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digitaldigit, you are a menk! "4th Arab goes out partying in London night before and ends up getting out of bed late. No worries, the 9/11 'hijackers' did the same thing but that didn't cause us a big problem. 4th Arab catches bus to see if other Arabs are waiting for him. 4th Arab starts...

some of these 'divisions' among arabs are just as acute as the 'divisions' between arabs and jews. what that has to do with british men whose family origins are in pakistan remains perilously unclear; and just as i would not expect all americans to identify with the 'national' war on iraq...

i dunno, i think the afghanistan war a) killed relatively few civilians, b) there wasn't much infrastructure to damage, but again, not such a destructive war. it's an interesting theory which i am surprised blair hasn't picked up on -- for most people the afghanistan war was *much* more easily...

it probably made the bombings more likely, and may well have motivated these specific individuals. i think it's strange how much people confuse the general causes with their substantive content. sure, subjectively AQ has an easy time of it with undereducated and malleable potential bombers, but...

basically you won't ascribe rational thought to muslims. you take 'objective' causes -- some of which i'd go along with in calling legitimate, some of which i would not -- and then pose a mechanistic, unconscious 'response' from undifferentiated muslims worldwide. fuck a common identity based on...

i'm missing bits of the argument. would the leeds bombers have been justified in targetting random muslims (as they in fact did) because muslims are killing muslims in iraq, or because muslims (were) oppressing muslims in afghanstian? i was against the war, but i don't think it was entirely...

of course the war on terror and the war on iraq have been big recruiting agents, i would never say otherwise. however, ithe attribution of every success of radical islam to western 'imperialism' is simplistic at best. if it certainly is unjust, so is the rule of the taliban, and of saddam, which...

iraq may have provided subjective motivation for the suicide bombers ('righteous anger' nuts -- everyone feels righteous anger about the war; these people felt something else entirely), but comparing casualties is mindless. sure the US militaryhas targeted civilians; how has that anything to do...

know your place, pop music!

i own this record.

plenty of people all over hampstead are angered, 'rightly', by palestine too, but there's a fatal lack of clarity in what you're saying: i'm thinking people driven to bomb buses in london by the situation (highly dubious proposition) are likely also to be against the very idea of israel in the...

i dunno how palestine gets dragged into this, really. i agree about US politicians, but i don't think the british government has overstated the terrorist threat that much, and i never got the impression AQ was as tightly organized as the IRA from them. it is deadly surely *because* it's...

cohen is right. i don't agree with everything he says, but the power of nightmares argument that, because it isn't as tightly drilled as SMERSH, al-qaeda doesn't exist, was always dubious. (also bizarre: why latch on to strauss?) quite clearly there is a terrorist threat, and while the doc...

i guess this is a case of looking for 'actually existing islam', isn't it? saudi arabia, for example, doesn't really bear this out.

i mean, how 'arbitrary' is this!?

this is quite ingenious, but sort of misses out on the way the music is heard and used; in other words everything outside the music itself. the lyrics have meanings, of course.

oh jesus, better the 'omigod the osmonds are the BEST' mentality than this closet stalinism. reynolds is right to point to the gap between popism and populism, but i don't think the neo-rockist position does much better on this score. i might need to dig into the archives to check but... i...

how brave of him to take on 'academic orthodoxy' *and* accuse SR of being 'unversed in adorno' in the same review. that's negative dialectics, folks.

how does fair trade stuff do more harm than good? genuine question.

yeah, it's the easiestthing in the world to hate on drug-users when you use legal drugs, i freely admit. obviously there *is* some kind of argument from necessity, but not a strong one. drugs make you act like a twat, which is close to being immoral ;)