Letters to the Editor
Dear Sir/ Madam, I must complain about…
The discussion forum for the promotion of the dictatorship of the indignant and easily offended.
Archive for February, 2008
You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up
A report has been released by the Pentagon showing they have investigated, amongst other things, lasers that put voices in your head.
(Mental Health Warning: If you do suffer delusions that suggest you have voices put in your head by lasers perhaps you shouldn’t read this report, else I will be accused of compounding your delusions… On the other hand maybe you should, and screw the psyches back. Evidence maaaan! Evideeerrnce!)
Goodbye Castro
So Fidel Castro is retiring through ill health.
Two different takes; the liberal (US style i.e progressive) but liberal (continental style i.e free market) Independent:
and the progressive (US) but leftie (European) Dissident Voice
One mentions the human rights violations but not the fact that Cuba’s health and education system puts it higher on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) than any country with comparable GDP the other one mentions the benefits but not the abuses. Methinks the history of Castro is somewhat more complex than dictatorship or communist success story.
The history of Cuba should make us reevaluate what we mean by development, especially before it is sucked into the black hole that is US foreign policy. Although I do not advocate them the plain fact is that many developing countries from Malaysia to Indonesia (Suriname) to Libya to Cuba who have scored well in terms of western concepts of development have done so under dictatorships. What does this mean for the advocates of democracy building civil society bolstering in the name of liberal democratic capitalist development? Bearing in mind the paradigm shift that brought about the Post-Washington Consensus was so named after it was mutually understood?/ agreed upon? that the previous Washington consensus, that promotion of free market policies was justified by the success of the Eastern Tiger economies, was slightly misguided?/ overzealous? as these free market successes were often under severe protectionist policies and had large amounts of internal state investment to get their economies going. That this also happened when many of these countries had dictatorial governments was overlooked as they became democratic later after their economic successes. If we want to look at free market ‘successful’ interventions of the opening up of markets lets look at post Soviet collapse Russia and the World Bank’s interventions there, or how about Africa, the structural adjustment experiment. Wait no those failures were just due to a weak civil society. My mistake.
Is a strong civil society synonymous with successful external or internal social (self)-discipline, either through state totalitarian measures (dictatorship) or capitalist hegemony (liberal regimes)? Is it this that stops the weighted bias on instrumental rationality in the market due to private property from descending to outright corruption? No, corruption is what causes these economic policy experiments to fail isn’t it? It is not that these, free market, experimental economic policies lead to corruption, on a massive scale. Surely not.
Here in civilised society with a strong civil society we just call it a healthy interest in the profit motive and create laws for it instead. That is until there’s a run on a bank anyway. Of course that’s no indication of a tendency to crisis, just a blip of greed getting the better of things. Perhaps there was a breakdown in civil society. Probably the poor’s fault. Oh no, they’re the ones who got shafted.
Dr Who Remixes
Dr Whooo Ooh Hey Dr Who.
I have a James Cauty print. My wife made me take it down in case it scared the baby.
These are not so scary: Dr Who theme tune remixes
Brighton Bin Strike
I wondered why my bins weren’t emptied last week. It’s a good enough reason, glad it’s going well.
Eagleton axing
Funny who stays and who goes, is it age-driven, economic-driven or political?
Eagleton facing the axe at Manchester
