Harry's Place

These are the last days of the regime:

Opposition websites said that demonstrators broke through cordons, blocked streets to thwart squads of baton-wielding motorbike police, hurled stones, stripped captured police officers of their uniforms and weapons, and burnt state-owned banks. Mobile telephone footage showed them holding aloft captured Basiji crash helmets as onlookers cheered. “People no [...]

Neel Mukherjee comes to the conclusion that no rational arguments can be made for eating meat:
It slowly dawned on me that there were no rational, intellectual or moral arguments to be made for carnivorousness.
However, he has come to a problem:
yet all of this is kinked by the fact that changing my mind hasn’t led to [...]

At Socialist Unity, Andy Newman writes in a recent post (in which he kindly links to one of my posts):
Well it is a quiet time of year.
Oh, I don’t know about that.

Not a word yet on the latest events in Iran from Socialist Unity, Lenin’s Tomb or even the snazzy new Socialist Workers Party [...]

This is a cross-post from Abu Faris of The Spittoon
About 15 million Christians continue to live in the Middle East, the biggest non-Muslim minority left in the Muslim-majority countries of the region. Yet every year, more and more leave their homelands for overseas; pressurised into flight by systematic economic and social discrimination on the basis [...]

Two posts from Potkin
1. Ashura in Iran So Far
AP has confirmed at least three people have been killed so far in Tehran. One of the dead is reported to have been a young girl shot in the back by the Baseej. Pro-regime lackey Ghanbar Naderi – he was fiercely pro-Khatami before – appeared on Aljazeera [...]

This Summer, the British Government acted swiftly to prevent an American neo Nazi, Preston Wiginton, from entering the United Kingdom where he was due to speak at the British National Party’s ‘Red White and Blue‘ festival:
An American white supremacist has been stopped from entering Britain to attend a British National party festival this weekend.
Preston Wiginton [...]

This is a guest post by Yeze
In Saudi Arabia, the religious police or mutaween enforce modesty and “appropriate” public behaviour. Under the direct command of King Abdullah, the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice ensures that unrelated men and women do not mix publicly, Islamic dress and dietary laws are enforced, non-Muslim [...]

At The New Republic, Jason Zengerle writes about how rightwing themes and messages have come to dominate the political thriller genre in the US.

When Vince Flynn recently finished writing his eleventh novel, Pursuit of Honor, he sent an advance copy to Rush Limbaugh, along with some special reading instructions. Upon arriving at Chapter 50, [...]

This is a crosspost by Shiraz Maher from Standpoint

Peter Neumann from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College, provides some instant analysis of the attempted bombing of a Delta Airlines flight travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit. He’s got all the main bases covered, so I’ll only provide some footnotes to [...]

So says one of his mates.