Via MEMRI, an Iranian Channel 2 TV report on the heavy metal scene in Tehran.

“Some of the youths unknowingly make themselves look like homosexuals.” More. And. Also. 

I’m not usually a great fan of graffiti, which is glorified scent marking, or of graffiti art, which is very often wildly overrated. But, via here and thanks to Dr Dawg, I found Lichtfaktor’s light graffiti. It’s fun and no-one else has to clean up afterwards.

Video. More. And. 

Further to this, here’s Denis Dutton on status anxiety and poststructuralist prose. “They want to be excoriated by what they consider to be the ‘establishment’, although they of course, they’re the academic establishment themselves.” Mp3.

More. Related. (H/T, B&W.) 

Oh boy. On today’s Comment is Free, the incorrigible Seumus Milne takes umbrage with Andrew Anthony, whom he denounces as a “cheerleader of the wider US NeoCon project”, along with his book, The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence. (Extract here.) Milne’s railing against the apostate is typically evasive and distressing to the moral senses, so I’ll highlight only one of his remarkable statements.

“Anthony is in a fury with liberals and leftwingers… for supposedly appeasing terror and Islamism and abandoning Enlightenment values in pursuit of a blind and guilt-ridden anti-Americanism… His political life seems mainly to be a series of angry breakfast-time reactions to newspaper columnists, and Guardian writers in particular…”

Supposedly? Seumas, if you’re listening, this is one of your Guardian colleagues, Madeleine Bunting, denouncing Enlightenment values as “imperialistic” and “an ideology of superiority that is profoundly old-fashioned.” Then doing it again. This is that same colleague rhetorically fellating the ‘spiritual leader’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a man who endorses suicide bombing, the murder of homosexuals and the beating of disobedient women as matters of piety. And whom Ms Bunting saw fit to praise for his “horror of immorality”, his “independence of mind” and his mastery of the internet.

And, Seumas, this is you appeasing Islamism and wilfully misleading your readers. Three years in a row.

More on MilneWorld here.

Following this post and subsequent comments, here are some brief extracts from Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s article on the improbable “social justice” icon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

“It is customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero, the historical truth. It is not surprising that Guevara’s contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth – except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: ‘Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,’ or ‘I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why.’”

On killing and boredom:

“Guevara might have been enamoured of his own death, but he was much more enamoured of other people’s deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his Message to the Tricontinental: ‘Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine’… In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: ‘It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in’…”

On vanity economics:

“His stint as head of the National Bank, during which he printed bills signed ‘Che’, has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: ‘[He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.’ Guevara’s powers of perception regarding the world economy were famously expressed in 1961, at a hemispheric conference in Uruguay, where he predicted a 10 percent rate of growth for Cuba ‘without the slightest fear,’ and, by 1980, a per capita income greater than that of ‘the U.S. today.’ In fact, by 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Cubans were dieting on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month.”

Carlos Santana, please take note.

Read the whole shebang. Alvaro Vargas Llosa is the author of The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty.   

More. Related. Some true believers. (H/T, Daimnation!)