Don't read this: No-one pays me to write it

I was browsing through the Blogosphere in Sunday’s Turbine looking, as usual, to see if my own Blog was mentioned, and, as usual, it was all the usual Irish bloggers that got a mention. I was begining to think that maybe all those bloggers that they mention week in week out were Turbine bloggers who wanted to say stuff that they couldn’t put their own names to because of the country’s Draconian libel laws, much like the cogair website from the early days of the world wide web.

I think the word Draconian is a bit redundant these days, by the way, and if the Republic of Ireland was at the centre of civilisation instead of being a tiny peripheral country that most people aren’t aware even exists then the word McDowellian would be far more apposite.

Anyway, after yesterday I think those bloggers are probably just people like myself, who according the nearest thing Ireland has to a Liberal paper, are “annoyed people with time on their hands who might otherwise be pasting letters from magazines into weird and threatening letters – or be gainfully employed”. Ouch! Feel the condesencion. It’s not that much of a shock to me as the Turbine has been getting noticably snootier over the last while, complaining about scangers, scobies and the like, but not in a tongue-and-cheek Ross O Carroll Kelly way. Perhaps it’s dawned on them after reading about themselves in Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that's also written by people with time on their hands, that it’s appeal is always going to be limited to people who live in places like Foxrock and therefore they have nothing to fear from insulting scobies, who they probably think aren’t able to get all the way through an article by Diarmuid Doyle anyway. This week Doyle, a supposed liberal made the astonishing claim that he thought it represented “inverted snobbery” for a middle-class student like Dermot Laide to be sent to jail just for murdering someone in cold blood. I suppose people called “Dermot” and derivatives thereof ought to stick together as in this country it’s a name only middle-class people are allowed have, though in the more egalitarian United States even Clitus the slack-jawed yokel was allowed call one of his kids by that name.

There’s got to more than mere class condesencion involved here though. You can sense in a lot of the coverage that bloggers get in the press both here and internationally a resentment that being able to mould opinion is no longer the exclusive prerogative of print journalists. This is nothing new. In the late nineties the Murdoch press was full of scare stories about how much porn was up there on the web, even though it’s only the same proportion as in print media, and the irony that Murdoch papers like The Sun did so much to normalise porn was obviously lost on them. Yesterday the Turbine printed another piece which was obviously lifted from the Independent on Sunday which argued that we live in a “relativistic” media world where the New York Times is on a par with the thrashiest blog. I'd love if that were true, but America’s soi-disant paper of record sells over a million copies daily, a figure that only sites like www.Moveon.org can even come close to, even though the Times constantly misled the American people over the existence of WMD in Iraq while it was one of those thrashy bloggers that exposed the fact that America’s dumb-ass president was being operated by remote control by his sinister svengali Karl Rove.

It’s certainly true that you can’t believe everything you read on the web. When I tell my girlfriend strange-but-through stuff like that the president of Turkministan renamed bread after his mum she asks me where I read that and I joke that it was on my own blog. But in an age where media press conferences are little more than photo-ops for George Bush, blogs have come around just when America needs them most. If the mainstream press are afraid of them, probably not nearly as much as the powers that be. When the printing press came along first the Catholic Church were terrified of it as before then they had a monopoly on interpreting the bible, after Gutenburg people were free to set up their own religions, many of them with even more outlandish beliefs, just as, regretably, many blogs are to the right of the Bush administration. But argument and debate things without which society becomes as sterile as Europe was in the Middle Ages.

I used to think that the reason civilisation was created in the first place was to allow the interchange of ideas which is why the centres of Ancient Athens and Rome were both known as the Forum. If people like Socrates were alive today he might well be on the internet trying to get people in places like Kansas to think for themselves and not believe everything that Fox News tells them, though if he was the Turbine would still be telling him to get a proper job.

But here’s some bad news. The people who control the issuing of domain names on the web, www.icaan.org are answerable to the US Treasury, who up till now have kept their noses out of their affairs. But last week the Bush-appointed treasury secretary expressly asked them not to create a new domain code, .xxx for porn sites as the his supporters think this will increase the amount of porn on the web, though people who actually understand how the web works think it will make it easier to filter. This could be the start of a slippery slope which sees Uncle Sam increasingly dictate what can and can’t be seen on the web. And not just in the land of the free, but right here in the people’s republic of McDowellisatan as well.

A Steyn on the dress of the Grand Old Lady of D'Olier Street

In a 1942 movie called Strange Holiday Claude Rains goes away fishing for a few weeks while his nation is at war and returns to find blank expressions and a prevasive climate of fear where he comes from. It's a pretty unsubltle dig at those in the US who let other people fight the Nazis who were never going to impose their way of life on the US but could easily have become the bullying superpower that that America is right now.

I thought of this movie after as I've been away for most of the last two months and haven't had much chance to read the Irish papers (It costs €80 a year for a subscription to the Irish Times- Fuck that!) but it seems that on my return they've been taken over by aliens from a distant planet that bears no relation to the world I live in myself.

To be fair, the main object of my shock and horror is a man whose been writing for the Irish Times for a while, Mark Steyn. Looking like a surly younger version of Osama bin Laden when he wasn't quite old enough to grow a full scraggly beard, but having far more extreme views,he originally wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times when it was owned by Conrad Black who brought him over to England to write for his far-right titles like the Telegraph and the Spectator. How he ended up writing for the D4 chattering classes is a bit of a mystery, but his appointment did coincide with the beginning of former PD Geraldine O Kenneide's tenure as editor. He's already been the subject of an angry demonstration by anti-war activists outside the Times' office in D'Olier street, yet the baggy-eyed one seems to be standing by her man as she did with that other swivel-eyed bearded psychopath Kevin Myers a while ago.

Last week he outdid himself for extremism by suggesting that George W Bush is being a wimp over the Iraq situation and should use the nuclear option, not in any metaphorical sense, but in the sense of dropping a big bomb on Iraq that would kill millions of people and spread disease around the area for centuries and possibly make the whole area uninhabitable. His justifiaction is that nuking Japan in 1945 brought an end to the war and ultimately saved more lives than it terminated, even if most of the lives that it ended were civilian. He glosses over the subtle differences between the two conflicts, like the fact that Japan attacked the US first, that they were fighting the whole nation whereas they claim to be friends of the Iraqi people today, and that nuclear profliferation has meant that an attack would almost certainly result in Iran, Pakistan and other muslim nations stepping up their arms programmes and making the world a much more dangerous place.

The really scary thing is that he's saying in print what the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney are probably saying in private, though they know that a nuclear attack on Iraq would make things worse and alienate the US from the rest of the world even more. Still, you know that deep down they'd love if the middle east was one big arid desert with no sand niggers getting between them and the oil they need for their SUVs. Cheney actually said a few years ago that there was a problem caused by the Good Lord choosing to put the oil under countries that weren't democratic.

But why a neo-con like Steyn should be writing for the Grand old Lady of D'Oleier street is still a mystery. I'm considering a boycott of the paper until Baggy eyes gives him the heave-ho, but the trouble is that it's still the Irish paper with the greatest plurality of views, even though it doesn't give any genuine left-winger a regular column and instead lets fuddy-duddy Ken Barlow types like Vincent Browne and Fintan O Toole share their equivocations with us. Then you've got people like Breda O Brien telling us that the tide of history is turning against abortion, making statements like: "A foetus is not a child, but then a teenager isn't a grown woman". I kind of agree. I never thought being born was such a big deal and always wished that I celebrated my conception day instead of my birthday, as Breda obviously does. Presumably she celebrates Christmas in March as well, and thinks that if the 3 wise kings were really wise they would have shown up 9 months earlier.

Still, there are worse things than the Times. Like the Sunday Independent, for example. I came across a piece from the lifestyle section which complained that Irish universtities teach the work of "frauds" like Noam Chomsky instead of "genuine intellectual titans" like Conor Cruise O Brien and Eoghan Harris. (I'm not making this up) He claims that there's a "Cosy liberal Consenus" on campus. I'd love if that were true, but the words "liberal" and "consensus" don't really go together which is why the right, who agree to think whatever the Sindo leader writers tell them to think, has been in power for so long, no matter how irrational that may be.

This Sunday, Eilis O Hanlon was suggesting in her wrist-slashingly unfunny "Satirical" way that Ireland wasn't really a democracy any more as (according to her) Bertie had done some sort of dirty deal with the the Shinners to bring the Columbia 3 home from that bastion of democratic values that is Columbia. As someone who's been abroad and listened to how my country is regared as the terror state it's sickening to see the Irish people swallow the US line on Columbia. It seems that most of us think the country is a genuine democracy and that the government have nothing to do with the right-wing paramilitaries that shot all four left-wing candidates before the last election, just as many people in Britain believe that the RUC have no links with loyalists. What's more sickening still is that the Sindo printed 8 articles about the 3, none of which deviated from the line that they were anti-democratic terrorists even though it's clear that the situtation in Columbia is far more complex than they give it credit for.

But there's no room for complexity in the world of CNN, Fox News, or our own Sindo. You're either for them or against them. I'm happy to say that I'm against the Sindo. I hope the hypocrites who write for it all choke on the Columbian Cocaine they probably snort every night.

Put your money where your big fat mouth is, Harney

I was cycling down through West Cork the other day and noticed that I couldn't get reception on my mobile phone for love nor money when I was heading down towards Sheep's Head even though my providers, Meteor, claim that they have 100% national coverage. Perhaps they think that Sheep's head is part of Holland because of the preponderence of Dutch licence plates in the area.

I thought of this when I heard that the so-called Columbia Three have been holed up somewhere in West Cork for these last six months. I think that it's good to know in this era of 24/7 surveillance that people are still able to hide from the authorities much as Micheal Collins was in the old days.

Of course there's another theory that the government have known about them all the time and that Bertie's been turning a blind eye to it to appease the IRA and goad them into declaring a ceasefire. Mary Harney isn't at all happy about this, but then she never seems to be happy about anything. But can Harney, who paid €300 to listen to Henry Kissinger, really live with herself if she's part of a government that's been appeasing terrorists? Living with such a lie could eat her from the inside, though this would take quite some time as there's a lot of her to be eaten. I think it's better to get some closure on the issue, put her money where her extremely capacious mouth is and get the PDs out of their coalition with a man who can talk out of both sides of his mouth simultaneously.

To me, it's dissapointing that the government have to cling to the notion that the three went to Columbia to see some birds when there's no shortage of ornitholigal diversity in the peninsulae of West Cork. I'd love if they could come straight out and say that they were trying to help the indiginous people of Latin America to defend themselves against US-backed right-wing militias and Oil companies.

Unlike Bertie, I'm in a position to say that I'm proud that some Irish people are standing up to the might of US hegemony and defending oppressed peasants. I remember when Marion Keone was interviewing George Bush last year he had the Brass balls to claim that the US is the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world. Quite apart from the fact that Japan gives more in aid, most of the US's aid goes to oppressive governments like that of Columbia, where peasants land is sprayed with defoliant in the guise of fighting drugs so the likes of Unocal can come in and drill their oil. I'd love if there was a part of "socialist" Bertie that thought the same way and would come out and say so.

In the current climate of the "War on Terror" this isn't a possiblility. In that BBC show The Power of Nightmares there was footage of Donald Rumsfeld claiming back in the 70's that terrorists all over the world, including the IRA were backed by the USSR which fitted nicely into their Manichean World view though it wasn't supported by the facts. I'm pretty sure the last thing people in the North would have wanted is to live in dreary housing estates with little hope that things would ever get better while across the border people were enjoying the fruits of an economic boom.

Today there's no evidence that there's a global conspiracy of indiginous peoples around the world against the might of the western-military industrial complex, much as I'd love if this were the case. Still, it suits the powers that be to tar all "terrorists" with same brush, even when in the case of the PKK and Al-Qaueda, what they want is the complete opposite.

But if Bertie has any integrity he won't hand the Columbia Three over to Interpol. It would be a signal to many of his supporters that the Fianna Fail dog is being wagged by the PD tail.