Civilisation resumes slow crumblification

It’s certainly not a laughing matter, but you’ve gotta laugh, otherwise you can only weep at the very proposition: Iran has been elected unopposed to a seat on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

That’s the same Iran which sanctions the stonings, lashings and hangings of women for so-called lapses of ‘modesty’ and ‘morals’.

No gesture of disapproval came during an acclamation vote affirming the Islamic nation's appointment to the 45-nation group... Iran was one of only two nations that put forward candidates to fill two empty seats for the Asian bloc for the 2011-2015 period during a round of “elections” in which no real votes were cast. The other nation was Thailand.

Thus, the expression I used above — ‘elected unopposed’ — should be regarded with significant qualification. Indeed, taking a wider view, Iran’s ‘procedural’ success is not a matter of such earth-shattering urgency as accorded by the UN’s usual detractors, since “Iran has served on the [CSW] for successive terms since 1990.” And among the current CSW membership are countries such as Eritrea, another serial offender against women’s rights.

The US state department takes a (shall we say) philosophical, longer-term view of the problem. The Islamic Republic’s seat on the CSW is “something of a booby prize for Iran,” following the US’s successful lobbying against Iran’s bid for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

The United States worked with a broad range of other countries “to make it clear to Iran" that it was not going to win a seat on the Human Rights Council.”

“We're not going to stand up and cheer [at Iran’s CSW membership],” [an anonymous high-ranking official] said. “By the same token, that is less onerous than the Human Rights Council because women in Iran, relative to other countries in the region, actually have greater rights.”

“You don't have women placed in head-to-toe burkas in that country,” the official said. “You have women elected to the legislature in the country... I’m not saying we can take Iran and compare them to the human rights record of any country in the developed world. But in that region, women in Iran have a greater opportunity for education, for business and to participate in politics.”

Well, we might say, that’s okay then ... er ... but why could not the US have “worked with a broad range of other countries” to block Iran from the CSW as well? Because the very idea of a regime such as Iran sitting on a body such as the CSW does strike at one’s sense of the fitness of things.

Australia was an inaugural member in 1947 of the CSW but, with the rest of the Western bloc, seems to have somewhat dropped the ball on defending women’s rights internationally.

Only last month the Attorney-General Robert McLelland launched the Rudd Government’s vaunted Human Rights Framework, which as a ‘key principle’ aims at “enhancing our domestic and international engagement on human rights issues.”

So then, let the international engagement begin, commencing with giving Iran and other serial offenders some curry on their human rights pretensions, including particularly in relation to women’s rights.

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Ancient Warfare Magazine

In any given army the number of men who are at ease with killing and capable of routinely carrying it out is small. The Antigonid phalangites were now locked in a death dance with just such men. Their memories of Paraetacene, where their phalanx had been summarily driven from the field with severe casualties, were alive now in front of them. Working sarisae into the spaces generated by the confusion, the Argyraspids pushed and thrust at the disordered phalanx opposite them and spaces became gaps. As front rank sarisae shattered the double edged sword (xiphos) of the Argyraspids began to find unprotected sides and groins. Gaps turned to breach as, wielding sarisae, butt spikes and swords and “not a man withstanding them”, the Antigonid phalanx was “cut to pieces at close quarters” (Plut. Eum. 16.4) by the Argyraspids. Dry salt dust turned bloody saline mud.

The breach, driven deep into the Antigonid phalanx, was quickly exploited by Eumenes’ native hypaspists and the other phalanx units as they drove in to the left and right, their rearward ranks butt-spiking those underfoot. The Antigonid phalanx, cohesion falling away, could not retreat as their rear ranks, the light infantry still loosing the odd missile from behind them, kept pushing forward. All now was butchery as Antigonid phalangites, desperate to escape, discarded weapons and attempted to flee the carnage. Bodies piled on bodies in the rout as those not spitted by sarisae were eviscerated and hacked apart by swords. As the panic spread rearward and along the line, the Antigonid phalanx was put to incontinent flight. The Argyraspids, regimented in their brutal savagery, pursued. Blood mixed freely with faeces and urine as the salt dust drank.

Go order a copy....

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A (hi)story...

Shameless self promotion... Anceint Warfare Magazine III-2


The dead lay everywhere; the ground onto which they had been driven was a charnel house littered with their corpses. Shattered sarisae, viscera and body parts shared the killing ground with the whole weapons and armour that had been abandoned in the final rout. The foetid odours of blood and bowel fouled the increasingly frigid air as the cries of the dying and the wounded faded with the Persian mid-winter sunset. Litter bearers carried the still living from the blood soaked dust into which they had fallen while carts, the produce of carnage piled high, plied their way to funerary fires as yet unlit. Morale in the camp matched the freezing night air as confusion, tinged with anger at the day's proceedings, spread with the smoke from the campfires. The military prospects were not propitious: the phalanx infantry and, more importantly, its Macedonians were shattered. Any resumption of hostilities on the morrow would prove difficult, if not impossible...

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The Road to Hell . . .

. . . is paved with good intentions:

In November 2007 in Kermanshah [Iran], Makwan Mouloudzadeh, 20, faced the death penalty on false charges of raping several boys seven years before. His accusers retracted their claims. No evidence suggested he had committed any crime under Iranian law.

However, European activists wildly seized on him as another “gay” victim. They organised a mass petition to Ahmadinejad for mercy for “the young Iranian gay”. Their pleas sent an inadvertent message: Makwan was innocent of one capital crime, but Europe believed him guilty of another. On December 5, Makwan Mouloudzadeh, probably neither gay nor a rapist, went to the gallows.

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Brief newslets

Turkish warplanes targeting Kurdish rebels bombed villages deep in northern Iraq today, killing one woman and forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes.

But it’s okay, because it was done “with the implicit approval of US occupying forces in Iraq.”

Hang on — no it’s not okay, because the US didn’t approve it at all. But it would’ve been okay if they had...

And singer and songsmith Dan Fogelberg has died of prostate cancer, aged 56.

Meanwhile another singer and songsmith almost as well-known as Dan, Chris de Burgh, will become the first Western artist to play a gig in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Incidentally, something about the chorus of Chris’s song, ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’, has always bothered me...

Don’t pay the ferryman!
Don’t even fix a price!
Don’t pay the ferryman
Until he gets you to the other side

I mean, what halfway competent ferryman would even contemplate getting you to the other side before first fixing a price that reflects market realities? And would any rational agent even want to be ferried by a person so lacking in basic commonsense?

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Intel assessment nukes ‘Iran nukes’ hysteria

George W. Bush in January 2007:

I take the Iranian nuclear threat very seriously, even though the intel on Iraq was not what it was thought to be.

Happily not too many people seem to be taking this man very seriously at all of late.

Iran hasn’t had a nuclear weapons programme since 2003, a stunning new assessment released by US intelligence agencies has found.

Perhaps this is a tad premature, but this could be the final nail in the coffin of the credibility of this clown and his troupe.

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