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I woke up in Montana and am now going to sleep in Minnesota. On my way back to where I lived. Learned some things this trip, for instance that Montana is indeed a state that is very, very, wide, and that North Dakota is actually more settled and hospitable than South Dakota, for some reason. Yesterday I played The Damned's album "Machine Gun Etiquette" for five hours straight on the drive. I
one loon pond is the name of a blog that has come to replace The Michael Duffy Files. loon is a) entertaining and b) informative — the two purposive categories into which all writing may be classified (if I remember my high skool English classes correctly). For the benefit of any law-talking guys who may be reading [...]
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS-CANADA/ICELAND:MAGMA ENERGY WANTS STAKE IN ICELAND GEOTHERMAL ENERGY:One has to say that Magma Holdings have hardly been slowed down by our present recession. One acquisition after another, some of them bargain hunting amongst th…
Excerpts from Duncan MacLaren’s “History of the Resistance to the Annuity Tax” (1836), showing how as the title of “official” state church of Scotland changed hands, those who promoted and denounced resistance to taxes to prop up the state church flip-flopped right along.
Brazil’s Milton Nascimento sings Anton Carlos Jobim’s musical celebration of Rio de Janeiro, Samba do Avaio (The Jet Samba) . The lyrics reference the statue of Christ the Redeemer that towers over the city and the Guanabara. Minha alma canta (My soul sings) Vejo o Rio de Janeiro (Seeing Rio de Janeiro) Estou morrendo de saudade Rio, teu mar, praias [...]
It’s time to reclaim patriotism from the racist narcissists
Tim Soutphommasane
The Age
September 1, 2009
NOT all that long ago, ”Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” was just an innocuous, if inane, chant at sporting events. Commemoration of Anzac Day was greeted with indifference. And the idea of tattooing sunburnt flesh with the Southern Cross was, well, strange. Not today…
‘Reclaim’ patriotism from the Right
Peter Wilson
The Australian
August 5, 2009
TIM Soutphommasane has spent more time than most people thinking about what it means to be Australian.
Growing up in Sydney’s western suburbs as the son of Chinese and Lao migrants, he built his own sense of national identity among friends from more than a dozen ethnic backgrounds.
As a political philosopher at Oxford University, he has spent much of the past five years examining the concepts of patriotism and nationalism in 21st century Australia.
When he travelled back to Sydney this year he was shaken to see ethnic clashes in that city’s seaside suburbs even while the city was celebrating Australia Day with a relaxed, friendly and newly confident pride.
The result is that Soutphommasane, an ALP member since the age of 15, is urging Kevin Rudd and others on the Left of politics to mount what he sees as a long-overdue campaign to reclaim the notion of nationalism from John HoWARd and the political Right…
Affronted by the xenophobic nationalists who stalked the land during the HoWARd years, many progressive Australians have rejected a love of country, forgetting that there is a patriotism of the liberal left that at different times has advanced liberty, egalitarianism, and democratic citizenship.
Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and political theorist who has journeyed from Sydney’s southwest suburbs to Oxford University, re-imagines patriotism as a generous sentiment of democratic renewal and national belonging. In accessible prose he explains why our political leaders will need to draw upon the better angels of patriotism if they hope to inspire citizens for nation-building, and indeed persuade them to make sacrifices in the hard times ahead. As we debate the twenty-first century challenges of reconciliation and a republic, citizenship and climate change, Reclaiming Patriotism proposes a narrative we have to have.
Reclaiming Patriotism is published by Cambridge University Press in September 2009. It is the lead title of the new Australian Encounters series published by Cambridge in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University.
“It is fitting that Tim Soutphommasane makes the case for progressive politics in defining Australian patriotism. When right-wingers claim the national story as their own - white picket fences, Don Bradman, Gallipoli - we need books like this to remind us that Australian citizenship belongs to us all.” ~ Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales
Whose cuisine will reign supreme? See also : George Orwell on democracy, nationalism, patriotism and socialism.
NB. Tim also has some thoughts on ‘Democracy’ in the August edition of The Monthly, in the form of a review of John Keane’s latest magnum opus The Life and Death of Democracy. On ‘Democracy’, see also : Cornelius Castoriadis Agora International Website | On ‘radical democracy’, see :
In Motion Magazine: What is radical democracy?
Gustavo Esteva: We are still using the word “democracy” because it has still a beautiful tradition. For some time, I used the expression “radical democracy” to re-claim the original meaning of the word: that is “people’s power”. Among the Greeks, that was the meaning.
Radical democracy implies two things. One, is a very radical critique of representative democracy and here I would like to mention the enlightenment of Douglas Lummis who published a book “Radical Democracy” and who gave to me a lot of elements of historical and theoretical critique of representative democracy and offered a clue for some alternatives within the framework of democratic thinking.
Douglas is a very interesting guy from California who has been teaching for twenty years in Japan. He is a brilliant thinker and his book, this book, I find particularly interesting as a very enlightened critique of representative democracy and an opening to other forms of thinking.
The second source for my radicality is in the sense of “radical” in Spanish which means to come back to the roots, the root of the things. Our roots here is what we describe as democracy in the villages. Meaning that they don’t have vertical authority and a structure of government. They are governing themselves.
…Anarchy alive! Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory, Uri Gordon, Pluto Press, 2008 (review by Tom Jennings, Freedom, Vol.70, No.3, February 2009; review by Lawrence Jarach, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed; and elsewhere… except the arse-end of the world, Australia, where the book isn’t even on the bloodyfuckingshelves unless yous wanna pay an arm and a leg and order it in from o/s goddamnit).
Huh.
That’s odd.
I’ve been linked to by a fascist blog in the UK called ‘The Green Arrow’ (State Supported Terror groups, Mister Fox, August 20, 2009):
After the BNP’s Euro election victory, UAF thugs attacked a BNP press conference outside Parliament, pelting the media and party officials with eggs, placards and bottles. Several of the UAF thugs punched and kicked members of the BNP, including deputy leader Simon Darby who was repeatedly kicked in the back.
http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1284
http://isupporttheresistance.blogspot.com/2009/08/state-supported-terror-groups.html
I’m not sure why the post in question has been linked to, as there are numerous other accounts of the argy-bargy outside the British Parliament. The incident took place at a BNP press conference in London in June of this year; the conference called immediately after BNP Fuehrer Nick Gri££in was elected to the European Parliament.
It reminded one of a similar incident in Brunswick in the ’90s, when ‘National Action’ Fuehrer Michael (De) Brander expertly caught an egg in his mouth, and later featured on that week’s edition of The Footy Show…
To resume.
I can remember coming across the name of The Green Arrow (apparently some bloke called Paul Morris) before, I think ’cause Darrin ‘Sleeping Dragon’ Hodges was wont to reference it as being a suitable alternative to sites devoted to ‘adult shopping’.
Anyway, it so happens that Denise has just recently written a little more about Snakes and Arrows (Norfolk Unity, August 29, 2009), prompted, in part, by the closure of a forum at the BNP website:
And so the dispossessed, muttering darkly about “egos” and “dictatorships”, move on to posting pastures new, but carry with them their unfailing loyalty to the very man who caused their discomfiture.
The closure of the BNP forum has led to a migration to the hitherto moribund Green Arrow forum – but if anybody thinks voicing an opinion there is a good idea, the spousally-challenged drink-loving Paul Morris has news for them, making it clear that nothing less than wholehearted support for Griffin and the Griffinite BNP is expected.
Now the pompous Morris is as much of a standing joke to his own fascist brethren as he is to the anti-fascist community. The online Colonel Blimpish persona and the over-frequent use of military metaphors are rather belied by his real-world persona as a vicious hater prone to subject his neighbours to drunken rants, and who urinated against his caravan while screaming and shouting at the now estranged wife who had locked him out of his own house.
Speaking of Darrin, his ♥ has recently been broken by ‘Terrible’ Terrie-Anne Verney, but he’s nothing if not determined — see : Oh, Darrin!, September 30, 2008.
