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Original post is in italics.
August 17: I leave Edinburgh
August 19: International Premiere of Romero’s “Land of the Dead”
August 19: UK Premiere of McKean/Gaiman’s “Mirrormask”
August 21: Michael Franti & Spearhead play Edinburgh
August 22: World Premiere of Whedon’s “Serenity”
August 23: Joss Whedon Q&A session
August 26: Goldenhorse play Edinburgh
August 27: John Ralston Saul Q&A session
August 28: The Pixies play Edinburgh
Extreem Suxx0r.

There is a Superlate on my couch.
He has no clothes
except the ones he is wearing
– but he is not dejected.
His clothes are just
superlate.

Blimey. So that was Germany, huh? Pretty cool.
I had a blast. I managed to send precisely one travel email, which generally is a sign that I was pretty busy. I will send more at some point, full of wonderfully entertaining and erudite Germany-thoughts.
In the meantime, I’m going to try and catch up with what seems to have been a very eventful two weeks in the world. And not in a good way, more’s the pity.

Weird drifting sensation these last couple days. I am beginning the process of disengaging from Edinburgh. The place where I am sleeping has stopped feeling like home. Every calculation is now made with the expectation of impermanence. I am feeling lots of endings and in my head something is changing back to ‘journey’.
Tomorrow I hop that plane to Berlin. Cool. Back in ten days. Will update then.

I’ve kinda lost the will to blog at the moment. The one-two punch of the London bombing (or more precisely the rhetoric that sprung up in its wake) and the (predictably) weak outcome of the G8 meeting have left me feeling like I’ve nothing to say at the moment. There’s definitely more to be said about the G8, but it will have to wait because if I did it now it’d just come out all half-arsed.
Scotsman editorial, Saturday (I think it was): “Bombings result of political correctness gone mad”. Aargh.
Going to Germany on Wednesday. Really looking forward to it, but it sounds like I won’t be able to meet up with Tobias and Liani in Nuremberg as they’ll be out of town. Curses! I met them in Syria and they are seriously good people. Oh well. Craig and Marcel will no doubt keep me more than thoroughly entertained! (And I hope to touch base with Joe Dizzy in Berlin to boot.)
Man, it’s hot right now. This must be summer peaking.

Oh hell.
And:
Londoners know way more about terror bombings than just about anyone else.
And:
My stomach has been all twisted up all day.
And:
This has snapped a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about into focus. I’ll try and relate some of this over the next few days, along with wrapping up the G8 coverage/discussion.

This demonstration wasn’t challenging inaction on poverty. Today was about challenging the power concentrated in the G8 and the exploitation that results from their power. Essentially, and as the latest step in a continuity of action from Seattle ’99, the protest was a disruption of the image management of the powerful.
The bit I was in involved walking up a road, grinding to a halt, and going home three hours later. I’m exhausted. Might post more later. As for what else went on, I leave as a task for the reader to filter through this lot:
Indymedia coverage
BBC coverage
Bah.

(A well-earned break from the G8 stuff…)
The Tuesday that just ended, 5 July 2005, is the second anniversary of ORC Edinburgh, the Open Roleplaying Community here in Edinburgh. When I leave here in the not-so-distant future, this is the most significant thing I’ll leave behind.
I’ve been into roleplaying games most of my life. My aunt and uncle were to blame, but once I got a taste I never looked back. The mix of creativity and collaboration seized my enthusiasm like nothing else. Those two words are still fundamental to who I am – creativity and collaboration.
I want to spread the love of roleplaying games. I’m an evangelist for the form, and I genuinely believe it offers cool fun you can’t get other ways. I’m always looking for avenues to push RPGs to a new audience or in a new way.
When I came to Edinburgh I noticed a chain bookstore, Ottakars on George Street, carried some RPGs. One day I went in and noticed they’d set up a small noticeboard to be used by gamers looking for people to play with. This, needless to say, is a huge rarity. I seized my opportunity, contacted the lovely woman responsible for the noticeboard, and asked if I could run a demo day instore. So I did. And it went well. Not too many people came by but those that did became the core membership of what was to come.
What was to come was the Roleplaying Club, which inevitably became known as the Ottakar’s Roleplaying Club. Eventually we realised we’d created one of those cutesy acronyms quite by accident, so ORC it became.
Two years of regular Saturday meetings, with an all-welcome vibe and more young people than I’ve ever seen involved in gaming before. With some tremendously creative folks stretching their creative muscles. With a bunch of people learning new things about themselves and other people. With a whole heap of fun being had.
It’s been demanding. Almost every Saturday for two years I’ve gone along to ORC. For the first year, I structured my holidays around it, and carried a heavy load of organising gatherings and running games. But since then it’s taken off, and it now runs itself fine without input from me. It has hit a critical mass of people, acquired a niftykeen website, and generally matured into something really solid that should be on the scene here for quite some time.
I’m really proud of what I’ve started here, and I’m even more proud of all the people who took that small thing I kicked off and through their enthusiasm and effort made it so successful.
I’m going to be back in Edinburgh some day. It’s my second home and I’m going to miss it horribly when I’m gone. I hope and trust that, when I arrive here again, ORC will still be going strong.
http://www.orcedinburgh.co.uk/

(A short update, I’m exhausted and it’s past midnight. And not from any of this stuff, I just wandered along to observe for a bit when it had all gone quiet. Relax mum.)
Well, it was expected to kick off today if it would any day. I’d hoped it wouldn’t, and expected that there’d just be small-scale stuff if it did. I think I was right, but I’m not sure, because the police response was enormous.
My best take on the situation was a bunch of carnivalists were setting up little spots of whatever in random places, and this was mostly going well, but the enormous numbers of police on hand were constantly present and constantly trying to reduce disruption. Whether anything more serious than space occupation had been planned by the more extreme groups, we’ll never know, because it turned into confrontation before anything really happened.
The heavy police presence did lead to some provocation from protesters, and the police did not hesitate to respond in massive numbers. (The type of provocation is a bit unclear – things were definitely thrown at police lines, but whether this was a starter or a response or something in between hasn’t been apparent from people I spoke to or media coverage.) Exactly what the protesters were doing is likewise unclear – there were many small groups and at least two large ones at different points in the day. Rumours flew around of building invasions and windows being broken, but the only account that made it into the media (the BBC’s report that protesters had invaded the Standard Life building) was retracted a few hours later.
Credit where it’s due: the massive numbers of police seemed to keep their cool and not exacerbate the situation, as some had feared. They weren’t shy about moving crowds along and bringing out the mounted police and riot gear, but they were a disciplined bunch by and large. There were at least a few baton charges and mounted charges, however, and some of the Getty photos show a bit of enthusiastic baton wielding.
It all seems to me like the police tactic was to stamp things out and cut groups off before they could actually do anything. In other words, to overreact in order to seize control of the situation. It worked. It’s not a tactic I approve of, but given the range of potential police responses to anarchist groups wandering through the financial district, it’s one I can live with.
I’m not sure what I’m going to find when I head up to Gleneagles on Wednesday.
Lots of pictures here at the Getty site.
Indymedia coverage
BBC report, complete with the amusing spectacle of a police spokesman pointing damningly at cellphones and maps as evidence of sinister intent. Er, cellphones and maps, so that would be just like tourists then yeah? (To be fair, he also claims that weapons were taken, so it’s not complete bullshit on its face.)
EDIT TO ADD:Derek’s photos and video clips
EDIT 2: Siobhann’s account is really good – she was right in the thick of it
EDIT 3: BBC provides various opinions on the policing tactics used
EDIT 4: Malc’s take

(G’day to any No Right Turn readers who’ve wandered over – this is a longer one than the last few, so take a deep breath. Or go get a cup of tea or something.)

Sunday, the day after the big MPH rally, showed the progressive movement’s diversity in full bloom – ‘one no, many yeses’ as the slogan has it. There were two separate counter-summits in Edinburgh, each packed with speakers and workshops relating dozens of subjects to the G8 meeting that will take place near here this week. There were dozens of other events held by independent groups, from special services at churches to a skaters for justice gathering (which looked much like the standard skater Sunday gathering in Bristo Square, only with more people watching). There was another march today as well, organised by the Stop The War Coalition. I couldn’t begin to keep track of it all.

I did make time, prompted by Siobhann, to get along to one of the many sessions George Monbiot was speaking at. Monbiot is a high-profile figure in the progressive movement in the UK, best-known for his Tuesday columns for The Guardian. He was partnered with socialist Alex Callinicos in a workshop entitled ‘Alternatives to Neo-Liberalism’.

Both men spoke eloquently of models that could be workable alternatives to the current neo-liberal model of global governance and economy. (Monbiot wasn’t just eloquent – he was funny, utterly in command of a wealth of information, and tremendously charismatic to boot.)

Callinicos championed socialism, but a form of it quite different to any model I’ve encountered before, based largely on Pat Devine’s ‘negotiated coordination’ with Michael Albert’s ‘Parecon’ also mentioned. (Here’s a Callinicos address from a couple years ago which covers some of the same ground; go check it out, theoryheads!)

Monbiot’s programme was essentially that outlined in his book ‘The Age of Consent’, which seems to be becoming a key text in the progressive library for the clarity of its vision. He spent a bit of time talking about ‘contraction and convergence’ – here’s a quote from Monbiot’s column on this from 2003, to give a flavour:

Contraction and convergence, which the African governments have now adopted as their official position on climate change, first establishes how much carbon dioxide humans can produce each year without cooking the planet. It then divides that sum between all the people of the world, and allocates to each nation, on the basis of its population, a quota for gas production. It proposes a steady contraction of the total production of climate-changing gases and a convergence, to equality, of national production per head of population. To produce more than its share a nation must first buy unused quota from another one.

The bulk of his discussion, though, was his concern about the G8 resistance project and what it meant and symbolized for the progressive movement in general. He expressed worry that the global justice movement was being depoliticised by such broadly appealing tactics as the Make Poverty History march and the Live 8 concerts. None of the widespread coverage of the event had mentioned the word ‘power’, let alone provided a critique of that power.

In a recent column he criticised the butter-them-up rhetoric of Geldof and Bono:

The answer to the problem of power is to build political movements that deny the legitimacy of the powerful and seek to prise control from their hands: to do, in other words, what people are doing in Bolivia right now. But Bono and Geldof are doing the opposite: they are lending legitimacy to power.

Today he characterised Live 8, Make Poverty History et al. as approaching the table of our lords and masters on bended knee, and celebrating when we receive more and better crumbs than we are used to.

He’s right, of course. The devil is always in the details with a system as complex as global governance and economics. The MPH campaign celebrates Gordon Brown’s recent debt cancellation, heedless of the conditions attached to the amnesty that open those nations to privatisation and predation by multinationals. MPH says ‘Make Trade Fair’ but the complexity of trading structures means relatively superficial restructuring can be presented as a great victory for justice. And so on.

Monbiot particularly attacked the way so many of the activities underway characterised the G8 as something akin to an NGO, an organisation meeting to resolve the problems of the world. They are not, in any way, such an organisation. They are representatives of the most powerful nations in the world, each motivated by national self-interest, and they directly preside over and rely upon the structures that cause massive global inequalities.

The Make Poverty History campaign wouldn’t bring justice even if it was entirely successful in ‘winning over’ the G8 leaders. Even so, I am convinced the concessions it seeks will make some positive difference, hopefully more than the negatives that it will legitimise. It’s not enough for real and lasting change, but I’m not comfortable with holding out for a massive restructuring of international capitalism while people are dying. The increase in aid, overall the least important of the MPH demands, is easily the most important in the short term.

There’s not just the short-term gains to think about, though. The MPH campaign has put into discourse the notion that poverty is structural. If the powerful put their seal on the message of the MPH campaign, then they may gain some legitimacy from it in the short term, but in the long term their failure to make real change will become more and more clear. They will have signed up to a demand for justice that cannot be spun away.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both wore white Make Poverty History wristbands. Today George Monbiot wore one as well. There is a battle going on for the meaning and value of the MPH campaign and the message being sent about the G8 meeting; but in the long term it’s a battle only we can win.