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Politics, The Final Frontier (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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Socialism is actually an advantage in long distance exploration and, as usual, Britain was in the forefront of developing models. Or Spain and Portugal as we were called when it all kicked off. Private individuals said to their kings (king & queen, if Spanish), "You pay for the outfitting, I'll take the risks in terms of life and limb. Whatever I find, we divvy up after, comprendo (comprendõ, if Portuguese)?"

The Dutch, who had neither king nor queen to ask, set up the Dutch East India Company which was kinda private, kinda governmental. We Brits kinda went along with both models. We're never at the forefront of these things but we're terribly good at mixing'n'matching other people's models. It all worked well as long as one condition held. If whatever was discovered was worth discovering and could therefore pay for it all. This wasn't the case for considerable areas of the world. Enter the gentleman's club. Probably in Pall Mall.

"Are you a member, sir?" Leaving the gentlemen's club, we get to the Royal Navy. Now read on.
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Mick Harper
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Neither capitalism nor socialism are much cop at putting together expensive expeditions to distant parts with little prospect of any financial return. Capitalism because nobody will invest in them and socialism because nobody will vote for them. Cheap expeditions are a different matter. 'Dr Livingstone, I presume' came about because Stanley was being financed by the rampantly capitalistic US newspaper industry and Livingstone by the rampantly socialistic Scottish presbyterianism industry.

Gentlemen's clubs, the Travellers specifically but the Athenaeum pulling the strings, are good for medium enterprises -- getting round the world in eighty days, exploring the Hindu Kush and other spying expeditions, but for more ambitious trips, one needs the intervention of such things as the Royal Geographic Society, the Royal Institution, The Royal Asiatic Society which are sort of gentleman's clubs but with a bit of state oomph. I know it sticks in the craw but these are highly socialistic.

But for the real biggies -- like Arctic exploration -- you need the navy, which is socialism in tooth and claw. Whether it's Captains Scott, Oates and Shackleton RN or Admirals Peary and Byrd USN or Amundsen ... whoops, my entire theory has fallen down. I'll get back to you when I've found a paddle. This has been an exploration to unknown parts after all. Financed by the AEL. Which is backed by some very mysterious interests.
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Mick Harper
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The Glasgow climate conference has presented us -- not sure who 'us' is but I'm coming to that -- with a remarkable opportunity. These big climate shindigs always follow a pattern. Yes, it's the usual M J Harper patented ten-step guide:

1. Everybody and his dog turns up, though not the Top Dogs
2. Media attention is concentrated on the climate shindig protest groups who have sent all their dogs
3. When everyone tires of that the media concentrates on the lack of progress because of xxxx (fill in the usual reason whatever that is)
4. Progress is made
5. The Top Dogs turn up to sign the XXXX Accords (fill in name of shindig city)
6. The media reports that despite everything surprising progress has been made
7. The Top Dogs interpret or apply the XXXX Accords according to their national interests
8. The situation continues to get worse
9. Steps 1- 8 are repeated.
10. Someone writes in and says, "Surely you mean steps 1 - 9?"

Probably. But anyway I'll tell you why it all stops with Glasgow.
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Mick Harper
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For reasons that I cannot explain and, to be honest, cannot be explained by the gradualism of global warming even if that is the underlying cause, the entire world has gone into meltdown. It does not seem to be the product of the global news-cycle, there really does seem to be an unprecedented number of floods, droughts, temperature record settings and wild fires afflicting just about everywhere. It looks at last as though people might be genuinely frit. Therefore

7. The Top Dogs interpret or apply the XXXX Accords according to their national interests

may mean the national interest is interpreted as 'all pulling together'. Since this has never been done in the whole of human history -- Covid being the most recent example of the lack of any such capacity -- it falls to someone to articulate it in some effective way. If it is not Glasgow, then when? Next year we'll be back to normal, by modern standards, so by the time of the next big climate shindig it will be business as usual.

Hands up anyone who thinks Boris dancers are those articulators?
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Grant



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It’s not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is our irresponsible media which is hyping up every natural disaster. It’s hot in California - how amazing. Floods in Germany - well I never.
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Mick Harper
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The bogus list has landed right on time. Tell me, Grant, why did you select those two in particular? Since you tell us the media are hyping up 'every natural disaster' does this mean these two are specially hyped? In which case they must be very close to not being natural disasters of any kind, merely adverse weather events. But then how to explain that the authorities are/were treating them as natural disasters. Unless they too were misled by the irresponsible media. Or are in cahoots with them.

And of course all the other governments are doing likewise faced with phenomena that may be worse than the American and German ones but are still not full-blown natural disasters. With everyone lying about their own local situation this can only mean they are in cahoots with one another which in turn can only mean the New World Order must have arrived ahead of time.

By the way, I do not deny (since I specifically mentioned it) that this might be an artefact of the media. But alas you did not deal with this aspect. Just assumed it. And because of your known position, you could assume no other. That is correct, isn't it?
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Mick Harper
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So let's move on apace and consider what ideally should be done at Glasgow. I say 'ideally' because... well, you'll see.

1. Keep the protesters right out of it. They are a thoroughgoing nuisance and contribute nothing to the exercise save muddy waters. Doing this won't make much difference in itself but will signal 'this time, we're serious'. [Action: Glasgow police, Barlinnie prison, Barlinnie overflow centre, Banff.]
2. Rip up the timetable. Nobody leaves until everybody leaves and everybody leaves 'when we say so'. This is the fate of the world, people, so there isn't anything more important you should be doing right now.
3. Set up a supra-authority with teeth. Anyone who steps out of line with whatever is agreed gets sanctioned until the pips squeak. Anyone who doesn't institute sanctions will have their pips squeaked. Given the gravity of the situation all other existing sanctions are hereby lifted. No exceptions.

That's a start.
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Mick Harper
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So why won't it happen? Why won't anything happen. Yes, it is true the host country is afflicted with an unusually jejeune government, but that won't be the reason. It is we just don't have the infrastructure. We don't even have the structures to build the infrastructure because we have spent so much time using supranational bodies for cheap political gestures, that that's all they're good for.

The only supranational bodies we do have left capable of effective action are a) multinationals and b) terrorist groups. It's not much to work with but needs must. Good luck to you all.
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Mick Harper
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The Guardian Review devotes its cover and six pages to the 2011 riots. Six pages! No wonder my book got squeezed out for the second week in a row.

What riots were they? That's my first point. Only the Guardian remembers them, never mind celebrates them at lipsmacking length. They were the ones triggered by the shooting of Mark Duggan, an operation that was clearly more botched than malevolent and didn't even have much of a race dimension. Nobody disputed he was being targeted on account of being a career criminal. Problem for the Guardian though is we were all there. There was no mistaking that the whole thing was more an excuse for a bit of mayhem and thievery than ... well, as the Guardian headline put it

'Uprisings like these don't go away'

Actually it seems they do, as the Guardian ruefully acknowledges

The last time disturbances on this scale hit the capital on successive nights was during the ant-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780.
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Mick Harper
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A Brief and Simple History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Everything You Need To Know About The Israel-Palestine Conflict

This I've been waiting for all my life. Set the scene for me, bub

Most people today believe that the Israeli-Palestine conflict has to do with a clash of two religious ideologies. However, it is not just a Jew vs. Muslim fight; put simply, it is a fight for two groups of people who claim that they have the right to the same land. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/a-brief-and-simple-history-of-the-israel-palestine-conflict-d4a7c4094bfb

I like it. Cool. Objective True.

One had already been living there, and the other was forced to migrate to this land due to increasing antisemitism but then made it their home.

I don't like it. Mainly because it is flabbergastingly untrue. Jews migrated to Palestine before the war because of Zionism, not because of antisemitism. They couldn't emigrate to Palestine during the war when it could certainly be said that antisemitism would have forced Jews to live in Palestine faute de mieux. Jewish emigration to Palestine/Israel resumed after the war when antisemtism was no longer, as it were, the driving force. Put simply, in the writer's preferred phrase, no Jew has ever been forced to migrate there for any reason. Though antisemitism is certainly a reason for choosing to do so.

Need we go on? I'll give it one more go....
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Mick Harper
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Notably, before the issue began, people from all three major Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity — occupied the land under Ottoman rule.

This is often said, and it is true, but it's a bit like saying France is occupied by Christians, Muslims and Jews. True but a little misleading.

However, as time went on, two groups of people living in two completely different areas started to form a sense of nationality. The Palestinians started seeing themselves as more than just the ethnic Arabs, a group of people large enough that it warranted their own state. While somewhere far off in Europe, the Zionist movement gained traction, which called for a separate homeland for the Jews

Eh? None of the Arabs living in the Middle East had any sense of nationality, aside from somewhat reluctantly regarding themselves as Ottoman, until (a) the British and the French started arbitrarily carving them up into states and (b) the Israelis started being so thoroughly objectionable as to make it inevitable that Arabs in -- or just out of -- Palestine would start regarding themselves as Palestinian.

I suppose, just to complete the picture, it should be pointed out that Zionism's quest for a Jewish homeland was not to create a Jewish 'nation' -- that is actually a chief objection from many Jews, both in and out of Israel, who regard themselves as already 'a nation'. I'll just have to go on waiting, I guess..
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Mick Harper
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One of the simpler tasks of AE is to provide a sense of perspective. Here's a story from medium.com that got five thousand claps and eighteen sympathetic comments.

Losing Myself in Florence Mateo Askaripour
“The most dangerous thing a person of color can do is forget they’re a a person of color — especially in unfamiliar places”
https://level.medium.com/traveling-while-black-in-florence-6555d3959e28

It retells an experience when the writer was at a Florentine party and the host was going round photographing the guests and asked him to pose like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction. A bit naff maybe but hardly world war three. Except it seemingly became that in the writer's mind and was treated as that by everyone else on medium.com.

When I read the account the overwhelming impression I got was how civilised and relaxed young Italians were in their attitudes to black people. So I learned something too. I had always supposed the Italians were particularly unreconstructed in this area.
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Mick Harper
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On sort of the same topic and featured on the same daily selection of stories medium.com's algorithm deemed worthy of my perusal was this

Why Are Northern Countries More Successful Than Southern Ones? Philip Dhingra
https://medium.com/philosophistry/why-are-northern-countries-more-successful-than-southern-ones-4960056c475

I'll take fifty-to-one on that the obvious reason 'black/white' will not be mentioned, even to be refuted. Anyone? No looking.
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Mick Harper
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But in the same bag came something I've never seen on medium.com before -- people lining up to savage something in medium.com [This admiring unanimity is something you see all the time on Twitter and Facebook, contrary to the alarmist headlines.]

Top 10 Ugliest States To Live In America For 2021 Markie Young
Trust me, don’t move to these horrible states
https://markieyoung.medium.com/top-10-ugliest-state-to-live-in-america-for-2021-362840fbda4f

Very funny, very apt. No wonder he got both barrels from everyone.
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Mick Harper
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Sorry, last one. It also included
Seven Underrated Spielberg Films Simon Dillon
These gems from the great director deserve more attention.
https://medium.com/fan-fare/seven-underrated-spielberg-films-fc66c828c2fc

Zank ze Christ, I thought, at last someone's going to recognise 1941 as a masterpiece. There aren't, after all, so many turkeys in the oeuvre, irrespective of what one thinks of them overall. Not mentioned. Nor by any of the myriad others pitching in with their choices. I am so alone in this world. He should do a film about me. Forget it, pal, you're not even in my top seven.
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