Inverse Racism

Was it inverse racism that led me, and probably many others, to hope for an attitude, policy and actions more sensitive to human rights from a black person in power than his white predecessors?

After the terrible eight years with George Bush whose administration gave the world morally defunct and strategically catastrophic invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with the spin-off lowlights of Guantanamo prison, rendition programmes and a deterioration of our rights to privacy under the mantle of “homeland security”, there was a craving for change that went further than the normal Democrats – Republicans divide.  

The Republican Party offered the American people its dream ticket: a perhaps not senile but aging and self centred McCain and their very own version of a dumb blonde who was not even blond, Sarah Palin. Almost half of America voted for the Republican couple (46%). Obama came in at a disappointingly low margin.

Naively – it turns out - many expected that a black President would make a difference, especially in areas of human rights. It turns out that a black President is just that, a President who happens to be black. Obama promised to close Guantanamo and has not done so. Obama has allowed his military to torture a US soldier, awaiting trial for leaking secret documents to the wikileaks network. They held him in solitary confinement for months on end, forced him to sleep naked on sheetless beds, made to stand for parade in the nude. By not stopping this abuse, Obama condoned it. And then, there is the mass theft of our personal communications by the NSA.

This may be the one important legacy of Obama: an understanding that blacks are like everybody else.

Secret Porn

There is nothing like porn to wake one up and in this case to get me to blog again. Two seemingly unconnected items recently appeared in the press:

·      *   The British electronic eavesdropping station, GCHQ (the United States NSA’s little sister) not only listens to all our phones, reads our faxes, emails and even sms messages but also – in a programme aptly names Mastering the Internet - follows the whole world’s internet traffic. They know what sites we visit, what we use search engines for etc. Moreover, GCHQ sucks in and holds on to the material for 30 days, to give them time to analyse the material.

·      *   30 per cent of all data transferred across the Internet is porn.

If you consider both items in conjunction with each other, what you get is that a secret British government’s department has built gigantic super computers to enable it to store vast amounts of pornographic material. It may also mean that they have hundreds of [happy or probably frustrated] government analysts whose sole remit it is to watch porn.