced rape would be incredibly easy to prove, compared to say rape where there was no chemical proof available for the prosecution.  No, it doesn’t wash with me.

While I’m sure there are many women who have been forced into prostitution due to economic pressures, caused by the fucking government’s economic policies more than anything else, and I’m sure there are plenty who get knocked about a bit by their ponces , I fail to see why that mean that every man who fucks one of them should be made a potential criminal and, presumably, be put on the esx offenders register! Crazy! And let’s face it many hookers are just lazy bitches who have realised that they can earn more money on their back or on their knees than they can on their own two feet. No, I don’t feel sorry for them.Sure bad things happen to some of them, but that doesn’t give the government the right to impose crassly authoritarian measures.

The reality is that the manipulated figures have been hijacked by the feminists and Christians, both of which hate the idea of women having sex. Christians just hate anyting to do with sex and promiscuity. Feminists, in their hatred of men, hate the idea connecting and enjoying sex in anyway that isn’t governed by some stultifyingly unsexy political correct ground rules. News flash: women like sex too. Some like dirty sex. Some like using sex to get what they want. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean you can outlaw it! You have no right not to be offended.This is just another example of feminists trying to ban prostitution by slight of hand. If they want to make it illegal (an impossibility) then they should have the ovaries to make a case against it, an open case. Personally, I don’t think anyone has the right to tell anyone else how they should make a living.

A little know fact is in the 19th century the proto-feminist movement cosied up to the nationalistic anti-immigrant lobby to sneak in anti-vice legislation along side a load of racist laws. In the 1970s they lied and manipulated the facts to try to ban hardcore.There tactics never change…

Could it be just possible that some, just some of these Slavic Sex Slaves might actually have been hookers in their home land? The patronising attitude that all sex-workers are just naive and honest girls lead astray then exploited by the evil Western slave master is something we all need to grow up from. Could it be that some, just some of these girls kinda knew that they wasn’t a job as a PA in London waiting for them and some of them felt like earning a little more money over here back when the pound was strong?  Of course this kind of talk identifies me as a penis whealding potential rapist! If only there was so way we could prove either way if there were some willing prostitutes in Poland…

Instead of polish sex-slaves in Britian, here are some in Poland working hard! Pic taken from: http://www.brothelsexguide.com/

Question Time, über alles – but who are the real fascists?

From The Times

Well, despite the insane fears of the doom-sayers re: the appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, on BBC’s topical political panel show Question Time, today I haven’t woken up in an alternative dimension where the reign of the Third Reich still rules supreme. Indeed unsurprisingly nothing has changed, despite the worst efforts of the ludicrous and highly anti-democratic Anti-Nazis League to give the moronic BNP as much free publicity as possible by yet another banner-whealding protest against the freedom of the press. And why has nothing changed? Well, because Nick Griffin is a useless cock-muncher that’s why. If you were scared of him and his goons before – and shame on you if you were, you scaredy-cat – then last nights performance must be enough to put your worries to bed. Nick Griffin appeared nervous, shifty, slimy, creepy and so far out of his depth I swear I saw a coelacanth paddling by at one point: he looked like a drowning David Brent! Christ, I even felt sorry for him at one point (I think he needs a hug). In fact he’s so uncomfortable in his own skin that he makes Gordon Brown look like the confident, debonair statesman that he so obviously isn’t. Poor, poor Nicky!

In fairness I’m not sure how many of this generation’s political-classes would have stood up to a one hour long gang-bang by Dimbleby, the rest of the panel and a largely hostile audience! Indeed, the only valid reason to be opposed to the BBC’s entirely correct position of including the BNP on Question Time was that it was so obviously going to mean that the BNP where going to disproportionally dominate every fucking question! Hopefully next time the BBC will follow the advice laid forth in The Times. Indeed the entire show was focussed on the cunt! Not a single question on the fucking postal strike for fuck’s sake! Only the penultimate question, regarding the Daily Mail’s homophobic article on the death of talentless Stephen Gately (the only sad part of this news story is that it wasn’t Roland Keaton instead), was even remotely ‘off-topic’ and even this was somehow interlinked into the rest of the show via the tedious and relentless thread of bigotry vs. freedom of the press. But actually QT wasn’t quite the bear-pit I thought it was going to be and all Griffin really showed was that he is slightly less versed in denying his old policies than the rest of the class-politik on QT, News Night and Daily Politics circuit.  Indeed even the difference on immigration was less apparent than you might suspect: Griffin saying that he wants to close the door and kick out bogus asylum seekers, although ostensibly not compulsory repatriate migrant families; Jack Straw (who suddenly seemed so old and feeble) admitted that immigration was a problem then avoiding all responsibility for it (despite being in power for the millennia); the next-gen sexy Edwina Curryesque Tory Baroness Warsi (who I’d like to kiss every inch of – I like evil women) and Chris Huhne, the LibDem nice guy (who should have been voted leader of the party instead of the Cameron-lite Klegg) both saying that it was a problem and the door needs narrowing a bit, but not closing because we’re not racists – oh no; and the obligatory and entirely superfluous non-politik guest, Bonnie Greer, who, as per usual, said nothing of any value whatsoever  (although she was marginally better than the walking abortions that past guests like Frank Skinner and Javis Cocker were). By my calculations that’s 100% of the guests who actually matter, i.e. the poli-fuckin’-ticians, saying immigration is a problem. A view, rightly or wrongly, widely agreed within British society.

So is Griffin so far off the mark? Well, yes – obviously he is, but he’s not reallyall that different in policy or current rhetoric (“British jobs for British workers” a la Gordon Brown). However, it is obvious from the show and from anybody who has taken an interest that the BNP’s policies beyond the fucking farce that has been the last few weeks, while not particularly offensive and, in fairness, quite often misrepresented (such as claims by the Anti-Nazis League that the BNP what to forcibly repatriate all migrants: claims which, I’d argue, don’t hold water), are just a white-wash (no pun intended) of their far more extreme beliefs. I have no doubts at all that Griffin and his cronies would love nothing less than to behead Jews in Wembley Stadium and hoist a burning-cross in the front lawn of every Afro-Caribbean (or African-Caribbean as some weirdo in the QT audience insisted) in the country… Terrible stuff, yes! But this is irrelevant. You can’t ban a political party on what you SUSPECT they stand for, just on what you can PROVE they stand for. And it’s not up to the BBC to decide who is and who isn’t a valid political party. Surely this is the electorate’s responsibility? Obviously the BNP have and are walking a fine-line between a dodgy kind of respectability and outlaw status, but as far as I can see they are saying and doing much less than murderous cunts like Sin Féin and Ulster Unionists ever did, so lets at least try not to be a bunch of embarrassing moralising idiots and actually deal with the facts for a fucking change. No, you can’t ban them and if there was an election in Britain today then legally the BNP could stand and, yes, the BBC were right to make the call they did: FACT!

Of course that doesn’t mean you should vote for them, no way! You can vote for anyone based on whatever reason you want, should you want to. If you, like me and anyone else higher up on the evolutionary ladder than a slug, suspect them of being a racists party, then don’t vote for them, but don’t be a cunt and don’t interrupt the freedom of the press! The BNP are racists: FACT. The Nazis were racists: FACT. But the Nazis also wanted to stop the freedom of the press and in this regard I see NO fucking difference between the fascist parties of the 1930s and the Anti-Nazis League today. If you don’t understand this then you need to take a serious look at your thinking process or your total lack of it.

Laying my cards on the table: I oppose anybody who stands against the freedom of the press and stands for censorship of anything, from art to politics: anything! I think the Anti-Nazis League need to take a good long look at their politics and consider if they are really so different from the Nazis? Because I don’t get it! It seems to me that they are just trying to close down the debate.

I have a very simple rule to life: if you ever start a sentence with ‘I’m all for freedom of the press, but…’ then stop right there, hit reverse and stick a full-stop right after the last ’s’ in ‘press’ and delete the ‘, but’ bit and whatever you put after it. You’re wrong. There is no exception to the rule. This is a scientific fact. And if there was an exception who gave you the fucking right to impose it on me anyway, cunty? To quote the mighty Peep Show: “we can all live in harmony, the Jews, the Muslims, the Racists.” Frankly, I disagree with just about every human being on the planet. Even more frankly, to be honest on general principle I don’t like most of the human beings on the planet because they’re all arseholes. And frankly, I’d prefer it if everyone just shut-the-fuck-up and stopped spouting forth their nonsense opinions all the time. (Yes, I realise the inherent hypocrisy of me doing that same thing here, but as this is my blog and you’ve decided to read it then I feel it is your fault and not mine.) But while I might disagree with you, I might hate you and I might not want to listen to you, I won’t try to ban you – and I expect the fucking same courtesy in return. Failure to comply won’t result in me banning you, no! But if I had my way it would result in you being imprisoned in that thing General Zod and his crew get put in in the Superman films when they get fired into space.

I’m not even sure if I see the need of the ANL in Britain today. There sole role seems to inadvertently give the BNP more publicity than it otherwise would. Duh! Let’s face it the BNP got a shity 2% of the vote and 2 MEP seats in an election which had a record low turnout, after a summer where the mainstream political parties had been busted for corruption and fraud. The BNP’s absolute numbers were actually static, just their share of the vote was technically bigger and only due to the system of Proportional Representation they managed to scramble together a handful of pissant seats. Now PR is a system I personally agree with. In fact I’ll spell it out: I’ve never voted and never will vote in a first-past-the-post system and if I ever do vote it will be in a PR system and that’s all! However, one of the well-known side-effects of PR is that extreme parties do a little better under this system. Both far-left and far-right parties do better, so I guess things kind of equal out: a fact which I personally think is more representational of the general public and is an actual strength rather than wakness of the system. PR is widely used across Europe and there’s been no resurgence of the Third Reich there in the last 60 odd years. It’s safe. Safe as houses. The Europeans must be laughing their garlic-munching heads off at us over the ‘rise of the BNP!’ 2%! Fuck, so-called far-right parties in most mainstream European countries regularly get 10-15% of the vote and guess fucking what? No fucking death camps to be seen this side of the Black Sea. Even in countries like Switzerland who have voted in a far-right government we see that the far-right, once in power, becomes much more moderate. Indeed there is plenty of evidence across Europe to suggest that the BBC’s decision to ‘legitimize’ the BNP by allowing Griffin to appear on QT will actually have a moderating influence. Same thing happened in Northern Island. What more proof do you need? I’m not saying that Le Pen is a pleasant sight at the best of times, but I am saying that beyond his rhetoric he is actually a much lesser figure in Le French politik than we perceive him to be on this side of the duty-free checkout. Fuck Le Pen! Without PR there is no fucking chance of the BNP ever getting in power: FACT. Even with PR I doubt the BNP could ever realistically get more than 5-10% of the vote and even if they did… well, that’s democracy, shit-head. I don’t agree with it. I’d sooner have a meritocracy with a second house drafted jury-style as a fail-safe. You might not agree, but if you have ever voted, then you agree with democracy, then you have to accept the BNP’s right to exist and the public’s right to hear them out and, if they’re dumb enough, vote for them. Get over it! If you don’t trust the public then you’re saying you want a different and non-democratic system: FACT, which is a different debate.

Fuck off world!

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