China against Marxism

China attacks the Marxists Internet Archive: “In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server’s operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government…” Remarkable. Gotta protect the people from subversive thought?

Descending into the absurd

Please indulge me, and imagine the following:

A government-appointed academic gets exclusive access to highly sensitive archives, in order to perform bespoke research about the cold war. Even at the time he is appointed, there is clamor about opening said archives to a wider selection of interested parties — perhaps even to the public at large. But this is denied, and it is emphasized just how sensitive the information still is, and how carefully it has to be handled.

Lo and behold: almost immediately said academic researcher writes a newspaper article (in a rather government-friendly paper), naming a certain journalist as a former KGB-agent. The journalist, of course, is not allowed to get into the archives, and thus cannot in any meaningful way defend himself from the specific accusations.

No, I am not kidding: this is presently happening here in Denmark — all part of the Kulturkampf the current government is waging.

Power, corruption and lies

Power, corruption and lies — Will Hutton writes a rather interesting article about China (“The truth is that China is not the socialist market economy the party describes, nor moving towards capitalism as the western consensus believes. Rather it is frozen in a structure that I describe as Leninist corporatism – and which is unstable, monumentally inefficient, dependent upon the expropriation of peasant savings on a grand scale, colossally unequal and ultimately unsustainable.”)

LOSERS JUSTICE

Losers’ Justice: “It might therefore have been a nice idea, given the American and British promises of a new and democratic Iraq, if the latest change of regime had not been marked by yet another clanging of the gallows.” Yeah, the Hitch himself (bless him, after all, for once again being the one to cry “But he has nothing on…” Regardless.)

Axess, a magazine for the liberal arts and social sciences

A tale of two cities: “Copenhagen and Amsterdam have long been symbols of liberal permissiveness. But the cartoons scandal and the murder of Theo van Gogh have changed both cities profoundly, polarising adversaries in a new politics of intolerance.”