The United Klingon Independence Party

Kingdom, surely...? Anyway, it seems the heat is on UKIP, and it's about time. Why? Here's why.

Physical exercise stops you from being gay. Unborn disabled children should be aborted. Nigel Farage admits UKIP candidates could be former BNP members, never mind, at least he's honest, also lap dancing clubs are alright. It seems the limit for UKIP is anti-semitism, which I suppose we should all be grateful for. At least holocaust denial will get you kicked off the ballot paper.

This is the United Kingdom Independence Party. This is, of course, the ugly, provincial underbelly of British life, pub bores, frustrated small businessmen, Graham from the Golf Course, characters we all know and loathe. UKIP is not fascist. Fascism is a right-wing movement that uses extra-parliamentary, often extra legal means. There is a fairly fluid interaction between the ideas of the far right and the mainstream right. The difference is that extra step the far right take, onto the streets, trying to assert such ideas.

No fascist movement ever starts out as an ideologically coherent force but converges, either on a cause or more often on a charismatic figure. The UKIP swamp is broad and dank. In it lurks the wounded monster of British fascism.

This swamp must be drained. What does that practically mean? A UAF-style campaign, perhaps, to suppress the UKIP vote and expose its activists wherever the need arises. Certainly something needs to be done otherwise, even if most people disagree, if this kind of politics is accepted as legitimate then it will give the genuine fascist right room to make a comeback.

David Bowie enjoys a good list too

This is, apparently, the flowchart of David Bowie’s most recent album, The Next Day. Enjoy:

Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification

In other news, the fantastic blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame has just reached the end of another epic chapter, Bowie song-by-song 1992-1995, which included the great lost and found avant-album Leon, from which this indescribable song comes.

Memes galore

The advice animal periodic table... in case you were wondering.

Rabbit hole...

The Boston bombings are proving a strange fascination. They are being investigated by federal prosecutors. Their abiding metaphor, at least in public, seems to be “rabbit hole”. The only man who could have unravelled their mystery, who could have said why the bombings happened, is dead.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, seems to have been the instigator of these acts. He is described as being “self-radicalised”. The evidence of his internet browsing and mosque attendance shows a man who became attracted to a hard line, literalist interpretation of islam around three or four years ago. But that is not evidence of terrorism. There is nothing in islam that advocates bombing massed crowds. Terrorist acts are secular acts. Terrorism is the most oblique form of war. When people resort to terrorism it’s because of their military/political weakness.

In terms of politics he did take an interest in Chechenya. But that begs the question, why attack crowds in Boston? Tsarnaev was also known to have propagated conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks. The centre of various conspiracy theories was himself a conspiracy theorist. When the elder Tsarnaev was interviewed in 2011 by the FBI at the Russian state’s request he was found to have no actual terrorist connections.

The younger brother appears to be an even vaguer character. It is a strange thing when a 19-year-old effectively sacrifices his life without any compelling reason why. Could it be Dzhokhar was kept somewhat in the dark by his brother? Perhaps he was just a fool. We may yet find out. Mystery abounds.

One thing is for sure, it is practically impossible for any society to physically defend itself against so-called lone wolf attacks, including supposedly apolitical, non-terrorist acts, like the Sandy Hook or Columbine massacres. Even if they ‘worked’ before no crackdown is going to guard against this kind of thing happening again. The only substantial defence lies is asking why. Why do these things keep happening?

Attention scum!

Childcare minister Elizabeth Truss reckons too many nurseries are chaotic, with "children running around with no sense of purpose". Honestly, what sense of purpose does a two-year-old need? You heard the minister, attention freeloading toddler scum, grab a broom, get up that chimney and find a sense of purpose!

It occurs though, it is standard neo-liberal statecraft, for both Tory and Labour ministers, to decry public service. That's what executive power seems to mean. Make someone a minster the first thing they do is slag off the people they are responsible for administering and trash the service they provide. Why do they do this?

Part of the reason surely is that public service is provided often by skilled labour, which difficult to quantify and almost impossible to mechanise (the reason why public sector unions, badly organised and soporific, still hold some sway - skilled labour has sectional strength). We are still a long way from a digital doctor or a mechanical teacher.

Outbursts like these are partly technocratic frustration and partly a conscious way of holding down the public sector workforce. No one ever comes into office and says, "hey, you're all doing a great job by and large, keep up the good work" or "you don't get the resources you need and yet you still soldier on, I will fight for you". No. Ministers want these workers run down. In the case of nursery workers it means raising the minimum ratio of staff to children to one in six - a recipe for chaos if ever there was one. They want them run down and demoralised.

Satellite eye...

Here's this month's Satellite Eye (it seemed to be a little while coming). This is my favourite, one of the oldest surviving impact craters on Earth, now a lake in Quebec.

Age of conspiracies

This picture has been buzzing round the internet immediately after the Boston bombings. Who is this man?

The Boston bombings are compelling firstly because they are awful to contemplate but secondly because they are, as of yet, motiveless (if it was Al-Qaeda we would have been told straight away). The President initially did not even call the bombings and act of terrorism, then he did, but he still upset some people.

For the time being there is room for myth-making and pareidolia. What was that man doing on the roof? What would anyone do on a roof?

There are immediate psychological reasons for embracing conspiracy theories, the solidarity of the initiated, perverse reassurance about human agency and so on.  There are political reasons why one may promote a conspiracy theory, or conspiracism in general. Fear and projection are key stimulating factors for right wing populist movements, the tributaries of fascism.

The unacceptable attributes of the self, in this case a political body, for example a nation or a race, are projected on the enemy, who is always more powerful, cunning and prolific. Triumph over the enemy requires urgent action, great passion is mobilised, and it becomes a transforming force. It helps also when you find attributes of the enemy within the political body, these people become ‘traitors’ and can be dealt with peremptorily (btw – is anyone else spotting a similarity between this and the SWP CC’s epistemology of internal debate? – a leap I appreciate, but word has it Alex Callinicos turned up at a CC meeting with a copy of the infamous Facebook conversation and started ranting about conspiracies).

There is a short Marxist rider to this, we live in the age of public life, where all the formal decisions about society are taken in the open, yet society seems to career down strange, unwarranted paths beyond any apparent human control. Noam Chomsky contrasts conspiracy theories to institutional analysis. Conspiracies fill the gap left by the absence of the theory of class rule, the nature of the state. Perhaps this means they are part of the operation of bourgeois hegemony? In which case more consideration is necessary.

A damming indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA

More supernature

There’s a book review in the Guardian that gives a spotlight to a fascinating idea – shadow ecology, a stealth biosphere based on an alternative organic chemistry, undetected, right here on Earth, not even imagined until now.

This idea is perfectly congruent with natural selection. At the point when life was formed on Earth there was a lot of biochemistry, energy and time. Most of the history of life on Earth is dominated by single-cell life. By many measures bacteria are still the dominant mode of existence. Multi-cellular life is the comparative exception. There would be no currently available niches for multi-cellular shadow life.

Our conception of life has expanded. Life has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean living in endothermic ecosystems, in extremely acidic or saline conditions, under ice sheets and in deserts. But this life uses the same basic chemistry as our own. If a shadow biosphere exists why have we failed to find it after a more century of biological science? It might be because scientists have been suffering from a lethal theoretical conceit but it might be because it’s not there.

The link between theory and reality is investigation, and there are some tests being proposed to test for possible shadow-life. An example, life as we know it uses the left half of DNA strands as code. “Right-handed” organisms in a culture should respond to right-handed amino acids. Finding creatures using entirely different replicating molecule would be even more exciting.

If found it means something very interesting. We compare how photosynthesis, which evolved once, to the eye, which evolved 50 to 100 times. It is assumed that life arose once on Earth, but maybe it evolved twice, three times, many times. This improves the chances of life arising elsewhere in the galaxy.

Lists etc

Tallest mountains (base to peak) in the solar system according to planet/moon/asteroid:

Mercury - Caloris Montes
Venus - Maxwell Montes
Earth - Mauna Kea
Moon - Mons Huygens
Mars - Olympus Mons
Vesta - Rheasilvia
Io - Boosaule Montes
Mimas - Herschel Central Peak
Titan - Mithrim Montes
Iapetus - Equatorial Ridge
Oberon - Limb Mountain

Bozo bites

Boris Johnson wants a potential new Londonairport to be named after Margaret Thatcher. Double whammy! More proof, I think, that Boris Johnson functions as a prophylactic for Tory craziness (remember when he positively associated himself with Rupert Murdoch during the Olympics, when no other politician wanted to be near him). This is ULTRA provocative, yet a twinkle and a smile from Boris Johnson makes such things seem less than harmless. He is hardening people to Tory ideas and hardening people with Tory ideas.

IS Network - new website

And it looks pretty good. the founding meeting was yesterday. Somewhere between 50-100 people were there. Things went very well in my opinion. This an the Left Unity initiative (which the ISN has decided to support) are two reasons to be cheerful.

Trashing dead politicians

From the Daily Mail two days after Michael Foot died.Richard Littlejohn (who has fought in precisely no wars either) might have done well to note that Michael Foot was a volunteer in the Auxiliary Units that were intended to be the basis of a Resistance if Britain was invaded by the nazis. Life expectancy for unit members was estimated to be two weeks.

Inanimate carbon rod

But let's be clear, future; not just for the next 5 years but the next 4,000 years, together, with the rod, in positive, serious fightback, together, clear where we're going.

Ding dong etc...

An interesting if grim set of results from the latest Guardian/ICM survey. Asked to assess Margaret Thatcher's term in office and it's legacy a narrow majority of people look favourably on her destroying the basis of social democracy, in this case trade unionism and council housing, but oppose the (some would say logical) result of that destruction, structural unemployment and widening class divisions.

Now, we're Gramsicans; we take it as read that median subaltern consciousness in average times is contradictory, that's why we organise. And of course this is just one survey, and surveys are not neutral examinations. But, if it is true, this political agnosticism, people wanting the ends but not the means of social democracy, suggests why a coherent anti-austerity movement has proved difficult to put together.

Breaking news...

Some news

Here’s dome news to chew on. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, may be useful in treating severely depressed patients, but it is a Class A drug (I did not know that) and red-tape and costs make it prohibitive to develop.

This is of course a living critique of moralistic laws, legislating what adults of sound mind can put into their body and the unintended knock on effects such laws have. It also shows up the absurd contortions law based on private property can get into. Psilocybin is made in nature, proscribing it does not stop it from being made. You may as well outlaw the tide.

There is no free market in nature. While directly capitalist relations appear to be egalitarian and free (of course in reality they’re not), capitalism applied to nature is naked appropriation. Rent was created out of the violent appropriation of land. When pharmaceutical companies appropriate naturally produced chemicals it is no less of a violent act.

LolOfficer

A Sussex police officer chased himself after his suspicious activity was registered on CCTV. He followed himself for twenty minutes before he was told of the mistake. It's lucky they found out before he caught himself, pinned his own body to the ground and pumped eleven bullets into his head.

Turning the tide

Another win for Owen Jones. We desperately need a genuine anti-austerity front, ideally a left party that multiplies these arguments and starts to turn the tide. The mainstream political logjam is stifling. Owen is right, enough is enough, though it's been that way for nearly five years now.

For no raisin

French words or phrases in English that either mean nothing or something different in French... you heard me...

Agent provocateur
Apres ski
Bete noire
Cause celebre
Cri de coeur
Demimonde
Double entendre
Encore
Fin de siecle
Homage
In Lieu
Marquee
Negligee
Outre
Portmanteau
Reprise
Seance
Vignette

Thoughts for the brain...

I am, I hope, about to have something of mine (a rewrite of the recent Another Green World post) put up on the IS Network blog. The point of the piece will be there is something to be said for socialists incorporating environmentalist politics in a non-utopian way.

Part of the difficulty of green politics is who is expected to put on the agenda, let alone into action. The piece ends with a set of suggestions, possible demands that can link improving quality of life to curbing greenhouse gas emissions to tangible action in the here and now.

The other problem with green politics is the scale of climate change. There is no plausible environmentalism-in-one-country. We’ve commented before on the potential risks and rewards geo-engineering, particularly the scheme for carbon dioxide removal via iron fertilisation of the oceans.

Another solution proposed is solar radiation management, the most realistic idea being spraying the atmosphere with particulates that reflect sunlight. It’s a very costly outlay but it’s familiar from nature. Very large volcanic eruptions have cooled the global climate many times. But the knock on effects can be drastic. Two African droughts in the twentieth century have been linked to eruptions in the northern hemisphere. 

Geo-engineering is no substitute for reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, but, given the late hour we will need some measures to ameliorate climate change. An environmental movement linked to the workers movement can bridge the gap between the huge ends and currently inadequate means.