And I managed pretty well I think…

You can now find me at http://www.stevebrewer.eu.

“If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I’ve seen, if they’d watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.”

- John Pilger

Max Du Preez and Jacques Pauw were investigative journalists in South Africa during Apartheid. The difference between them and journalists in the West today is that, for Du Preez and Pauw, the emphasis was on facts. If they were to succeed in exposing the government for its corruption and murderous death squads, rigorous fact checking was necessary to stand a chance at surviving smear campaigns and libel lawsuits from those in the pockets of the government. They were literally being hunted, one single untruth, deliberate or accidental, would be enough to destroy them, and a Daily Mail style apology printed at the bottom of page fifteen wouldn’t be enough to save them.

The story of Du Preez and Pauw’s fight to help end Apartheid is one of thirty inspiring examples of real journalism included in John Pilger’s Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs. While it’s tempting to lose faith in humanity as you read of the horrifying afflictions millions of innocent people have endured for the triviality of money and politics, I find it to be a stark and vital reminder of why the world needs real journalists, what is required of them and the importance of remaining independent and getting the facts right. Not merely independent of political views, but also of the underlying patriotism that obstructs impartiality.

Wilfred Burchett reached Hiroshima a month after America wiped out the entire city with an atomic bomb. His journals reveal the devastation caused, and how atomic radiation was affecting the area long after the bombing, causing death and deformities to survivors and aid workers. Meanwhile the American government and press in unison categorically denied the existence of such radiation without any grounding facts, branding it “Japanese propaganda”. Burchett was smeared, attacked and ridiculed, again without the use of any facts, in order to detract attention from the truth.

Jessica Mitford’s expose on the morbid state of America’s industry of funeral directors is one of the less bloody accounts, but it runs along the same theme of highlighting what the rich get up to for the sake of making money. In territory few would have the stomach to tread, she revealed the elaborate tactics used to extract as much money as possible from bereaving clients, which had previously gone unquestioned until Mitford’s investigations.

Perhaps the most revealing and heart wrenching journals were those of Seymour Hersh in My Lai, Vietnam. His graphic depiction of the sadistic massacres committed by American soldiers of vulnerable, unarmed and innocent Vietnamese women, children and elderly people will evoke more compassion than any contrived, synthetic Hollywood film, because this was real. Unlike in the movies, justice was not brought to the orchestrators of this mass murder, who were defended by government, military and media, either directly or by condoning it with their silence.

A final shining example is Paul Foot, who died as this book went to print and to whose memory it is dedicated to, as he gives his account of “The Great Lockerbie Whitewash”. Here the British and American government’s feckless disregard for morality is exposed as they frame an innocent Libyan man for the bombing of a plane over Lockerbie in Scotland for political gain. Despite plenty of evidence that the bombing was orchestrated by Iran, with the help of Syria, in vengeance for the shooting of an Iranian airliner by America the previous year, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted and imprisoned for life. The sole evidence was one “eye-witness” in Malta who happened to be receiving substantial funding from the US government. Megrahi was a tool, a pawn in a political chess game. As America was preparing to attack Iraq, it was negotiating secretly with Iran and Syria, former enemies of Iraq, and convictions of terrorist bombings against them would not have fit their political motives well at that time.

Pilger, in his commentary and choice of accounts included in this book, demonstrates the outstanding heroism of journalists that don’t see the world in terms of its “usefulness to the West”, aren’t subverted by politicians or national interests and can remain impartial, on the side only of humanity, even through intense media assault on their reputation as a sane human being.

Tell Me No Lies is the essential guide to modern history we aren’t supposed to read, as doing so surgically removes the political virus of patriotism, the veil that obscures truth and must be lifted from journalists if they are to be prevented from spreading it further.

Coinciding with this theme was a cartoon published by the Mail:

This was somehow supposed to represent this couple:

Where else have we seen behaviour like this before?

Courtesy of Randall Bytwerk.

Courtesy of WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

It’s not without irony that one of the men in the Mail’s cartoon has a swastika tattoo on his arm. Nazis used posters like the ones above to propagate anti-semitic hatred, thus over time manufacturing consent from the German people for Hitler to persecute and kill them. That is actual persecution, not to be confused with hyperbolic persecution for political gain, a searing insult to the millions of people that genuinely suffered because who they are offended some political opinion based solely on prejudice or personal gain.

Peter and Hazelmary Bull allowed their repugnant prejudice to surface and chose to act on it, with the misguided view that their faith not only justifies it, but insists on it. They’re now attempting to absolve responsibility of what they’ve done and get away with 1950′s style segregation by hiding behind the freedom to practice religion. Except, Christianity preaches tolerance. Nobody is really being persecuted here, such exaggerations should be avoided, but Steven Preddy and Martyn Hall are being marginalised by the Bulls, and gay people are being marginalised by the Daily Mail… all under the guise of a seemingly acceptable debate about rights.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 28 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 49 posts. There were 84 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 33mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 21st with 72 views. The most popular post that day was Spotify: The Music Movement.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were alphainventions.com, twitter.com, stumbleupon.com, facebook.com, and worryaboutethics.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for intersex brazil, monike demikoski, “uk print press” & 2010, and arguments for euthanasia.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Spotify: The Music Movement May 2010
2 comments

About Me December 2009

Loyalty, Schmoyalty. January 2010
2 comments

Teenage Pregnancy – Can I just set the record straight? January 2010
1 comment

Is that one of them Boris Bikes? August 2010
2 comments

It’s evident, particularly from the British press that supposedly either ‘guides’ or ‘represents’ our views, we still regard non-Western people as inconsequential. The media obsesses over the ways such people serve to threaten or inconvenience us, churning out xenophobic and Islamaphobic rhetoric, while largely ignoring humanitarian crises outside our own borders.

Ours is…

…a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival.

It is abundantly clear that the colonial attitude of our past, the poison ‘instilled into the veins of Europe’, still exists today, subjecting all the lessons we’re supposed to have learned to the same psychological denial that got us into this predicament in the first place.

Césaire on the decaying effect colonialism has on Europe:

…colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…

…each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism… that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it…

… [colonisation] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.

Césaire quotes rhetoric from Carl Siger, author of an Essai sur la colonisation (Paris, 1907) that attempts to defend the barbarity of colonialism by suggesting it eases pent up aggression in the West, and therefore serves as a ‘safety valve’ – effectively, the rest of the world is Europe’s punchbag:

The new countries offer a vast field for individual, violent activities which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against certain prejudices, against a sober and orderly conception of life, and which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop and, consequently, to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve as a safety valve for modern society. Even if this were their only value, it would be immense.

On the underlying condition of Western denial:

…his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois’ clear conscience.

Before the arrival of the French in their country, the Vietnamese were people of an old culture, exquisite and refined. To recall this fact upsets the digestion of the Banque d’Indochine. Start the forgetting machine!

These Madagascans who are being tortured today, less than a century ago were poets, artists, administrators? Shhhhh! Keep your lips buttoned! And silence falls, silence as deep as a safe!

The petty bourgeois doesn’t want to hear any more. With a twitch of his ears he flicks the idea away.

The idea, an annoying fly.

With the cancerous consequences of colonialism for Europe out the way, Césaire moves onto what colonialism consists of:

I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, “boys,” artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.

No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thing-ification.”

The West brutally dominates other nations, turning them into proletariats to one giant bourgeois.

[For colonisation] I see less clearly the contributions it has made…

They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living.

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.

They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks.

I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Ocean. I am talking about those who, as I write this, are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life-from life, from the dance, from wisdom.

I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys.

They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted – harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population – about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.

The backbone to the feeble argument in blue, if indeed it even has one, is undermined by Césaire:

The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; that it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score; that it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.

In summary, Césaire reminds us what we’ve lost at the hands of the dominant and aggressive antics of the West:

They were communal societies, never societies of the many for the few.

They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist.

They were democratic societies, always. They were cooperative societies, fraternal societies. I make a systematic defense of the societies destroyed by imperialism. They were the fact, they did not pretend to be the idea; despite their faults, they were neither to be hated nor condemned.

They were content to be.

In them, neither the word failure nor the word avatar had any meaning.

Transport for London have just implemented a somewhat poorly tested system for cheap, short term cycle hire across zone 1 of London. The initiative is sponsored by Barclays, a wise move not merely because their name will be splashed about town on every bike, but also in every fascinated newspaper currently praising and mocking the service. This seems to have everybody talking about it, and since nobody is using it, the moment you hop on one you might as well be in a Maserati for the scene you’re about to experience.

I did feel the same hesitance most Londoners seem to express when they stride past the new cycle docks, making comments and staring curiously. Once you’ve shelved your inhibitions, inserted the key you ordered online for £3 and were lucky enough to get the green light signalling the bike’s release, you’re away. The breeze is refreshing, as is the freedom from traffic, waiting times, bus routes and tube lines. Just be sure to carry the map with you so you don’t find yourself frantically scanning every back street for light blue signs to dock within 30 minutes to avoid paying.

That’s half an hour of roaming free on the roads of central London, speeding past queues of traffic, ignoring one way streets and enjoying the fuss and attention from everyone you pass that’s read about the scheme in the paper. If you stop, the nearest person will ask questions like “Is that one of them Boris Bikes?” or “What’s it like?”, usually accompanied by a curious smile or a full on ear-to-ear grin. It’s not just pedestrians, when the driver of a cab I’d just cut up leaned out to speak to me while driving, what I assumed was going to be abuse turned out to be a chirpy “Is it heavy? It looks heavy… What’s it like to ride?”.

The bikes are comfortable enough for short city journeys, although you will constantly be hauling yourself backwards onto the two mini mountains that make up the back part of the saddle. Since they are new, the tyres are hard, so don’t even think of riding up a curb unless you fancy taking off, which is quite embarrassing when you’re not expecting it and people are already staring at you because you’re on a Boris Bike! Also, avoid bumps in the road if you have anything in the bay on the handle bars, you will lose everything.

The biggest drawback is the electronic system, which still seems to be in beta. Whether you actually get a bike or not when you want one is currently hit and miss, I often get a red light for no apparent reason. You may be in luck if you walk to another dock, but that rapidly cuts into the time you’re actually saving by cycling. The terminals, when functioning, don’t seem to be good for much besides telling you how many bikes are at other docks nearby. Be aware that the hire fees displayed on the TFL website are incorrect, the fees in the pamphlet seem to be correct.

As yet this is not a service you can rely on as your sole method of transport. Home to work, St Johns Wood to Leicester Square in 20 minutes is well worth the £45 per year, and once the initial teething has passed this will be my first choice for getting around town. I just hope supply continues to meet demand once the rest of London catches on, and after casual use has made it available to anyone with spare change.

Imagine if the battle of the mighty, money-mad record labels vs. us capitalist-rat-race slaves had a peaceful solution that would please both sides. Meet Spotify, the first practical answer to the mass suing of parents by the anti-freedom, copyright elite that want the pocket money of teenagers everywhere to start flowing in the direction of their shareholders.

Free, unlimited music streamed to your computer and mobile phone, anywhere, anytime. Spotify bends the rules to give you a music library akin to iTunes, but with a free pass to all the music you like. Throw all the songs by your favourite artists into playlists named after them, save whole albums as playlists or compile your own playlists from almost all the songs available in the world. All for free with a monthly Spotify Premium subscription, setting you back £9.99 a month. Deals are available through mobile networks to make this cheaper, but it’s a small, pocket money sized price to pay to ensure these people don’t give up producing music altogether.

When you read the word ‘streamed’, maybe you think of antiquated online radio station players that take minutes to load and frequently freeze. That’s not Spotify – the music starts the second you hit play. Why waste volumes of hard disk space saving your over-priced ‘intellectual rights’ to files when you can just play your music seamlessly from the cloud?

Search ‘Lady Gaga’ and get instant access to all the songs she’s ever released. Right click or drag to move tracks or entire albums straight into playlists.

Hit the ‘Available Offline’ switch on the new playlist and within minutes you can listen to it anytime without an internet connection.

To help you discover new music, the Radio feature plays random songs filtered by different genres and time periods.

I’ve created playlists by artist, saving all songs by that artist into each playlist. I can listen to them instantly as long as I have internet connection. Making music available offline downloads to my computer as unaccessible files that I can play offline, but I can’t put them onto a CD or MP3 player. That’s where my audio cable for connecting computers to any stereo with a headphone outlet and my Android smartphone come in handy…

Streaming a track on a mobile may take a second or two longer depending on signal, so it’s advisable to make some or all playlists available offline on your handset via a wifi connection to ensure instant playback.

Spotify plays no differently to the built in music player, so you can still control it using the same buttons and the headphone controls, and it will pause for messages and calls.

As a social sideline, you can share your music library with your friends via Facebook, also allowing you to see your friends’ libraries with the push of a button. You can share individual songs as posts on Facebook and Twitter for others to discover. Or you could just not do any of this, and leave your whole library (or just certain playlists) unpublished so your mates won’t find out you listen to Britney Spears…

I deleted my iTunes library this morning and saved myself 10Gb of hard disk space. My phone bill is now £8 per month higher and I can have all the music I want at the press of a button on my Mac and Android smartphone. Legally.

Spotify is currently only available in parts of Europe, with a US launch date yet to be confirmed.

Summary

It is becoming evermore apparent that some news publications attempt to cultivate a set of beliefs among audiences that may not necessarily correlate to reality. This report looks at UK publications, specifically the Daily Mail, and sets out evidence to show how it misrepresents ideologies and expresses bias towards a dominant ideology. I have analysed recent articles in the Daily Mail, highlighting those that lack reliability or attempt to persuade readers to a particular viewpoint with news stories posing as ‘factual’, ‘unbiased’ reports.

Bias and Misrepresentation in the UK Print Press

So it’s International Day Against Homophobia, and I was dismayed to hear a man last night tell me that he still believes being gay is ‘wrong’, despite being gay himself. My biggest problem with the word ‘wrong’ is that people forget it’s entirely subjective. One man’s ‘mental disorder’ is another man’s essence of being. A culture that eats cats and dogs would consider us wrong for keeping them as pets, just as we’d consider them wrong for eating them. We’re free to live however we like in this world, if we can just separate the threats from society that try to make us conform. We’re not broken, we’re not abnormal, we won’t burn in ‘hell’, we won’t have a less happy future and a happy, successful gay marriage is no myth.

I cannot change my sexuality any more than a black man can change the colour of the skin he was born in. Sure, we can make superficial changes. I could ‘role play’, pretend to be straight, get a girlfriend and pretend to be excited about being with her, pretend to be aroused during sex and pretend I didn’t wish I was happy. But do you think that’s really fair on anyone? Do you think she’d never find out? Do you think she wouldn’t itch to know what it is that’s not right about her marriage for years? Do you think relationships aren’t difficult enough without removing desire and happiness? I don’t know exactly what love is, but any child can see that social pretences are not the foundation of any lasting love story. It could also be dubbed anti-therapy, as it will make you insane.

Every day it gets more obvious to me that people construct their own realities. We believe what we prefer to be true, and for a long time the majority of society imagined into reality this ‘fact’ that love between two men was sick, a sadistic ‘abomination’. Not for any real reason besides their own primal fear, anxiety, ignorance and intolerance, but the effects are far reaching and still resonate with too many people today.

This is my life, it won’t be dictated by others. I won’t be shut out or intimidated because I don’t conform to somebody else’s world view.

It’s 2010, it’s been 20 years to the day since the World Health Organisation finally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Yet we still have minorities that believe they are somehow ‘wrong’ because they aren’t included in the dominant but dated ideology that feels threatened by a different, yet innate, sexual orientation.

I’m glad to say that ideology is dying gradually, but it isn’t happening fast enough, and it can only be cured by education and an open mind. If you know a homophobe, come out to them, introduce them to a gay friend or just disagree with them firmly, just knowing a victim of their aggression will help them achieve compassion through empathy, and disagreeing will help chip away at their intolerance.

For 20 years homosexuality has not been a mental disorder in civilised countries. The American Psychological Association has a resolution against attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation. This is because it’s unethical and psychologically detrimental. These ‘cure’ attempts will not make a person feel better about themselves when they discover it doesn’t actually work. Gay people need therapy to help them get over their own stigma, instilled in them by society and people like Philippa Stroud.

Some facts everyone needs to be aware of, and these are based on scientific fact rather than religious opinion:

The longstanding consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions is that homosexuality per se is a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation (Bell, Weinberg & Hammersmith, 1981; Bullough, 1976; Ford & Beach 1951 ; Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953 ). Homosexuality per se is not a mental disorder (APA, 1975). Since 1974, the American Psychological Association (APA) has opposed stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and violence on the basis of sexual orientation and has taken a leadership role in supporting the equal rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals (APA, 2005)…

APA is concerned about ongoing efforts to mischaracterize homosexuality and promote the notion that sexual orientation can be changed and about the resurgence of sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE)…

Although sound data on the safety of SOCE are extremely limited, some individuals reported being harmed by SOCE. Distress and depression were exacerbated. Belief in the hope of sexual orientation change followed by the failure of the treatment was identified as a significant cause of distress and negative self-image (Beckstead & Morrow, 2004; Shidlo & Schroeder, 2002)…

Many of these individuals and groups appeared to be embedded within the larger context of conservative religious political movements that have supported the stigmatization of homosexuality on political or religious grounds (Drescher, 2003; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2005; Drescher & Zucker, 2006).