Sacha Baron-Cohen

I keep reading reviews of Brüno (often misspelt, ohne Umlaut, by reviewers). I may even watch it. The reviews annoy me, partly because of their lack of knowledge of Baron-Cohen's oeuvre.

Firstly, few seem to understand that Bruno was the first character Baron-Cohen portrayed on TV. This was my first exposure to him: as part of the miniscule audience of whatever satellite channel it was that Bruno's early appearances in comic confrontations with fashionistas occurred. Partly to blame is doubtless that Baron-Cohen's publicity machine is for whatever reason not keen to dredge up the memory of this, but, understandably now perhaps, wants to present this tired idea as fresh.

Personally, I've never thought that Baron-Cohen's confrontations with people were very funny. That kind of humour just makes me cringe. It was the other elements, the fictional ones, that are funny. With Ali G, it was the spiel that he gave around the interviews that was markedly funnier than the interviews themselves. As such, Baron-Cohen's finest production, at least that I've seen (and I haven't seen Borat, I confess it!, but I felt I'd seen enough of Baron-Cohen doing Borat to know I wouldn't like it), are his first, forgotten feature film, Ali G Indahouse, which is entirely scripted.

The Grauniad apparently think that the revelation that Hemingway was on the books of the Soviet Union as an agent detracts from his reputation. I of course think the exact opposite: my favourite author is more awesome now than ever.

"Hey bro, nice tan!"
"Get the fuck away from me, you pig-ignorant racist plutocrat."

I have to respectfully disagree with this clause from the Vice Guide to Everything:

Men are not allowed to wear any kind of baby-carrying knapsack. A kid only weighs 30 pounds, and if you can't carry that, you're not much of a dad.

30 pounds is the weight of two bowling balls. Except unlike bowling balls, kids don't come with finger holds, and are rangy and move while you carry them. My kid is only at the one-bowling-ball weight, and I've been holding him a lot today and it hurts (though maybe I also have the swine flu). It's true if you can't pick up your kid, you're not much of a dad, but carrying the fuckers around hurts. Gavin McInnes does not have kids and doesn't know what he's talking about.

NHS latest on swine flu; salient points:

All deaths in the UK from swine flu already "had serious underlying health problems".

"For most people, swine flu has been a mild illness that has passed in a few days without the need to visit a GP or hospital."

The UK has moved "from a 'containment' to a 'treatment'" policy with respect to swine flu; no more school closures or anti-virals for healthy people.

So this means that basically all the shit that's been done, all the school closures and what have you, all the hysteria, has been a waste of time. Swine flu is a less serious than average form of influenza.

Honduras analysis

It's become clear to me that what's happened in Honduras is rather more complicated than the military coup I initially thought it was.

Firstly, the forces behind the coup include not just the military, but the legislature and the judiciary, including the President's own party.

This seems to indicate that this is no coup, but more of an impeachment. There are, however, mitigating factors:

1. the President was not just removed from office legally, but hustled from the country. This, the military have acknowledged, was an illegal act, though they defend its necessity.

2. the reason for the removal of the President was, legally, and I think really, that he was trying to change the constitution, whereas the Honduran constitution does not allow certain of its articles to be changed. Such a constitutional arrangement is surely completely outrageous – the basic law of the country defined core aspects of itself as immutable, thus above debate or democracy. Such a constitution is eo ipso a justification for revolution: it is an outrageous offence against liberty, justice and democracy, and must be smashed by any means necessary. I would suggest that this ought to work even as a formal legal argument.

3. though Congress voted unanimously to remove the President, the military prevented the attendance of leftist congressmen at the vote on the President's dismissal (the President himself being a member of the non-left Liberal Party, which has the parliamentary majority).

The ultimate question is, I think, as in Iran, where the will of the people lies. If the people are for this coup, then let the ousted President return, since he is no danger. The military's use of deadly force today to prevent the return of the President is an outrage that exposes any legal mask they may use to cover their actions. Alternatively, if the people are not behind the ouster, then we are seeing a cabal of influential elite Hondurans (I note the whiteness of the new President) suppressing democracy.

What's extraordinary of course is that the 'international community' are taking more or less the same line as me on this, at least regarding the return of the President, if not the importance of the popular will. I find this extraordinary, because I don't feel the mitigating factors are obvious enough to puncture the respectability this move ought to enjoy among those who would be expected to align with such a rightist coup. The only explanation I can proffer is that the new US administration wants to court the emergent left bloc in Latin America.

DO NOT FORGET

The Grauniad has an investigative story about Gaza today on the website. It's billed as following up on "Israel's war with Hamas". I took real effort for me even to write that, to put those words together, this fictional war. I wanted to write 'war on Hamas' and in fact wrote 'war on Gaza' initially before I had to force myself to rewrite it. But use of the word 'war' here is wrong in itself, let alone the preposition. What happened there was an assault, a massacre, an atrocity, not a war. We must not forget, and are in danger of allowing ourselves to forget two bald facts, that we should renew in our minds and not allow ourselves to forget for the time being. There may come a time of peace and forgetting, of reconciliation, where we don't need to bear this at the forefront of our minds, but this is surely a long way off yet.

Barely six months ago, the Israeli military massacred over a thousand Arabs in Gaza, in a cold-blooded atrocity perpetrated against defenceless, helpless civilians.

Less than three years ago, the Israeli military similarly massacred over a thousand people in Lebanon. Here there was 'war', a war with Hizbollah, that Israel lost – the massacre occurred in a distinct but simultaneous act however, in the bombing of civilian areas far from the frontlines.

In three years, around two-and-a-half thousand dead, massacred by the Zionist terror machine.

I remain convinced that the massacre in Gaza was precisely an attempt by the Zionists to wreak as much destruction as possible in the Gaza Strip while they still enjoyed the support of the Bush White House.

I love Ben Goldacre most of the time, but this week's column is a real corker. The Torygraph ran a story claiming a scientific study showed that women who

drink alcohol

are friendly

dress 'provocatively'

are more likely to be raped.

In reality, the science is the preliminary data from a master's dissertation, and it shows nothing of the kind. Rather, it found that promiscuous men are more likely to be rapists. I could have told you that for nothing, and it's so utterly different from the reported data that it is, as Goldacre points out, scandalous, given the sensitivity of this subject.

This is FUCKING HUGE NEWS.

As you probably know, close to 20% of the people in the world live in India. You know, over a billion people. What you are perhaps less likely to have known is that the doubtless significant proportion of this population who are same-sex attracted in the pants area (and I specify this advisedly - while homos in the West sometimes complain about the iniquity - and iniquity it is - that their public displays of affection are frowned upon while heteros can kiss and fondle in public pretty freely, in India men all walk around holding hands with on another, but the idea of a man and woman holding hands in public has been frowned upon) have been criminalised since the 19th century, courtesy of the British.

Today, this is apparently no longer the case, as the Indian supreme court has ruled that the Indian criminal code violates Indians' fundamental human rights by criminalising homosexuality. And this is potentially huge, as I say, legalising gayness for a large portion of humanity.

Still, it remains to be seen what will happen. Since this is a judicial decision, it in itself does nothing immediately to affect social attitudes in India. Most importantly, it doesn't mean that politicians will accept that homosexuality will be tolerated now. There may yet be backlashes, appeals, repression. Still, here's hoping this is good news for Indian gays, that it will prove an important step on the road to recognition.

For some reason, the Grauniad turned itself into a Glastonbury publicity mag for the Glastonbury Festival weekend. Even now, with Glastonbury over, they continue to publish retrospective material. Everyone on the Grauniad's staff seemed to attend, except Hadley Freeman and Charlie Brooker. Brooker used the time instead to pen the most laugh-out-loud thing I've read on the grauniad.co.uk for a good while, if not ever. Still, the photos of Glastonbury made me want to napalm the place. I of course would require an air force to do that, but you get the idea: these people deserve to die. The Grauniad has, however, partly redeemed itself today by posting, underneath all the retrospective drivel about Lilly Allen's performance, this piece by Tanya Gold, who they forced to go to Glastonbury, and gives the only sober or objective assessment of it by an attendee I think I'm ever likely to see.

'Glasto' is the perfect example of the relative emiseration of the middle class. Middle class people used to live in a measure of comfort. They used to have their own flats in London, drive cars, stay in hotels. Now none of these things are within their grasp. They have iPhones, and foreign holidays, but, behind a greenwash, they can no longer afford to drive, live outside of share housing, or find better accommodations for a weekend break that are, Goretex notwithstanding, basically Neolithic.

The coup in Honduras.

This will be a test of how far the politics of the Western hemisphere have changed this decade. It is also, as many are saying, a test of how much things have changed in Washington.

Nevermind Iran: if you want to talk about a military coup, he's a real one in action. Not electoral manipulation, but the removal of a sitting president, and simply by the military, not be some putative electoral alternative. A coup is launched here not to prevent the election of the president, but to prevent the holding of a non-binding referendum on constitutional reform. Yes, elect your president, but try even to suggest that the order of this country is changeable, and your democracy is cancelled.

This is old-style shit: the military, the CIA. America's hold on Central America out of all of Latin America has long been particularly tight. This is really 'America's back yard'. It's further away from Mexico, but Mexico is large enough a polity to command some kind of respect of its sovereignty. The tiny states to its south however are not, an accident of history for which their peoples pay regularly in blood.

As I say, this is a test. As Richard Seymour has pointed out, it makes little sense to think that the coup could have gone ahead without the US go-ahead. But this is revocable. Strong enough objections from other nations, or from within the US, may lead Obama to intervene within US government to change this, to remove US support, tacit or otherwise. I'm not holding my breath, however.

Zizek weighs in on Iran

The first thing he mentions is that there is a moment when people know the game is over. The problem with this is that they only know something if its true. And sometimes people can feel this way without the feeling being vindicated. Tienanmen Square in 1989 perhaps felt this way. Bizarrely, Zizek ends the piece concluding that this will probably not be a revolution now in Iran.

Zizek repeats Alizadeh's fallacious claim: "the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote" (this is no coincidence – Zizek knows Alizadeh and certainly will have read Alizadeh's piece).

Then Zizek draws us a picture of what the contest represents. Unlike the pictures drawn by others, I suppose he must think this is the right picture. Ahmadinejad, he says, is not the friend of the poor – he's an Iranian Berlusconi. This statement is unbelievably stupid. It's worth pointing out that Ahmadinejad has certain things in common with Berlusconi: they both say things in public that embarass the cultured elite of their countries, for example. Otherwise, they're completely different. Where Berlusconi is a flashy pultocrat who personally controls the country through his media empire and personal control of state power, Ahmadinejad is a humble man of modest means who is only one of a number of major leaders, and not the most powerful.

Mousavi on the other hand represents the revivial of "the Khomeini revolution". Not Khomeini himself, of course, who more or less ruled Iran for a decade, but of the revolution that bought him to power. Maybe. Zizek quotes Freud here on the return of the repressed, where he should have quoted Marx: history always repeats itself as farce.

Update: the statement of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) could have been targeted as a riposte to Zizek's line on Mousavi; it is aimed directly at the protesters, urging them to have no illusions in Mousavi, and attacks Khomeini.

Peter Hallward and Alberto Toscano's Open Letter of Support to the Demonstrators of Iran

A confusing document. It is authored by two London-based Marxist academics, both prominent in the scene around contemporary Marxist continental philosophy, and signed by a selection of more prominent figures of continental philosophy (Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar), the serial letter-signer Noam Chomsky, and perhaps more interestingly the Middle East expert Juan Cole (whose signature is inexplicably buried in the general mass of signatures) and the analytical philosopher Philip Pettit.

More telling perhaps are those who have not signed: Alain Badiou is the most prominently absent, and one might also question the absence of any of the colleagues of Hallward or Toscano at their respective institutions (Middlesex and Goldsmiths). The absence of other figures involved in the On the Idea of Communism conference in London recently in addition to Badiou should be noted: Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, and Terry Eagleton. Update: a commenter points out that the latest version includes the signature of Alain Badiou; it also includes Hallward's colleague, Eric Alliez.

What kind of statement is this? It is an extraordinarily vacuous one. It states that we are wary of supporting the protestors, but also wary of the government's excuses for clamping down on the protestors. Its title is the only unambivalent part: it is a statement of support, but in fact its conclusion appeals only to the Iranian authorities not to clamp down against democratic contestation of state power.

This strikes me as extraordinarily redundant: the basic fact is that we don't know who won the election. Since we don't know that, we don't know who is right. We do know that the protesters believe the election was stolen, and that the state does not recognise this. In such circumstances, we stand poised for a bloody fight to the finish. This is in fact what one should expect when the legitimacy of elections is not accepted: the only way power can be contested now is by brute force. By condemning the force of the state in advance, Toscano and Hallward side with the protestors against the state. This strikes me as an unacceptable position to take, inasmuch as we can't know whether they are right.

I think this might be the first time I've linked an article by a fashion correspondent, though this is Freeman's column that is not really about fashion. I really agree with this, and furthermore want to take the opportunity to issue a mea culpa for really inveighing against Baz Luhrman's Australia without actually seeing it. I've now seen part of it, and its clear that the criticisms made of this film at the time took the film much too seriously – as indeed did everyone else, as far as I can work out.

The following quote is from Maija Nadesan's Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life, although it's actually just a précis of a cited source, a throwaway sentence not developed. Nevertheless, I think this point is immensely important:

Fertility testing, treatment, and expert-informed child rearing among the U.S. upper-middle class are matched by the disciplining, surveillance, and incarceration of the children of America’s lower classes.

Our concerns about raising our children well is precisely a concern with producing the next generation of middle class functionaries. Those who are not so concerned really need not be: they are not reproducing this middle class, but rather an underclass, who will live bitter, beaten lives.