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Divorce Politics

Labour's Church

It’s not the interdiction is it? The PLis currently spinning the idea that the party is pro-divorce. I have no time for people who will vote NO to divorce just to spite Joseph Muscat’s spin. That’s stupid. However there is much to be said about this excessive opportunism by Labour and its leader – particularly after the insulting assertion that he is taking Malta into Europe.

J’accuse said it time and time again. Labour has abdicated from its responsibility as a progressive, modernist party. It has failed on all counts the moment it decided that any vote on divorce is not one for it to contemplate as a party. The “frijvowt” granted by Joseph to his parliamentarians is the proof of this abdication.

Labour has no position on divorce. Insofar as the vote on divorce is concerned Labour is as close to the Catholic Church’s position as it can get : it’s a question of conscience. This makes claims of a “new interdiction” as revived on the social media doubly ridiculous.

Here is Labour MP Adrian Vassallo in a letter to the Times:

It is being argued that MPs are in duty bound “to respect the will of the people who elected them”, and that “they were elected by the majority and, therefore, they should respect the will of the same majority”.

In the specific case of the divorce issue, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando et al had no mandate to propose divorce legislation. Much less is he (or the Iva movement for that matter) qualified to pontificate on the moral obligation of MPs when they come to vote on an issue of conscience.

As far as I am concerned, I made it amply clear that I am determined to navigate by my own star in matters of conscience.

I have no hesitation in publicly affirming my intention to be loyal to my conscience and steadfast to my principles.

I am comforted by the added knowledge that, ever since I was elected to Parliament, I have had no mandate to tamper with the Maltese social structure by means of divorce legislation. Moreover, all Labour MPs have a “free vote” on this sensitive issue.

There you have it. It’s a sensitive issue so Labour has skirted it. It has given MPs like Adrian Vassallo the comfort to vote with their conscience and in doing so has abdicated on its duty as the only party in Malta that claims to be progressive. Just think of it: if PL was capable of carrying the vote on the simple issue of the referendum question then it basically has the key to a majority vote on the bill: all it needs to do is find a pair of balls big enough to take a position as a party.

Taking us into Europe? What bullshit Joseph.

Image taken from poster for “L-Interdett taht is-Sodda”

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Mediawatch Rubriques

I.M. Jack – the déménagement issue

Boxes are being packed and labeled. Furniture is being sold at bargain prices and frantic contacts are being made with various moving companies as D-day approaches. J’accuse is moving base and leaving the city. Come May we will be castellans in the village of Dondelange and you can expect more of the current hiccuped manner of posting on the blog. Meanwhile here are a few things I’ve been meaning to post about and had no time to.

1. Rules of referendum

Our pet storyline is making the headlines. Raphael Vassallo explains the implications of the PLPN drafted rules on the next refered. In the article “Divorce: Law assumes referendum will be held along party lines” Raphael points out the rules of the game and how they seem to be written almost exclusively with two parties in mind. Well there you have it. Further proof that the PLPN Dumbing Down theory is not simply a theory. We now have a ridiculous situation where a party that has no position on divorce (PL) and another that has a position but will not do anything about it lest it loses precious votes (PN) are the only two who can participate in the administrative aspect of the referendum. No amount of public formations f Pro- and Con- entities will change the law. Funny? Not really. This is what we mean when we say that electoral rules are written solely with the intention of preserving and reinforcing the bipartisan status quo.

 

2. Flights of Fancy

In the same vein let it be registered that J’accuse’s position on the expat vote in the referendum is consistent with previous positions. We firmly believe that in the 21st century expats should be given the opportunity to vote either by overseas ballot or via post – especially when it comes to a vote in a consultative referendum. J’accuse never agreed with the PLPN farce of sponsored flights – and still does not agree with the principle. We doubt whether any sponsored tax-free flights will be offered in this hour of Air Malta need (although they would actually serve as a hidden form of subsidy for the airline) but should they be offered we will use them until the day the possibility of voting from abroad is offered.

3. Referendum and Church Points

The campaign proceeds with inputs from all sides. The consultative referendum is turning into making a point and just that. So yes, vote if you have to and vote in favour of the introduction of divorce. It will be sad to see Joseph Muscat and Labour acting as though they carried the vote themselves – they did not and they are not helping. Worse still those idiots and nincompoops writing away on facebook as though Labour is facing a new interdiction better wake up and smell the coffee – their party is just as cowardly yellow as most of the no to divorce factoid inventing freaks. If ever divorce is introduced in Malta it will be DESPITE LABOUR, DESPITE PN and DESPITE CATHOLIC proselytisation.

4. Giletti… the worst that RAI can get

The Maltese world is in uproar because a third rate “journalist” on RAI TV dared allege that the Maltese shoot on immigrants and that is why they choose Lampedusa. I tend to see the reaction as overblown and for a while I would also go far as to say that an Ambassador phoning in to correct would be a step too far. Then I think of the Mexican Ambassador officially complaining to the BBC “over “offensive, xenophobic and humiliating” comments made about his country on Top Gear.” It’s not a matter of colonial mentality as other “journalists” might put it. I do believe that an official protest is in place – it’s the rabid reaction by the internet posse that really was over the top. The colonial mentality – or rather the PLPN educated reaction is one of violent tirades of personal retribution on anything that smacks of RAI and Giletti. In a nation of people brought up and stunned into an aggressive-other mentality there was little more to be expected. The reaction, though originally justified, tends to obviate any response after a while. And anyway… does Giletti know that our army are too busy daring each other to chew on poisonous beetles?

5. Libya

It’s not that I wanted to relegate the topic but as the UN sanctioned intervention continues there are a number of pressing questions that cannot be ignored. As I read today of the developments in Sirte I couldn’t help but notice that we have moved very, very far from the protection of civilians. At which point did the advance of the rebels become covered by the UN sanctions? I have no shadow of doubt that (a) Ghaddafi has to go and (b) that the dawn of a new, free Libya is ultimately desirable. What I do worry about is the legal somersaults that will be required to differentiate any intervention that is occuring henceforth from the need to intervene in other nations such as Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and who knows…. China. It’s not a war – there is no casus belli. It’s not a UN Sanctioned rebellion (they made pretty sure of that). Then why are missiles thundering over Sirte and getting closer to Tripoli?

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Articles

Talk is Cheap

It’s Saturday morning in Luxembourg City and I’m readying for another session of keyboard bashing. The ritual includes the thick espresso lungo and a quick read through of the grapevine to see whether I’ve missed any last minute oddities coming from the island. Sure enough, even though it’s barely nine of the clock, some eager beavers (dare I add card carrying progressives?) are busy on Facebook quoting the latest news item that reads: “Air Malta CEO to get €500 package”. Suddenly the coffee tastes sour.

You could see it coming. I scarcely needed to refer to the actual news item to confirm my most basic of hunches but I did anyway out of some masochistic impulse and there it was − buried among the lines of the report: “Sources said Mr. Davies was the cheapest of three short-listed contenders for the post. The most expensive asked for a package exceeding €1.1 million.” The report went on to explain that the choice for Davies only came when the government failed to obtain the services of their first choice − a former consultant with Easy Jet. Instead we get the bargain: Mr Davies. Or at least the poor (it’s an expression) man will now forever be seen as such.

A grand don’t come for free

This is the result of government pre-empting the Opposition by attempting to adjust to the Opposition’s (very misguided) standards of expectation. J’accuse has analysed this fixation about salaries before − remember the “Who Gets Paid More than the President” saga? It’s bad enough that we have an Opposition that will hammer on about paying foreigners and paying them too much − half a million euros per year? Now we also have the government (or a source) leaking the fact that our money is being spent on bargains in a move that is very evidently there to appease the Opposition’s ridiculous stand.

It’s what you get for dealing with stupid − or as Forrest famously said: “Stupid is what stupid does”. We’ll hear all about the “downsizing” of Air Malta and how Mintoff had created a winner that is now being dismantled piece by piece by the spendthrift Nationalists to the detriment of the worker. We’ll hear how the “penny wise pound foolish” approach translates to being harsh with the haddiema and generous with the elite. Labour has always been great at grinding out this kind of animosity − being the progressive, modernist, European party that it is.

We now have to deal with the added ignominy of a government that is beginning to show signs of thinking in Labour’s terms. Hey, we know we need to reform the airline, we know we need compete in a dog eat dog world but hey, we got a bargain! Well, while I’d like to wish Mr Davies the best of luck with his new endeavour, I’d hate to be in his shoes what with the kind of confidence his new employers seem to have in him. Thank you very much Labour. Thank you very much PN.

Free is free

What we have called dumbing down for a very long time is also due to the culture of the “cheap”. It’s all pervasive and it is not just limited to monetary terms. In education we have witnessed the gradual dilution of university and other degrees − what Mintoff couldn’t do, public perception and a watering down of standards is achieving very quickly.

In politics we are already scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have no party that is willing to stand by a set of values or principles. There is only one constant: the vote. The ugly counterpart to that constant is the cheap appeasement of the man in the street who hangs on to the edge of one network or another in the hope that the crumbs that fall off the table might satiate his needs for the week.

And to get the crumbs we play our part: ‘Labourites’ will take the cue and grumble and obsess on salaries for the “blue-eyed”, ‘Nationalists’ will reopen the history books and flutter around in the mess they helped create. All the while, the nation is all the worse off as it cheapens itself thanks to this political prostitution. Yes, expression and most other freedoms are free. That does not mean that they have to be cheap. Unfortunately, there is no longer any benchmark bar the electoral guillotine − and that too has proved to be easily malleable.

bert4j_110327

Pleistocene and plasticine

We have no exacting standards. We have no aspirations, either as a nation or as individuals, other than the rat race as scripted by the behemoths: the two dinosaurs of our political firmament. There is no sphere − commercial, educational, social or any other that you can think of − that has avoided the dumbing down. Land of opportunity? Hell no. In this land we are busy holding each other back.

Well, so long as it is cheap and affordable, who are we to complain?

www.akkuza.com − clicks are free

This article and accompanying Bertoon appeared in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.

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Jasmine

September 1940

Another from Orwell. This time it’s his diary recording a battle in the skies between the Luftwaffe and the RAF in the middle of the Battle of Britain. The battle was fought in the skies and a few people could witness first hand the dog fights between opposing air forces. Orwell’s record on the 15th September 1940 could very well have been a thought recorded in a Benghazi diary in March 2011 when the fighter jet burst into flames and fell over the city:

It fell slowly out of the clouds, nose foremost, just like a snipe that has been shot high overhead. Terrific jubilation among the people watching, punctuated every now and then by the question, ‘Are you sure it’s a German?

Chilling.

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Arts Mediawatch

Orwell's Newspeak

Here’s an extract from an essay by George Orwell that appeared in Horizon in the April 1946 edition. The essay entitled “Politics and English Language” may be found in its entirety on this page. Now to the extract:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called PACIFICATION. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called TRANSFER OF POPULATION or RECTIFICATION OF FRONTIERS. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called ELIMINATION OF UNRELIABLE ELEMENTS. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of dictatorship.

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Mediawatch

J'accuse Shortlisted for Journalism Award

You may have read by now that the J’accuse column on the Malta Independent on Sunday has been shortlisted for the “Opinion Article” section of the Malta Journalism Awards organised by the Institute of Maltese Journalists.  J’accuse has often been critical of the awards themselves – especially since we could never fathom a system that requires in which you nominate yourself for the prize.

Nothing has changed since then and we do believe that one reason the nominations are not “altruistic” so to speak is the fish-pondism that curiously (and understandably) is part of journalistic culture in Malta. It’s not like we’re falling over ourselves to say how good “the others” are is it? Anyways – so why are J’accuse’s articles on the nominations list and how did they end up being shortlisted?

We have Alex Vella Gera to thank (he does not know yet). Around the time the nominations were opened AVG was supposed to get a literary prize of sorts. Alex refused to pick up the prize in protest at the obscenity case that was still open at the time – if I get this right, Alex would not receive a prize from a government that still tolerated such laws. I am sure Alex will correct me if I am wrong – he did and here is his full explanation:

I didn’t attend the awards ceremony for this reason alone: because it was held under the auspices of the prime minister, leader of the political party which runs NET TV, and which accused me and Mark Camilleri of paedophaelia (a pretty serious accusation, especially when unfounded, in this day and age). My not attending was not a non-acceptance of the prize (I need the money badly) and neither a protest against being hauled to court. I bear no grudges about that. I hope that’s clear now, although I suspect I’ll be called to correct misconceptions and inaccuracies once again soon enough. – AVG

Some people, commenting on the AVG business, said it was ironic that he was being awarded a prize when his work was being “censored” by the police and when he was actually still an accused in court. Sweet. Only Alex was not awarded the prize for “Li Tkisser Sewwi” so it was a little less ironic.

Back to us. We liked the idea of prizes for misfits. So we nominated three articles from J’accuse. The articles in question all deal with the state of journalism in Malta – something that J’accuse has taken much to heart believe or not. We did not really think we’d get very far to be honest so Kudos for the shortlisting. As an addendum we would like to add that we would have liked to nominate some blog posts for the category of e-journalism but our questions regarding the procedure for an electronic (unsigned) application remained unanswered.
Here are the shortlisted articles:

1. The Day Journalism Died (28th February 2010)

In which it is argued that Malta’s foremost programme (winner of the Best Current Affairs Programme in the Malta TV Awards) that boasts that it sets standards in investigative journalism has abdicated its responsibility. The article questions whether the ethical standards that should be upheld by investigative journalists have not been lost using the Bondi+ programme about blogging as an example.

2. A Nation Divorced from Reality (11th July 2010)

In which both censorship and divorce are examined in the light of current developments and attitudes and in which J’accuse returns to the running theme that no matter what the medium for discussion is or what the current theme is, the Maltese have difficulties reconciling themselves with the image in the mirror.

3. The Power and the Glory (28th November 2010)

In which the relationship between power and exposure/popularity is examined. J’accuse analyses the concept of “fish-pondism” or the refusal to acknowledge other sources/opinion within the journalistic/opinion column community. Is Maltese media prepared to engage with the New Media or will “fish-pondism” prevail?

It’s not really about “winning” the prize – we’d actually be surprised if we got much further than this (incidentally congrats and good luck to fellow shortlisted entries Claire Bonello and Kristina Chetcuti). It’s more about making the point in the community that should be listening.

Incidentally the Maltese blogging community is getting a shake up (and is very much alive and kicking) over on facebook thanks to Davinia Hamilton’s new page. Here’s to hoping that a new phase of cross-referencing discussion will open: still trying to find a way to create a common blogroll for Maltese blogs.

 

 

 

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