A few links

Robert Fisk discusses the semiotics of conflict reports - 'Civilians pay price of war from above', which gives Al Jazeera's report, 'US probe 'confirms' Afghan deaths', greater resonance. The use of language by US officials is spookily similar to that of the Israeli government’s justification of the Israel Defence Force's activities. The story itself is receiving little or no attention from mainstream British news organisations.

Dave’s Part assesses the perceived moving left of Labour under Brown -'SDP, the second time as farce'.

'Monbiot meets... Hazel Blears' is extraordinary. It might not sound that interesting but wait for Blear's reaction to Monbiot's question about Islam Karimov, the brutal dictator of Uzbekistan. At about 7:02 comes a moment of near David Brent proportions awkwardness.

An overlooked story from Michael Crick's Newsnight blog

If you are still hungry for interesting and informed reading matter, A Very Public Sociologist is a pretty good place to look. I recently discovered that they have linked The Polemical Report (it is listed in the ‘Counter-Hegemonies’ section), which I am pretty pleased about. Thank you if you are reading this A Very Public Sociologist team.

A couple of links to Dave's Part.

Here are two posts from Dave’s Part - 'Atrophy: how the left blew its big chance.'

New Labour has from the start been gulled into intellectual stupor by its own self-delusional rhetoric. Convinced that it was indeed ‘the political wing of the British people as a whole’, it neglected even to renew the bases of Labourism itself.

Old Labour, by contrast, pulled up the drawbridge and refused to acknowledge that the last three decades were happening. As a combined result, the Labour Party is now so hollowed out that it could collapse at the slightest push.

The Marxist left, which prides itself on being the brains of the operation, for the most part retreated back to fundamentalism. There has been no attempt to come to terms with the need to put Marxist philosophy on a footing devoid of dialectics, for instance, or even to operationalise fully the essential concepts of Marxist economics.

On the Budget and the 50% tax rate - 'Return of class war. Not.'