Is John Pilger necessary? Sunny Hundal thinks so:

Here’s a taste of Mr Pilger’s idealistic anger, from the pages of the New Statesman:

No evidence is advanced to support this claim of “brainwashing” and no explanation is offered as to why so many actual Texans should have escaped its burdensome effects. Though the reader is left to presume that, however this brainwashing works, it leads inexorably to a presidential “blood fest” and the “killing [of] yet more brown-skinned people.” The same article also tells us that “Condoleezza Rice… has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice” and states as fact “liberal democracy’s shift towards a corporate dictatorship.” Sadly, the particulars of such things are left to the reader’s wilder imaginings.

Wild imaginings are, of course, a signature of Mr Pilger’s rhetoric, along with the aforementioned anger and unrealism. As illustrated in December 2003 by his enthusiastic support of Ba’athist thugs and jihadist fantasists: “I think the resistance in Iraq is incredibly important for all of us. I think that we depend on the resistance to win so that other countries might not be attacked.” The precise nature of the “resistance” – its methods and lineage – didn’t seem to trouble Pilger; nor was he unduly concerned by the mismatch between that noble resistance and concepts of democracy, human rights, etc. One might, for instance, hesitate to champion the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who in January 2005, a week before Iraq’s parliamentary election, said: “We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it.”

What mattered to Pilger, and mattered a great deal, was “deal[ing] a blow to the US Empire” – a point on which he was later happy to elaborate. Asked in January 2004 whether the “anti-war” movement should really be supporting al-Zarqawi and his associates, the Voice Of Conscience™ replied: “Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy… We have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the Bush gang will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.” Two months later, Pilger described British, American and Australian troops as “legitimate targets” and revealed the true, fiendish scope of America’s ambitions: “Unless the United States is defeated [in Iraq], we’re likely to see an attack on Iran, we’re likely to see an attack on North Korea and all the way down the road it could be even an attack on China within a decade.”

China indeed. Based on the above, and much, much else besides, it isn’t clear how such a worldview could help those “brown-skinned people” who, reasonably enough, prefer democracy to despotism. One might, though, note that Mr Pilger is much more animated by the diabolical schemes he ascribes to America, with its designs on China and rampant “brainwashing,” than he is by, say, North Korea’s concentration camps and gas chambers.

Such is the voice of conscience. Hear it roar. 

Obama’s inauguration has been covered at tremendous length elsewhere, but it would seem a tad churlish if I neglected it entirely. Here are two images of the proceedings taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite at around 11am EDT yesterday from a height of 423 miles. Click to enlarge.

Several readers have steered my attention to the new Fake Charities website. It’s a directory of consultants, lobby groups and quangos that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments, and thus from thee and me. One featured charity is Alcohol Concern, which, according to its 2007/08 accounts, received £515,000 from the Department of Health. It received just £4,991 in public donations. This dependence on state subsidy, as opposed to public donations, raises the question of just how independent such organisations are, and whether “charity” is the word we should be using.

Anna thinks some of you may be interested in a gallery of rolling papers and smoking paraphernalia, which includes products by Rizla, Abadie and numerous other brands.   

And, thanks to Candice, I’ve discovered a compendium of superpowers with somewhat limited applications. Among them: the ability to levitate the left side of your body, ultra short-range teleportation, and an imperviousness to helium. 

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

Brendan O’Neill on eco-paternalism:

If less well-off people fly less often, why are their flights looked upon by environmentalists, again and again, as the most destructive and foul of all? It is not only cheap flights that environmentalists attack, but the cheap people who take some of these cheap flights. Plane Stupid refers to the “binge-flying” of those who attend stag nights in “Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner”. Green party leader Caroline Lucas says we need “an end to cheap stag nights in Riga”. These are not attacks on the Daily Telegraph readers who fly Ryanair, but on “the poor” who fly Ryanair.

Related: Plane Stupid’s theatrical onanism.

Joe Lima watches Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour film, Che. He’s unimpressed, at length:

I have just one more thing I’d like to say about Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro. I don’t mean this maliciously, as I think that the experience would be very good for the emotional, intellectual and artistic growth of these two men. I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives.

Related: Fellating Che. (h/t, Dan) 

Further to Guy Dammann’s regard for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Darleen has unearthed another display of unspeakably radical selflessness over at Feministing:  

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’. But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction? My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression.

Sorry, I should have warned you; there’s quite a bit of boilerplate.

Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

Families with children are selfish, see, and squanderers, and prone to consumerism. I hope you’re taking notes.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it.  

But of course. Again, note the approving nod to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the ultimate goal of which is “phasing out the human race.” Until that glorious scenario is achieved, VHEMT strives for a world in which the human population is, ahem, “less dense.”