Category Archives: Rants

Playground Politics

In yet another fit of U.S. imperial pique on an international scale, I read today with dismay that France, Germany & Russia were conspicuously not invited to an initial planning meeting for a multi-country “stabilisation force” for Iraq. Has the global political situation always been this childish and petulant?

I’m increasingly resigning myself to the dismal realisation that it’s always been like this. As the “might is right” mentality gains widespread political acceptance around the World, and pro-neocon pundits regurgitate past precedents of imperial tyranny (and my “homeland” Britain wrote large sections of the book on the subject) as justification, it’s more & more obvious that we haven’t progressed very much politically in the last two or three thousand years. How sad that a quote by Thucydides referring to the Peloponnesian War written more than 2,400 years ago is still relevant and much-quoted today:

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The Smoking Gun

19 days into the illegal war on Iraq, and coalition forces are now claiming to have discovered “smoking gun” evidence of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Distraction). What a surprise! Perhaps they found them in a parked car, along with a copy of the Koran and a Boeing flight manual…

Rant City

After several hours of faffing, I’ve finally got the blogs looking vaguely consistent with the rest of the site, so it looks like rant city for me from now on!