unknownj

However, in entirely other news, I have returned from South Africa with bloody hundreds of pictures.. Possibly thousands, actually..

I've been working through them, and on the basis that Facebook's timeline, location and people tagging functionality seems to fit a lot of the pictures, that's where they'll end up. Creepy data policies aside, the thing is that I had an amazing time, and it's an experience that I really want to share with people, and of course Facebook is more or less the best place for that sort of communal interaction.

But put simply, it was probably the best holiday I've ever been on, though it's difficult to form a fair comparison vs my honeymoon. In either case, South Africa occupies #1 and #2 on the list, and that's what matters. It's a beautiful country, with all kinds of awesome things to do, and a political background that I find really engaging and interesting. I think I'd take the politics of a post-apartheid South Africa over a proto-fascist UK any day.. It's not about where you are, it's about where your trajectory is taking you...

Much much more to follow, here or on Facebook..

Having just taken my best shot at Dale, it would be dishonest not to leave myself open to the same..

I think everyone is curious about what others think of them. It's a natural curiosity and one that we rarely get to indulge in. So, let's indulge. Comment on this post with the three words that you think best describe me. They don't have to be complimentary. They don't have to be anything but honest. Post this in your journal and find out what three words others would use to describe you.

"How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

"Whenever you scratch a Tory you find a Fascist."

"No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party... So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin."


Timeless.

Lovely day today, feels very much like Spring has properly arrived. Though that being said, it might have happened days ago, and I just haven't noticed because I've been stuck in the office all day..

Did give rise to a slightly morbid thought though.. Much like one has a limited number of birthdays, one also has a limited number of instances of realising "ah, summer is coming again". Pretty much the same number of each.

So much in the way that a birthday reminds you that you're a year nearer to death, so too can a nice day outside. If you're predisposed to thinking odd things.

At least each year has effectively two significant seasonal transitions, so I guess you have two instances of "ah, new type of prevailing weather coming up" for every birthday.. Still, it's odd to think that the number of times you realise "summer is coming" is actually very easily countable.

Cheery thought!

I keep meaning to write something here.

This isn't it, but when "it" comes along, this is where you'll find it.

I've had it pointed out to me more than once that my politics are a bit.. "extreme"..? I dunno, I don't care for that word - I'm always open to debate on it, and can back up any ideologies I might support with logical, considered arguments. With those attributes in mind, I don't find "extreme" to be a helpful word since it also describes people with the exact opposite attributes. If anything, I would go for the word "radical", since it has a slightly more appealing history in politics.

Either way, the criticism is that I appear to adopt positions that sit well outside of the "moderate" set of ideologies. However, it hasn't always been that way. I drifted towards being a moderate in the period between leaving university and my later radicalisation by the election of a Tory government (sic). The following graphic shows my positions at different times using the Political Compass as a handy way of recording such things:



What's clear is that I started off towards the anarchist corner, drifted towards being centrist, and then swung right back to the anarchist corner again. Fortunately (for me), the amount of time I spend dwelling on political ideas means I can pinpoint exactly where that drift happened, and the point at which I realised that I had been absolutely wrong. Liberals, moderates, whatever you fancy calling them - I'm sure their hearts are in the right place, but if they think their approach will ever lead to left wing progress, they're wrong.

Liberals are basically good for signing petitions, and not a lot else.

What I've noticed in a lot of liberals, and what I felt myself for a time, is that somehow perhaps the machinery of capitalism and neoliberalism can be use to deliver progressive, humanitarian outcomes.

Nick Clegg recently said

"competition is the means to a better NHS, not the ends"

And I think for me, that says it all. He imagines that the forces that routinely create societal inequality can be harnessed for good. It's a sad delusion, which I held for a few years, and which he has seemingly made a career out of holding. What will of course happen is that competition will do what competition does - serve markets, serve itself, and do nothing to help people.

I mean, look at the railways. There's meant to be some form of competition there, right? So, say I want to travel from Guildford to London.. Competition means that I can choose between taking the direct route with Southwest Trains (33 minutes), or else with First Great Western (88 minutes - more than twice as long) or else with FGW and Southern (97 minutes - almost three times as long). Is that competition in any practical sense?

"Ah!" say the neoliberals, "that's not how it's meant to work!" Rather, they would argue that the competition element comes when companies bid for the franchises to run the railway lines, at which point they can compete on price and on the services they propose to offer. So we get the best companies, right? Wrong - what we get are the companies who have the best short term policies, with no regard to the long term. What incentive is there to invest in the infrastructure of the line if in ten years, before the investment has paid for itself, the franchise is then awarded to another company? So that doesn't really work either. This is why we're currently overwhelmed with mediocrity in our rail network.

And this is why liberalism needs to be combated at every possible opportunity. It's a mechanism by which good intentions think they can tame a bad system, and in doing so only lend legitimacy to that system, without improving it one iota.

If you think you can tame the system, the system will instead tame you. The Liberal Democrats are an obvious example of this, but there are plenty of others. Do not aspire to tame the system, aspire to smash it. It'll try to smash you back, but better that than be turned into a liberal...

One of the things I noticed on HYS was the number of people who rather like Mandela now, but consider him a "terrorist made good", as though he underwent some sort of transformation which cured his previously wrong line of thinking.

So here's a couple of quotes from his trial in 1964 which for me make it impossible to consider him a terrorist:

I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.

And this:

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war.

Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

That about covers it for me..

BBC's "Have Your Say", arguably the most obnoxious troll pit outside of the Guardian's "Comment is Free", has managed to surprise me.

I'm now left trying to understand the motivations of the people who would condemn Nelson Mandela (now, not even during apartheid) as a terrorist. Obviously a bunch of them are probably resentful racists, grasping at whatever opportunity they can find to discredit a man whose politics are diametrically opposed to their own. But outside of that, there's another group that I hadn't really considered before..

Loathe though I am to refer to the "political compass", the upward axis refers to the extent to which a person exhibits authoritarian traits, and it's that tendency that I think is responsible here.

The only context in which I can imagine a person genuinely believing Mandela to be a terrorist is if they're so blinded by a respect for arbitrary authority that they can't conceive of violence as an appropriate response to state oppression.

An authoritarian would look at civil unrest in Soweto, see the police beating poor black kids on the streets, and would instinctively feel like they had probably done something to deseve it. Without necessarily feeling that the power structures in the country were fair, they would nevertheless probably believe that the government is trying to do its best with a bad situation, and that the police are ultimately there to protect law and order, and were probably provoked into anything they did.

Under these delusions that authority (which is almost always derived from power rather than any qualification) is always right, I can possibly see how such a person might arrive at the conclusion that attacking the state is always bad. Why did the ANC not try harder to negotiate? How can a "good" person ever advocate violence in support of their cause? All of these questions typically come from those who sit on the right wing of politics, towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum. A lack of relative perspective combined with an absolute view that might is right naturally leads to the belief that all "freedom fighters" are "terrorists".

What surprised me though was the very idea that the belief that Mandela was a terrorist could persist even after the end of apartheid, even as worldwide public opinion snapped back to the "correct" view (which was that the government of South Africa at times bordered on genocidal, and that any and all means to resist and overthrow that government were justified).

Just a bit of an eye opener really.. To believe that the ANC were the principle instigators of terror in apartheid-era South Africa betrays a very serious ignorance of the power dynamic at the time, or else a very twisted view about when direct action becomes necessary. Either way, the world is a slightly sadder place now that I know such people still exist...

Dear TMA,

I'm curious, do you ever stop and think about the wider implications of your political position?

This might be the point where you claim that your stated political beliefs are just an attempt to troll me for fun, but it's a bit tricky since they so closely resemble the beliefs you grew up with, and the beliefs you genuinely claimed to hold throughout your teens. If you expect to be taken seriously when claiming you're just trolling, you might want to work harder at establishing your actual position.

In any case, I got to thinking - what would things be like if you and I had been born, say, thirty years earlier? I'd wager good money that I'd be helping to organise pickets of companies that supported apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile, you would be obnoxiously tweeting (or contemporary equivalent) about how I and my ilk are unwashed hippies, probably throwing in a "Mandela should be hanged as a communist terrorist" for trolling good measure.

A couple of decades earlier, and I wonder what you'd be saying about the civil rights movement as part of your right wing rambling.. Or a couple of decades more, and perhaps you'd be agreeing with the Daily Mail about how agreeable the "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine" of fascism is.

Now obviously I know there's a part of you that's just after a reaction, but there's another part that's sitting there kind of agreeing with everything you say if not exactly how you say it. Just want you to think about what company that puts you in - throughout history, pretty much, it puts you on the side of the "bad guys".

Consider me trolled,

James