Freesteel Blog

Giant undemocracy undata checkin

Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 11:48 am Written by: Julian

I’ve been working pretty hard converting the underlying undemocracy website to using the pylons web framework on a version on my local machine. Then I noticed that the main parser wasn’t working (it was still trying to grab A-62 documents instead of A-63 documents) and fixed it. This brought in about 20 General Assembly transcripts, (linked here) including all the annoying ones at the beginning of the session where all the world leaders get escorted to the rostrum to say their bit and don’t have their nation’s name in brackets after their name in bold. It takes a lot of hand editing to do, because I’m not willing to commit to parsing the standard introduction:

The President: The Assembly will now hear an address by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was escorted into the General Assembly Hall.
The President: On behalf of the General Assembly, I have the honour to welcome to the United Nations His Excellency Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to invite him to address the Assembly.
President Ahmadinejad:I am grateful to the Almighty for granting me another opportunity to be present at this world Assembly…

Way back in the mists of time when the United Nations was founded, the United States insisted that it be hosted on their soil (to make it all the more easy to bug their offices), but it could only work if they agreed that the site be international diplomatic territory.

In 2007, during the two year presidential election campaign, when the lies are flying thick and fast, the US presidential candidates all weighed in with their condemnation of the United Nations for allowing President Ahmadinejad’s visit to the the General Assembly, as they quite reasonably counted on and contributed to the ignorance of the electorate with regards to international law.

This year (last September) one of the defeated candidates, Hillary Clinton wrote this nasty piece of work in support of the protest at his 2008 visit where he staged “his hateful propaganda against Israel and the United States”. The link is above. He mentions God too many times. Here is some of what he says:

Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool it and its supporters have created. The Islamic Republic of Iran, while fully respecting the resistance of the oppressed people of Palestine and expressing its all-out support for it, submits to the Secretary-General of the United Nations its humane solution, based on a free referendum in Palestine to determine and establish the type of State in the entire Palestinian lands.

Hillary Clinton is now the US’s Secretary of State designate, the nation’s chief diplomat. Still stirring things up and participating in hate and propaganda.

What a load of rubbish.

Robert Mugabe also flew in to New York to give his speech. Without Peter Tatchell there to attempt a citizen’s arrest, everyone was okay with it.

No politician got out there to condemn it, etc.

It’s a shame our media is such an empty-headed pack of stenographers just copying down the words of the politicians’ latest wheeze without posing questions about the purpose of their selectivity. I don’t get to ask questions of politicians, only journalists do. And the politicians are evidently quite happy with the desperately low quality we are currently served with.