“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Alan Greenspan in his memoirs. Why did the US and UK invade Iraq? Theories abound, but here are the top four: To get rid of weapons of mass destruction. To overthrow an evil dictator and
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Rewriting History
A few months after Coalition forces successfully secured control of Baghdad and toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square before the world’s media, Tony Blair referred to way future historians will remember the liberation of Iraq. It is certainly possible to construct a version of history in which the US and UK armed
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Combatting Extremism
Years of conditioning have led us to believe our benevolent leaders and entrepreneurs want to protect us from all sorts of political extremists, commonly defined on the outmoded left-right spectrum or in terms of religious fundamentalism. That our leaders themselves may be extremists seldom dawns on the collective imagination of media pundits. Could we not
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A Very Human Animal
What is in your genes and what is not? The nature versus nurture debate has long presented us with a false dichotomy as nurture, i.e socio-environmental influences, is very much part of nature. But many commentators have narrowed the definition of nature to refer only to genes, the mere blueprint or genotype that determines our
⋯environment, genetics
The Hidden Paedo-Scare Agenda
Hardly a day passes in the modern mainstream British media without a peadophilia-themed scandal, whether it be police discovering hundreds or thousands of child porn images on some poor soul’s hard drive, a young woman’s revelation about her parents’ role in childhood sexual abuse, a high-ranking official or celebrity using his (or her) credit card
⋯hegemony
Get ready for the Big Corporate Takeover of the Web
The Internet is not going to disappear any time soon, at least short of a nuclear holocaust or a world-wide power outage. Big business has simply invested too much money in it to let that happen. What’s at stake is the pioneering concept of a free and open network of hyperlinked resources. Media leviathans may
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It's official, Dissent is a Mental Illness
If you obsess with or consider stalking political celebrities, personally I think your fixations and potential actions are both ill-advised and in all likelihood counterproductive. Politicians not only thrive on publicity, the media would be quick to whip up a frenzy of hysteria should anyone attempt to threaten their life. An assassination attempt represents a
⋯critical thinking, mental health
The Brown Broadcasting Corporation
Call me a cynic, but the BBC seems to have transitioned magnificently from its role as a covet apologist for the Blair regime to a smooth public relations operation for the emerging Brown leadership. Such a transition requires no change in logo, editorial control or political outlook. Indeed, as the electorate has grown tired of
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New Labour's Legacy
Results from recent regional and local elections should bring a few cheers to those, like me, who have long distrusted New Labour. While the letters in Tony Blair nearly form an anagram for Tory Plan B (if we replace i with p), David Cameron certainly follows in the deceptive footsteps of our Tone, as the
⋯corporatism, new labour
On The Nature of Violence
Consuming re-enactments of violence in various forms has long brought considerable pleasure to large number of people, especially but by no means exclusively, males. Quite clearly many residents of middle class suburbs in towns and cities across the prosperous world are relatively shielded from the real-world physical violence that millions experience on a daily basis
⋯All in the mind, corporatism
In Association with Pfizer
Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation, with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running
⋯corporatism, Living Marxism
Implementing an Ajax-like Interface: A Quick How-to
In the Web development world there’s been a lot of buzz about an acronym many of us previously associated either with a brand of detergent or a Dutch football team. In a nutshell Asynchronous Javascript And XML means inserting new information into a Web page without reloading the whole page. Traditionally Dynamic HTML would use
⋯Scientific Orthodoxy and Scientific Fact
Open letter to George Monbiot I just read your recent piece (3 May 2007) on Alexander Cockburn’s anthropogenic climate change scepticism and his reliance on one scientist. Let me first state that broadly speaking I’m with you on this one. Irrespective of our exact scientific interpretation, it seems obvious that the exponential rise in humanity’s
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Is the Crime Rate Falling or Rising
One well-designed Website, www.anxietyculture.com seemed worthy of a link exchange request as it was publicised in the forum of another site I respect Medialens. It claims to offer an antidote to the mainstream media with a special focus on the left’s favourite bête noire The Daily Mail. I particularly liked the article on ‘Team spirit
⋯Something's Changed
Thoughts on Michael Bywater’s Big Babies or Why Can’t We Just Grow Up Originally prepared for a talk and discussion at the South Place Ethical Society Book Club. Why do people seem to behave differently these days? Why do young girls appear to be more interested in sex? Why do young boys appear to be
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Dear Macophobe Charlie Brooker
In response to Charlie Brooker’s piece on Guardian Comments Free: Why I hate Macs Hey, I’m using a Mac and also use Linux on another machine, use Windows XP + Linux at work and have endured my fair share of woes with the various incarnations of fenestrated operating systems falling victim to viruses, spyware and
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May the Thought Police be with you!
Over the last week the mainstream media in the UK have focused on two moral issues. The first concerned the televised racial slurs of a working class Londoner raised in a Bermondsey council estate who made her name on Channel Four’s Big Brother against a multi-millionaire Bollywood diva. The second drew our attention to the
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CSS Two Column Layout
If you view this site with Firefox or other browsers based on the Gecko 1.8+ engine, you’ll see the body of articles neatly arranged into two free-flowing and self-balancing columns. This relies on the new CSS 3 column module, implemented in Gecko browsers as -moz-column before ratification by the W3C. Safari and Opera have introduced
⋯The One Laptop per Child Dream
Do children need game consoles, mp3-players, camera phones, bedroom TV sets with inbuilt DVD players? Probably not. Few cross-cultural comparisons would suggest such devices are of any educational benefit. Indeed they distract children from other forms of play and learning, bombard them with a never-ending blur of junk information and prepare them only for a
⋯Letter to The Guardian exposing Corporate Agenda behind its Science Coverage
I read with interest your report about celebrity endorsement of alternative diets and treatments (The truth about celebrity health claims, Wed 03/01/07) . While I agree the media disseminates a multitude of disinformation and scare stories that may lead people to choose unwise diets, may I point out that Sense about Science is a front
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Buying a Mac
For the last 15 months I’ve been using a second-hand laptop purchased on ebay for £200 with a 1.3 GHz Athlon processor, 256MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive. I first installed Mandriva Linux 10.0 and owing to persistent power management problems I later tried the Ubuntu/Debian-based Simply Mepis distribution. With a little tinkering I
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Blair's Big Brother Binge
Blair’s Big Brother Binge If you thought genuine concerns over security and welfare motivated the deceptively named bills in Tony Blair’s final Queen’s speech, in all likelihood you believed him when he reassured us of his noble aims to rid the world of the genocidal threat presented by Slobodan Milosevic, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam
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Conspiracy Theory Slur
Many defenders of orthodoxy can simply shrug off all challenges to their sacrosanct worldview by dismissing them as conspiracy theories or urban myths. Recently a flurry of books have appeared to debunk conspiracy theories in totem by painting both empirically researched critiques of mainstream thinking and conjectural fantasies with the same brush, thus equating the
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The Awareness Raising Scam
On the surface there seems nothing wrong with bringing people’s attention to the plight of other human beings. As a concept awareness raising began life in political activism, but was soon embraced by the advertising industry. It does not take a huge leap of faith to conclude that National Smile Week, as delightful and charming
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The Misery Industry
In the run-up to New labour’s historic 1997 electoral victory, thespian extraordinaire Tony Blair launched his rallying soundbite “education, education, education“. Any brief exposure to modern teaching techniques as they have continued to evolve since would reveal the necessity to revise that slogan to “edutainment, edutainment, edutainment” . Outside the bustling edutainment sector with semi-privatised
⋯corporatism, new labour
Shameless Celebrity Promotion of Personality Disorders
Letter to the Independent (on Sunday) Judging from the Independent on Sunday’s feature on Stephen Fry’s high-profile outing as a bipolar-defined person, we can look forward to a new season of personality disorder awareness raising. If we believe the hype, until the mid 1990s human beings labelled with the new generation of behavioural disorders lived
⋯depression, mental health
Where OpenOffice could do better
Some may argue that you cannot fault the quality or features of free software, so if MS Office still offers a few bells and whistles that are a tad more polished than their OOo counterparts, a potential user need simply decide if these refinements are worth £200+. Yet OOo Writer has emerged not only as
⋯Two add Two equals Five because Four is a Racist Number
Racism, or more correctly in most cases xenophobia, is matter of ethics. It seems fair to conclude that racism has no place in any caring society because nobody benefits from being victims of prejudice based on arbitrary ethnic distinctions. In the real world prejudice is a natural by-product of extreme variations in wealth, rampant materialism,
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You're just an Individual
Whether you read psychiatric literature, social work reports or listen to the speeches of leading politicians, you’ll find ordinary citizens increasingly referred to not as women, men, people, human beings or citizens but as individuals. Whether you lead an atypical lifestyle, are considered to suffer from a disorder or disease, are addicted to an obsessive
⋯Linguistics
Globalitis: Why Economic Migration is not always Good News
This Wednesday’s Independent (UK edition, 26/07/06) ran a front page story spilling over to page two under the heading “Outstanding: Official Verdict on school that shows the success of immigration“. It featured a fabulous inner London primary school with twenty six pupils and twenty six languages, all apparently excelling academically and growing up bilingual in
⋯limits to growth
What is Open Source and why should you care?
Operating systems and productivity software are very much here with us to stay. The millions of person hours invested in the development of the powerful programmes many of us use every day will serve hundreds of millions of users for generations to come. Only five years ago a typical desktop system may have cost as
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Why are you using still using Microsoft Internet Explorer?
You may just be wondering why it matters. Microsoft have their operating systems on over 90% of the world’s desktops and these just happen to ship with IE as the default browser. Not only that some sites use code specifically designed for Microsoft technologies like Active-X, so why not just take it easy and reap
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