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Post by dodger on Dec 21, 2013 14:10:13 GMT
This Will Podmore review is from: The Irving Judgment (Law) (Paperback)
The remarkable judgement recorded in this book exposed David Irving as a Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying anti-Semite and racist, who falsified evidence to promote his fascism.
In 1994 Penguin Books published Professor Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust. Irving complained that certain passages in the book accused him of being a Nazi apologist and an admirer of Hitler who had resorted to the distortion of facts and the manipulation of documents in support of his contention that the Holocaust did not take place.
In 1996, Irving issued a writ claiming damages for libel, naming Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt as defendants. The trial opened in the High Court in London on 11 January 2000. The Hon. Mr Justice Gray delivered his judgement in favour of the defendants on 11 April 2000.
Mr Justice Gray reminded the Court that Hitler said to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, "if international Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
And on 12 December 1941, "He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not just an empty phrase. The World War is there, the extermination of Jewry must be the necessary consequence." Hitler talked again of exterminating Jews on 1 and 30 January 1942, and on 14, 22 and 24 February 1942.
Mr Justice Gray said, "I find that in most of the instances which they cite, the Defendants' criticisms are justified. In those instances it is my conclusion that, judged objectively, Irving treated of the historical evidence in a manner which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian. Irving in those respects misrepresented and distorted the evidence which was available to him."
He said, "I have found that, in numerous respects, Irving has misstated historical evidence; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed credible evidence."
He said, "In my opinion there is force in the opinion expressed by Evans [Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University] that all Irving's historiographical `errors' converge, in the sense that they all tend to exonerate Hitler and to reflect Irving's partisanship for the Nazi leader. If indeed they were genuine errors or mistakes, one would not expect to find this consistency. I accept the Defendants' contention that this convergence is a cogent reason for supposing that the evidence has been deliberately slanted by Irving."
Mr Justice Gray concluded, "The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
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Post by dodger on Dec 23, 2013 12:06:10 GMT
DECEMBER 23, 2013 13 natural and man-made disasters of 2013
QUESTION EVERYTHING?
Mong Palatino?
1. Taiwan-Philippines diplomatic row. The crisis was triggered by the tragic killing of a 65-year-old Taiwanese fisherman by members of the Philippine Coast Guard on May 9 in Balintang Channel. Angered by the incident, Taiwan stopped issuing work visas to Filipinos and has conducted military exercises near Philippine waters. The Coast Guard claimed that the shooting was an act of self-defense but there were reports that the shots fired were excessive.
2. Sabah standoff. Armed followers of Sulu Sultan Jamalul Kiram III occupied parts of Lahad Datu on February 9 and vowed not to leave until Sabah is returned to the Sulu Sultanate. After waiting three weeks for the members of the Royal Sulu Army to voluntarily surrender, the Malaysian military launched a full-scale attack against the group on March 5.
3. Zamboanga siege. An armed faction loyal to Moro National Liberation Front chairman Nur Misuari attacked Zamboanga City affecting hundreds of thousands and paralyzing the city. Violent clashes erupted between the rebels and government soldiers.
4. Flooding in Central Luzon. Typhoon Santi battered the Central Luzon region causing massive floods in Nueva Ecija and Bulacan, the country’s rice bowl.
5. Oil spills in Cavite and Cebu. A leak in an underwater pipeline of Petron Corp. poured 500,000 liters of diesel into the waters of Manila Bay affecting four towns in Cavite. Petron is the same company that caused the worst oil spill disaster in the country’s history seven years ago in Guimaras. Meanwhile in Cebu, a sunken ship spilled 120,000 liters of oil into the shorelines of the coastal towns of Talisay, Cordova, and Lapu-Lapu. Aside from affecting more than 300 hectares of mangroves, the oil spill also displaced more than 3,000 fisherfolk and threatened to undermine the tourism business in the area.
6. Tubbataha damaged, not once but twice. On January 17, the USS Guardian minesweeper ran aground on the South Atoll of the Tubbataha Reef, a no-sail zone and UN marine protected habitat in the Sulu Sea. The ship damaged 1,000 square meters of the marine park. “It willfully trespassed. It wasn’t lost. It was the voyage of an intruder,” said Palawan province congressman Antonio Alvarez. Three months after this tragedy, an oversized and quasi-military Chinese fishing vessel also ran aground at the marine park.
7. Central Visayas earthquake. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake killed more than 150 people in Bohol and Cebu on October 15. It destroyed many roads, homes, buildings, and historic churches in Bohol and several markets, malls, and also churches in Cebu.
8. PCOS and 2013 midterm polls. Not surprisingly, hundreds of Precinct Count Optical Scan machines malfunctioned, experienced glitches, and delivered erroneous reports in the 2013 elections. The local IT community is still denied of the right to review the election source code. The reported 60-30-10 voting pattern is believed to be a proof of automated cheating. But the worst disaster is the persistence of local and national dynasties or the continued dominance of oligarchs in the country’s elitist elections.
9. Kristel Tejada of UP Manila. Her suicide exposed the criminal neglect on the part of the government in allocating sufficient funds to the education sector. Policymakers and educators discussed tuition and scholarship reforms but they failed to link the issue with the government thrust of deprioritizing public higher education.
10. 40 families own 75 percent of economy. Early this year, it was reported that a few families dominate the whole economy. It highlighted the disastrous impact of the mainstream economic dogma which redistributed the country’s wealth in favor of the rich. Inequality, not just poverty, is the social ill plaguing society which explains why the government’s overhyped cash transfer program doesn’t work.
11. Sex scandals. From Chito to Wally, sex scandals have gone viral. Unfortunately, these scandals are invoked to justify the imposition of draconian Internet laws. But this issue is also a reminder about how we lost our precious privacy in this age of Internet surveillance.
12. Napoles and Corruption. The Napoles scam sparked a nationwide outrage over pork corruption. It led to the abolition of the legislative pork from the national budget, the filing of plunder cases against lawmakers, and the Supreme Court ruling which declared some aspects of pork as unconstitutional. Equally important is the naming of the presidential pork as a bigger source of corruption in the government. The issue revealed how public funds are systematically plundered by politicians, it unmasked the deceptive posturing of President BS Aquino as an anti-corruption crusader, and the need for a system overhaul in order to fundamentally exorcise the scourge of corruption.
13. Supertyphoon Yolanda. The world’s strongest storm of the year devastated the central part of the Philippines, in particular the Eastern Visayas region. A tsunami-like storm surge instantly killed thousands. But the humanitarian crisis worsened due to slow action of the government, inefficient distribution of relief, and partisan politics. Yolanda exposed the arrogance and incompetence of BS Aquino and Mar Roxas who failed to act quickly and decisively when the storm hit the region.
In summary, the biggest disaster of the year is the government of BS Aquino as proven by the president’s mishandling of crisis situations, his stubborn defense of pork politics, his support for extractive activities which contributed to the further degradation of the environment, his inaction over continuing human rights abuses inflicted against activists and journalists, and his shameful lack of leadership when Yolanda hit the country. Filipinos deserve a better government. src=”http://bulatlat.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/bulatlat_tagline.jpg” alt=”(http://bulatlat.com)” height=”16″ /> Mong Palatino is a Filipino activist and former legislator. Email: mongpalatino@gmail.com - See more at: bulatlat.com/main/2013/12/23/13-natural-and-man-made-disasters-of-2013/#sthash.4AEWaWzQ.dpuf |
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Post by dodger on Jan 4, 2014 22:31:45 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_0114/science.htmlIn praise of science, and scientistsWORKERS, JAN 2014 ISSUE In November Fred Sanger died, aged 95. He was never a household name, but he should have been. The only Briton – and one of only three people in history – to have won two Nobel prizes in science, his contributions encompassed laying the basis for the sequencing of proteins and genes.
He was in exalted company: the other two are Marie Curie, the pioneer of research into radioactivity, and John Bardeen, who invented the transistor and later helped develop the theory of superconductivity (without which MRI scanning would not exist).
Sanger’s death made headlines around the world, and even a few in Britain. But the truth is that this government – more than any previous one – has little time for science or for scientists. For all that they bang on about scientific literacy, ministers avoid the results of science: they make policy based on prejudice, not on facts.
And Sanger never played the fame game. Unlike several recent and perhaps more politically prominent Nobel laureates, he turned down the offer of a knighthood that always comes to Nobel prizewinners. He didn’t make a fuss about this, though he did tell a journalist he didn’t want to be called “Sir”.
But Britain also gained a new laureate last year, Peter Higgs, famous for the “Higgs boson”, the fundamental particle that institutes like CERN in Switzerland have been searching for – and, it seems, might well have found. Higgs turned down a knighthood in 1999. “I’m rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly,” he told a Guardian journalist in December. “A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.” How refreshing!
Both men shared the quality of being self-effacing, not seeking fame and certainly not claiming it where they thought it wasn’t due. Sanger famously said that he was “just a chap who messed about in a lab”. Higgs has also gone on the record saying the media should stop using the term “God particle” to describe the Higgs boson (because as an atheist he doesn’t believe in God). And he has said the so-called Higgs mechanism should be called the “ABEGHHK'tH mechanism”, after the people who discovered it.
Higgs has never endeared himself to university officialdom. Now in his 80s, he thinks he would have been sacked from Edinburgh University in the 1960s for his trade union activity (as a member of the AUT, the forerunner of the UCU), his support for student protest, and the dearth of papers he produced – and that only rumours of a Nobel prize at the time saved him.
With the government intent on forcing children as young as 10 to take state exams, and piling the curriculum with deadly dull rote learning, the lives of these two scientists show how little the government understands about creativity.
Sanger struggled with mathematics at Cambridge, and described himself as “academically not brilliant”. Higgs has said he wasn’t very good at physics at school. He won school prizes for languages, English, chemistry and maths, but not physics. (And last year’s British winner of the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, John Gurdon, related how his teachers at Eton told him he was too stupid for science.) Spot the pattern?
When you look at current government educational policy – or that of the previous government for that matter – its fixation with targets, its disregard for evidence and its rubbishing of original thought, you have to fear for the future of British science.
Our education system, whatever its faults, has proved brilliant at producing people who can think. That, and our technological, industrial past, is why a small island like Britain can have produced so many scientific advances. So while we should praise our scientists, we must also fight to preserve the conditions that nurtured their talents.
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Post by dodger on Feb 2, 2014 19:08:16 GMT
Forty helpful tips for anti-communists
1. Constantly insist that Marxism is discredited, outdated, and totally dead and buried. Then proceed to build a lucrative career on beating that supposedly ‘dead’ horse for the rest of your working life.
2. Remember, any unnatural death that occurs under a ‘Communist’ regime is not only attributable to the leaders of the state, but also Marxism as an ideology. Ignore deaths that occur for the same reason in non-Communist states.
3. Communism or Marxism is whatever you want it to be. Feel free to label countries, movements, and regimes as ‘Communist’ regardless of things like actual goals, stated ideology, diplomatic relations, economic policy, or property relations.
4. If there was a conflict involving Communists, the conflict and all ensuing deaths can be laid at the feet of Communism. Be careful when applying this to WWII. Fascist movements who fought against the Soviets or Communist partisans are fine, but try not to openly praise Nazi Germany. Save that for private conversations if you must do so.
5. You decide what Marxism ‘really means,’ and who the rightful representatives of Communism were. Feign interest that Trotsky was somehow robbed of power by Stalin, despite the fact that you hate him as well.
6. Constantly talk about George Orwell. Quote from Animal Farm or 1984. Do not worry about the fact that Orwell never set foot in the Soviet Union and both of those books are novels.
7. Quote massive death tolls without regards to demographics or consistency. 3 million famine deaths? 7 million? 10 million? 100 million deaths total? You need not worry about anyone checking your work, which is good for you seeing that you probably haven’t done any.
8. Everyone ever arrested under a Communist regime was most likely innocent of any crime. Communists only arrested harmless poets and political prophets who had a beautiful message to share with the world.
9. Everything Stalin did or didn’t do had some sinister ulterior motive. Everything.
10. Keeping with the spirit of #9, remember that Stalin was an omnipotent being, perhaps an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who had full awareness of everything going on in the Soviet Union and total control over every occurrence which took place between 1924 and 1953. Everything that occurred during that time was the will of Stalin. Stalin knew the exact details of every criminal case that took place during that era and out of his boundless cruelty, had tons of innocent people shot for no reason regardless of where they were or their position in life. Being omnipotent, he was not dependent on information passed up from tens of thousands of subordinates.
11. Constantly attack ‘Communist’ regimes for actions that occur in capitalist regimes up to this very day.
12. Claim that Marxism is utopian because of its description of a possible future society. Alternately claim that Marxism failed because it never gave a detailed description of how a Communist society would look. Do not pay attention to the massive contradiction here.
13. Start referring to Marxism as being some kind of religious faith, Messianic, or whatever other spiritualist bullshit you can come up with. When people point out that you can draw similarities between virtually any political ideology and other religions, ignore them.
14. Remember the one-two anti-Communist attack: Attack the post-Stalin system on economic grounds, and claim it just doesn’t work. Since an informed opponent will most likely point out that actual socialist economics did indeed work during the Stalin era, and in fact worked very well, attack that era on human rights grounds.
15. Two words - Human nature. What is human nature? For your purposes, human nature is a quick explanation why political ideas or systems you don’t like are wrong.
16. Bolshevik revolutions were carried out with violence and bloodshed. Bourgeois revolutions were all carried out by democratic referendums, and there was no violence whatsoever.
17. Use words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ constantly. Do not accept any challenge to define these terms.
18. Communists can be for or against whatever is popular in your particular area. If you are preaching to a right-wing crowd, Communists are for degeneration and homosexuality. If you are preaching to a more mainstream audience, Communists were homophobic. Essentially, Communists are for moral degeneration and puritanical prudery at the same time. Again, do not notice the contradiction.
19. Constantly flog Stalin over the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, while totally ignoring massive support and collaboration with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan on the part of America, Britain, and France, long before the war and even after in some ways. As usual, do not allow your opponent to examine the context of the non-aggression pact.
20. Praise the new-found ‘freedom’ of Eastern Europe. Ignore the massive depopulation via migration, plunging birthrates, huge alcohol and drug problems, political instability, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking and child prostitution, organized crime, high suicide rates, unemployment, disease, etc. Who cares about all that when you have freedom of speech?!
21. Constantly talk about the culture of fear in Communist nations, about that ‘knock on the door’ in the middle of the night. Ignore the ‘kick in your door in the middle of the night, stick a shotgun in your back, and haul your ass out of bed etc. because you are suspected of dealing,’ a normal occurrence in the American War on Drugs.
22. Attack Communists for suppression of religion. Attack Islamic fundamentalists for not being secular. What contradiction?!
23. Do not notice the irony that the US is currently fighting an incredibly expensive, losing war against an opponent which it funded, supported, and even handed its first victory in Afghanistan.
24. What should you say when confronted with all the continuing and often worsening problems in the world today, and asked for a solution? FREEDOM!! (Repeat as necessary until your opponent goes away)
25. Nothing from “Communists” can be trusted. Unless it somehow works in your favor, ala Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ from 1956, or anything Trotsky wrote.
26. Communist leaders were ‘paranoid’ for devoting so much time to security against counter-revolution. Ignore the mountains of evidence, including the restoration of capitalism in the East Bloc, that this threat was indeed real.
27. Communist regimes were never popular. If proof is presented in various cases to show otherwise, claim that the people were brainwashed. Make no effort to consider the budgetary and logistic constraints on such an undertaking.
28. Communist propaganda is crude and primitive. If someone mentions Red Dawn or worse, mentions the J. Edgar Hoover-endorsed comic book series known as The Godless Communists, run away.
29. Praise secularism in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘pluralism’ until faced with a Communist. Then play the religion card.
30. Atrocities and other bad things that happen under non-Communist regimes are the fault of individual ‘bad people’. Anything bad that happens under a ‘Communist’ regime is the fault of the ideology and system. And Stalin.
31. Being an anti-Communist means not having to have any sort of ideological consistency whatsoever. Preach populist left-wing pseudo-socialism 90% of the time, and then compare the capitalist system to ‘Stalin’s Russia’ (if you never really studied the subject, just read 1984 andAnimal Farm). Bitch about capitalism 99% of the time, but balk when someone suggests Communism as an alternative. Far right wing Fascist? Constantly bitch about cultural degeneracy under capitalism, while remaining fanatically opposed to Marxism for no discernable reason save for your affinity for historic nationalism.
32. If you’re an anarchist, keep pointing out the ‘failure’ of Marxism while ignoring the fact that your ideology has a 100% failure rate throughout its entire history. Blame those failures on Communists, or stronger military powers. Ignore the fact that the most wonderful society is worthless if it can’t defend itself from reaction.
33. Neo-Nazi? Communism is Jewish!! Debate over.
34. Neo-Hippy? Tibet!
35. Constantly condemn the genocide that allegedly occurred under Mao, while ignoring the US’ relations with China established by Nixon, and the massive role capitalist China has played in the modern US economy. When you want to talk positively about China, it’s a capitalist country. If you need to criticize it, it’s still ‘Communist’.
36. Claim Marxism is not empirical. Neither are neo-liberalism, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, but don’t worry about that.
37. Always insist that despite the location, country, historical era, past experience, and all other factors, Communists must want to recreate a modern-day copy of Stalin’s Russia, and all that entails according to you. Do not notice the inherent idiocy in this concept, such as your particular country being already industrialized, and not having a historical problem of severe backwardness.
38. Learn to use the magic word ‘totalitarian’. This word allows you to link two ideological opposites, Communism and Fascism.
39. Ignore the fact that socialist states experienced more economic problems parallel to the number of market reforms they made.
40. When challenged about numbers or historical context, resort to labels like ‘ruthless tyrant,’ ‘cruel murderer,’ and such. Remember, people like Stalin were mass-murderers because of all the people they killed, and we know they killed all those people because they were mass-murderers. It totally tracks!
originally by J. Slavinski
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Post by dodger on Nov 12, 2014 12:25:45 GMT
www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1S60W4KWFX1Y9/ref=cm_aya_bb_rev
Fine demolition of the case for relativism, 7 Nov 2014 This William Podmore review is from: Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Paperback) In this brilliant little book, Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, demolishes the case for relativism, the notion that there is no such thing as objective truth.
He cites Thomas Nagel: “the claim ‘Everything is subjective’ must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.”
Boghossian points out that relativism can’t claim to be true: “any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed.”
He asks, “Wouldn’t anyone promoting the view that epistemic reasons never move people to belief need to represent himself as having come to that view precisely because it is justified by the appropriate considerations?”
He sums up, “we have no option but to think that there are absolute, practice-independent facts about what beliefs it would be most reasonable to have under fixed evidential conditions.”
And he concludes, “The intuitive view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective.”
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