When her bedroom was searched police found a ringbinder full of documents as well as a bracelet bearing the word “jihad”.
There was also a sticker on a mirror inside the door, bearing the words “lyrical terrorist”.
…
Also found were publications from an Islamist extremist group called Followers of Ahl us-Sunnah Wal-Jammaa’ah, linked to another group, The Saved Sect, and to the extremist cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri.
In a box file in the family lounge was a printed version of the “declaration of war” by Osama bin Laden.
A young woman faces the possibility of a jail sentence for an internet alias, some poems, and a couple of books. Oh, how marvelously the liberal democracies are protecting our freedoms.
So, she’s been given a nine month suspended sentence; good that she’s not been imprisoned, but of course still appalling that she was convicted in the first place. The CPS said: “Samina Malik was not prosecuted for writing poetry. Ms Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” So that’s alright then; it’s not illegal to write, just to read.
A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness? Read more↴
You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.
— William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101
Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right, that maybe politics would be “over,” and that seems hard to comprehend. Read more↴
Mr. Obama had voted minutes earlier in favor of an extremely similar resolution proposed by Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.
Ms. Boxer’s proposal, which failed, called for the Senate to “strongly condemn all attacks on the honor, integrity and patriotism” of anyone in the United States armed forces.
This is one of those strange limit-cases of contemporary liberalism: it’s an important principle of liberal democracies that the civilian government has formal control the military, but only, apparently, on condition that it never disagrees with the military.
I was listening to the Happy Mondays the other day and was struck by the thought that WFL (which I’d believed to be a kind of hedonistic bragging – “I ordered a line / you formed a queue,” etc) might actually be a dialog between the crassly capitalist and their others (“Is there nothing else you can do?” / “Well not much, I’ve not been trained”). Possible material for the theory of proletarian resentment?
