The Politics of Dancing

ON THE BRAND, BRAND The list of things I don’t want to write about keeps on multiplying, Russell Brand, Scottish Labour Party, UKIP, EU, The Tory party, Ebola, Scottish Nationalism, Islamism,…the list grows. Of course all of these things are important, some a lot more important than others. Against the backdrop of the defence of Kobane, and let’s not forget Aleppo, most seem trivial. Not wanting to write about something is usually a pretty big indicator that I eventually will. Of all the above  Mr Brand is undoubtedly the most trivial, and also the most irritating, like a wasp at a picnic he seems intent on spoiling your day. Brand seems to believe that being someone who has recovered from drug and alcohol addiction gives him some sort of superior insights than other mere mortals. I have written about this before.   This kind of arrogance, usually masquerading as humility, is far more common amongst those so recovering than is maybe realised. This is a consequence of cert

‘ By comparison, chimpanzees at birth are neurologically and cognitively ahead of human babies of the same age, but the chimps begin to fall behind by about six months old because of the more rapid continued development of the human brain following birth. With the exception of these differences, we are quite similar to the African apes anatomically and genetically, especially to the chimpanzees and bonobos.  Humans have 46 chromosomes in their cells while all of the great apes have 48.  In reality, this difference is not as great as it would initially seem because the human chromosome 2 is a fusion of ape chromosomes 12 and 13 with most of the same genes.’ Last week I paid a short visit to the very dark side of the Twitter-sphere, to the tweets of the Islamists, the would be Jihadist warriors and big time haters, haters of all that we think of when we think of a free and democratic society. Above all they hate secularism and the freedom to reject religion. Those tweeting r

'ISLAMIC STATE'  TURKEY  AND THE WEST: DOUBLE DEALING AS A STRATEGY  TURKEY'S TWO FACED POLICIES ON IS On twentieth of September this year, as the same time as IS was holding journalists and aid workers, ready to be dressed in garish orange jumpsuits and beheaded in front of well-placed TV cameras, 47 Turkish hostages were released unharmed, well dressed and obviously reasonably well cared for. This, seemingly without a quid pro quo from the Turkish Government, is not normal IS modus operandi and understandably it raised some eyebrows. Some might even think shady business had gone on. No, was the Turkish President,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to western cynics, the release was the product of the ingenious work of Turkey’s intelligence services. Some eyebrows however remained raised. Turkey sits famously between three worlds, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The European dimension to Turkey has always been important both inside and outside Turkey, whethe

Though no great fan of Lenin ‘the heart on fire and the brain on ice,’ has always been a maxim to which I have aspired, though constantly fail. Watching the events unfold in Kobane I have felt more physically upset than at any time since Srebrenica and thoughts also turn to Sabra and Shatila, [1] which also made me feel physically unwell. Impotence now acerbated by receiving regular tweets from inside the besieged enclave from someone calling themselves Cahit Storm [@cahitstorm].  Tweeted letter from @cahitstorm  His tweets are frequently humorous, often courageous and above all provide an insight into the courage of the YPG Kurdish fighters. The semi-autonomous Kurdish state has been one of the few success stories of the Iraq war, whilst the democratic experiments in the newly liberated Rojava region, the three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria, give a real glimpse of what a secular democratic state in the region could look like. These forces are now under attack

One of the current themes of the Stop the war crowd, gratefully taken up by more ardent apologists for Islamism is what Orwell would have called the silly/clever line you can't bomb ideas. Those who fought fascism in Spain or on the beaches of Normandy knew different. Of course poisonous ideas are like the plague, difficult to eradicate, but ask yourself the following question. Your neighbour suddenly adopts the philosophy that he has permission from God to rape your wife or kill your husband and steal whatever of your belongings he feels so inclined. Do you say “Oh well, you can’t defeat ideas with a baseball bat?” Or do you slug him and wonder where he got such poisonous notions from later?   Clerical fascists like IS can have poisonous ideas aplenty, however when they try to impose these on others the right response is to fight back. IS fighters can then take their ideas to the grave. What is more troubling is the sinister notion that we supposedly cannot fight these id

For my sins I have discovered Twitter. Of course I have been superficially aware of the thing for some time but never really saw the point. Then after a discussion with a friend in a café in Piccadilly I decided to give it another go. The net result, [no pun intended] being that I soon became addicted. The appeal of Twitter is not hard to fathom, the potential to take part in a national and sometimes international conversation and to communicate with those whom, outside of virtual reality, you would have no possibility of conversing and - for the politically minded like myself - the chance to add your penny worth to the cut and thrust of political and cultural debate. The atmosphere on Twitter is a strange combination of the intimate and private and public and open. The conversation runs on a spectrum from overly cutesy and saccharine to the virulent and abusive. In political discourse in particular licence is given to a level of rudeness unusual even in the normally acerbic di