[camera obscura] beware the unattended

Don't think you need to know German but Sean does.

[mondayitis] posts to cheer you up

We have grey gloom and it's so depressing that the Brits have snow blizzards [which I adore] and we only have slushy, drizzly, yukky uggghness. So here's an ongoing post to cheer us up a little:


1. Haggiso on Heather Mills

2. Welshcakes on Simi in a bonnet

3. Calum Carr on the NHS

4. Liz on Hoover Heaven [I suck, therefore I am]

5. Ian Grey on strange shapes and big balls

6. Steve Green's Magical Mystery Blog tour.

[oppression] why - just tell me why

One of the major themes on this blog is [and is increasingly going to be] on mindless oppression, particularly of women.

It's in my nature as a man to do all I can to fight pernicious attempts to demean women and as a gender I love them. One lady and I were having a "gender war" the other night with a difference - she was vehemently arguing the reasons men were better and I was listing the reasons I love women.

But arguments such as that don't actually solve the problems and bloggers can do little more but still it must be attempted. One such is Jams O'Donnell who posted this:

The Afghan Olympic team has plenty of problems with run-down facilities and a woeful shortage of funds, but only Mehboba Andyar . the sole woman competitor, has had to prepare herself mentally for the biggest challenge of her life while dealing with sinister midnight telephone calls, the open derision of her neighbours and even police harassment.

When she competes against some of the finest runners in the world, with skills honed at the best facilities, Miss Andyar knows that she has little chance of a medal in either the 1,500m or 800m competitions.

Just getting to Beijing will be more of an achievement than most athletic stars will ever know, even if she will be noticed on the racetrack mainly for wearing traditional Islamic dress instead of skin-tight Lycra, and for the novelty of being an Afghan woman.

Please get over there to read the full thing if you haven't already done so. Another is Santi W who is fighting for women in her own language in Indonesia but from a traditional perspective [non-Feminist].

[blog debate] open letter to anonymous

Dear Anon

Some blogs have people come for an all in "debate" [brawl] and love that. This blog, not by my choice, tends to have people who just come in to read and seldom comment.

I know they do read from the occasional e-mail on some point or other and this blog seems to attract the shy rather than the opinionated. I know for a fact - STB and others - that people do follow these suggested links and so it is not wasted effort.

This can be turned to advantage - if the people visiting here are more mainstream, more of the mainstream way of thinking, then this blog serves a purpose in often [not always] drawing their attention to something they would not go to an Anon's political blog to see.

In other words - it reaches a wider readership than the purely political and this seems to me to be not wasted effort.

My comments policy is laid down - argument to the point e.g. on religion where the anons put something to me and I answered, still looking for their "evidence". By any reasonable definition of the word, that in itself is debate.

But ad hominem directed to another blogger is not on, not here. The exception is me and you can say what you like to me. That's why I haven't deleted this comment on the previous post. That's the only policy here on comments and I think I'm fairly free and easy - how many of yours have I deleted before?

Not only that but you are welcome yourself [I note Verlin's concern though] because you DO add greatly and provide good stepping off points to explore.

I write posts which are provocative to my reader base to challenge thinking, that's all. However, this sort of person really does not like being pushed around and told what to think and that's always in mind in the tone I adopt in a post.

For example, the girl who gave me the Islamic info is worried I should not have posted what I did. Look, I print what appears to be the truth and that is the sole criterion in posts, except to keep it within the bounds of taste.

What, would people have me post bland, formulaic pieces based on the MSM? My source material is generally other bloggers whom I know have taken the trouble to research, I link and hat tip and prefer them to the MSM.

That's about all I can say on it and will continue to try to steer a line down the centre and avoid outright mindless ad hominem war between fellow bloggers, directed, not to the issue but to the person, with the intent to hurt. Please stick to the issue.

We, Anon, are both trying to draw people's attention to iniquities so it's hardly right that we descend to the same level as the people we attack. You are welcome, as always, to tear this post apart.

I shall direct people from my "About" page to this page in future if they'd like to know the blog's comments policy. You might like to also check out these comments by Tiberius.

Thanks,
James

[allies and axis] who was the enemy of whom

The Flying Rodent, he of the battle fatigues, opines or allows to be opined:

Obviously, this depends on whether you think the Russians could've fought off the Nazis without Stalin's ruthlessness, inhumanity and propaganda.

Well that's a moot point, you know. I mean, who was actually the enemy of whom? To start with:

Lend-Lease was the most visible sign of wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. About $11 billion in war matériel was sent to the Soviet Union under that program.

While this was occurring, on August 25, 1939, the Swiss periodical Revue de droit international published the text of a speech Stalin delivered on August 19 to a closed session of the Political Bureau in Moscow. He was quoted as follows:

It must be our objective that Germany wage war long enough to exhaust England and France so much that they cannot defeat Germany alone.... Should Germany win, it will itself be so weakened that it won't be able to wage war against us for 10 years.... It's paramount for us that this war continues as long as possible, until both sides are worn out.

Whether or not Stalin planned pre-emptive attacks in Europe, as Rezun claimed, war was certainly anticipated at the least:

In general, the Soviet media denied rumors of troop concentrations along the frontier. The defense committee had been secretly transferring combat divisions there since the summer of 1940. In April 1941, the Ural and Siberian military districts were ordered to release more formations.

And yet the massive negligence in preparing for the war is puzzling:

The Red Army had, for security reasons, opted for cable communications over wireless but in "something approaching criminal negligence, the telegraph lines had been left unprotected on the night of June 21." With their easy disablement by the German forces, intelligence could not be shared. Armies vanished. The Commissariat of Defense lost contact with 10 of 26 special trains that had been sent west. The slaughter was horrific.

Added to this was the British leadership's fuzzy attitude to "the enemy":

As early as 1934 British leaders of conservative party had adopted a policy of giving Germany a free hand in eastern Europe.In Nov1937, Lord Halifax met Hitler ,told Britain would not oppose if Germany carried out expansionist polices in eastern Europe.Later British ambassador in Berlin Neville Henderson gave similiar assurances to this effect.

... coupled with the role of Allied firms in Germany throughout the war:

GM and Ford, through their subsidiaries, controlled 70 percent of the German automobile market when war broke out in 1939. Those companies "rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the Germany army," writes Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post.

The Soviet Union had certainly been well involved with the allies more visibly and had been persuaded to attend the Bretton-Woods conference where Keynes and Harry Dexter White dominated, White accused of collusion with the Soviets:

Defecting Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley, on July 31, 1948, told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that White had been involved in espionage activities on behalf of Soviet Union during World War II, and had passed sensitive Treasury documents to Soviet agents. Bentley said White's colleagues passed information to her from him.

So whatever was really going on and whoever was financing whom, over 20 million soviet people died, in an estimated overall toll of 48,231,700 during a fabulous time for wartime profiteering, which never seems to end, even today.

Lovely people, our leaders and financers.

[easter] and the path to islam

Catholicism meets Islam

Today is western Easter and the majority will either enjoy the long weekend or will be into the bunnies and eggs.

The key to Easter is not so much Good Friday, as any scholar knows and every child used to know three decades ago but Easter Sunday. That it was Sunday at all is a moot point and to me - an irrelevant one.

Just as the old arguments of consubstantiation v transubstantiation should never ever a be a basis for schism, just as the Great Schism was nothing but a power play of patriarchs, so divisions within Christendom are stupid - especially as we can't definitively know the finer details.

We know the main idea is that there is One G-d and go from there.

My bona fides. I was christened and baptised as a child into the Church of England. I am a WASP and one of the most pernicious kind - I was public school educated. So it's pretty clear where I'm coming from.

My father stood on the banks of the Jordan once with the Armed Forces and in later years told me that on one side was desert, with a few encampments of Arabs and on the other - fertile irrigated land. That had a profound effect on him and my views on Jews were not negative, although the Hassidic took some getting used to. I have seen fanaticism in both our camps.

Just like everyone else, my views on Muslims were of the 911 variety until I began to do some research and started putting aside the more vehement of my "colleagues" and trying to see it from the other side.

In the past few weeks I've been able to see another side and much of what the west alleges - I know, at least in a non-Sharia state, to be just not so. I live in a Muslim republic, speak with them every day, work for them and this last contact has been a real eye-opener.

We were discussing the ills of the world and found we agreed on virtually everything and both of us were arguing for a return to some sort of code you come back to by yourself which orders these things. I'll tell you now I'm in the process of learning all this and the reason for much of the daily ritual and so on.

When I said we have to do something to reverse this moral degradation we see around us, she answered, "That's called jihad, James."

Of course I countered that I don't see 911 jihad as such a good thing and she showed what it could also mean, shorn of its hypersensitivity. And also of course, I was dealing here with an educated speaker of English who was able to put what it was like at grass roots level.

The key problem, even if we're at one on the social issues, loosely described as "faith, hope and charity", is the question of the redemptive power of the resurrection from the dead.

If you are to say it is not possible to be resurrected, then you are denying an aspect of G-d's power. I mean, is he omnipotent or not? If he is - then such a thing is always going to be possible. With Him, if you are a believer, all things must be possible.

So why the problem of the Nazarene Carpenter's Son? Why couldn't He have been resurrected?

You can have multi-faith conferences, rapprochement, peace and mutual understanding till the cows come home but this assertion of the resurrection is always going to be the stumbling block.

It's dashed inconvenient and it doesn't go away.