Blog

Edward Snowden opens Twitter account, immediately mocks NSA

Posted on by Jimmy Nicholls
Edward Snowden, Wired cover, September 2014 by Mike Mozart

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower responsible for revealing mass snooping by both British and American spies, opened a Twitter account on Tuesday in style.

In his first message Snowden even took the opportunity to mock the spy agency that he used to do contract work for, tweeting:

Seemingly the message is a reference to the American telecoms company Verizon, which created a number of adverts flaunting the supposed superiority of its phone network, one of which is below:

The gag is that the first story from the trove Snowden leaked to journalist Glenn Greenwald concerned mass collection of Verizon customers’ telephone data.

In later tweets Snowden shot the shit with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who welcomed the whistleblower onto Twitter as a “patriot”, a term much contested in America where national pride is a more vaunted quality than in Britain.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, was equally pleased, but others were not so impressed by the arrival of Snowden.

Oh, and the only Twitter account Snowden is following? The NSA, naturally.

Image Credit – Edward Snowden, Wired cover, September 2014 by Mike Mozart

Blog

Warwick SU’s mistake was not the Namazie ban, but that it rejects hatred, insult and intolerance

Posted on by Jimmy Nicholls
Maryam Namazie, January 2015 by Anders Henrikson

One can only imagine the atmosphere at the cretinous Warwick Student Union as it decided to overturn a decision to block the anti-Islamist campaigner Maryam Namazie from speaking at the university.

Since the story broke in the press, Isaac Leigh, president of the union, has hidden behind the claim that no “final decision” had been made on the refused application, the matter having been subsequently appealed by Warwick Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, the club arranging Namazie’s visit. He therefore had little choice but to flip-flop.

Of course by Leigh’s logic a court that has convicted a criminal has also made no “final decision” on whether he is guilty – though that will not stop the perp being carted off the jail in the meantime. The fact is that in an email to Benjamin David, president of the atheist society, the student union had clearly declined her application, with no intimation this decision was likely to change.

Perhaps Leigh was always intending to reverse this policy, and is a stern advocate of liberalism, free thought and rigorous debate. But if so the president of Warwick Student Union must surely be planning to revise the squalid rules that were used to justify Namazie’s exclusion, which stipulate a speaker:

  • Must not spread hatred and intolerance in the community and thus aid in disrupting social and community harmony
  • Must seek to avoid insulting other faiths or groups, within a framework of positive debate and challenge

How exactly one is supposed to criticise something without accepting a risk of insult is unclear. And why one wouldn’t wish to insult, hate and reject some religious practices – the more charming of which include homophobic abuse, maiming of children’s genitals and rejection of modern medicine – is still more mysterious.

Given the behaviour of the student union, and indeed Warwick’s pedigree as a leftwing university, one suspects the union would not have combated insults, hatred and intolerance directed against the Westboro Baptist Church with the same zeal with which they sought to protect Islam, certain adherents of which are even now terrorising the Middle East in the name of their god.

Hate speech remains a crime in Britain, though the law is roughly enforced and provides caveats for criticism of religion. Perhaps Warwick’s student union is just supporting the law, though again one suspects that if this were not the law a similar policy would still stand at the university.

Ultimately the failure at Warwick was not that it blocked Namazie from speaking, but that such policies that could exclude her from speaking existed in the first place. Spiked and the Spectator have already chronicled the spread of censorship at university campuses, and for this there has been little apology from the so-called Stepford students who dominate many student bodies.

Until that attitude changes, student unions will continue to censor dissent and sanitise debate. That certainly should not be tolerated.

Image Credit – Maryam Namazie, January 2015 by Anders Henrikson

Podcast

Podcast Ep. 16: Piggate scandal, Pope Francis in America and Matt Damonsplaining

Posted on by Jimmy Nicholls
Pope Francis speaks to John Boehner, September 2015 by DonkeyHotey

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A mere day before the official denial from David Cameron, Jimmy and John sat down to discuss piggate, Jazza being away in some foreign clime having better things to do than natter about politics.

Elsewhere we talked Pope Francis in America, what it means for the Republican party and whether Catholicism is still relevant any more.

…and finally, we continue to bang on about Matt Damon and the phenomenon of Damonsplaining, based on articles focusing on the creative and political sides of the debate around diversity in Hollywood.

Image Credit – Pope Francis speaks to John Boehner, September 2015 by DonkeyHotey

Blog

How PCS chief Mark Serwotka and the unions plan to fight the Trade Union Bill

Posted on by Jimmy Nicholls
100 days at National Gallery, September 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

By any measure it has been a mixed few months for the trade unions in Britain.

For the first time in almost 20 years the likes of Unite, Unison and RMT face a Tory majority in Parliament, swept into power by the failure of Labour’s former leader Ed Miliband to convince voters that the centre-left party was capable of leading the country.

At the same time Jeremy Corbyn, a formerly obscure Islington North MP, has become leader of Labour, placing the hard left in a position of control in the party for the first time since Tony Blair became leader of the opposition with a promise to govern from the centre.

“What we have in the union movement, for the first time in a long time, is a leader of the opposition who can say what he believes,” said Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), a trade union for civil servants.

He was standing with the Right Dishonourable outside of the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square, a public portrait gallery that had been enduring a strike for a hundred days on Thursday as staff dispute plans to outsource jobs.

Serwotka, who was blocked from voting in the Labour leadership election in what he termed one of the “desperate last acts” of those opposing Corbyn, said that discussions with Gabriele Finaldi, the National Gallery’s new director, were bringing the strike to a close.

“We’re finally moving towards a settlement that we will all find acceptable,” he told the modestly-sized crowd of protestors who had come to support the gallery staff. “There can be no settlement without decent wages, without job security for the staff, without people being respected for what they do.”

But even if the National Gallery strike may be coming to a close, Serwotka and his counterparts in other unions face a bigger battle on their hands: Fighting a Trade Union Bill that could reduce the powers of the unions to their lowest point in Britain’s post-war history.

Among the provisions of the bill are attempts to establish voting thresholds that must be met before unions can call strikes, limits to picketing, and the use of agency staff to fill in for striking workers.

Serwotka told the Right Dishonourable that it was “fairly clear” the Trade Union Bill would make it through Parliament. “The way we’ll defeat the Trade Union Bill is by making it an issue for the 6.5m trade union members,” he said, a figure that can be traced to a government report from 2013, which points out that in 1979 the trade unionists numbered 13m.

The PCS chief believes that when people feel their incomes are under threat it will galvanise public support against the bill, especially when combined to other forms of public welfare such as tax credits.

Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, has also since attacked the Trade Union Bill’s plans to make striking workers wear armbands, which he said echoes a Nazi policy in the concentration camps of Dachau, language which illustrates the ferocity of the coming fight.

For the heads of the trade unions rebuffing the bill may prove a tougher and longer battle than the 100 days at the National Gallery. And with five years of Tory government on the cards it may be the first fight of many with David Cameron’s second ministry.

Image Credit – 100 days at National Gallery, September 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Blog

Apparently the Cereal Killer Cafe owners are ‘barely even victims at all’

Posted on by Jimmy Nicholls
Cereal Killer Cafe via shop's official website

When it comes to victims everyone has their own standards as to who qualifies. And at least for one writer on the student website the Tab, apparently hipsters who run cereal cafes are not included.

On Saturday night, hundreds of protestors seemingly led by the anarchist group Class War massed in Shoreditch with the intent of demonstrating against the gentrification of the area.

At least some of them ended up outside the Cereal Killer Cafe in Brick Lane, a shop which sells bowls of cereal for £3.20 that has become a symbol of the fact that young, rich folk are increasingly dominating what used to be a poor neighbourhood.

The cafe was then pelted with paint as people hid inside, with one of the owners fearing the windows were about to be smashed before the police arrived to break up the crowd.

Yet for William Lloyd, assistant editor at the Tab, the owners of Cereal Killer Cafe are “barely even victims at all”, and indeed the mob that attacked the shop are described as “heroically” arriving at their intended target.

The writer then goes on take issue with the following tweet, made by the cafe just before it opened as usual on a Sunday:

According to Lloyd:

“A hate crime is generally defined as ‘a prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group’.

“What happened to the boys who sell cereal for £3.20 a bowl in an area synonymous with existent poverty and nonexistent infrastructure wasn’t a hate crime. It was pantomime with some criminal damage thrown in.”

This is a baffling display of illogic, given the words of the so-called Fuck Parade organisers on the Facebook page for the event:

“We don’t want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing. We don’t want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns – we want community.

“Soon this city will be an unrecognisable, bland, yuppie infested wasteland with no room for normal (and not so normal) people like us.”

At least on the face of things, it appears that the Cereal Killer Cafe was attacked exactly because of the owners’ “perceived membership in a certain social group”, even if that social group happens to be well off. But Lloyd goes on:

“Tower Hamlets, with its reeking fast food pits, breeze block shacks, multi-storey pound shops, brazen Isis recruiters, festering junkies and lunatic local politicians is simply too real, too claustrophobically human an environment for a twee, kidult catering business like the Cereal Killer Café to operate in without fear of reprisal.”

“Without fear of reprisal”? Just what kind of illiberal savagery is Lloyd excusing? Does he want London to be the sort of city where people can vandalise a shop just because its owners are not the right sort of people?

Thankfully the liberal commenters on the offending Tab piece largely disagree with Lloyd. And should the mob apologist wish to live in a country more suited to his tastes he already knows where he can organise passage to Islamic State.

Image Credit – Cereal Killer Cafe via its official website