Gary Glitter jailed 4 months for downloaded photos
Downloaded Damnation
was reported to be "child pornography" on his PC. He received a
sentence of four months in jail, and will now be entered on the sex
offenders register for the next seven years.
Glitter (real name Paul Gadd) had taken his computer to PC World for
repair, and a shop assistant, upon discovering the offending images,
reported him to the police.
There is no suggestion that Glitter himself took the photos. The media
would like to suggest that Glitter himself was involved in the
production of pornographic images and child abuse, but he was cleared
of all charges of sexual abuse relating to an under-age girl.
Furthermore, it must be remembered that British obscenity law does not
distinguish between genuine photos of sexual acts, and those created,
for instance, by photo-montage. For example, running Photoshop and
superimposing the head of a baby atop the nude body of Pamela Andersson
would in all likelihood be classified as "child pornography" under
British law, as would a perfectly innocent picture of a small child to
which had been digitally added the markings of sexual abuse etc.
This dangerous confusion between an act and the image of that act was
at the heart of the moral case against Glitter. The terms of
discussion blurred this crucial distinction, suggesting that possessing
a photo of a sexual act is equivalent to performing it.
The judge in his sentencing commented: "This is not victimless crime
... the victims are the little children whose images you wish to view.
The potentially corrupting effect of such filthy and revolting material
on those who view it is obvious." But who is harmed by _looking_ at a
photograph? And if Glitter himself risks "corruption" by such photos,
then as an adult, isn't he old enough to decide for himself what the
risks are?
In a similar voodoo-like vein, a spokesman for the NSPCC said: "The
judge may well have had his reasons for imposing this sentence, but it
sounds very light for such a reprehensible crime. It sends out the
wrong message ... We must never forget that these horrific images are
real children who have suffered terrible abuse at the hands of
dangerous paedophiles. And child pornography on the Internet repeats
the abuse, because the children concerned know that the images will be
broadcast again and again."
Comments?
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Workers Militia
WORKER'S MILITIA ISSUE#1
British Imperialists: HANDS OFF GARY GLITTER!
British Neo-Stalinists have once again proven their bureracratic
treachery and political banditry through unjust arrest of GARY
GLITTER. The arrest of Glitter is nothing but a scare campaign to help
keep the masses in line. Tony Blair and his gang of Neo-Stalinists are
creating a moral panic and sexual repression to strengthen the hand of
the blood-soaked capitalist class against the toiling millions of
Great Britain.
We say: Free All Poitical Prisoners! Free Gary GLitter! Smash the
Capitalist State and its Neo-Stalinist Defenders! For Sexual
Freedom!
Geoff Collier
American imperialist plot as Pinochet, in which Clinton and the CIA use
crimes against humanity as a means to extend their global domination. After
all, 1973 was made worse by both of them.
Sorry
Workers Militia <r...@uniserve.com> wrote in message
news:3831cf58...@news.uniserve.com...
uchural
<Ge...@balcony17.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
What about the possibility that Gary Glitter is a victim of the same
American imperialist plot as Pinochet, in which Clinton and the CIA use
crimes against humanity as a means to extend their global domination. After
all, 1973 was made worse by both of them.
Sorry
Perhaps because Dragon abused the English Language? His last post:
"Indeed. Political and Economic Domination are the goals; Moral
superiority is simply a method to justifying it." Any idea what this
means? Come on apst, help me out here. We have a mystery. Dragon
was born in 1973. It must be his fault. This is a chance to figure it
all out, and set things right on apst.
uchural
Chris Parslow
Geoff Collier wrote in message <80sllo$n2e$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>...
>What about the possibility that Gary Glitter is a victim of the same
>American imperialist plot as Pinochet, in which Clinton and the CIA use
>crimes against humanity as a means to extend their global domination. After
>all, 1973 was made worse by both of them.
>
>Sorry
As well you should be!
Still, you're right.
CP
Denzil Morgan
(Workers Militia) wrote:
> We say: Free All Poitical Prisoners! Free Gary GLitter! Smash the
> Capitalist State and its Neo-Stalinist Defenders! For Sexual
> Freedom!
Yes, we're all laughing, but the last laugh is on you. The article on
Glitter aims to highlight the enormous dangers facing free speech on
the Internet and in society more broadly. If there is one thing which
demonstrates beyond any possible doubt the dogmatic irrelevance of
so-called "Trotskyism", and the demoralised and defeated character of
its supporters in APST, it is that the r-r-revolutionaries here ARE NOT
EVEN PREPARED TO DEFEND THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH WITHIN THE MEDIUM THEY
USE FOR THEIR OWN DISCUSSIONS. It's difficult to imagine a more
damning indictment of "Marxism" in 1999, although I intend to stick
around for a while in the full expectation that someone here, probably
Kaufman or Proyect, will better it.
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
mebe...@hotmail.com
uchural <ap...@chik.commie> wrote:
> In article <80sllo$n2e$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>, "Geoff Collier"
> <Ge...@balcony17.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> American imperialist plot as Pinochet, in which Clinton and the CIA
use
> crimes against humanity as a means to extend their global domination.
After
> all, 1973 was made worse by both of them.
>
> Sorry
>
>
the SWP leading 'reformist' politician?
Or are we to assume because the bourgeois state is chasing Pinochet we
have a 'left' and right face? One which is democratic and wants to put
butchers in jail and one that doesn't?
Half the planet has gone through in the 1980-90's so called UN Truth
Commissions which have whitewashed all the leading players from Central
America, to Latin America to Africa. These same gansters arae running
the international capitalist system now. Collier would have us believe
the opposite in his campaign for the 'democratic' face of imperialism.
Easier to see pigs fly.
Meberry68
Class Justice as Opposed to Imperialist 'Justice' (Dictatorship)
ln...@panix.com
release of PeeWee Herman after he was arrested for masturbating in a
men's video arcade.
>USE FOR THEIR OWN DISCUSSIONS. It's difficult to imagine a more
>damning indictment of "Marxism" in 1999, although I intend to stick
>around for a while in the full expectation that someone here, probably
>Kaufman or Proyect, will better it.
--Louis Proyect
(For Marxist discussion: www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
Denzil Morgan
>
> But who ever said Pinochet isn't in on the act right now? Tory
> Blair - the SWP leading 'reformist' politician?
> Or are we to assume because the bourgeois state is chasing
> Pinochet we have a 'left' and right face? One which is democratic and
> wants to put butchers in jail and one that doesn't?
> Half the planet has gone through in the 1980-90's so called UN
> Truth Commissions which have whitewashed all the leading players from
> Central America, to Latin America to Africa. These same gansters arae
> running the international capitalist system now. Collier would have
> us believe the opposite in his campaign for the 'democratic' face of
> imperialism.
> Easier to see pigs fly.
> Meberry68
> Class Justice as Opposed to Imperialist 'Justice' (Dictatorship)
Mr Meberry68, it's a shame that we can't see eye-to-eye on the subject
of immigration. You stand head and shoulders above most of the
so-called "Marxists" in APST, who simply haven't got the first clue
about the doctrine, let alone the ability to apply it to the problems
of the present.
Denzil Morgan
>
> Now wait just one minute. I circulated a petition for the immediate
> release of PeeWee Herman after he was arrested for masturbating in
> a men's video arcade.
> >It's difficult to imagine a more
> >damning indictment of "Marxism" in 1999, although I intend to
> >stick around for a while in the full expectation that someone here,
> >probably Kaufman or Proyect, will better it.
Well, that turned up even quicker than I expected. Well done to Tankie
Proyect for crowing over another victim of Britain's notorious
censorship laws.
mebe...@hotmail.com
Denzil Morgan <denzil...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> In article <80ut3i$7p9$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, mebe...@hotmail.com wrote:
> >
> > But who ever said Pinochet isn't in on the act right now? Tory
> > Blair - the SWP leading 'reformist' politician?
> > Or are we to assume because the bourgeois state is chasing
> > Pinochet we have a 'left' and right face? One which is democratic
and
> > wants to put butchers in jail and one that doesn't?
> > Half the planet has gone through in the 1980-90's so called UN
> > Truth Commissions which have whitewashed all the leading players
from
> > Central America, to Latin America to Africa. These same gansters
arae
> > running the international capitalist system now. Collier would have
> > us believe the opposite in his campaign for the 'democratic' face of
> > imperialism.
> > Easier to see pigs fly.
> > Meberry68
> > Class Justice as Opposed to Imperialist 'Justice' (Dictatorship)
>
> Mr Meberry68, it's a shame that we can't see eye-to-eye on the subject
> of immigration. You stand head and shoulders above most of the
> so-called "Marxists" in APST, who simply haven't got the first clue
> about the doctrine, let alone the ability to apply it to the problems
> of the present.
>
on your politics.
Just to add my ideas on immigration aren't what the majority on apst
make them out to be. I consider it now a commodity which imperialism
uses to attack the working class in most continents. Just as capital
has been liberated from all controls, so have state entities in terms
of commodities, so the last thing remaining is labour.
A longer article will appear shortly on the issue.
meberry68
Stephen R. Diamond
> > Mr Meberry68, it's a shame that we can't see eye-to-eye on the subject
> > of immigration. You stand head and shoulders above most of the
> > so-called "Marxists" in APST, who simply haven't got the first clue
> > about the doctrine, let alone the ability to apply it to the problems
> > of the present.
> >
> I don't think I have come across you before so I can't really commnet
> on your politics.
You have come across him, but he changes his name constantly. He's an LM
supporter.
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
(Workers Militia) wrote:
> First draw up a simplistic formula and then apply it to
> everything you think it might be relevant to. There is a point to
> 'moral panics', 'human rights imperialism', the 'culture of fear' and
> there is certainly nothing liberatory about feudalism. However, these
> concepts may only apply to certain specific situations and do not
> carry the explanatory weight assigned to them.
Yet they call the most elementary generalizations across time improperly
ahistorical. One might say they are temperophobic but spatiophilic. They
refuse (or think they refuse) to generalize across historical epocts. An
example of this refusal is their unwillingness even to consent to the
existence of classes in all historical societies. Within the present time
period, they generalize like madmen from one situation to another.
Marxists often say the truth is concrete. This aphorism often seems to
have no serious meaning, It only rejects a particular generalization. The
aphorism serves to avoid giving reasons as part of the rejection.
I think "the truth is concrete" means that one avoids prejudging the
explanatory principles one employs. One constructs those explanatory
principes anew for each case. So what then is the role of theory? It
provides the materials out of which the explanation is constructed. One
can use the available freely, but one cannot use materials not available
within the theory.
The materials available to a Marxist are entirely transhistorical.
Materialism is historical when applied to society because the dialectical
method comprehends society in its development. There are no social laws,
as the sociologists would like to think. There are only the laws of
historical development--the forms of CLASS society that must be passed
through, IN ORDER. This lawfulness exists because at different levels of
technical development, different forms of social organization become
predominant on acount of their efficiency. (The business of the Bolsheviks
"skipping" the capitalist stage assumed that not only economic development
required a capitalist stage --which obviously had already occurred in
Russia--but that political forms must exhibit the same pattern.)
So, LM rejects the essential material for Marxist theory construction, but
then embraces (wildly) a set of super-sociological generalzations. These
pseudo-generalizations have nothing that all to do with Marxism.
Stephen R. Diamond
Workers Militia
<denzil...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Yes, we're all laughing, but the last laugh is on you.
u miss the point. The barbs are not meant to make light of Glitter's
or anyone else's situation but to highlight the methodology of LM and
other sects. First draw up a simplistic formula and then apply it to
everything you think it might be relevant to. There is a point to
'moral panics', 'human rights imperialism', the 'culture of fear' and
there is certainly nothing liberatory about feudalism. However, these
concepts may only apply to certain specific situations and do not
carry the explanatory weight assigned to them. For example, the idea
that giving the NObel prize to R.Menchu was a UN conspiracy to subvert
Guatemalan sovereignty under the guise of human rights 'human rights
imperialism.) What is the evidence? When was Guatemala ever sovereign?
When was it not a cow to be milked and controlled by US imperialism?
The article on
>Glitter aims to highlight the enormous dangers facing free speech on
>the Internet and in society more broadly.
Sure. I'm close to an absolutist about free speech [noone is an
absolutist about free speech.]
I reallyhate Tony Blair, whathe stands for and don't think the state
should enforce morality. BUt applying simplistic formulas to
everything has got to go. It violates a basic tenet of rational
inquiry namely TO THINK FOR YOURSELF.
SAM PAWLETT
Jellyhead
> <denzil...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Yes, we're all laughing, but the last laugh is on you.
>
> u miss the point. The barbs are not meant to make light of Glitter's
> or anyone else's situation but to highlight the methodology of LM and
> other sects. First draw up a simplistic formula and then apply it to
> everything you think it might be relevant to.
Spare me your "methodological" digressions which, as usual, are not
backed up by any quotes or analysis, but are simply asserted in the
banal manner of all dogmatics. All that is required to take the debate
further is for you to give your analysis of the case and its broad
political background.
Jellyhead
38ldmnm.dialup.mindspring.com>,
steph...@mindspring.com (Stephen R. Diamond) wrote:
>
> I think "the truth is concrete" means that one avoids prejudging the
> explanatory principles one employs. One constructs those explanatory
> principes anew for each case. So what then is the role of theory? It
> provides the materials out of which the explanation is constructed.
> One can use the available freely, but one cannot use materials not
> available within the theory.
A fine example of Diamond's gobbledegook which ultimately boils down to
the banal idea that an explanation for something is constructed from
theories that relate to it and not from theories which don't relate to
it. How profound!
In fact, the idea that "truth is always concrete" is a key
methodological aspect of the dialectic method. In his analysis of
capitalism, Marx makes various simplifying assumptions (eg. society
only contains workers and capitalists, commodities exchange at their
values, there are no non-capitalist societies) in order to arrive at a
basic understanding of the laws of capitalist development. His
conclusions have only a _provisional_ character and at each successive
stage of the analysis, the abstract concepts developed in the previous
stage are reconsidered, reworked and made more concrete by considering
the effects of reintroducing what he had previously abstracted from for
the purposes of simplification and analytical clarity.
For example, Marx arrives at the law of the falling rate of profit by a
consideration of the features of capitalist production in general. But
in reality, capital exists in the form of many competing individual
capitals. As his analysis moves on to appropriate this next, more
concrete stage, he reworks his conclusions and arrives at the various
counteracting factors to the falling rate of profit. This leads him to
revise his original, provisional conclusion and identify the falling
rate of profit as a _tendency_.
Thus, Marx's theory moves through a succession of less and less
abstract stages, building up a concrete theory that grasps reality
itself as it unfolds, in all its multiplicity of forms and
contradictions. It is in this sense that "the truth is always
concrete". (See E.V. Ilyenkov's "The Dialectics of the Abstract and the
Concrete in Marx's 'Capital'", Moscow 1961)
Over to you, Diamond.
mebe...@hotmail.com
<stephend15-18...@user-38ldile.dialup.mindspring.com>,
Living marxism = changing name?
Meberry68
Stephen R. Diamond
> I thought they had liquidated their group? Why the name change?
> Living marxism = changing name?
I don't really know for certain why Justin Flude, the poster, changes his
name, but I think you are asking about why LM has changed its name.
It started out as the Revolutionary Communist Party, but having decided
that there was no longer any class struggle (that is *really* their
position!) they liquidated into the journal Living Marxism, with the
avowed purpose of applying Marxist methodology to a cultural environment
that had little in common with Marx's day: one in which the "culture of
fear" is the demon, there is not only no class struggle, but right versus
left is totally beside the point.
Then, they recently decided to forego the term Marxism in the journal's
title, and to adhere to the fashionable practice of calling it only a set
of letters. "LM" does not mean Living Marxism. As Tarski would have said,
"LM" means LM, and that's all that can be said. Marxism in the title,
despite its absence inside the covers, must have proven too embarrassing
in the middle and upper class circles in which they now exclusively move.
Stephen R. Diamond
rabhegmarlen
news:813d3m$fus$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <stephend15-1811992351530001@user-
> 38ldmnm.dialup.mindspring.com>,
Not bad for a LM supporter. One correction. If you read volume three of
*Capital* you will see that Marx actually calls it: "The Law of the Tendency
of the Rate of Profit to Fall". He goes on to explain about the
contradictions in this law and says that the mass of profit may still rise
whilst its rate is falling. It is this tendency that is the driving force
of imperialism, as capitalists seek a greater return on their investments
overseas where the organic composition of capital is lower. In the present
crisis of capitalism it is the driving force for recolonisation both for
cheaper labour and cheap sources of raw materials. And you were the one
that denied any economic motive behind the imperialist onslaught on
Yugoslavia instead talking about *moral superiority* and all that crap.
rab
--
Roger Blackwell, Norwich, NR3, Britain
Pager: +44 (0) 1523 187644
www.blackwell23.freeserve.co.uk
Stephen R. Diamond
<rog...@blackwell23.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> One correction. If you read volume three of
> *Capital* you will see that Marx actually calls it: "The Law of the Tendency
> of the Rate of Profit to Fall". He goes on to explain about the
> contradictions in this law and says that the mass of profit may still rise
> whilst its rate is falling.
More than one correction is required. In fact, in so far as the truth IS
concrete, Flude's whole reply must be scuttled, because in this context it
is a denial, a falsehood. Flude doesn't give an account of how the truth
is concrete, but of Marx's method as used to discover the truth, given its
concrete nature.
LM ignores the key fact that not only must explanatory principles be
selected with reference to the actual phenomenon,* but also that those
principles must come out of the underlying theory-be constructed from that
theory. Thus Flude ignored the second requirement--his copybook didn't
contain it.
Flude changes the subject, mindlessly repeating his usual copybook stuff,
without realizing that the caveats about truth cut against LM. LM ignores
the requirement that theories be constructed in the light of the
phenomena, since, as Sam pointed out, LM just trots out its same
simplistic explanations (culture of fear, etc.) regardless of the
phenomenon, AND it ignores the requirement that the principles be
constructed from the underlying theory--the "culture of fear" is a purely
ad hoc construction.
And come on--EVERYONE knows about Marx's method of successive
approximations in Capital.
Stephen R. Diamond
*My point wasn't what he construes. It isn't that theories must relate to
the phenomenon to be explained, but that "cross-spatial" (or synchronic,
to use the traditional term) generalization is doomed in historical
science. The theory that actually explains must be reconstructed anew.
This is an entirely different point than the stupid point Flude attributes
to me. The question isn't whether or not the theory relates to the
phenomenon (a tautology), but what kind of theories do explain phenomena.
The answer is, in historical science, they are composed of historical
(diechronic) principles, not "spatial" (synchronic) generalization, such
as "culture of fear." That's because history is a history of development.
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
> So they split?
No, merely "evolved."
Stephen R. Diamond
mebe...@hotmail.com
I met them in London during the Bosnian conflict whey they published in
English photos regarding the war and stood out alone amongst the
British left against the so-called 'genocide' crimes of Serbs.
But they used to meet in posh London hotels and there audience was
advertising or estate agent types with a couple of professor looking
types thrown in.
They made a big fuss that a chain store sold their magazine Living
Marxism and then they dissapeared...
So they split?