Set up your own peace camp - free at the lovely Isla Montevideo.
Click the sign at the landing point to receive your free tents. Then create a display of your choosing (max 25 prims) on the theme of peace. Please be respectful of the sim and other contributors.
This video clip from the upcoming, award winning film from Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, Meeting Resistance, portrays a side of the Iraqi insurgency President Bush doesn't want the world to see.
In “Meeting Resistance” we hear the voices and stories of individuals usually simply referred to – depending on your perspective -- as resistance fighters, insurgents, or terrorists. Visit the film’s website.
Priests Protesting Torture Jailed
Louis Vitale, 75, a Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest, were each sentenced to five months in federal prison for attempting to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were taken directly into jail from the courtroom after sentencing.
Fort Huachuca is the headquarters of military intelligence in the U.S. and the place where military and civilian interrogators are taught how to extract information from prisoners. The priests attempted to deliver their letter to Major General Barbara Fast, commander of Fort Huachuca. Fast was previously the head of all military intelligence in Iraq during the atrocities of Abu Ghraib.
The priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were charged with trespass on a military base and resisting orders of an officer to stop.
More HERE
VISIT THIS POLITICAL BLOG: http://politicsplus.blogspot.com/
Steampunk an SL invention? Scroll down for the first in a short series of articles by Plot Tracer on Utopian SF Writers from the days of steam...
Remamber to visit the SLLU Factory Exhibition - in collaboration with Luna Box
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Isla%20Montevideo/234/88/33
Watch the stream and then enter the building for the exhibition about worker exploitation in the past and now!
After you have been to the exhibition, please go to the Tribute Garden on the island to place your tribute to the exploited.
The Tribute Garden is at the top left of the island...
PLOT TRACER Looks Backwards...
Click on slurl to go to Babbage - a "Steampunk" sim. Or alternatively click on the slurl below.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Babbage%20Square/207/204/32
Caledon: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon/255/128//
Steelhead -
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Steelhead/84/226/24
“Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy, is a strange read and it is so for a number of reasons, not least being the fact that it was published in 1888 and is about the socialist utopia the writer envisages for the 20th century. In it he predicts credit cards, radio, television and covered pedestrian malls. Julian West, a middle class insomniac, employs the services of a hypnotist to put him to sleep at night. His manservant, Sawyer, is supposed to wake him the next morning with a special “reversal of the mesmerising process.” When he awakes, he finds he has slept over 100 years. It is the year 2000.
As well as being a critique of the social, economic and political situation of his own times, it is a romance and a science fiction fantasy. The ideas Bellamy wrote about, ie. the portrayed utopian society , influenced people such as Eugene V.Debs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs) , John Dewey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey) , Thorstein Veblen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen), and Norman Thomas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Thomas ).
Bellamy’s twentieth century is a time when everyone shares in a common wealth. It is a time when there are no wars, no private profit, no starvation, no class war, equality and retiral on full pension at 45 (so you can, just with that fact, see that his prediction was wide off the mark!)
His twentieth century utopia is a very nineteenth century idea of utopia. 
Bellamy – West in the story – explains that everyone in the twentieth century speaks in the way the educated middle classes spoke in the nineteenth century, the dialect of the working classes having been eradicated by equality and education. He also tells us that because the relationship between money and married status has been eradicated, marriage has become freer – people marry only for love rather than to keep status in society. This has in turn led to an equality of sorts between men and women – though his nineteenth century mind could only imagine an “imperium in imperio” organisation of the “weaker sex”. Women do work and are paid equally but their working hours are less, they have more frequent vacations and “careful provision is made for rest when needed,” because women are “inferior in strength to men and further disqualified industrially in special ways.” What women have, ie. an equality unimaginable in 1887, has been given to them by the men, “We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions and careers.”
Bellamy gives the moral authoritative voice to a protestant minister - modernity in the nineteenth century middle class mind was greatly effected by the individuality the church was allowing capitalist venture. The sermon is written in a way that today we find grating. The minister takes ownership for the change in society for the church (perhaps this would be a way we could sell socialism to
Though these things are telling of the middle class Boston Bellamy is from, (he had studied law, though never practised and had become a journalist) his ideas on state capitalist organisation and equality were revolutionary enough to make the book the third biggest seller of its day after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
One of the most interesting parts of the book for me comes towards the end when he revisits the nineteenth century. He takes a walk around
"I have been in
Humanity hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights
the sun and stars look down on in this city, that you can think
and talk of anything else? Do you not know that close to your
doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh,
live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their
dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear
their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that
suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned
half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women
selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your
ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can
hear nothing else."
He looks around the table and sees the guests are shocked and he tells them he was not accusing them personally of the weaknesses of the nineteenth system. The guests, rather than seeing his point became “angry and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!" "Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no more poor. Ha! ha!" He is then thrown out. I don’t know about you, but I have been to parties like that.
After this revisiting of his former time he feels shame, “For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring then to an end?”
Perhaps, using the same dramatic devices Bellamy uses to prick his 19th century audiences consciences. I should ask myself the same question on behalf of my descendants, what was I doing while New Labour papered over the cracks while Bush plundered the world and promoted “poverty with servility?’ What was I doing when “governments were accustomed, on the slightest international misunderstanding, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to the victims.” 
Bellamy makes a lot of metaphors – though I think his metaphor of the “prodigious coach” is his best. In it he describes society as a coach, the fortunates riding in the luxury seats – the unfortunates – the masses, pulling at the harness and driver, hunger. At times the road was bumpy and some might fall from their seats, but they tried their damndest to keep them and pass them to their children. He also says that those who sat in the seats were under the illusion that they were “made of finer clay” than those pulling the coach. He said that this illusion was quick to take hold of those who managed to climb up from the ground, “before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. Another telling line in this metaphor is when he says that the people up top can, “enjoy the scenery at their leisure or critically discuss the merits of the straining team”, something I feel, Bellamy is a tiny bit guilty of as he later pours scorn on the working class labor (sic) movements. He believed a solution could only come if the educated classes were persuaded are willing to do something. He believed class solutions were fragmentary narrow and the nation should unite patriotically to create the ‘ultimate nation’.
Bellamy’s ideas are not fully formed in this book. He talks about a loose treaty between nations who have adopted his socialist/state capitalist system and says that it is for future generations to sort out the future ‘unification of the world as one nation. Meanwhile, however the present system works so nearly perfectly that we are quite content to leave posterity the completion of the scheme’
Bellamy went on to write another book about this ‘time’ called Equality, in which he explores his ideas further. His ideas became the basis for a new political party in the
This is an interesting read – giving an insight to the ideas that were being bandied about at the time and the belief that capitalism was in a state of imminent destruction. Bellamy was writing around the time when Marx’s ideas were becoming known to the world. Actually looking backwards, perhaps if all of those people with similar goals had come together and forced change perhaps a time-traveler arriving today would not see the increase of death, destruction and broken lives that has actually happened. Perhaps arriving today she wouldn’t know about the death and destruction happening in the name of capitalism as the capitalist press and capitalist politicians conspire to keep the west ignorant, but that is another story. Perhaps if all of the people with the same goal come together in our time, a time-traveler in 100 years will find a utopia were ‘long ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For generations rich and poor had been forgotten words.’
Read Bellamy’s works online –
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Edward_Bellamy/Looking_Backward_From_2000_to_1887/
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/b#a327
The Parable of the Water-Tank from the book "Equality" published in 1897 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Parable_of_the_Water-Tank
Edward Bellamy on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bellamy
The news goes so fast nowadays. Add to that the choice we have not to listen, read or watch it. Things are so different from when I was younger when everything came to a stop for the 1.00pm, 5.45, 6.00, 9.00 and 10.00 news. Real news was reported on the front pages of the newspapers – even on the tabloids. I wonder does my ten year old know what is going on in the world? I remember the news from my childhood – miners trapped down mines, people shot, planes bombed on runways, politicians hauled over the coals for misdemeanours and political faux pas.
Who remembers the prime events leading to the political and war state we are in at the moment?
Who remembers the wee boy cowering behind his father as Israeli soldiers snuffed out his little life? Who remembers the little girl crying on the beach in
M y point is about memory and the “War on Terror”.
Who remembers David Kelly? Who remembers weapons inspectors in
Who remembers Craig Murray?
Those of you who keep up to date with the War on Terror will know who he is. Those of you who trawl the internet for secret documents will know who he is. For the most of us caught up in every day life filled with the noise of advertising ways to a better life and the lives of the select few who show us our inadequacies, Craig Murray may well be a tennis player, a golfer or Paris Hilton’s/Jade Goody’s latest love interest.
In his own words, Craig Murray says, “many would judge that in my private life I have behaved pretty badly. In the small hours of the night, I tend to agree. What I think I did right was to refuse to go along with some absolutely dreadful things the West was at best overlooking, probably condoning and arguably encouraging in the name of the War on Terror.”
A few months back, in the depths of the Scottish Winter, I happened to be in Ayrshire. My visit coincided with a protest outside
As I stood in the rain, with representatives from across the political spectrum, becoming wetter and wetter even though I was under the protection of a huge SSP golf umbrella (rain in Ayrshire seems to come at almost 90 degrees),
I thought, “What good am I doing?” I thought, “Will anyone listen?” What had started out as an issue a friend had alerted me to through her persistence online seemed to me to be an issue few knew or cared about. This is the lot of the protestor. Alone in a sea of apathy. I used to think apathy was something people chose. I don’t believe that now. I think we are encouraged to be apathetic. Amnesty and lefty journo’s were shouting about it, but few people were raising their heads above the purple haze of petrol prices, the imminent arrival of Santa Claus, Harry Potter and yes, Jade Goody and her men. Few people had heard that
Craig Murray was the British Ambassador to
Craig Murray published a book about his findings – a book I read just after publication. Some of his evidence has had to have been left out because of the British Government's tightening suppression of the written word, though the references left out can be easily found online. I find it shocking that so few know his findings – and that the Daily Mail are not up in arms about what he said about the links between our Government and the Uzbekistan Government. But then they are making an honest buck out of absolute disgust at the racism of the “Chav” Jade or the terrible world rocking events in the life of Pete Doherty. I’m glad they are on the case. I know my life is better lived by knowing their disgust at Paris and Lindsay Lohan. Lives will be saved by their investigative journalism.
New Labour holds on to power even though week after week our democracy is bled of morality. Bush will go, and in his place will be a clone from the other party who may say things in a slightly different way, but nothing will change. Such is the two in one party state.
“Murder in
This article was originally posted on http://thedrink.blog.com/893452/
