Author: Jacques René Zammit

Or why SuperOneJoseph is bad news….

a post by guest blogger Justin BB

What Joseph Did

Joseph Muscat won a huge majority. Well done to him. The choice of a number of candidates who are palatable to the middle class helped, but that was not the clincher. No, Muscat won so handily because he ticked all the boxes of discontent. One of those boxes was the immigration issue…he pandered to the far right and stoked the fires of ignorance and hate.

What Joseph Did Next

As a graduate of the school of lies and sound bites, Joseph led a campaign that lied about lots. They lied about government’s healthcare plans. They twisted Vince Farrugia’s declared confidence in PN candidates and a PN government. I was interviewed by Super 1 back in the day when Joseph worked there – what made it to the screens and TV spots had very little to do with what I actually said. Can I trust Joseph to be honest behind his smile? Not a jot.

What Joseph Almost Did

The Labour-loving crowd and the lovers of all things new and kind of shiny think that JM apologised for Labour’s past. Almost, but not quite. Joseph actually said something to the effect of ‘we’re sorry, but PN should be sorry too/sorry for provoking us’. It’s redolent of a wife-beater’s apology – ‘sorry, but she provoked me’. He did the same thing again after Labour supporters beat up elderly PN zealots in Zejtun. By putting ‘provocation’ (whatever that might be) and violence on the same level, you are condoning violence because petty provocations will be there forever.

Moviment Graffitti are organising a “Walk against racism” tomorrow evening. Here is an extract from the invitation I received:

Paceville has long been a place where racism is the order of the day. The majority of clubs do not let black persons in and when these persons try to protest this decision they often risk violent aggression.

This is NOT acceptable! We will NOT accept an Apartheid in Malta!

We are not in any way accusing the Maltese people of being racist, however we cannot ignore that realities of racism are also taking root in our country.

Let’s show that there is a part of Malta which rejects racism. On Saturday 13th June Moviment Graffitti is inviting the public to a peaceful walk in the streets of Paceville, starting at 7:30pm from Baystreet.

Bring candles with you

Much as I find this personification of “Paceville” as some kind of being with a will of its own unproductive, I agree with the idea of a peaceful demonstration to make a point about intolerance.

It might be time to revive the dormant project of “The Lamppost Movement” that was, at the time, a reaction of the Maltese blogosphere to rabid, racist comments by some members of Maltese society. The Lamppost had been adopted as a symbol of light in the darkness of intolerance also in reaction to the nazi idea of hanging reactonaries from lampposts. Every blogger had chosen his lamppost (as collected on flickr) and adhered to the campaign.

I am willing to hand over the idea and organisation of the Campaign to someone who is in Malta. It’s a campaign that is needed and once again I insist.. it  should not be “against” something but in favour of values such as tolerance and diversity.

Slideshow of blogger’s lampposts here.

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6. The Knaves with Knives

Tribal dualism is what this EP election has reaffirmed in many ways. Never was it more strikingly obvious than when the breeding ground of nationalist gossipry decried “Staunch Nationalists don’t campaign for Labour“. And to think we bothered to even try to argue with these people some time back.

Until a year ago the favourite subject of nationalist mental bashing was the “floater” who dared “waste” his vote. Worse than that. The floater would be told that he, and anyone else backing him was “setting himself up as an object of hate”. The selling point this year switched to “Taste” and while the third parties got a huge drubbing and the electorate reaffirmed the ever so helpful duopoly the 35,000 vote gap between PL and PN set off a Witch Hunt at the online Nationalist pink blog where hardliners aggregate for a dose of Manoel Cuschieri PN style.

Lino Spiteri’s article in the Times about a ‘nationalist’  lawyer who felt at home at a meeting supporting Labour MEP Louis Grech set the tongues wagging and keyboards ticking. Unacceptable isn’t it? A nationalist feeling at home at a labour meeting? What is the world coming to? No. He must be one of two things: ungrateful or an opportunist.

The two are not mutually exclusive and I am still to discover whether there is an ounce of truth in many of the allegations regarding government contracts allocated to a law firm that are being bandied about (you know dirty linen and its bad habit) all over DCG’s site. What is really, really interesting is the logic behind all the mud slinging….

Apparently it is OK (or OK-ish) for a hypothetical law firm to get contracts from government SO LONG AS his vote and support remains firmly entrenched in the PN side. How does J’accuse conclude this?

Well. Easy. Everyone on DCG’s blog seems intent on claiming that Michael Grech, the lawyer in question, enjoyed some nice patronage from government contracts. Now we cannot definitely know if it is true, at least not for now, BUT in their minds it is a fact. Which begs the first question: Did they only just discover this or have they known for ages?

Which leads us to the second point. So Michael Grech ALLEGEDLY supported Louis Grech at a meeting. If he did, and I am not saying he did, he had every right to do so. What irks me is this: Do the angry and sour nationalists led by the Gossip Queen only bring out their knives and accusations of “off with his head” now that the lawyer has (supposedly) switched sides? If they really believed that a law firm was obtaining undue favours from government why speak now? No prizes for guessing the answer to that one.

You reap what you sow.

Boy, are we in for one hell of a harvest (a taste of the very best medicine)

The Haiku

orwell reprised

red vote is bad blue vote good

same but different

sophism

2. any false argument or fallacy. — sophister, n. — sophistic, adj.

AND HERE IS DAPHNE ON TODAY’S  INDY:

As for using your sacred vote to teach somebody else a lesson, what can I say about the sort of person who does that? A real man, a real woman, a person of honour, somebody who is not a coward, expresses himself or herself personally, face to face, or publicly, as I and others do.

That is what real, sophisticated democracy is all about. Using your vote as a threat or a bribe is the democracy of the most backward villages in southern Italy in the 1950s, and if you don’t believe me I have a couple of anthropological studies I can send you.

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5. The Joke

A huge lesson that this election has definitely reaffirmed is that the notion of an ‘intelligent voter’ is a rarity. The trouble runs deeper. It is not only the ‘intelligent’ voter who is conspicuous in his absence but also the ‘informed’ voter. It appears that nobody, or next to nobody, had any real clue about what kind of person is really needed to be effective in the European Parliament.

Readers and detractors may be forgiven if they read this with the “sour grape” meter because they believe that J’accuse is bitter about the lack of cross-votes or votes to AD. Far from it. The ‘ignorant’ (or if we want to sound less snobbish – the ‘fanatic’ vote) has continued to let itself be milked and nurtured and has spread as fast as a Californian wildfire.

The shepherds of the ignorant vote are the Great Duopoly that operates within a power structure of its making (unconsciously I would add) and thrives on the race to mediocrity. The stakes were unclear and the agenda and battleground were either hazy or irrelevant. And we revelled in it. This time round it was the PL’s turn to shout empty hoorays while the PN ‘shrewd’ analysts yelled “Ungrateful”.

The saddest part of it all is that the electorate voting on whims and fancies (and taste and flair and hurts and pains) are unwilling to use their vote to effectively obtain real change and send out a message. The joke, unfunny as it is, remained squarely on the shoulders of Joe Public.

And the only ones laughing are Simon Busuttil, David Casa, Louis Grech, Edward Scicluna, John Attard Montalto and (maybe not so much) Joseph (He ain’t heavy he’s my brother) Cuschieri.

The Haiku

universal vote

no cause for celebrating

when the joke’s on you

sophism

2. any false argument or fallacy. — sophister, n. — sophistic, adj.

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4. Counting Votes

The agony and ecstasy in Naxxar has gone on for over two days and we are nowhere nearer having more than one directly elected candidate (Simon Says Busuttil). The preference votes should have jumped from red to blue to green to black like a drunken frog and there were moments when the tension on both sides of the perspex was palpable even through the reports on the ether.

Much to Arnold Cassola’s dismay the electorate rejected the possibility of cross-voting (even with the gargantuan eye-opening efforts of pompous J’accuse). In most cases they stuck to the party lists (in the Nationalist cases they have long learnt to stick tothe few candidates their hero supports). But is there a way out? A threshold for party lists?

The “6 Xs” solution, where every voter just marks an X near six candidates of his choice cannot be considered. The problem there is that this election would have produced 6 labour seats since the parties would have proposed six candidates each and the party garnering most votes would automatically fill all seats. J’accuse cannot see a viable alternative. Neither can smug Jason Micallef who wants a revamp of the vote counting system but mentions no solutions (for a change).

The Haiku

preference voting

tedious wait to inherit

a tense heritage

sophism

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3. The Agony Aunt

Watching Jason Micallef on Bondi+ you could easily begin to tear the hair out of your head. One by one. Jason Micallef really believes that there is no problem for PL if they attract people to their fold simply “ghax imwegghin” (because they are hurt) even if it is evident that there could be no solution for their hurts.

Take the scantily dressed man who was celebrating at the Labour victory and very evidently believed that with this vote he could now practise his hobby of “insib” (catching birds). Jason Micallef smiled gleefully when asked whether he was not aware that Labour could never give the man his hobby back.

To Jason Micallef what counts is that “in-nazzjonalisti dahku bih” (the Nationalists cheated him) and that only Labour can empathise with that fact. Jason Micallef is absolutely unable to see an anomaly in the fact that he is planning to emulate the Nationalists in four years time by leading this very man to believe that Labour will implement what neither it, nor the PN, can implement.

A vote for Labour in this current stage of evolution means shifting from a valueless, unsympathetic party in government to a hopeless, clueless and directionless party that simply exists in the hope of wining an election without any thoughts beyond that. Thank God there are EP elections for them to let off steam.

The Haiku

labour empathy

vote a shoulder to cry on

get gvern tal-biki

sophism