Category: Uncategorized

Loyalty Day, 2003 This is surely like a red rag to a bull (or its a joke!) How about we make all web pages red for a week!

From here: History:

Our modern celebration of Mayday as a working class holiday evolved from the struggle for the eight hour day in 1886. May 1, 1886 saw national strikes in the United States and Canada for an eight hour day called by the Knights of Labour. In Chicago police attacked striking workers killing six.

The next day at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police killing eight of them. The police arrested eight anarchist trade unionists claiming they threw the bombs. To this day the subject is still one of controversy. The question remains whether the bomb was thrown by the workers at the police or whether one of the police’s own agent provocateurs dropped it in their haste to retreat from charging workers.

In what was to become one of the most infamous show trials in America in the 19th century, but certainly not to be the last of such trials against radical workers, the State of Illinois tried the anarchist workingmen for fighting for their rights as much as being the actual bomb throwers. Whether the anarchist workers were guilty or innocent was irrelevant. They were agitators, fomenting revolution and stirring up the working class, and they had to be taught a lesson.

Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer were found guilty and executed by the State of Illinois.

In Paris in 1889 the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) declared May 1st an international working class holiday in commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs. The red flag became the symbol of the blood of working class martyrs in their battle for workers rights.

Mayday, which had been banned for being a holiday of the common people, had been reclaimed once again for the common people.

BACP News
I have always had respect for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy – it has a strong code of ethics and is the basis for many codes around the world. While I am not a member I belong to a similar though more psychotherapy focussed organisation in New Zealand.

The BACP have New guidelines for online therapy – which are summarised here. It is a balanced report. I am pleased to say my Psychotherapy Online practice meets all their recommendations.

Support Our Boys in Uniform, by Harry Browne

If you really think the country should unite now, it should be united against the idea of attacking a virtually defenseless nation on the unverified say-so of a known liar.
To “come together” to support insanity is not patriotic, it is not reason, it is not moral. It simply makes you as guilty as the people perpetrating this war.
If you really want to support our boys over there, do the honorable thing:
Demand that they be brought home now.

Parliament (washingtonpost.com)This item concludes with the words llegal, immoral and illogical” — all those! I feel sad and angry as I hear reports of support for this war. Polls in the US 66% in favour.

I feel angry when i hear people against the war wanting a swift victory… now is the time for something else… the beginning of people uniting against dictators, Bush #1 on the list.

Back to Iraq 2.0

I promised I wouldn’t make predictions about the start of the war, so perhaps I can make one about the end of it. When it’s over and the dust has settled, the United States will stand supreme in the world, powerful but hated, its boot on the throat of Iraq. The international frameworks built over the last 50 years, including the United Nations, will lie in ruins or will be about to collapse. Resentful young men, hearts full of fear, hate and Allah will find refuge and a raison d’etre as explosive martyrs. The world will be less safe — for everyone. And thousands of people — soldiers, civilians, innocent or not — will be dead. And for no good reason at all.

Christopher Allbritton is a independent journalist t blog-busking (I made up that word!) his way to the war. Independents are needed as there is censorship from the front by the other media. Let’s see how he goes.

An Item I wrote exploring the ways in which psychotherapy can be political.

There is a great little – http://home.netvigator.com/%7Ekwongkf/4070pg01.htm – paper that proposes that the Net is not like other media which conform to McLuhan’s insight that media are an extension of the human senses. Rather the Internet is an extension of all other media. Just as our senses are re-shaped by the development of the ordinary media so media is re-shaped by the Net. Amputate is a word that McLuhan uses. Media amputates our senses the corollary is that the Net amputates media.

All this came beautifully to mind while listening to Frank Miller talk on public radio via the Net of course, about Daredevil, the comic he reinvented and which is now a movie and which no doubt I could download with Kazaa months before it arrives here in NZ.

There is a new development happening I think where artists, directors, producers etc. are not just cashing in on the new environment but using it creatively. Adaptation (the movie) explores this to some extent. AI had a Net event? Imagine a “happening” that was as much a book as a film as a web phenomena, not one adapting to the other, but an integrated whole.

Here is the collection

I could not get audblog to work from our NZ phone but made a quick mp3: very simple to do! I can hear it easily in my quicktime plugin, but I imagine other devices cwould work. You could also download it and play it in winamp.

listen

Will put something new here from time to time.