Serious Golmal

Sometimes a comic strip is worth a thousand blog posts:

Hat tip: Katy

From the newly re-commerced (”giving it away for free”) New Statesman comes Ziauddin Sardar’s polemical lambast of three celebrated British writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. Sardar gets so excercised about the domination these writers purportedly hold over the British literary landscape that he gives them a dodgy neologism (”Blitcons”) because “the vanguard […]

The Iraq Study Group, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, presented GWB with it’s report yesterday. As an assessment it is not an anti-Bush document, but it cannot not be anything other than a damning prognostication of the catastrophe has resulted from the invasion of Iraq.
There does not seem to be a single positive […]

It was 26 years ago today.
As they were leaving the Dakota, they were approached by several people who were seeking autographs. Among them was a man who would be later identified as Mark David Chapman. John Lennon scribbled an autograph on the Double Fantasy album cover for Chapman.
The Lennons spent several hours at the studio […]

Sexy-Sadie Ahmadinejad announced details of a conference questioning whether the Holocaust really happened. This follows an international outcry a year ago when Sexy-Sadie Ahmadinejad described the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis as “myth” fabricated to justify Israel.
The conference will have six panel discussions and an open forum. It will discuss the capacity […]

Seymour Hirsh writes a long, complex piece (in the New Yorker) about the continuing machinations in Washington DC for the ‘Next Strike’. Yes, war on Iran. The article is detailed, the facts are complex (nuclear intelligence) and the background is far from simple and none of it can be reduced to a simplistic “good vs evil” translation. No one […]

Ethan Heitner writes, on the excellent TomPaine.com site, a good article about two events that will put the the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ tripe out of service once and for all. But first, what exactly is the Clash of Civilisations myth?
Samuel Huntington’s nonsense 1996 hit, The Clash of Civilizations, holds as its basic premise that […]

Over the last 4 months, extreme violence between rival political activists spilt over into social unrest and mass strikes (hartal) has once again crippled Bangladesh. Public reaction is polarised in a country where few aspects of life have not become politicised.
Traditionally, Bangladesh has always seen social divisions based on deep political rivalries between the political […]