The Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA

12 May 2004

Dear Mr Blair,

You have taken this country to a place where immediate and decisive action is now required on your part, or you risk going even further down a road from which there is no return.

There may have been a time that your influence with the abhorrent regime in Washington was greater through quiet diplomacy than direct confrontation, but that time is over. The circumstances of the coalition’s occupation of Iraq, being revealed through horrific images of civilian degradation, torture and murder, now demand that you stand up for what is right, and stand up for it loudly and clearly.

Blatant disregard of the Geneva Conventions may have only become official US policy at Guantanamo Bay, but the American right wing’s attitude towards prisoners has its roots in the systematic maltreatment of their own nationals in the notorious US prison system. We cannot let a regime that abuses its own people, let alone one which maintains the use of the electric chair, make the rules for international engagement.

The UK can no longer afford to be a pawn in the game of transnational subjugation to US corporate interests, in whose name the Bush government acts. Their “war on terror” is a fatal fallacy: world peace, freedom and prosperity will not be won with bombs, mercenaries and torture. America has the power to do immense good, and perhaps with a new and fairly elected government come November, the US might begin to follow your lead in putting the UN and the ICC to work in Iraq.

War crimes appear to have been committed, and the perpetrators must be brought to justice. The peacekeeping mission in Iraq must be handed to the UN as soon as possible. Could you try to convince all of us that the UK, at least, has the world’s best interests at heart, and stop working for Bush’s re-election campaign?

As a dual national, I have been a Democrat and a Labour supporter and activist for as long as I’ve had a vote. I will not vote Labour again under your increasingly doubtful leadership, unless you begin once more to show the promise you had for me, back when things could only get better.

Yours truly,
–Chris Brody

It’s your patriotic duty: 19/11 – 21/11.

DeanSpace is an open development community providing web-tools, support, and advice to Howard Dean’s supporters. The goal is to better interlink existing web activism, bring new citizen participants into the political process, and assist individuals to network and organize for taking action in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

According to some, this could be another sign of the approaching singularity. Smart mobs on election day anyone?

Discussion on MetaFilter.

A test of Radio’s new trackback feature (beta). Does auto-discovery work?

Yes. On MT-powered sites at least.

Source: Jake’s Radio ‘Blog, Radio Userland, Moveable Type

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new “gay”. Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn’t it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can’t imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright.

Source: MetaFilter

Tell Congress to do its job

President Bush justified invading Iraq by claiming that their “weapons of mass destruction” posed an imminent threat. The evidence presented to back up this claim is looking increasingly dubious, and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has introduced legislation to create an independent commission to investigate the matter.

I’ve joined over 330,000 other people in calling on Congress to support this independent investigation. According to MoveOn, 1,118 other people from my district (Congressman Doyle (D-PA)) have already signed; the target is 1,400 by tomorrow.

You can join at http://www.moveon.org/wmdpledge/

If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used false data to support the call to war, it would be an (almost) unprecedented deception. Even if weapons are now found, it will be difficult to justify pre-war language suggesting that the exact location of the weapons was “known” and that Iraq was ready to deploy “within 45 minutes”. The world is waiting: we want to know the truth. If Bush and his officials intentionally tried to deceive in order to create support for the invasion, they must be held accountable.

From here in the UK it seems that this issue might actually be one that can force the Bushites onto the defensive, as it has done to Blair and his cronies. Even if the call for an investigation is unsuccessful, the publicity caused by a large show of public support can only help the progressive cause.

Hats off to Dennis Kucinich for being the only Democratic candidate to be entirely consistent in his views on this: he & Howard Howard Dean are taking the inter-party argument to the right side, even if neither of them stand a chance in hell against the hate & fear machine currently in power. To paraphrase what Jim Hightower said, if God intends the US to vote Democrat in 2004, he will give the party a decent candidate!

Mark Morford considers a Kucinich Presidency:

Is it really all that radical? Is it really all that extreme to try and imagine a truly connected national leadership that promotes international cooperation and spiritual openness and the sacredness of the environment and a genuinely holistic worldview, one who actually attempts to connect with and listen to its populace?

Why does this seem so far off, so utterly impossible? Have we gone so far down the road of BushCo-style isolationism and dread and knives-out bile that we can’t even entertain a serious alternative, the notion that we actually could, as a country, stand for something as radical as peace?

Source: SFGate

Bonjour from the home of the free!

Ben Fritz argues that as the invasion continues,

and debates rage about tactics and policies, some politicians and pundits have been using extreme rhetoric that serves only to shut down open discussion, rather than encourage it.

The New York Post’s Ralph Peters, for instance,

…has referred to the New Yorker as “a minor magazine loosely affiliated with the Baghdad regime.”

This is simply absurd. Does Peters ever read the magazine? It has been broadly supportive of the “War on Terror” and the invasion all along, even if the editorial line sometimes disagrees with the Bush administration’s methods. On the other hand,

in his online column for The Nation, John Nichols compared the current media to that of the Soviet Union and labeled some right-wing pundits “neo-conservative commisars.”

Now this I can almost sympathise with, but it doesn’t help in trying to understand what’s actually going on.

It seems the US media are unable to see beyond the binary world view that they have themselves created, with eager prompting by those in power in Washington. The progressive left’s reaction, sometimes using outdated and simplistic metaphors, makes it difficult to take the attacks seriously.

Now Akamai, a web hosting company, has pulled the plug on Al-Jazeera, giving no reason for their decision. Who, I wonder, put the pressure on them? The government, their advertisers, or was it simply a policy decision coloured by the fact that the company is Jewish-run and possibly against the right of free speech for the Arab community?

The corporate media (and the wider business community) seems to be completely in tow to this “us and them” approach, fostered by concepts such as the “Axis of Evil”. Is this simple self-interest, or is it a new form of “corporate fascism”?

Guilty as charged.

Source: spinsanity

From an article by George Lakoff. (Discuss it here.)

The basic idea of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales: The Self Defense Story and The Rescue Story.

Millions of people around the world can see that the metaphors and fairy tales don’t fit the current situation, that Gulf War II does not qualify as a just war – a “legal” war. But if you accept all these metaphors, as Americans have been led to do by the administration, the press, and the lack of an effective Democratic opposition, then Gulf War II would indeed seem like a just war. But surely most Americans have been exposed to the facts – the lack of a credible link between Saddam and al Quaeda and the idea that large numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians (estimates are around 500,000) will be killed or maimed by our bombs. Why don’t they reach the rational conclusion?

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors – conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains – physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

It is a common folk theory of progressives that “The facts will set you free!” If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.

Source: Doc Searls, via Too Much News