Manics@TheAstoria

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Manics@TheAstoria
Fucking awesome experience to see the Manics last night.

The greatest band ever.
Third time I've seen them and they are still fucking great.
They did a long set and songs from almost all of their albums.
They looked well and in fine fettle and it was as ever like watching a fire work display of amazing music.
They did a couple of my favourites: Stay Beautiful and Motown Junk.
Love all the songs anyway.
James also did "Let Robeson Sing" :

"Liberty lost still buried today
Beneath the lie of the USA"

Probably the most important lyric in the history of pop music.

I have seen the Manics three times Brixton '93, Reading Festival '97 and this one above.

"The Monty Trinity"

The three films really are all THAT good. I can't decide which one is best.
So here is my soluction! :).....

Anyway they aren't really consubstantial
[unless they've done a compilation where they all
run one after the other]
- but co-equal and co-eternal they certainly are
(whilst we have DVD players)....
(er...and whilst humans exist) er....! :)......

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Mental Health Bill

Re: "Mental Health" Bill.

One of the concerns is to "protect the public."

At what point did so-called "mentally ill" people stop being members of the public themselves?

I know this may be either patently obvious or hard to admit, but people with mental health problems/mentally ill whatever you want to call them
are....

wait for it

*drum roll*

HUMANS.

Consequently people so designated undoubtedly can avail themselves of whatever human rights there are.

Furthermore, the question must be asked:

Do those designated as having mental health problems (as members of the public) have the right to be protected from psychiatrists and the harm that psychiatrists can do to them?

----


The truth is that psychiatry as a historical phenomenon has done more harm and committed more crime - than anything that any so-called "mentally ill person" - which is a meaningless and arbitrary distinction - has ever done.

19th June

Got another begging letter from Cambridge University today.
They still think I'm an alumnus.
Hehe.
So here I am on benefits and the greatest university in the world is asking me for money in
one of the richest countries on the planet.

Criticism of Religion

If a religion is true then it should not be concerned about criticism or ridicule.

Posting on University Fees 2007

Further to the discussion of university fees. Found this posting by someone which deserves to be saved from oblivion.


"
The top-up fees argument has had an extraordinary effect on politics in the UK. I find it quite baffling. As somebody who organised more occupations, marches and mass-whatevers than Che Guevara on this and associated issues over the years, I don't particularly want to go back through it all again (the argument hasn't really moved on since 1993 when Labour first started considering the relative merits of graduate taxes, income-contingent loans, etc.)
Nobody has ever reasonably explained to me the argument that, if graduates earn more money (and on average they do) why it is fairer to charge all graduates who earn over an average wage, rather than charge those graduates who earn the highest wages, through taxing the wealthy, as well as charging non-graduate rich people who benefit from graduates' skills?
If the cost is not exorbitant for graduates who have reached the magic income (a tiny proportion of society) then it would be negligable across general taxation. Indeed it IS so - and there's the key point.

The truth is that the loans and fees argument is based on a string of lies. The key ones are:
a) fees pay for undergraduate tuition (they don't, never have, never will).
b)This will cost the taxpayer much less (it won't, and never was going to).

It, like PFI, is an accountant's dodge, and nothing more.

A number of the universities in the UK have held the government to ransom on funding, and the government has long planned to avoid borrowing (other than 'to invest' where a return is clear).

A loan - even though the return is income contingent and much of it will never come back - does little or nothing to save tax-payers money today or any other time, but appears on a different column on the budget and means Brown can meet his iron laws, the UK can meet the Euro convergence criteria, and students can be in huge amounts of debt at the start of their working lives.

I feel strongly about it, because I know I could never have done my MA and PhD if I had had the sorts of undergraduate debts people who have followed me have been lumbered with.
And, while those qualifications have had negligible effect on my income, I do consider them to be important.

That the government have realised the effect that their policies were having on student poverty and made concessions is not really something to go wild with enthusiasm about.

"

"Mental Illness"

Further to points about "mental illness" I will add these three points:-

A metaphorical illness is a metaphor not an illness. (Szasz says this and with reason).
A brain disease is a brain disease not a mental illness.
What psychiatrists are dealing with, or what they should be dealing with, is not illness but problems in living. (Szasz says this and with reason).

Madness?

If you believe that there are people who are "mad" and people who are "sane" and that anyone could "go mad", then my question to you is:
What would happen if EVERYONE went mad?
It is perfectly possible to be severely depressed without any genetic or chemical factors in play.
Therefore there cannot be a genetic or chemical basis to depression.

McJob

Re: "McJob" and the Oxford English Dictionary.

So McDonalds want to dictate our language to us? To tell us that we can't use a word to mean something that we want it to mean? Astounding.

What a bunch of McFuckers!

JFK

Saw a new documentary about the Kennedy assassination and saw Norman Mailer talking such bullshit about Lee Harvey Oswald that I can't keep silent.
Lee Harvey Oswald killed no one at all.

What happened to the USA in November 1963 was a coup d'e'tat by the CIA against the US government. This coup d'e'tat probably had the support of elements of the US government that were very high up in the chain of authority.

Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT the assassin of JFK.

Haile Selassie

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war and until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... everywhere is war.”

Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

-

All different, all equal.

The Gulf "War" of 1991.

Bill Hicks on the Gulf War of 1991:

"Let's check the casualty figures for that war again:
Iraq: 100,000
USA: 79.

79? Does that mean if we'd sent over 80 guys we still would have won that fucking thing?
One guy in a ticker tape parade saying "I did it!" 

"It wasn't exactly a war. A war is when two armies are fighting.
.... so I think we can all agree it wasn't exactly a war."

"People say to me 'Hey but Bill the war made us feel better about ourselves.'
What? What kind of people need a war to feel better about themselves?"

Bill Hicks.

I agree with Bill that it wasn't really a normal war.
What was it then?
Mass murder.

I met personnel of the English Army in the "war" of 1991. They showed me pictures.
They were openly racist about the slaughter they inflicted. They celebrated it.
Glorification of terrorism if ever I saw it.
------

Another favourite Bill Hicks quote of mine is

"You're right!
You're right!
Not those fuckers who want to tell you how to think!
You're fucking right!"

Bill Hicks.

As a counterweight to this I also like the famous words of Cromwell:
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

I like the Bill Hicks quote "You're right!" because it encourages independent thought.
Independent thought is important in an epoch in which the intellectual establishment and the whole culture it is part of has abdicated its truth-telling role.

My liking for this sentiment doesn't mean that I think you shouldn't question what your own views are as well.

Why is it left to a solitary American stand up comedian to point out this obvious truth?

Where are the journalists, writers, intellectuals, academics that are saying this truth - a truth that is blazingly obvious?

Where are the political movements pointing out this truth about the Gulf "War" of 1991?

The unusual French thinker Baudrillard also had some interesting views on this  unusual war or genocide as he did on other things.

But even he - one of the few major figures to question the conventional view of the war - abdicated his job as an intellectual to criticize and condemn by abandoning a soundly moral view of the war.

.......