NewsBrain - Dispatches from the Truth Factory

Wacky racists? Liberals celebrate Stephen Lawrence

2012-01-30T15:06:00.000-08:00

No-one can be unhappy to see what would appear to be two deeply unpleasant individuals being convicted of a heinous crime.

But liberals yet again strolled into an authoritarian trap by expressing their glee following the Stephen Lawrence murder retrial.

The disappearance of double jeopardy will not encourage the police to get things right first time and may see people being effectively persecuted by the law.

And there is every chance some of those being persecuted might in fact be ethnic minorities.

Little was also said about the police officers who messed up the original investigation. Given how well known the suspects were, there remains mystery about why so little action was taken against those officers.

McPherson talks about institutional racism - a phrase which remains conveniently enigmatic, a term which screams out process adjustment rather than radical rethink.

Given that black police officers are known to mistreat blacks in the US, I wonder if this whole mess was about the police not caring about crime in poor areas. Race has been the decoy all along.

Nothing has been done to address the issue either.

The final odious occurrence was the Daily Mail claiming this as their victory.

This was the newspaper who recently had to admit their winterval story was false. Why make up claims that Xmas was being abolished?

You might think it was harmless tabloid fun. In fact, this was about stoking racial fear, about exploiting that dormant sensibility in Britons, of all colours, that the foreigners represent a threat to things as dear as Xmas.

It is the backbone of the Mail's coverage to continually, in the face of all evidence, suggest that foreigners are a threat and ethnic minorities continue to suffer - mostly in silence.

Luis Suarez case shows racial hatred is merely supressed

2011-12-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was always told sweeping things under my bed was not the same as cleaning my room.

The fight against racism is in a similar state. Liberals have focussed their energies on using the penal system to 'eradicate' racism.

This is oddly illiberal as anyone of such a political bent knows that the penal system is probably the worst way to improve society.

Liverpool footballer Luis Suarez is an unlikely case in point. He was given an eight match ban for racially insulting another player. It was a ban of unprecedented length.

This is what the liberals want - punishment for racist behaviour.

This punishment has martyred Suarez in the eyes of racists and similar. The Liverpool team all wore T shirts in his support.

Suarez tried to blame a cultural misunderstanding. But he has played in Europe for years and was clearly engaged in an aggressive conversation with his opponent. They were insulting each other vigourously, as is the norm for football.

The word which he used - negro or negrito - found itself being hurled around Twitter by racists or miscreants targeting black footballers who use the social media site.

Of course Suarez deserved some punishment. And it is good to see that some in football criticised Liverpool's attempt to dismiss - and ignore - the incident (motivated because Suarez is their star player).

But all that we are doing is simply banning language which then drags in the immature, idiotic and furious into a huge legal dragnet.

None of the causes of racial hatred are being addressed. Eventually, these tendencies will simply become to large to bury and will be represented in far worse terms than a fight between two rich, ignorant athletes.

This is also a further example of using methods that they have previously disowned to achieve policy goal, thus further highlighting how liberalism is rendered paralysed by knotting itself in profound hypocrisy.

And finally, excessive punishment creates martyrs of the victims and the dangerously false perception that those prosecuted under racism laws are the 'real' victims.

Word banning is another misplaced micro-cause

2011-11-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Ricky Gervais nearly became a hero for free speech until protecting his movie career suddenly became more important.

Gervais was defending the use of the word 'mong' He claimed the word had changed meaning and was now all right to use as a jokey insult.

Then up popped a disability rights campaigner whose two children had suffered verbal abuse. She broke down on the radio and Gervais quickly caved in and said sorry.

There was a very easy riposte to the campaigner though. While the word may be unpleasant, the major issue is the behaviour of those saying.

Following this logic, you might want to also ban words like idiot, thicko fatty - all verbal tools of any playground bully worth his salt.

Racial words have been effectively banned too and it seems this has created a 'word banning' fetish among social justice campaigners.

Yet this seems to cause terrible confusion when ethnic groups themselves re-appropriate these words in a bizarre attempt to emancipate from subjugation.

Here again, liberals can be seen fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.

Michael Haneke's White Ribbon

2011-09-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

Michael Haneke's new film is a dour but powerful meditation on the abuse of power in an isolated German community.

At the outset of World War One, a quiet village is hit by an increasingly worrying set of mysteries which leave a doctor injured and a handicapped boy mutilated.

As this drama unfurls in typically taut Haneke fashion, we begin to see a community where the respected institutions and moral arbiters are wilfully abusing power.

Peasants work in unsafe environs or are sexually abused (by the doctor in one instance).

Meanwhile, the local pastor rages at his children over what seem trivial matters, insisting that they wear white ribbons until they can behave.

In an attempt to stifle this bleak portrait, Haneke creates a rather unconvincing romance between the film's narrator, who is a schoolteacher in the village, and a nanny.

The film attempts to hint at the deep sickness in German (and perhaps European) society in the years leading up to the first of the 20th century's great bloodbaths.

The abuses of power we see are ultimately linked to the dreadful incidents which take place in the village. It is a place without innocence.

Whilst the performances are suffocating and excruciatingly exact, this is ultimately a heavy handed piece (notwithstanding some beautifully shot, atmospheric scenes).

There is something mediaeval about the society portrayed in the film. For a director who prides himself on denying the audience easy answers, it is surprising that his film is filled with such unremitting contempt for its subjects.

NewsBrain Film: Never Let Me Go

2011-08-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Kazuo Ishiguro's disappointing novel Never Let Me Go fares little better with an Alex Garland screenplay and the obligatory drama-school-by-numbers Britflick cast.

Even though Ruth (Keira Knightley), Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) appear to be in the bosom of a privileged boarding school, they are in fact doomed to a dreadful fate due to the dystopic central idea which defines their society.

Ishiguro, a darling of the literary establishment, clearly found the idea of taking on a science fiction theme rather daring.

But his dystopia is cliched and not fully formed. True to form of such an author, the story quickly rampages toward the literati's favourite topic, 'unrequited love'.

Garland's script sticks to the heavy seriousness of Ishiguro's prose. We see the characters slowly come to realise their fates while, at the same time, a love triangle between them develops.

Never Let Me Go wants us to believe, for most of the film, that these individuals live in a bubble despite the dreadfulness of a future which they are fully aware of.

It is as if Ishiguro got bored of his dystopia and quickly rushed back to the safety of pained expressions and the melancholic eyes of wistful idealism.

Even this film's ideas about love seem twee, lost as they are in one of Wordsworth's perfect summer days.

The three stars are drama school automatons and overplay each 'stolen' look as it becomes clear that Tommy's initial choice of girlfriend will not make him happy. They are also ludicrously overstyled.

As the film concludes, suddenly the consequences of their fate sparks a flash of protest. But ultimately this is a tame film of half-ideas.

At its most interesting, it seeks to show how the worst treated seem to cling most to the purest of ideals.

But relations between the three protagonists feel rather tedious and the film chooses to offer little in the way of meditation on its main theme, man's insatiable quest to live forever.

Andrew Gilligan's incredibly stupid journalism

2011-08-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Right is tub thumping. Lock 'em all up is the cry.

One thing they have been keen to peddle, is the idea that none of these rioters were poor or jobless. They were just BASTARDS.

Andrew Gilligan's piece in the Telegraph heavily implied that the rioters were not poor or alienated.

It began:

They were, some told us, the alienated poor, those without hope, lashing out in rage and despair. But as the accused London rioters started appearing in court they included university students, a rich businessman’s daughter and a boy of 11.

Yet later it said:

Most defendants conformed more closely to Mr Cameron’s “sick society” template.

So even the right wing Telegraph admits the obvious and logical supposition that there would a strong demographic link between those that caused trouble.

Yet Toby Young had not read the piece fully and decided to quote:

The eye-opening revelation of the Court hearings today and yesterday is that there’s no such thing as a typical rioter

What I am intrigued is the psycho-political motivation in such a futile point. Is it just lazy pseudo intellects once again proving standards have terminally slipped at Oxbridge? (Young is an alumni).

I suspect it is simply a kneejerk protectiveness of a society which is 'theirs', which they fanatically believe to have been a success. Are they not in denial about the banks too?

Imagine if they were right? If rioters were not definable by social factors and had simply 'chosen' to riot, quite simply to 'get stuff' this would then suggest that ordinary citizens have no respect for the law or fear for the consequences of transgressing it.

No free society would be sustainable with such nihilism in its mainstream! The right had better pray those rioters are poor.

They are also seeking to simplify the debate. To reassure a panicked public, simply create a 'good and bad' narrative, then posit yourselves as on the side of 'good'. Job done.

Is there some tiny hope amidst the burning embers of the mass ram raid?

2011-08-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

This riot feels like Devil's Night, that oft used film myth whereby the miscreants of one city choose an annual night to unleash mayhem.

In London's case, it was one huge, co-ordinated ram-raid. Rebellion in consumer-capitalism is about getting shit for free.

In our fragmented society, where do these actions sit?

The anti-capitalist May Day protests were postmodern in character. They were more like a jamboree and while damage was committed, there was a sense of humour pervading the whole event.

It was a community, perhaps largely of the indefinable rejected (in demographic terms), showing themselves as a force in unison on London's streets.

At summits and forums the world over, they now duly turn up some in music festival mode while others seek to be heroes with their silly ski masks.

In riot stricken London, the left opine about cuts while the right will no doubt seek to further manipulate the criminal justice system. Or pretend to at any rate – actually long sentences cost too much.

But these events, surprising in their character and longevity, are not about cuts.

The underclass, bedevilled by drugs and extraordinary fits of violence, have finally bitten back. They existed in the good times too.

Until now, these feral gangs have been merely attacking each other. But in not caring about life (overly) or illegality they represent a dangerous mass.

By apparently setting aside turf considerations, they have shown what force they can muster. Too much for the Met and without weapons or assets of any note.

Watching them attack shambolic shops in the economic desert that is the Tottenham High Road hardly fills one's heart with hope.

But out of the fire, missiles and misery, we have seen some weird phenomenon that the state has not been able to combat. How powerless our leaders look and how detached they are in safe houses well away from trouble.

Could squalid greed be replaced by a zeal for political change? Tonight at least shows transformational energy has not been wiped out by heroin.

In the US, this type of activity would be far harder. Cities are linked by long highways and the underclass are often marooned and left to fight it out.

London is a labyrynthe of social surprises. How many people will seek the refuge of high-fenced, steel-gated residences after today's events?

We are left with a more divided city, but an oddly changed one in areas way deeper than the charred scars.

Message to lefties: bashing Murdoch gets you nowhere

2011-07-28T07:29:00.001-07:00

The Left have certainly been enjoying the phone hacking scandal, clearly believing that Rupert Murdoch travails should be met with gleeful smugness.

It is never a good sign when a political movement blames newspaper proprietors for its own failures.

Of course Murdoch's politics, disseminated aggressively via his seething tabloid 'dogs', helped to create the powerful neo-liberal consensus which exists in 'same, same but different' forms across the elites of all the developed world.

But there were other factors too, such as the concentrated and unaccountable power of multi-national corporates and international banks.

This is nothing more than a brief period of humiliation for one of the world's most powerful organisations.

Newsflash: Fox News ain't going nowhere.

Yet the liberal critique which suggests that unfettered capitalism does not promote ethical behaviour in business has been proved categorically correct. The trouble is that we knew but just didn't really care.

The Left has become a childish rump. They celebrate the demise of Murdoch even though they know it is in fact not a demise and that he is, in fact, not their bête noir anyway.

The real mission for those who stand against neo-liberalism and market economics is to come up with an alternative vision.

Those who effectively represent the Left in the media seem far more interested in ego-driven 'victories' in the unreal world of media hyperbole.

It is a search for bogeymen to 'pound on' because the big battles have been lost.

Until such infantile and bewildered conduct ends, we can expect little to change after this latest witch-burning pantomime.

How a needless pursuit of truth killed the News of the World

2011-07-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

This hacking affair feels like the ultimate non-story story; a classic inversion whereby the feral activities of the ruling class are providing banal entertainment to the masses.

The drunks in the street are boring. Now the idiocy and hypocrisy of our rulers, and their temporary humiliations, substitutes for actual opposition, pyrrhic joy for us joe schmoes who are otherwise essentially powerless.

They always were us: a projection of all our worst fears, a mainly joyless human mass driven by exploiting voyeurism and paranoia.

Of course it has been fun to watch Murdoch's seemingly impregnable empire show that it could crumble and it may indeed still.

And the bizarre thing? It was the pursuit of truth which undid the fabrication factory.

Now a series of scores are being settled. Brown, the MPs, the Guardian, the BBC and inexplicably Hugh Grant – all of them, like some great reawakening of Murder on the Orient Express, finally getting the chance to stick the boot in.

But it was their amoral decision to indulge, rather than oppose, Murdoch's ruthless, zero ethics approach to news-gathering which they are truly railing against. We nourish the monster, maybe we slay it too. But do we learn?

Mr Brown tells us his concern is for the ordinary people. No it wasn't it. The bitter bear wants his revenge and he is too much the coward, like Coogan and Grant, to admit it.

The post ideological politician always tries to do the right thing, he has tossed away the "straight jacket" of ideology. Instead he shouts slogans into the ether so vague that even the most nefarious beast might find himself being able to agree.

What is left, is a series of short term decisions which only serve to corrode the authority of politicians to dangerously low levels. Low enough for malevolent forces to easily exploit disillusionment with extreme, unhappy ideas.

New Labour never even sought to hide their begging of Murdoch. That seems crucial. News Corp was like the school bully that everyone preferred to just get on with, his constituency of readers too great.

And who did the hacking effect? A relatively, small number of people albeit the sufferance was both macabre and abhorrent given the grief involved.

The news doesn't need an effect. It needs characters, tragi-comedy, suspense and twists. It doesn't have to add up to much.

This is where the great Rupert and his technocrat, clueless son appear to have completely missed the point.

Part of Twitter is driven by half-baked rumour and nonsense conspiracy. You don't need to hack phones for a few extra details that can just as easily be made up and then forgotten.

Murdoch's macho hatchet men were pursuing the truth when it does not matter any more.

We go to the news to escape – notwithstanding the odd grim atrocity to remind us how lucky we are.

In the wake of these events, soft celebrity journalism will balloon. Stuff that is targeted at celebrities we hate anyway. Stuff that is so untrue no-one would ever bother to sue. A fog of beauty and mass abbreviation.

Virtual reality isn't coming out of computers, it comes out of us.

Poor Rupert, the supposed media genius, didn't get it.

Phone hackers

2011-07-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

The outrage and vitriol has poured forth after it emerged that the News of the World was hacking into the phones of murdered children.

It seems clear that the persons responsible are going to spend some time in a jail cell.

But I feel compelled to discuss some of the hypocrisy underlying the outrage in connection with this story.

First, we have the politicians who have colluded and shamelessly courted Murdoch for years.

Then, we have rich celebrities who are so shameless, that they sue newspapers owned by R Murdoch while they film movies for companies who are partially owned by, er, R Murdoch.

And finally, we have us. Us weirdos, who have helped to create a news saturated society with a seriously unhealthy, voyeuristic and pornographic obsession with murdered children.

Hari Kari

2011-06-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

Johann Hari is in trouble. The Indie columnist has admitted borrowing quotes and pretending that they were given to him in his interview.

Readers of Private Eye will know that he faced some accusations related to artistic license before.

What is rather depressing is that this fellow is yet another 'voice of the left' writer who never had to earn the tag.

As far as I know, he has never worked as an actual news journalist. No surprise that he has never considered the perils of quote-mashing.

One assumes Hari had friends in the right places. His writing is of a good standard but no better than a large percentile of journalists might manage if given half a chance.

The left, it seems, is only represented by these personality cult types. To Hari, one can add Galloway and Livingstone. Not journalists but definitely ego-driven cults.

No wonder even a banking crisis could not inspire leftist ideals. Its public face is mediated by corporate media which sees ideologues only as another form of 'infotainment'.

Columnists should be esteemed journalists or writers with long, fearsome track records (such as Robert Fisk). Or people producing ideas-driven stuff like Adam Curtis.

Nowadays, papers of all political persuasions are more interested in their columnists being weird kinds of representations of what they think their readers see themselves as.

No doubt, editors will go on paying Hari, Burchill and the rest huge sums while people who actually know the trade get laid off.

Keeping mum

2011-06-09T16:55:00.001-07:00

In our postmodern, post-political confusion everyone is a something – there are labels for everything whether it be skin colour or TV shows.

Postmodernism encourages fragmentation. In politics, this has expressed itself in insouciance, bewilderment, personality politics and the inexorable rise of single issue politics.

There is something rather lazy about this brand of politics – as if one cannot be bothered with a fully formed worldview.

There is also perhaps something fanatical about it too. Rather than a political view, we have groups almost worshipping their own view and they service it like mindless army ants.

This is a rather useful way of thinking about environmentalism. It explains why this movement has backed taxes on the poor (fuel duty) and on occasion appeared to stymie development in the third world (the we can have luxuries but you can't argument).

Now mums are at it. Thanks to the internet, organisations like Mumsnet are influential enough to get interviews with the Prime Minister. The Mother's Union has been telling us how to stop the sexualisation of childhood.

This fragmented politics results in less cohesive world views which can be subsumed easily by the omni-narrative, neo-liberalism.

If the mums actually represented all mums, they would be a group so diverse as to make it meaningless.

In fact, they really represent some kind of weird 'front' for a group of rather censorious, antagonistic and suspiciously conservative types.

Here, a frankly pretty old perspective inserted itself into this seemingly new activism. In a way, these are how the old ideologies reinvent themselves.

Worse still, they give off the impression of trying to exclude people from certain arguments because they are not parents. This may be because sometimes it is easier to exclude people from the debate when your arguments are weak.

There seems little to recommend single issue activism. They offer a great place for the old, failed ideas to hide and also allow for distortion in the single minded pursuit of specific goals.

Politicising rape

2011-05-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

The 'rape debate' is an example of how liberalism has shifted its gaze from big picture issues to single issue obsessiveness.

The effect can be deeply perverse and not particularly in line with the general tenets of the liberal mind.

Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, got himself into predictable trouble when he used the phrase 'serious rape'.

While it was obvious he did not mean to suggest there was such a thing as trivial rape, New Labour and rape activists piled in.

There is a certain psychology to this debate - soon enough, almost every speaker felt the need to say that every rape is serious even though this is not what it is contentious nor ever has been.

The theme of the criticism was this: here is another man revealing what all men really think which is that significant numbers of rape cases are 'not really rape'.

This belief is justified by citing the low percentage of rape reports which end in convictions. (the higher figure between those charged and those convicted is less enthusiastically cited).

It seems that the discrimination of women debate has somehow displaced itself into the agreed necessities of the justice system.

There are other reasons why rape convictions may be hard to obtain. The nature of the crime means there are often no witnesses. Witnesses are the life blood of proof.

Then, you look for proof of violence or signs of struggle. If these are not present, it is not reasonable for a jury to begin to doubt they can reach the threshold of 'beyond reasonable doubt'?

The quasi left campaigners won't have it. They are part of the discrimination industry and predisposed to find injustice.

These same activists are less interested in whether our hedonistic, carefree culture is perhaps more to blame for occurrences of this crime.

Alleged assailants can often be known to the alleged victim - these type of crimes are born from complicated entanglements.

Yet the activists simply want the legal system to be changed or tweaked. So-called liberals, narrow minded enough to attack a justice system in order to serve their needs without having proved fault with it.

Time and time again these days, the liberal mind loses sight of the 'big picture'. True liberals values such as fairness for all have been forgotten in this activist-driven, single-issue bloodsport of a democracy.

Heavy sentences for rapists seems reasonable - perhaps they remain too light.

But this worrying liberal habit of targeting the legal system to satisfy a misplaced sense of 'righting wrongs' creates, ultimately, an even more, fragmented, unfair society.

The Bin Laden paradox

2011-05-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

The media's reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden was to suggest that this was something akin to the death of al Qaida.

At the same time, other journalists suggested a wave of reprisal attacks may be possible.

If we are to believe that al Qaida is now rudderless, which seems quite possible if not probable, then we are led to a rather interesting conclusion.

Suddenly, the 'truth' of al Qaida as a barely credible organisation being held together by an ageing sheikh becomes clear.

This was not the picture presented to us by the very same journalists (eg John Simpson) in the years after 9/11 and 7/7. Then, we were told to expect terror to simply be a part of our daily lives.

For all the terror al Qaida created, an organisation held together by one man could not possibly justify the hype spewed out by the mainstream media networks.

Yet not a mention of this in the aftermath. Indeed the two positions continued to be represented with the 'analysis reporters' telling us al Qaida was mortally wounded while the 'security reporters' warning us of reprisal threats.

So in our fragmented, hysterical news world, two seemingly paradoxical positions lie side by side as our breathless news presenters charge toward the weather.

E.L.E.C.T.I.O.N

2010-05-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

Here is NewsBrain’s full range of thoughts in regards of Election 2010.

The result of the general election always looked close but you had a certain, weary feeling that the Tories would prevail with a small majority.

The difference between that and a hung parliament may not be that great.

Like any political body, the Tories are a ruthless lot and even with a small majority Tory wet David Cameron (wet being the term for left leaning Tories) would have struggled to maintain unity.

Old school Thatcherites will crawl from their rocks demanding “reforms” borne of their markets fanaticism.

Boris Johnson would likely be their ringleader, a man who has cleverly made himself both a clownish celebrity and an ideologue.

He is a dangerous politician because his hypocrisy for a modern elected representative is in fact quite profound.

His journalism was a panoply of tub-thumping freedom from the state agitation.

Yet what was one of his main policies in the dressed up parish council pantomime that is the battle for London’s mayoralty? None other than to stop you from having a beer on the bus. What could be more nanny state than that.

This Tory disunity will now be compounded by whatever they have to give up to assuage the Liberal Democrats.

Silly Twitter

The Twittersphere has been peppered with all manner of political angst in these past few weeks.

There was the alarmist liberalism of ‘what happens if the Tories get in?’. Labour must wish the working classes could be this dumb as perhaps then their vote would not have collapsed this much.

The point being that Labour has offered a cynical neo-liberal agenda which has included illegal war and anti-democratic reform.

Their great project was the NHS and there is significant conjecture to be had over exactly what level of improvement has been garnered from the huge injection of funds.

Heavy management costs, an obsession with ‘choice’ and maltreatment scandals are but some of the issues which make you wonder how well they did in this area. Yet there is no doubt they intended this to be the great legacy.

But the point is that what occurred on social networks was symptomatic of the great liberal denial. They cannot accept class war is dead and thus for a few days attempted to reimagine the Tories as demonic beasts ushering in hated capitalism.

It got worse after the election when it emerged that many voters regarded the Liberal Democrats as a legitimate anti Tory vote.

This was simple ignorance. The LibDems have much common ground with the Conservatives but do play that game of telling people what they want to hear depending on the audience. This hung parliament may give the LibDems brief power but may also leave a sour taste in the mouth for voters who should have done a bit more research.

Voting reform

Much talk now too about voting reform. Accurately reflecting the electorate’s wishes is of course a morally advisable aim. But campaigners looking desperately to attach themselves to a cause seem to be getting rather carried away with the prospect of proportional representation.

Most despicably, Labour people now talk of some “progressive alliance” (a liberal/labour government) despite doing nothing about voting reform when they had a stranglehold over power.

The probable reality of PR is thus: a Labour Liberal coalition pushing a bureaucratic market economic agenda no different to the policies we have right now.

The key difference is that with PR, no party will have the chance of getting sole control and elections may in fact become a lot less interesting because of this. Real power will be decided in the horse trading after elections whilst a confused populous looks on trying to understand the complex result.

PR may be the right thing to do and in the long term may allow for a wider array of parties to be represented. But this much vaunted progressive alliance would be nothing more than a neo-liberal stitch up which could last for decades.

Debates

How did Nick Clegg come to win that first debate and achieve a huge bounce in the opinion polls which then fell flat on its face?

He did not win the debate in terms of the traditional framework one may use to anoint the winner of a verbal exchange. He did not make you laugh or construct a brilliantly argued point on a key issue. The great praise for him was derived from that fact he remembered people’s names.

What happened was that this X Factor style popularity contest came to be the defining heart of the pre election campaign.

The media loved it because it was they who were able to construct narratives from it. Using Twitter and focus groups, they had a kind of pulse monitor of the nation’s mood.

From that spin doctors fed journalists their take on who ‘won’. It was a meaningless stab in the dark to some extent but soon enough the networks started reporting Clegg’s victory as a pseudo-fact, a fact made entirely by the media itself.

And I suspect that with the LibDems dire performance in the poll, the media may not be offering them victory when the next debates come round.

Bigot Brown and the campaign

NewsBrain thought Brown’s bigot comment rather summed up what New Labour think about anyone who questions immigration. It is an issue where they are particularly nasty.

They continue to treat asylum seekers with no respect, forcing them to live in squalor while their applications are tortuously reviewed.

And their justification for eastern European migration solely rests on the economic benefit or, put it another way, ‘their foreign so let’s screw their asses’. My, how enlightened; and Brown has the nerve to call others bigoted.

So racist are New Labour that Brown, toward the end of the campaign, talked up his achievement by including all the ethnic firsts his cabinet had managed. Why didn’t he just say, ‘look at me, I employed a black man?”

The wider campaign was a dull, tense affair. It reminded of a dull FA Cup final sliding towards penalty kicks. There were few gaffes or interesting micro-battles in the constituencies.

The leaders are all automatons, not even the showbiz charisma of Obama could be mustered to enliven proceedings.

There is a real sense that this type of democracy no longer has relevance so perhaps those locked out of polling stations will be seen by historians as some kind of symbolic watershed.

Like the economy, large competing institutions (the three main parties ) have merged in order to concentrate power in representative democracy, which remains subordinate to the globalised economy.

The checks and balances system did not envisage, or wish to deal with, such a position.

A truly radical idea would be to introduce wide scale referenda on key issues. But NewsBrain suspects the elites fear that more than fascism.

Private Eye and the MMR scandal

2010-03-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

Private Eye, alongside the hysterical media it so often lampoons, has come in for serious opprobrium over coverage of the MMR story and its alleged link to autism.

To summarise: the Eye gave huge prominence to claims – published in the respected medical journal The Lancet – that such a link existed. The GMC recently castigated the doctor who compiled this research and pretty much everyone in the media now accepts this as a non-issue.

Criticism has been ferocious: and with pretty good reason as the effect of this coverage caused vaccinations to fall and thus risk the re-emergence of measles.

Media commentator Roy Greenslade has suggested the Eye’s ‘apology’ is rather less than satisfactory. But it is interesting to look at what lies behind their huge error and question how the media really should handle these stories. Should they be held responsible for MMR debacle?

With newspapers, the question is rather more easy to answer. Their agenda is not to find the truth so much as to sell papers using the potency of fear. Health coverage in newspapers is often hysterical and this undoubtedly was the main attraction for the papers in relation to MMR.

Cash in

The relevance of the story is also crucial as clearly anything connected to child safety will immediately grab the attention of the "average reader".

When Private Eye issued a special edition dedicated to the issue, one could not help feeling they were trying to cash in on the popularity of the story. But the Eye, unlike the papers, has never presented itself as an organ of record.

It does not solely use journalists and instead, quite often, trades on the currency of anonymously attributed ‘insiders’. Its whole raison d’etre is that we often cannot trust the public face of institutions and there is increasing amounts of evidence to substantiate said position.

Unlike the newspapers, the Eye also "peer reviewed" its own coverage recently, with the conclusion reached it failed to provide enough balance.

But does this suggest that all journalism can be tarred with the same brush?

One could make the argument that there is a certain process in all journalism, that of chasing the story. It conflicts with telling the truth in some senses, particularly when the facts uncovered undermine the thrust of whatever that journalist may have been pursuing.

In summary, the journalist of whatever political hue will always be blinded tby he dazzle of his "story" and therefore will never be capable of objectively interpreting the facts he garners.

Journalism at fault

In which case, it is not a matter of berating the Daily Mail or the Sun. It would be a case of the process – journalism – being at fault.

However, this would be too hysterical a reaction. The difference between mass consumption media and polemicists is intent.

The newspapers seek to stab their readers with fear and are now so apolitical that they will jump on any cause which does the job.

Take global warming: the papers will gladly jump on spectacular apocalypse prediction as "a bit of sport".

This should not be taken as some great commitment to protecting the planet. The vast majority of their coverage will remain about short term concerns which run entirely against the environmental agenda.

Institutions and organisations lie, with the Iraq war being one of the most recent and obvious examples.

The BBC's largely deferential journalism is not the answer (the middle market fear agenda also features heavily in its coverage), nor is the poisoned hysteria of Fleet Street lunacy.

Polemical journalism involves honestly taking a position and then using investigative reporting techniques to prove or present it.

There is no attempt at balance as this type of journalism does not bother with the naive belief that in all things there is a nice, easy "truthful" position.

It is then incumbent upon the audience to go and find other points of view should they wish to.

The MMR coverage reflected more the consequences of the truth of the real relationship between citizen and the state.

In testing times, the trust has gone because the media "blame culture", heavily galvanised by politicians, has eroded our faith in what institutions say.

So even though there was no logical reason to suppose that the government want to seriously harm our children, many parents still opted for the far greater risk of not immunising at all.

That is to say, they prioritised possible risk over definite risk.

NewsBrain cannot see how even the most hysterical news story could account for that spectacular misreading of probability.

Why voting is the greatest apathy

2010-03-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Apathy seems generally to be associated with physical shortcomings.

So the meaning of a hugely subjective term such as voter apathy tends to be restricted to not bothering to attend the ballot box and complete this civic duty.

This behavioural pattern, dubbed the democratic deficit, would appear to trouble liberals greatly.

Reasonably, they suppose that the freedoms we enjoy will evaporate if we do not exercise our choice in elections. The old slippery slope argument.

Of course many of us do not use these freedoms. Why, for instance, do the poor vote for a system in which they get no job security, poor schooling and housing while a small class of undeserving rich grow their assets even in times of austerity.

The other strong counter is that there no actual choice. And that in fact the real choice at this election is not between parties but whether or not to condone our malfunctioning democracy with the dignity of a vote at all.

Yet for all that, our meagre democracy is better than the violent totalitarianism of places like Burma and North Korea.

The latter represents the stick with which we are forced to the ballot box. It is the recurring "cheap trick" of mono-systemic times.

If there is no positive reason for doing something, then instead create some dystopic consequence to combat the refusal to adhere to tradition. And that is what our democracy is becoming, a tradition as empty as the unqualified fantasy of Church of England wedding vows.

From this predication, enter the seemingly many groups who seek to address the apathy problem. A tidal wave of earnest and clueless liberals if ever there was.

They talk of reports and chatter fervently about their discussions with "real people". Forgive NewsBrain, but people who talk about having conversations with "real people" are unlikely to offer much enlightenment.

And the character of what they tell us is as tired as the politics they supposedly seek to change.

The public are political apparently but they are turned off by the Westminster bubble. These think tanks do not seem to have noticed that other systems of political debate exist and are equally unappealing to the public.

In fact, despite the public claiming to dislike adversarial politics, there has been a move to increase this style by the introduction of TV leadership debates. It is the closest thing politics can offer to drama via the medium – television - in which we form our understanding of almost everything.

These groups also put forward electoral reform as a potential solution.

Changing our system might be more mathematically honest and will reduce the power of voters in marginal constituencies.

But it will simply leave behind a coalescence of power which will be largely unaffected by the outcomes of elections (ie, the real election comes afterwards when parties horsetrade to form the majority party).

It is possible that more parties may be represented but the costs of entering parliament are likely to inhibit that largely.

Yet all these supposed solutions neatly avoid the question of whether there is really a choice. Therein lies the irony.

The organisations tasked with combating apathy are themselves the most apathetic, because they are not prepared to even consider the fundamental systemic issues which have de-politicised our society.

The extent to which opposition as a concept has died is quite flabberghasting. It has reached the point where no authoritarian controls or strategies are even neccessary to engender it.

Take the power of Blairism. When Tony made his heartfelt Diana speech, did that not in some way create a whole army of "Tonys", men suddenly became keen to emote disproportionately in public over the death of a rich aristocrat.

Another example is the current National Union of Students President Wes Hall. In the olden days, major New Labour figures posited themsleves as student radicals and backed a heavily leftist, if not neo-Marxist, agenda.

Of course they were just attention seeking and soon jettisoned their ideals to pursue the soothing of their own egos instead.

But the new student politician, if Mr Hall is to be taken as its template, is not even bothering to simulate offence towards the status quo. In fact, he sounds so New Labour that he reminded me of the sinister Macauley Culkin film, The Good Son.

The point though is that even public figures completely outwith the reach of any organisation have become self-selecting mouthpieces.

So the claim that elected independents would neccessarily reinvent politics now also faces a struggle in terms of credulity.

In conclusion, the apathy fighters have accepted 'the rules of the game' and this accounts for why the so-called solutions start to look so tired, recycled and incredulous.

A new politics is needed which rejects the neo-liberal consensus. A vote withheld from the forthcoming election for this reason is a far more politicised act than supporting mainstream parties.

This Bulger witchhunt is childish and vindictive

2010-03-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

The thirst for blood grows in regards of the killer of Jamie Bulger, Jon Venables. As he ponders upon his fate in prison, the growing public anger is ironically taking on the primitive character of a child’s fury.

The killing of a young child is now mediated heavily through the prism of frenzied media coverage and so the former Mr Venables finds himself a modern demon, even though - as a ten year old of limited capacity – he may not have understood his crime at the time.

Hired hands for organised crime syndicates do but our reaction to such individuals is less vitriolic. The politicians who know exactly what they are doing when they propagate illegal war would also not appear to be quite as evil as the hopeless Venables if public reaction were ever to be taken as some kind of forensic measurement of sin.

Yet on the liberal side there is fault too. Mindlessly, the mantra is rehashed that we must rehabilitate. But is such a thing possible or even worthwhile in such circumstances?

Such madness only serves to act as an indictment on politicians who, as managers of the system, do not have the confidence to shout the down the wild, feral rantings of our public. Instead, they indulge it while clinging desperately to the law.

No-one has yet seen fit to change it but if there are votes in it then do not be surprised.

Venables was the product of a difficult background, one that no-one would label as preferential. By the same token, it was one that millions across the world have to suffer.

What led him to kill is impossible to say. It may have been a buried trauma which we do not know about.

Almost certainly, it would have been a mosaic of complex factors all processing at the same time to produce this horrific catastrophe. One could treat this incident almost like a natural disaster, so freakish was it in nature and statistical occurrence.

A child’s cruelty can be more vicious than anything an adult can muster. Hates passes through such immature beings as a galvanising energy which, if untamed, can lead to dreadful bullying or macabre acts of animal cruelty.

Think about the child school bullying which undoubtedly precipitates numerous young suicides each year. But the lines of responsibility are blurred enough so the media cannot quite execute the full force of its panto-vision in these circumstances.

The playground is an under-reported crucible of cruelty.

It is probably only the restrictions impose by adults, and physical limitation, that prevents it spilling into serious harm against another human.

Venables, against the backdrop of a rundown Liverpool estate, probably stymied by paranoia and fear of crime, perhaps had greater opportunity to exorcise his demons or express some perverse fantasy.

Crimes such as these must be ascribed some form of collective responsibility. Didn’t this young boy watch or possibly obsess about some horror movie?

Of course a film on its own cannot be held to blame. But the transference of mindless violence into a regular vehicle for mass entertainment may point to a moribund, decaying society.

Venables had teachers and we supposedly have social services designed to help struggling families.

But then again, why do we have struggling families at all?

Somehow, we only focus on the perpetrator, the victim, the act and their ages. This heinous crime is born of the world we made as well as the machinations of weak, vulnerable young mind. Even in the most idealist society, human malfunction is still possible.

Once the crime occurred though, the question became a pragmatic one. In a country without the death penalty, all the possible options involved substantial expenditure when compared to the average cost of a criminal.

Yet Venables never had freedom but life licence. He was released on the basis of strict conditions. Worse still, whatever new identity this boy may have been given the memory of his crime would now exist alongside the moral abhorrence of it, which no doubt he is well aware of now.

Venables, released, was now ‘free’ to make friends, marry and start a family. Yet he would always be condemned to live a lie with such a vulnerable troubled past likely to bubble away in his subconscious.

Suddenly, this rehabilitation looks ludicrous. No matter how liberal or radical you may be, every person would want to know about the most traumatic moment of their partner’s life. And in any case, would Venables have the strength of mind necessary to lie with such precision and consistency.

Banned from returning to what he knows best and unlikely to have the skills to make a real impact on society, this may have been a freedom of little hope.

Perhaps the best solution would have been to incarcerate Venables in an open prison, thus giving him a humane existence while acknowledging in these circumstances that rehabilitation is simply untenable.

Meanwhile, the public foams at the mouth. There is something deeply repugnant about this indignation, the child-like fury of the ignorant evokes the madness of ancient history when any non conformist women was branded a witch and killed.

Politicians of all sides should slap this nonsense down, not fan the flames. We remain at the behest of false Gods and false demons.

Is this the end for the BBC?

2010-02-26T04:42:00.000-08:00

The BBC remains an anachronism in an age where ruthless media barons find ever more extraordinary ways of slashing costs in the business of making music, film, news and television.

Vast enterprises have merged and it is no surprise that the techniques of making mass entertainment have bled into the news itself. Yet, the BBC has been left alone even in the decade when Thatcher and Reagan exported an agenda of virulent – perhaps even spiteful – deregulation and privatisation.

Somehow, auntie remained immune. Yet the latest round of possible cost-cutting could finally add a certain terminal character to the BBC’s condition.
The corporation has always had to make compromises. It appears this death by 1,000 cuts may be nearing its denouement amid speculation of a new round of closures and cuts. Likely to be the chief headliner of the rationing proposals is the decision to axe 6Music.

In the Westminster village, a station which champions underground alternative music was never likely hold much water or interest. Radio4 and Radio3 carry the legacy of old BBC and are held up as crown jewels of public service broadcasting.

Yet the erudite, culture loving urban elites – which we are so regularly and erroneously told are disproportionately served by the BBC – are increasingly turning away from these stations. Of course Radio4 comedy output remains popular but there is no question its budget and status is sacrosanct because of the demographic it serves. Similar can be said of Radio 3.

Poor 6Music does not enjoy such patronage. Instead, greedy commercial stations want it to die so that their dismal, commercial rock stations may benefit. These stations cater for a much younger audience, do not make any attempt to back little-known artists and give their DJs precious little freedom.

The BBC’s closure plan must surely have been influenced by the growing complaints from media oligarchies struggling in the recession backed by politicians on all sides of the Commons partially motivated by settling BBC scores.

But do MPs and the like understand or care about the sensitivities and intricacies of modern music? One cannot help but get a distinct feeling that rock music represents a mysterious world which they do not really respect or understand.

Yet the growth of festivals in the UK must provide a massive boost to the summer economy. Those millions who attend festivals are very much the potential target audience for 6Music. This underlines the profound disconnection between London’s political bubble and the wider world.

It is phenomenal ignorance given that the very same city is one of the hotbeds of contemporary music on Earth. For theses millions, music is a passion which defines all the crucial aspects of their lives. How many front benchers or opposition spokespeople can identify with this?

It is fair to say that 6Music’s audience is small but the condition one cannot measure is audience loyalty.

Viewers might blithely flick on to BBC3 but I suspect many of 6Music’s followers regard that station as ‘worth the license’. This is the kind of passion that the BBC should be generating. This is what public service means. It seems the elites can have their crown jewels but no-one else is allowed.

Furthermore, this plan would damage the BBC heavily among this demographic. Right wing commentators often make the error of claiming the urban elite overly influence BBC output. A cursory look at a week’s output suggests programming almost exclusively devoted to the middle class, whether it be safe sitcoms, lifestyle shows or middle-market newspaper agenda documentaries such as Panorama.

Despite this, it is the same middle class/right wing demographic who appear to complain about the BBC the most often. In fact, the urban elite defend the BBC because probably they are politically sympathetic to the idea of public service broadcasting acting as a stopcock against Rupert Murdoch’s nihilist diet of Americana and football

Nevertheless, as the license fee goes up this political sympathy may simply evaporate if the BBC chooses to offer this audience next to nothing. They are already watching HBO in droves so the public service/quality television argument has been heavily undermined.

Killing 6Music opens up the BBC to virulent attacks from left and right of the political spectrum. We live in an age of pseudo-choice and survival of the fittest.

The BBC’s survival is in part owed to the fact that politicians know their ability to communicate with the public would be heavily damaged if it disappeared. Political coverage does not make money or generate advertising.

But if these savings are used simply to make more drama which the elite may recognise as ‘quality’ in their Reithian outdated outlook, it risks alienating an audience which hitherto have kept somewhat silent on the BBC debate. There is already a Facebook group set up demanding that 6Music continues. How long before one is created – by liberals – demanding the end of the BBC itself.?

Special effects: Avatar's anti-American credentials

2010-02-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

Avatar is a special effects behemoth likely to carry away all manner of film industry awards and profit-making plaudits. Reviewing its merits seems pointless as whether this film is good or bad hardly matters.

What is more interesting, is to ask how a film which appears to almost anti-American got made in the Hollywood dream factory. Is this some sea change of perception in the American/western populous? Probably not. It is however an object lesson in how value-free post-modernity can create paradox and thus provide the most spectacular special effect of the whole movie.

The movie’s premise pits a heavily armed force of what appears to be marines against a blue-skinned peace loving aliens on a planet with a nigh-magical eco-system. In a very clunky and unsubtle nod to Iraq, the bad guy Yanks launch all manner of unspeakable attacks against the aliens in a bid to mine some oil-like substance and, in Hollywood tradition, they end up taking a good spanking.

On the face of it, a breakthrough for mainstream movies when compared to movies like Rambo (the ones set outside the US) where American power is seen only as force bringing about good.

Yet this is only a very limited form of progression if it is indeed progress at all. The alien natives are a classic piece of ultra-stereotype, back-to-nature nonsense. They are DNA-linked to the trees and wedded to old myths dreamed up by writers re-hashing faux-spiritualism clichés.

Nice savages, ga-ga, goo-goo

They conveniently appear to have no customs or behaviours which could possibly offend a human sensibility. What a relief! It may make an easy film narrative but it also serves to totally undermine James Cameron’s attempt to critique military imperialism.

For here, we see the true face of modern liberalism; it has been reduced to child-like fairy tales in the face of our real-world narrative of brutality and survival-of-the fittest. In a time when a counter-ideology is urgently required, one suspects history will not judge liberalism kindly for pinning its hopes on photo-synthesis.

What Avatar offers is a simple tale of good and evil. That opposition does not help us understand the world but it is something we innately relate to for the purposes of mass entertainment.

Post-modernity has stripped us politically to the point where NewsBrain would question whether it matters what is ascribed with the labels ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in any given film. It is the idea of good and evil itself which is important.

We are the good guys

Out in the wider world, systems, organisations and politicians bully through soundbite and image to define these concepts. It would not surprise if people leave Avatar identifying themselves and their civilisation with the cute, peace-loving aliens more than the creatures who sound and look like they do. We are taught to believe we are the good guys, not ask who they are.

The film is also subtly de-contextualised to avoid putting off the patriots. Although the term marine is used we really do not know much about who the humans are and what they represent.

No presidential figure issues an edict and the military force could well be employed by a mega-corporation. Moreover, we never see the American flag. It is interesting that now a faceless violent mega-corporation can be construed in this way, without backstory – this is how tolerant and apathetic we are about such things.

War by maths

It also rather reminds NewsBrain of the supposedly anti-war Vietnam films such as Deerhunter, Platoon and Apocalypse Now. All these films focussed on the madness of the soldiers and preferred not to offer any comment on the now well-known theory that soldiers were encourage to kill to achieve targets set by defence chief Robert McNamara, who attempted to apply maths to the business of war. The point is this: by avoiding political context, the story of Avatar becomes even more meaningless.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that by the end of the movie, we are in full Hollywood crassness mode. The aliens are ‘kicking ass’ with guns and radio mics to the point where even a member of America’s defence lobby would have happily recommended Avatar for investment.

As discussed previously on NewsBrain, attempting to represent reasonable, if not painfully true, suppositions - ie military imperialism is morally wrong – in the realm of fantasy is self-defeating. Disrupting the poles of good and evil make people think more.

Documentary maker Adam Curtis recently suggested the lack of a good-and-evil narrative in the Rwandan conflict was one of the reasons why the horrific conflict failed to generate (relatively) that much media coverage. There is every chance that this conflict will occupy a minute place in contemporary history in comparison to something like the 9/11 attacks.

Avatar, however, will preside like a king in cinema’s annals. Its apparent message will not. The recent Batman film, The Dark Knight, did a far better of job of sneaking a subversive message out of tinseltown. In the ‘heroic’ ending, Batman takes the fall for the mess of his home town.

But if you objectively think about his actions in the film, his neo-conservative, vigilanteism was the cause of it all in the first place. Of course, you can argue that the message in this case is too subtle. Avatar hopes to be a cautionary tale of greed versus humanity. But if you want people to think, Mr Cameron, then you need to tell us whose greed and whose humanity you might possibly mean.

Michael's face/hip-hop's surrender

2010-02-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

As the colour drained from Michael Jackson’s face, it is hard to refrain from wondering whether this was some kind of weird cultural metaphor.

Because as Jackson went from, the king of pop - whose video performances in Billy Jean and Thriller immortalise him in the weird cesspit of popular culture – to hermetic non-human, another form of black music was also transforming, also draining of colour and energy.

Hip-hop began in that mystical, romanticised place, ‘the streets’. By the time it started to break into mainstream culture, acts such as Public Enemy and NWA were making heroically blunt but also rather enthralling screams from America’s new underclass.

They shocked America, with open hatred for the police. Their message was simple: your structures and doctrines simply no longer apply here.

American capitalism achieved what America’s politics never could: the segregation of the poor (largely ethnic but by no means exclusively). Of course many scrambled their way out somehow but it is reasonably safe to say millions did not. Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans tell us this.

Hip-hop was much more authentic than punk, a movement part inspired as a joke (sex pistols), part inspired by brilliant rock musicians with only the vaguest political vapour swirling in the air.

Yet the raw excitement of the music grabbed the attention of audiences beyond the ethnic and social profiles of hip-hop artists.

Record companies soon caught on and a musical genre which would eventually provide monstrous worldwide profits had sparked into life.

Biggie Smalls and Tupac’s feud perhaps lent a dark lustre to hip-hop which disguised the fact that hip-hop’s language was becoming narcissistic.

This represented the ascension of hip-hop into the musical establishment.

Now, there is no attempt at pretence as hip-hop takes the mantle of hard-edged slick pop, ably executed by Eminem and Jay Z, performer-businessmen like Mick Jagger and Bono.

The low point for NewsBrain was watching Kanye West attempt to attone for his stage invasion at an awards ceremony.

Talkshow host Jay Leno, a fat white multi-millionaire, asked Kanye mockingly what his mother would think and he simply stared back like a child who knows the game is up.

Ironically, it is David Simon, a white journalist, who is narrating the story of America’s poor most effectively in television dramas such the The Wire.

Hip-hop still holds the accessories of rebellion dear – swearing, anti-PC rhetoric and whatever else can suck in middle class youths with pocket money to burn.

But these are used as props where indeed they are used at all.

It is a neutered genre of music, posturing painfully like sugar-coated skater punks or the ludicrous death metallers.

Big time rappers prefer to discuss personal proclivities now rather than the political agenda. There are some who remain politicised below the radar.

So in the aftermath of the death of Michael, who established a cult without trying, we should also ask what happened to the blackness of black music.

It shows that perhaps the nature of the commodity is that the characteristics which give it definition are subtly replaced to allow homogenisation and a successful mass market transition.

You cannot take over the mainstream, MCs of the world, only become it.

Meet Tony Blair: politics' answer to the Joker

2010-01-29T13:44:00.000-08:00

So there it is. This political icon of our sad age; a cackling, ultra-smug piece of human graffiti came as the star of his ongoing news pantomime, the Iraq War.

Blair’s comical and consistent deceit serves as an Orwellian paradox to the horrendous death and destruction unleashed by the invasion.

It had been built up as the moment when ‘pressure’ would force Blair into admission. But that wasn’t what this inquiry was for. This event was nothing more than a stage for yet another Blair performance.

Whatever nervousness commentators claimed to have seen, the Blair brand thrives in this environment. Factually, the occurrences of Friday’s testimony give rise to undermining the point of establishment led political inquiry.

Blair trotted out the same lines as he had before. The Iraq War is a problem of philosophy and morality, not legality. On this easy ground, Blair simply had another chance to languish in the limelight.

The hopeless Nick Robinson filled his blog with bubonic drivel in an attempt to dramatise the occasion.

In his attempt to be critical, he simply fed the Blair myth some more. Blair is political journalism’s anti-hero and they fawn over it so pathetically at times.

What is more interesting is the anatomy of Blair’s fame and appeal.

He is different to Bush, an intellectual pygmy who possesses actual affable charm.

Thatcher and Reagan were dogmatic, value-led politicians bent on an agenda.

But with Blair, there is something more sinister at work, something that isn’t quite tangible.

He was stupid enough to be duped by America into supporting war in Iraq. Yet once convinced, his strange, shady religious conviction drove him to the position where he now positively revels in the criticism fired at him.

Post leadership, Blair straddles across a strange mix of charitable work, consultancy, public speaking and political missionaryship.

The Guardian exposed the very odd web of companies Blair has set up to sustain his new, ill-defined project.

Blair is a strange mix of the ecclesiastical and the performance.

In 1997, things could only get better.

Somehow Blair made Britain into Winston of 1984, we all bought into the dream of his waving hands, stilted speech and earnest eyebrows – the same way Orwell’s hero thought he could find love among Big Brother and double-speak.

Now Blair returns to us as the agent of Room 101, refusing to alter his stance and effectively making a mockery of any hope that someone in power will be held accountable for the mess of Iraq.

He is like the Joker; laughing in our faces, evangelising – through his foundations – under our noses.

He is telling us, ‘you made me’. And, as much as we think we might hate him, somehow we created the Iraq inquiry just so that we could bring him back.

Blair helps us understand the true nature of the Iraq inquiry.

Not a place whereby the elite is held to account over its violent war.

But another stage for Tony Blair to parade, smile and remind us that the powerful are largely untouchable. That will never change and neither will his unshakeable conviction with regards to the Iraq project.

Che, Hunger and the dangers of romantic rebellion

2010-01-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

Our notion of rebellion is steeped in folk-song myth and impossible odds.

Famous historical revolters parade on cinema with long-haired, rough beauty and a set of ideals as pristine as any conflict diamond.

Liberalism and film has an uneasy relationship, particularly in biography and historical re-telling.

Hollywood does not even bother trying to pretend, with vast fabrication in Pearl Harbour and Braveheart.
The recent Che Guevara picture is a more interesting example. Here, liberal filmmaker Stephen Soderberg clearly attempted a sober retelling of the much-lauded revolutionary’s story.

His film is functional and entertaining, reshaping the memory from which it was inspired into a narrative. It told you the facts, with all the gusto and technical expertise you would expect from an American movie.

Superman

Still though, Soderberg could not resist the sense of Guevara as the ‘superman warrior’. The film’s whole energy came from his presence, belligerence, extraordinary generosity and idealism.

The filmmakers probably thought they were avoiding the obvious trap, that is questioning whether Guevarra ‘really believed' his morals or whether his stance ‘really right’.

But there is another danger of the mythology biopic. By positioning Guevara as the hero fighting against impossible odds, rather than as the ordinary man which he was, films such as these create a sense that revolution and rebellion belongs in the realm of the fantastical or worse the impossible.

And therefore we return to the old chestnut: liberalism, now clearly a failed movement, effectively playing into the hands of the status quo.

Liberals cannot find a cohesive or consistent narrative to explain the world in relation to their values. So rebellion has moved from the pragmatic realm to the romantic. This shift only serves to makes us more benign.

Escape

Yet modern art may offer an escape from this ambush. From this cultural background came the film Hunger, which offered a wholly unromantic take on rebellion in its depiction of the Troubles in Ireland as played out in the notorious Maze prison.

Hunger tells the story of Bobby Sands: a classic figure on what might be casually referred to as the revolutionary movement.

Sands went on hunger strike in the Maze and died, going on to be revered as a martyr for the Republican movement.

There must have been a feverish posse of British filmmakers, such as Ken Loach and his acolytes, who would have loved to make this movie.

And one can imagine the type of film we would have got: Sands posited as the romantic rebel, the authorities as cruel ventricles of the state amid heavy swirls of emotion, back-story and corporate rock.

Steve McQueen eschewed all that: instead he made a piece of art which attempts to interpret what happened in Northern Ireland by almost using a film as a visual allegory. In a sense, by taking out the demands of narrative we come closer to the nature of the event.

Insect

There are scenes in the movie which are stripped bare of what the demanding movie goer would expect such as dialogue, drama, plot development.

In one scene, we see a prisoner, whose odd bit of dialogue is unintelligible, staring out of a window while playing with an insect. Later we see self-contained scenes where Sands is in different processes of dying.

The only prolonged scene of dialogue does offer a glimpse into what motivates Sands. But even here, McQueen cleverly posits Sands as the spiritual fanatic while the priest he speaks to comes across as the true pragmatist.

Hunger also borrows from Kubrick, with careful use of sound, camera and choreography in its depiction of the mechanised torture and prisoner abuse of republicans inside the Maze. Creating a sense of artifice around such scenes is far more powerful than visual realism.

Overall, Hunger addresses the Trouble by showing the desperate men caught right in the midst of this crucible in the Maze. The torturers hate themselves and the prisoners are fanatical, driven mad by memories of ill treatment and injustice.

It is hard to see anything but the madness, rather than a conflict defined by good and bad.

Hunger portrays man, oppressed by the rules of conduct laid down from him by system which is largely anonymous in the movie.

This seems to NewsBrain, a better opposition with which to understand our times, where men are pitted against each other at the behest of elites concerned solely with renewing their power.

What's worse, voting for Cameron or just not bothering?

2009-12-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

Voting remains wrapped in liberal mythology: it is, apparently, the cornerstone of democracy. Moreover, it is the gift of centuries worth of theorising and protesting from grandees of the past determined to let the ordinary man have his due.

But if we look at what is actually happening in our society, we can see that there is a persuasive discourse which casts doubt and heavily undermines these traditional arguments.

These issues take on a heightened importance as British politics moves into a US style era, where two politicians will offer very similar agendas in the upcoming election.

For those of a leftist perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what to do. There will be swathes of New Labour voters transferring back to their natural party of allegiance, the Tories.

Apathy is an emotive word loaded by liberalists scare-mongering which suggest that if we do not vote, then extremists take over and ‘all hell breaks loose’.

Well, we are already living under a form of extremism which both rejects the basic rights of those outside the West and almost denies the portentous consequences of global warming.

The elite is comforted when a bloc of whatever constituency votes or protests against it. The system simply offers a compromise which then diffuses the protest but leaves the issue entirely unresolved.

Despite massive protest over global debt, the world’s poor remain exactly that and are expanding in number.

Environmentalism in the 1980s was considered an extremist ideology. Once science became too strong to ignore, the system once again reached out and began to offer what appeared to be acquiescence, via treaties such as Kyoto.

Yet the reality is that even the best deal out of Copenhagen (and we got the worst) may not have put sufficient breaks on our surge to planetary catastrophe.

The system appoints environmentalists, introduces tokenistic reforms and saturates the media with heavily branded advertising suggesting that it cares about the environment. And so the protest, once again, is diffused.

Capitalism and environmentalism are at almost fundamental odds but the argument is never contextualised.

A similar scenario is seen when people demand bankers' wages be controlled. Again, there is a debate even though the rules of our economic system coould never allow for such an idea.

With apathy one presents a different problem. The system has nothing to take from, nothing with which it can reinvent itself to maintain the illusion of pluralist democracy. Is it worth a try?

The emotive reaction is to say that men and women fought Hitler for the vote. Yet as with many arguments defending the ballot box, this is merely a half-truth. The Second World War was fought to stop a pathological maniac having control of most the Earth. Could we really make people fight solely for the right to vote?

China is the dystopic vision in this regard. Here, the urban middle classes are so placated and anaesthetised that they seem happy not to have the vote. They have Prada, without needing the ballot box.

In fact, we are perhaps being conditioned for such a scenario. America is almost there, with its presidential race now a Hollywood show with right-wing market economics an unsaid given for any participant.

Is it possible that by voting we are in fact ensuring a future where we cannot decide how, and by what values, we are governed?

This is our oppositional Orwellian society; the vote is a process by which we ensure there is never any change.

When the election looms, liberals will demand that, whatever we think we must vote. Those who vote with hideous ignorance will be treated with greater moral reverence than those who do not join in.

But the responsibility of citizens today is to be informed and to be strong enough to understand the severe peril humanity finds itself in. Simply walking to the ballot box and writing a cross does not even prove you can read or write.

Is Swiss minaret vote bad for democracy?

2009-12-06T13:40:00.000-08:00

The decision by Swiss voters to ban the building of new minarets on Mosques will be grist to the mill for those who oppose referendums.

Elites hate popular votes; they fought hard against democracy for centuries and only tend to agree to referenda over issues which are electorally dangerous to endorse like, for instance, Europe.

The general spiel is the Swiss decision proves us of the ‘dangers’ of popular votes and hysterical reactions.

However the actuality is that referendums may be a key area where we can regenerate our society. But politicians will not give up this turf without a pretty vicious fight.

Seeds of hate

The Swiss vote is fantastic because it provides us with a cultural barometer of the population.

From that, we can start to analyse where we are as a society.

There is no question what Switzerland is reaping is the despicable seeds of hate sewn by Bush, Blair and others in the aftermath of 9/11.

This endless propaganda and wild exaggeration of the Islamist threat now leaves us the legacy of populist anti-Muslim votes thus offering proof of those who fiercely criticised the post 9/11 climate.

Darkest nightmares

As documentary maker Adam Curtis has explained, it is those with the darkest nightmares who are shaping the political zeitgeist.

So there is no reason to blame referenda. It is interesting that among the liberal elites ruminating on the ‘democratic deficit' (APATHY) very little is said about the possibility of introducing more popular votes.

In this way, we see the pantomime of opposition which is in fact responsible for the aforementioned deficit.

Both liberal and conservative elite hold exact the same position: to maintain the status quo and preserve their excellent position high up the economic ladder.

How many wars would have won popular approval?

Referendums could be divisive of course (lots of bar room scapegoating about who did or didn’t vote for war) but there is something idealistic about fights in bars about Iraq War referendums rather than scraps about whose girlfriend is less fat .

Parties are all the same and of course issues are thematically organised too. But they are not homogenous like the political parties.

Citizens would surely have a greater sense of ownership about what goes on in their society if they were more regularly voting on key issues of justice and policy.

Surely we have the technology for such a scenario too. But the political classes have no interest in relinquishing the last vestiges of their power, having already conceded much of it to energy oligarchies and other vast conglomerates.

Liberalism in particular will attack such arguments, claiming that referenda would for instance allow the death penalty to return to many western countries.

Anything that can save sick democracy and reinvent the vote as something empowering rather than a cruel joke should be given, at the very least, far greater scrutiny and discussion.

The fact that we aren't tells you that the subconscious and inevitable endgame of the elite's consumer-capitalist dream is to maintain an illusion of debate while democracy dies and we, the west, pass into the kind of economic authoritarianism which serenely holds court in the economic powerhouse that is China.

Who will notice the Iraq war stink?

2009-11-25T13:45:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes and try to imagine the Iraq war inquiry.

I think of an ungainly steam locomotive pulling out of a station carrying 18 trucks filled with faeces.

Occasionally, someone will get on board and suggest the train smells. Eventually, a learned white man with frail wrists will whisper that the source of the smell was inconclusive and so the inquiry will end.

Who do I feel sorry for? The Winston Smiths (from Orwell's 1984), the poor-bastard agency reporters who will have the task of day after day excreting something meaningful from the carefully chosen non-language of super-bureaucracy. A man verbally spouting binary would likely make more sense.

Instead of searching into the minutiae of this conflict, it seems more worthwhile to assess how war has changed, a subject interestingly covered in the excellent mini-series about the Iraq invasion, Generation Kill.

The most dramatic and sickening change has been shifting the burden of casualty from those who choose to be there to those too young to know the difference and their mothers. Shifting the burden of war on to civilians is something that possibly even medieval brutes would not have considered.

But the parasites ruling us have been considering the shape of ‘futurewar’ ever since the disaster of Vietnam. And no matter what the hyperbole might suggest, recent adventures in the Middle East have not hugely resembled conflict in south-east Asia.

Consumer-capitalism has not been great for the warrior-man. Manual industry has been outsourced to countries like China where labour rights are minimal.

The soldiers of yore are the drug addicts of today. Facing a recruitment crisis, the Army cannot afford casualties anywhere near Vietnam levels. With obesity, addiction and apathy rife, national service is a non-starter too.

It became clear that technology had to shoulder the workload. NATO’s war in the Balkans relied almost exclusively on aerial bombardment which eventually switched to targets which resulted in civilian deaths. Missiles rained from the sky in the first Gulf War too.

Iraq and Afghanistan have been far more complex projects yet the same coarse methods have been used.

Soldiers in Vietnam simply sought to survive. The new soldier fears ‘not seeing any action’ and one motif proffered by Generation Kill is that the futurewar Army is one where battalion commanders jostle to get their unit involved in the ‘real war’.

Casualties are rising and no-one is suggesting that being in the Army is not dangerous. But the numbers tell you that in this conflict the civilians have died in far greater numbers.

This has been caused by ordnance which failed to detonate and misguided missile attacks. Then, and perhaps most fatally, it came from the criminal neglect of post invasion Iraq which allowed fighters to pour in and chaos to ensue.

Each British military casualty is acknowledged in the weekly Prime Minister’s questions, a privilege which I doubt the dead of Vietnam were accorded by the American political elite.

Surely the future will see the process galvanise, to further reduce human capital in war and instead turn the enterprise into a sickening computer game played via telecommunications.

Perhaps NewsBrain has become carried away. The calculation is obvious though: the less soldiers die in war, the more war you can unleash.

Some years ago, dear old Boris Johnson criticised Liverpudlians for the way they reacted to the beheading of a civilian contractor in Iraq, Ken Bigley.

His critique suggested that we did not show the same concern when soldiers died.

In reality this is a spurious point as both soldiers and contractors are there by choice as paid professionals.

Yet now the deaths of soldiers receive much more publicity, underlining the unacceptability of military casualties in the public imagination. In the fog of propaganda, the horrors of civilian losses do not resonate in the same, strong way.

Orwell’s permanent war will be run by computers under this trajectory of profound cowardice.

From Pulitzer to suicide: Kevin Carter and reality rejecton

2009-11-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

A recent, and brilliant, supplement of press photographs in the Guardian touched on the remarkable story of Kevin Carter, a photographer who killed himself shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Carter, a South African, was a member of the famous Bang Bang Club, who exposed the suffering of black people in the townships of South Africa via the medium of pictures.

A huge amount has been written about the circumstances of his death and the Manic Street Preachers immortalised him in a pop song.

But what made him famous - his picture of a vulture calmly watching over a child as he desperately tries to reach a Sudanese food station - says something equally transcendent about our condition as his tragic death does.

The picture sparked anger and forced to the New York Times to issue a statement outlining what exactly happened to the child.

The Napalm child

Why this picture though? Photos stripped of context are an essential component of the headless mass-media post modernity which rules supreme.

Why not the famed picture which adorned front pages of the child vaporised by Napalm, which perhaps helped change perceptions of the Vietnam War? And what about the many other images of famine beamed at us?

The somewhat trite reason given is that people wondered why he did not simply help the child. But the same could be said of so many pictures of trauma which are funnelled into our television. The photographers who simply point at grieving relatives (simply gaining resource for a grief narrative) never raised the ire Kevin Carter did.

Yet was he not heroically showing us the underbelly of our very civilisation?

Perhaps what lies at the heat of 'vulture and child' was that it ruptured a hole in the cosy way we handle this modern phenomena, of being aware, and being able to see, all the horrors of the world.

Agitation

Consumer-capitalism is not organised to promote agitation in society: and yet paradoxically the free flow of these horrors has failed to help critics of the system significantly.

Strangely, it may be that our perception alters so that we simply do not perceive these disaster riddled regions of the world 'as ‘real’. To cope with disaster, we mentally place these pictures in the realm of film or nightmarish fantasy and therefore the graphic content becomes no more disturbing to us than that of an 18 certificate film.

Perhaps the reaction to 'vulture and child' came from a deep resentment that the powerful symbolism in the picture made it difficult shove this image neatly away like so many of the others.

Of course there are many interpretations of this picture: but one pretty cogent narrative is that the vulture is the brutal pragmatic logic of capitalism and the child representative of the struggle/defeat 'which must always occur' (in the eyes of the arch-capitalist).

Even when famine is heavily featured on charity telethons, the viewers are never accused in the way perhaps Carter's picture accused. They are positioned as the people who can help, people who are part of the solution.

It's only a movie

Yes viewers are moved by the images. But only in so much as doing a fun activity or simply by typing some numbers into a page and making a donation. Only an awkward few question the motives of the famous who appear to demand money, yet they are clearly gaining far more benefit than Carter ever did.

The reaction to 9/11 did not fit this paradigm perfectly but is worth noting. On the one hand, all the great writers and thinkers rushed for the ‘movie metaphor’ in the early aftermath, underlining this method of processing we have developed to gain immunity to the devilish horrors of our world.

But it has also been argued that the coverage of 9/11 was less graphic. Certainly, shots of people jumping from the buildings were quickly dropped from some news outlets’ coverage.

There is a debate to be had here: but there is a case to suggest the coverage quickly became less raw. As if to say, we can only deal with graphic horror, when it is over ‘there’, in distant lands on the nether regions of consumer-capitalism.

Certainly there may be a causal link between the level of sensitivity a news organisation must show in its coverage and the proximity that the news event itself is to the bulk of its viewers.

Kevin Carter’s image disturbed the web of dormant human consciousness. Creating a fissure amid the general one-way traffic of absorption.

Maybe his picture was too real. His demons certainly were.

How ambition made Gordon blind to his failings

2009-11-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

The Sun are apparently in the firing line again after allowing the mother of a dead squaddie to vent forth at the Prime Minister’s letter of condolence, which she described as a scrawl. It also misspelt her son’s name.

No doubt, the Sun has exploited this story for its own unpleasant political agenda.

But much hand wringing has been observed in the centre-left press, as if to say the newspaper had clearly crossed a line in this instance.

The argument goes that Brown was making a genuine effort of sympathy and through tiredness and failing sight, made a couple of unfortunate mistakes. That is a reasonable enough position.

But any competent Prime Minister or organisation would have the correct checks in place to ensure the possibility of such mistakes were virtually banished. If that means three pairs of eyes look at the ‘scrawl’ then so be it.

The Sun’s position is hypocritical, itself having been in the vanguard of frothing revenge following 9/11 (the war in Afghanistan of course being a consequence).

But its story remains perfectly reasonable. How can Brown be afforded sympathy when it is the self-same who, with Tony Blair, signed the death warrants of these few hundreds and the many civilians beyond.

This mother was no doubt angry for her loss but also angry at the realisation that her son had become nothing but a statistic, an inaccurate one at that.

But there is a certain sensibility coming out of the liberal position here. Almost as if to say, how dare this unintelligent, grief-stricken member of the public criticise our Labour Prime Minister.

Somehow, because she is angry her view does not count. What if we reintroduced national service and the privately educated offspring of the liberal middle class started to fall in the poppy fields of Helmand? Would their anger be credible?

If there is sympathy to be had for Brown, it is that he is the victim of a perhaps modern condition.

All too often these days, we are told about Brown’s failing eyesight caused by a childhood accident. NewsBrain does not remember so many references to said condition when he was wrongly being held as an economic genius.

What Brown also suffers from is having almost demented ambition without the talent to ever fully justify it.

This is a common and unpleasant virus, contemporary in its roots.

Ambition is like some kind of rocket fuel. It propels people way beyond the realms of their talent. When it melts away, the soft centre is exposed and so Gordon has come to be seen as an utterly hopeless leader.

At least Thatcher waited until losing the leadership before losing her cool. Major called his colleagues ‘bastards’ but knew the game was up and seemed happy enough to be remembered as the first man to lead Britain without a personality.

But Brown clings on amid U-turns and clangers which could be easily avoided. It is all rather Death of a Salesman in its character. Only his dying eyes seem to be fighting the end.

And this is why he sent that inaccurate letter. He could have waited a few days, explaining that he always gets his letters checked thoroughly. But this leader is in denial, refusing to accept that he is weak in any sense.

These years of ambition just won’t let Brown go. That is the illness which is killing him.

The Twitter bullies...and the digital dead

2009-11-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, we have seen Twitter turn into the cyber version of a ‘99’: that notorious call for the ‘pile in’ assault during football riots.

It is part of a raft of bizarre distortions brought about by social networking, which is thriving in our postmodern vacuum.

One can imagine JG Ballard regarding social networking as another means of isolating us: friendship becomes ‘virtual’ and human contact is phased out further.

We move from our suburban grief-box, to our petrol-powered coffins and then into the fluorescent-lit, graft-cathedrals, communicating solely in emaciated, vowel-free sentences.

Perhaps even in this dystopian hypothesis, we may be having online ‘chats’ with clever computer algorithms operating with trendy monikers.

Reinvention

Well, that’s the nightmare vision.

It has turned out more subtle than that though. Because the internet connects and empowers people too. Apparent sub-cultures have a new means of survival and reinvention.

Lets look at Twitter first and the recent death of Stephen Gately, a gay pop singer.

Daily Mail journalist Jan Moir was in the spotlight after Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker and other commentators posted their fury on Twitter about an article related to the singer.

They were rightly outraged at the sneering, homophobic journalism, written so soon after the singer had passed away.

Attacks

Thousands complained to the Press Complaints Commission but others simply posted more and more abusive attacks on the hapless (but undeniably unpleasant) Moir. Even her address was shared on a forum.

Then last week, a Twitter member politely suggested to Stephen Fry that his posts were rather dull.

Fry, who has suffered with mental health issues, is one of Twitter’s most popular users. But the poor lad was having a bad day and, in response to the post by a mere dot in cyberspace, he said he was done with 'tweeting’.

Queue another '99'. The poor sod who legitimately questioned Fry’s micro-blog found himself deluged by more abuse. Fry had to tweet in a bid to stop it.

Bullying

Strangely, the anonymity of the net is giving way to bullying, abuse and the mob mentality. But at the same time it also holds journalists to greater account than their own industry body ever could.

Who feels the need to abuse? It may range from drunk students to people reconnecting to their ‘inner-fascist’.

So yes the internet can connect disenfranchised people stuck in zombie-towns, wondering if there is anything out there. Or stamp collectors.

But it also empowers cowards, who viciously who uphold unwritten cyber etiquette with grievous fanaticism. Some must think they are ‘campaigners’. They more like morons, fed by narcissistic, private delusion. Ego is a dangerous poison.

Facebook brings in another surreal dimension to this strange phenomenon. It creates a virtual stage for people to express amusing thoughts or share news.

Innocent enough. Bit of banter with the lads to while away a dull afternoon’s work.

But the status update has dark side. A recent suicide left his last message on Facebook saying simply that death was better than life.

It is as if this these strange disconnected bits of information perversely appeal to those buried under a mound of existential girth. To them, perhaps the meaninglessness of the status update is exactly the appeal of it.

We are a people at the mercy of technology, whether they be PCs or machinery. For some, it becomes easier to communicate to them than fellow man.

Filling a void

The suicide note is not just some part of the ‘death scene’, carefully filed away with other artefacts of vanquished lives. Now it is instant communication, spearing its way into eyes of people who do not even remember who you are. Is the last revenge of the forgotten?

In general as the community deteriorates, so social networks may serve to fill the void. Facebook has agreed to maintain the dead's profiles, thus creating a cyber graveyard for ghouls to peruse.

Mobile phone companies base so much of their advertising on the importance of communication. Yet what they sell are second hand goods.

We must be cautious with this ill-defined world - the lonely and the bullies are disappearing into the headless maze of forums, tweets, statuses and avatars.

As a distraction theses sites may be pleasant enough. But the dangers is that they galvanise the process of making us feel like individuals while we voluntarily do the opposite, turning ourselves into bits of inconsequential data, preserved for all time by Facebook, the self appointed guardian of the digital dead.

BNP farrago - did The Sun protest too much?

2009-10-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

So the freakshow fireworks have subsided and politics, along with Question Time, goes back to its tranquil routine of corruption, denial and bureacracy.

Two things struck NewsBrain about the Griffin farrago.

Firstly, the right wing tabloid press were particularly brutal in their condemnation of the amusingly monickered 'Nazi Nick'.

Hysteria wins

Doubtless they will wheel out this copy when accused of feeding anti-immigration sentiment or xenophobia.

Certainly, there is no doubt that hysteria is more important to the tabloids than their politics. Politics only really matters around election time when the proprietors are at their most feverish.

But there is also an element of the tabloids 'doth protest too much'. It is as if they think slating Nick Griffin compensates for years of villifying asylum seekers and throwing bones to white van man's lazy xenophobia.

The social effects of tabloid hysteria are rather bizarre: in a sense, you have far right white skinheads railing against an influx of eastern Europeans, a few of which probably have some far right views of their own!( given the political landscape in some of those countries)

Fear agenda

Whilst that may be rather glyb, it once again shows how the BNP serves to help both Left and Right. The right maintains its agenda of tacit anti-immigration, fear and intolerance; masking this with over-the-top attacks on the BNP.

The Left meanwhile simply enjoys the chances to crusade, again.

Comically, the Guardian used its news pages to aim thinly veiled digs at the BBC, suggesting many (ie the guardian) felt the corporation gave the party a once in a liftetime PR opportunity.Maybe so, but the Guardian live-blogged the thing and regularly runs pieces on the BNP so it is hardly blameless.

It is however naive to think facism and racial hatred are directly linked to the electoral success of the Far Right.

Imagine

Try this for a what if? What if Nick Griffin was good looking, a lot smarter, rich and did not have a past located in extremism and possible holocaust denial?

What if this someone simply said that 'races do not coexist' and 'we just need to accept it'. This is an abhorrent position and but it is couched without the usual racist paraphernalia.

That position may not have received quite so much antagonism. The point is that the politics of the right must be banished in its entirety.

The first half of the 20th Century showed that what the right begins, fascism attempts to finish.

We, the human species, remain as malleable and naive as ever. An arch-manipulator with money and media savvy could do far more damage than the BNP and such a figure could easily emerge form the debris of consumer-capitalism in exactly the way Hitler did.

Why liberals love to bash the BNP

2009-10-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

Support for the BNP is not increasing by anywhere near the level of publicity for it is.

Will they get on Question Time? Will they admit non-whites? Will Nick Griffin replace Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear?

Liberalism desperately needs a punchbag. Having succumbed to the political right, it needs to look macho once in a while.

Not to say for one moment that the BNP isn't a vile and racist institution.

But its place in the media narrative goes beyond the straightforward justification of such coverage, that the Far Right must be defeated to prevent Nazism or facism.

By over-egging the BNP’s threat, liberals give themselves a cause which validates their core principles.

Yet if you live in vast regions of Asia, Africa and even South America, the rise of fascism in Europe is of little concern.

That is because these people have long struggled under a system which may be crudely described as economic fascism, what with the agreements arrived at in forums such as the G20.

Of course there is a liberal critique of such matters but it is rather less vigorous than its BNP stance. Liberals want to crusade without responsibility the way neocons want power without responsibility.

At the street-level, a similar phenomenon can be seen. So-called anti-fascists seem to thrive more from the adrenaline of squaring up to the right-wing thugs - with the safety of the police lingering – more than they do their cause.

The very lies which propagate power are behind the processes which begat facism. Things like cowering and conforming under the shadow of a single idea, whether that be the free market or racial purity.

Whilst this week, the BNP will get more headlines, a hugely important story about freedom of speech will soon be forgotten.

The rise of the super-injunction did receive a large amount of coverage last week. Trafigura were the latest big company seeking to gag vitally important debate.

This type of injunction demands ‘entire secrecy’ so that no media outlet can even name who applied for it and what the outcome was. The BBC’s Andrew Marr also obtained one.

Our byzantine media laws threaten us more than the BNP right now. But the super-injunction is a less sexy tale for liberalism-lite, pounding on extremists and inadvertently garnering them publicity is much easier.

Extraordinary pockets of hell exist on this Earth and Trafigura, in dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, are contributing to maintaining them.

Extremists succeed when massive societies fail spectacularly. The key aim is to avert this event, instead of being sucked into chasing the pantomime villains when the real ones lurk way above in the rafters.

Barack Obama and childish liberalism

2009-10-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

So the Nobel Peace Prize continue the unofficial canonisation of Barack Obama, whose major accomplishment so far has been nothing more than achieving office.

Nobel were indulging in cheap shots (on Bush) and cheap publicity for themselves. In a world of war, it is obvious that such a prize will struggle to maintain credibility.

What is far more interesting is the general characteristics of the relationship between the liberal media and Obama. It once again highlights the infantilisation of liberalism as it copes with the ubiquity of capitalism and its own subsequent humiliation.

It also seems a good moment to ask whether Obama’s great achievement, to be a black president, is the feat that so many believe it to be.

What tribe are you?

Liberalism puts tolerance and racial harmony at the core of its agenda. Admirable, one might say, but it is how such goals are achieved where questions may be raised.

It is the liberal agenda which has created addendums to every job application one fills requiring you to categorise yourself (skin colour, religion, marital status, disability) endlessly.

So in a bid to judiciously ensure fairness, we assault people with reminders of the labels which illogically make them feel different.

This anachronism repeats itself in the liberal narrative with Obama. Endlessly, the only thing any commentators seem to talk when discussing Obama was his race. Yet, it was these self-same who believed that his victory would somehow herald a ‘post-race’ era.

Helping the under who?

So liberals essentially talk about race ad nauseam and then somehow believe that this will be begat social harmony.

There was far less talk about whether Obama’s policies would help the millions of blacks stuck in the underclass.

An issue that one would think liberals would be greatly concerned by.

Sadly, liberals are lost. They have subconsciously become obsessed with getting black faces into positions of power and effectively ceding the issue of improving the lot of ethnic communities as a whole.

Another strand to their naive, childish narrative is the core belief that Obama’s race is a hands-down disadvantage in America. In terms of Obama’s European fans such as Nobel, this may be seen as an indictment of their own, more-racist societies.

Dollar bill

The West’s ultimate boss is the dollar bill and that, ultimately, sees no colour. Slavery began as an economic exercise and ended, it is argued, through economic imperative (ie slave owners thought it would be cheaper for them to free their slaves and pay them a pittance instead).

Blackness, of course ,represents negativity to some Americans. But in the field of sports and showbiz, black represents cool and sometimes Olympian endeavour to others. Obama, through excellent oratory and a well-kept physique, would undeniably have profited from this effect.

Moreover, as post-modernity continues to bash old-fashioned values with a baseball bat, superficial differences are far more preferable to the ‘radical’ political agenda than actual ones.

The Democrats came into the election proposing nothing more than a bit of prodding and poking at an economic system which nearly malfunctioned entirely.

It was Obama’s ‘blackness’ which enabled them to signify the change the voters thought they wanted. McCain did not and so failed spectacularly.

White is the natural colour of power and, in our society, such natural orders are challenged and broken down. It is the superficial anarchy which rages while the unchanging establishment passes down power via Eton and Oxbridge.

In reality, Obama’s precursor is not say Martin Luther King but in fact John F Kennedy. Exceptionally intelligent and charismatic but as attracted to the trappings of power as any fly is to the light.

Something truly remarkable would be an atheist American President or one who believed in an agenda entirely of the people.

The chances of such an event remain miniscule: Barack Obama’s presidency would probably resist it with the verve of any obstinate neocon.

Religion to conspiracy via Darwin

2009-10-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

The great irony of conspiracy theories is that the ‘horrific hidden truth’ they seek to expose is in fact buried within the motivation for their own machinations.

Religion seeks to make a narrative out of the world but in the quasi-secular West, organised worship is on the wane.

Into the vacuum steps the conspiracy theory. Much like religion, the effect of such stories is to provide ‘narrative’. Instead of a God, conspiracies coalesce around some dark Mr Big figure, offering a simplistic anti-establishment belief system.

Another similarity with religion is the way that such theories appeal to people across class and intelligence.

The good atheist cannot really believe in anything other than chaos. He/she/it can be grateful if this chaos manifests itself as a life in palm-tree lined streets as opposed to bullet-ridden roads in desert Africa.

Fairy tales
But the vast majority cannot accept randomness. Even though virtually the rest of their lives may depend on forensically rational cause-and-effect behaviour (driving, administrating, shopping), when it comes to the meaning of life we opt for fairy tales.

The conspiracy theorists may not believe in God. But the characteristics of their beliefs is deeply religious.

Conspiracy claims 9/11 was carried out by America/Israel. It postulates that science shows the ‘mainstream explanation’ is seriously doubtful.

There are pretty strong and basic counter arguments: motivation for one and likelihood of success for such a plan.

Worship

Arguments with such individuals also take on a certain character. Rather than listening, they tend to throw more ‘facts’ at you, with a rather visceral urgency reminiscent of a Jehovah’s witness.

They will relate pretty complex sounding science to you, which they believe with a seemingly incredible simplicity.

This is because they want to believe, the exact same process that exists between worshipper and deity.

Religiosity is dangerous because it justifies belief without fact, encouraging languishing, infantilised Man to remain bathed in ignorance.

The flourish of rubbish

It allows more sinister belief systems, like scientology, to flourish.

The strange thing is that in our daily lives we have to justify almost everything: everywhere a form to fill in, every action we do (it feels) has to be justified and explained to someone else at some point.

If we believe in fairy tales, our minds are open to exploitation.

The Nazis in some ways mastered this concept. Their fascist ideology took on a religious hue and there are other examples.

Religious belief has set a precedent in our society which should be unmade. Those who wish to believe in deities should at the very least have to confine such feelings to the personal sphere.

It should, however, not inform vital areas like human rights policy. How can you balance the complex rituals demanded by religion with the duties any employer may have for his workforce?

Conspiracy is merely the Darwinian evolution of religion. This is the ‘horrific hidden truth’. Until we stop believing in fairy tales, our minds are ripe to the next diabolical fantasy, brewing somewhere in the margins.

The death of rock’n’roll

2009-09-30T03:13:00.000-07:00

Some leading musicians have backed a plan that would limit people’s intemet access for illegal file-sharing.

Initially, the Featured Artists Coalition, which includes luminaries from bands like Radiohead as well as the erstwhile loudmouth socialist Billy Bragg, went public to attack a plan to entirely ban people from internet access for ‘sharing music’.

But then dear old Lilly Allen launched her own broadside (typically crude, blunt and ill-conceived) at the pirate sites.

Seemingly, these two sides have now come together and agreed a joint position. Limit users’ bandwith if they continually ignore warnings to stop downloading stuff they shouldn’t be. They would be able to use email and not much more under such a plan.

It is understandable that hard-up musicians are getting fed-up for not being paid.

Final nail

But in doing they have perhaps signed off rock’n’roll as a rebellious expression.

We knew it was an industry. But this movement by the performers themselves was perhaps the final nail. It represents a betrayal, no matter how understandable their points may have been.

In many ways rock’n’roll railed against common sense, it was about flowing with what you felt, fighting against the mechanisation of life.

Middle America of the 1950s feared rock music. Now, many swathes of it make their living from it, both directly and indirectly.

Rock music plc

Remember how the grand old industries of Britain (coal, steel) supported extended communities and regions?

Maybe the U2s of the future will be similar, not mere rock groups but gargantuan PLCs, directly employing hundreds of people.

Imagine such a band split and suddenly hundreds of silly haircuts in east London are just as up shit creek as their forefathers in the mines or steelworks were.

Even if NewsBrain is being fanciful, if U2 wound themselves up tomorrow, its economic effect would be measurable and palpable.

Persecution or prosecution

This is not music, it is a dystopian, Orwellian distortion.

Bad enough that artists were generally silent when record companies ‘picked’ people to prosecute over file sharing, seemingly at random.

Now, they openly back a plan which gives the state yet more power. Vast numbers of people have either downloaded or have received downloaded files which they got for free.

Vast numbers more, including probably every musician in history, has received a copied CD or tape.

Now, we want to give huge media enterprises the chance to randomly pick on people some more.

There is talk of warnings before access is tampered with. But such a policy will mean more ‘snooping’ and, undoubtedly, unjust law which penalises the poor and the music fan.

Is it worth it?

Ah, the musician argues, but I need to make a living or there is no music.

File-sharing effect

Musicians were the first post-war sub-group who saw the chance to have fun and make money. They charged fortunes for cheaply produced CDs for decades.

Downloading is devastating for the industry not because music is shared, but because so much of it is. And now, if we peruse Amazon, music is far cheaper.

Who says musicians are owed a living? Authors generally have second jobs.

This grounding in reality will probably improve music. Joy Division’s Closer was written while lead singer Ian Curtis worked in a benefits office.

His music underlined beautifully the sometimes macabre nature of reality.

The new music

It is no surprise that many British bands, made up of overpaid preppy private/grammar school kids, in fact act more as advertising vehicles for clothes companies rather than as artists.

They seek not to understand their world, or rail against it, but to become TV presenters or own a nice semi in Bracknell.

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told Uncut: “We may not pay for recording any more but we will pay 500 bucks for a concert. As for illegal downloading, well bands don’t really have a pay scale. There are some nights where we make $100,000 in 10 minutes and other days where we do nothing and make nothing.

“Punk rock, that’s not a career opportunity and record companies and bands should stop pretending like it is.”

The story, or travails, of rock music has an importance beyond what you like to listen to.

It tells us about the impossibility of rebellion in this era.

Socialism, environmentalism and rock have all been inculcated into the mainstream, where once they stood as an opposition to globalisation and greed.

So NewsBrain says let the downloading go on, and let Wayne’s Coyne view be the one which self-respecting musicians should adhere to.

Perhaps music will be forced to devolve. Back to the underground, away from the big firms which control ticket sales and venues.

Fans will have to change too. They will have less choice and will need to make more effort to seek out great music.

Most music fans will still pay money to see bands and for records when they have the cash to spare.

The alternative is music becoming indistinguishable and subordinate to the hypno-beat of the rustling dollar.

Why are there no ideas in politics?

2009-09-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

For the blue rinse brigade, the worthy sandal-wearers and, more latterly, the sharp-suited PC androids of the Blair era, these next few weeks represent the year’s annual zenith.

Party conference season, where the BBC and others provide an extraordinary amount of coverage and politicians launch an artillery of soundbites capable of engendering far greater paralysis than the tele-kinetic stunts of Derren Brown.

As the LibDems take their turn to pontificate, it seems an apt moment remember the comments of former leader Charles Kennedy, who suggested that ideology was no longer relevant to the public.

Tony Blair and his Tory counterpart must surely have nodded silently. This is the great myth which underpins our ludicrous politics. But more so, it puts our very freedom at threat.

Yet old Charlie thought he was in fact trying to reconnect with the public when he made the claim.

No more being wedded to dogmatic ideals, the modern politician instead makes common sense choices.

It begged the question: common sense based on what?

In fact what Charlie was doing, a recurrent theme in NewsBrain, was to rub out the ideology of capitalism which underpins our society.

When capitalism morphs to common sense, it ceases to exist as an idea and instead becomes as invisible as the air we breathe.

So emeshed in our thinking has it become, that politicians could get away with suggesting that they were no longer ideological by following its teachings to the virtual letter.

And to add grist to the theory that our society’s power elites are in some sense fanatical, and our public in some sense blind, no ideological debate of note has occurred since the near-collapse of the banks.

We are carrying on regardless.

There is also a second critique of ‘post-ideology’.

It is that if a system of ideas starts to become incoherent, then of course it will cease to be relevant or useful.

The Left has got itself into bother ever since it tried to somehow showhorn an acceptance of free-market economics into its thinking.

It resulted in the distortion of that tacit and cowardly liberal support (in some quarters) of the Iraq war.

Law and order policy suffers from this same schizophrenia. The left shows is proud of its tolerance, allowing murderers and violent offenders to plead their circumstances and win reductions in their sentence.

Yet where do these self-same people end up? Usually terrifying the poor – who the left claim to defend – in sink estates.

The Right drink at this well too. They drone on about freedom from the state but are at their most vociferous when it comes to matters of morality, such as gay marriage and abortion. This is bourn out of their Christianity, which lays suppressed beneath their secular thirst for money and status.

A system of ideas which is coherent and consistent is crucial to any politician of substance.

Currently, one set holds our rulers by the throat. New ideas are needed to address the grave problems of our times.

Whatever happened to our heroes?

2009-09-18T03:42:00.000-07:00

Warning: this contains a spoiler for the movie Gran Torino

In days of yore, which NewsBrain likes to call the eighties, Hollywood’s action men cleaned up.

Rambo caned the Middle East, where the grizzled, Siberian-winter trained, Nazi-beating Soviets failed.

Arnie terminated. Like Sly, his character and self were equally unreal, equally interchangeable.

And then there was Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry. I like to think of Dirty Harry as a working-class Batman, a marvel superhero without the snazzy cars and capes.

They are essentially the same thing; a neo-conservative wet dream, creations who ignored those tedious liberal preoccupations like the rule of law and instead crusade for the common good.

Make my day

My memory of Dirty Harry films is of a rather unpleasant genre, where ethnic minorities were depressingly stereotyped and Harry seemed like a kind of fantasy for middle class line managers the world over.

Make my day punk? Isn’t that what we all dream of saying in our stifling computer-pens.

The release of Falling Down suggested a change in the way mainstream audiences were thinking. Michael Douglas had gone from capitalist uber-demon (Gordon Gecko in Wall Street) to a crazed, workaday citizen putting right the micro-wrongs of society, like unfriendly Korean newsagents and poorly assembled fast food. This film was a comical at times and preferred to focus on the character’s personal failure than the wider societal factors which bring people to breakdown. It was confused about race too and in the end did not suggest the West was losing its confidence.

However Clint’s recent film, Gran Torino, appears to show that this certainty of the 80s is now dying. History tells us that all empires end eventually and maybe people can now feel the faint creakings of this Western one. This may explain the rise in conspiracy beliefs, as faith in institutions and beliefs begins to ebb.

Message in the movie

In Gran Torino, his character is hugely similar to that of Dirty Harry. Superficially unpleasant with a deeply humanist core. A man misunderstood by the PC elite and effectively discarded. Whereas Harry cleaned up, now Clint has to turn martyr in this movie in order to right his vigilante behaviour which goes wrong. The recent Batman movie carried the same message; his attempts to save Gotham fail and his girl dies. The heroes don’t clean up these days. Even the new Rambo film, so ill-conceived, had the sense of a giant digital suicide note for the American hero.

Yet America’s foreign policy seems driven by this principle of vigilante law enforcement ‘for the greater good’. With the near collapse of the economic system to boot, we are suddenly not so confident in the liberal-democratic gospel and its promises of eternal contentment. Our fictional heroes have already seen it coming.

The News as a Novel: an homage

2009-09-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Permit Newsbrain’s indulgence. This is a little different to the norm. The following blog seeks to wonder whether fiction is a better way of reporting the news. It was inspired by the Gordon Burn novel, Born Yesterday.

These events occurred on September 4.

Private Shaun Thompson, shivers in the dock, remembering, the shrill beseeching of little Kieron, not his own flesh and blood.
That is the ironic thing. Because Kieron has now intertwined into the mesh of Pte Thompson's mind. The screams of the dead in wherever, the screams of a newborn. Shadowing every thought, coiled around his pummelled nerves.

Data-speak

At the same time, Gordon Brown is blustering about his Afghanistan strategy. His hands flail and rivers of data-speak tumble forth, mixed with sudden and uncomfortable moments of emotion. After a turgid section about apparently ‘new’ Taliban tactics, Brown pleads with his audience and the wider public watching on the news channels. He cannot shift the gears like Obama, so most people have not even noticed this is Brown’s big humanity moment. He understands the great suffering of our troops and he wonders, he does wonder, whether it is really worth it?

Out-of-body

Pte Thompson listens to the judge outlining events and feels it like an out-of-body experience. The baby, Kieron was in his care. Wife had gone out with a friend. Sudden loss of temper...denied responsibility for two years...wife allowed to fall under suspicion...had been a good father to the boy...will be discharged and divorced. He was a public record, a sad story. No longer a private, no longer a private citizen. Now he was a symptom. Various aspects of the state apparatus would tell him what he is now. Psychologists, prison security, journalists and judges.

Babykiller

Yet on the TVs in the windows of the main street shops of Britain, it was Gordon Brown who was wondering whether it was really worth it, not the babykiller Thompson and his temper going tick-tock, tick tock. When does history rip through your hands and head? Not when you are David Brent explaining the war-by-numbers. He’s only doing it because the Sun are right on his back, the cynical watching scribes think. And the Sun are only doing it because the boys are falling in their readership heartlands, dead-faced market towns full of squaddies, seeing the world through cracked goggles and squint visors.

Obituary

Gordon is still talking even though the stories are already written, these mini-obituaries chronicling his death by 1000 press conferences. Britain is listening to Gordon commentating on his nocturnal, heartfelt wrangles over right and wrong. No-one can doubt his perspicacity. But is it really worth it? They, or Gordon, count it by objectives and bodybags. But every soldier will take something home with him or her from the war. The children of the Vietnam War fester in America’s underclass today. Those fatherless boys, sons of the forgotten bombed-out remains which came back, bedraggled and hated.

Genes, blood, beer and rancour

Shaun Thompson will never fully understand what motivated him to shake Kieron to death. His story was told in limited fashion compared to the swathes of mediaspace Gordon got. When they do come back, our boys, it will have been decided by men greater than them whether their contribution was worth it. It will go on though, this war, passed through genes, blood, beer and rancour.

Lockerbie row: fragments of news

2009-09-04T03:30:00.000-07:00

Professional Scotsman Billy Connolly must have been aghast when St Andrews flags were raised aloft in Libya as the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi returned home.
Suddenly ‘the loveable Scot’ stateside stereotype had been obliterated and instead a place at the top table of the axis of evil awaited.
Strange in a way as the US has always viewed Celtic terrorism more fondly as the IRA would probably testify.

Guilty...or not?

As usual, television’s fragmentary narrative helped to create this position.
The story of Megrahi’s release had been kicking round for some time. It has been a fairly longstanding tenet of British law that people can be compassionately released if they are dying.
Given the seriousness of the crime, some may feel this option too generous. Others meanwhile point to the strong undercurrent of doubt over Megrahi’s guilt in the first place.
But the US did not appear too vocal until pictures of the flag waving appeared on the news networks.

Why governments need news

What were those of images of? Some bored Libyan youths driving around and deciding to take a peek. Others brought in to make mischief.
It was a tiny number of people on any measure. But decontextualised pictures, fragments essentially, is all our news needs.
Our governments need the news: not merely to put the message out but to have something tangible to react to.
Some think it is only the humble man on the street who is deluded. But governments are made of equally confused citizens.
Without the news, Obama and his White Knights stare out across the White House lawn bewildered, wondering what people are talking about in bars, restaurants and AA meetings.
Television news is a largely failed media project, propped up by giant subsidies from the public purse or from other businesses (sic Murdoch).
But something is better than nothing for our disconnected elite. And so Libya’s mischief vaulted into a new, more urgent story as soon as the pictures forced the government to react.

The forgotten airliner

For the modern politician such things are a mercy; if there was nothing to react to, what would they do?
Of course it would be remiss to forget that it was the extraordinary negligence of America in blowing up an Iranian airliner which precipitated plans for a revenge attack in the first place.
Libya also paid huge sums in compensation to the victims of Lockerbie. The US paid out a paltry sum to the Iranian victims in comparison. And they have never admitted liability.
The scenes in Libya mirrored the much aired images of Palestinians ‘celebrating’ 9/11.
This is the growing trend of cheap-shot television; the event itself does not add up to much but the pictures are great. This serves only to distort.
Why should we be surprised that in the misery of places like Palestine, some people will seek to celebrate mass murder? What about the vast amounts of internet traffic in the West which either rejected or lampooned the same events?
In a strange way though, the Lockerbie row illustrates the evolved role of television in our lives.
In Libya, the release of Megrahi is the message and people, just a few, got in their cars and went to witness it.
In the West, television is no longer the medium, it is the message itself.
Events have to be framed by television to become ‘more real’. And this is the core paradox which allows nonsense and farce to bleed into our society where politics and thought once lived.
The Megrahi release became big news when powerful images gave the story narrative, a distorting one at that.
Governments watch it obsessively, while we watch it intermittently (at best).
For the Western viewer, it’s the paraphernalia of TV (the presenter, the channel, the images) that matters more than the facts.
Even a huge story like the death of Princess Diana was mediated by the collage of pictures showing her beauty and her ‘sacrifice’ (kissing an ‘aids baby’, touring Africa).
Stories about television itslef, particularly Big Brother, reach the surreal pinnacle. Television about television about what happens to people...when they are on television.
One hopes that if man is ever on the verge of extinction, there will be someone around to notice.

The axis of hilarity

2009-08-28T04:40:00.000-07:00

The axis of evil is a profoundly hilarious concept, reducing all the narrative and bloody struggle of our history into nothing more than cops and robbers.
What is less amusing is that such a flimsy concept was able to resonate in the western world with such remarkable power.
Central to its success was the media narrative of extremism.
Extremism by its very definition appears to be a pretty simple concept that we can all agree upon but at the political level things become somewhat less clear-cut.
Last week, two stories broke which rather neatly illustrated this point.

Plastic hockey mum

Sarah Palin (and friends) were, in America, taking it upon themselves to rubbish the NHS (despite the diplomatic code of not commenting on the internal affairs of other countries). Palin, the plastic hockey mum clearly inspired by the ignorant charm of Bush, even used the word evil. Others were tricked into discussing their experiences of the NHS only to find that their stories were distorted severely.
It seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that some of this activity represents extremism of some form. The use of the word ‘evil’, the entire fabrication of horror stories for example.

Walkout

Yet in the media this story was framed as a debate; of course we sided with the pro-NHS St Obama but at no stage was the American Right ever cast as anything other than a legitimate public organ.
Another story which occurred that week was the rather less interesting story of how a Labour minister walked out of a Muslim wedding because he could not sit next to his wife.

Extremism

Many men would find such a custom blessed relief. But leaving that aside, why did respectable news channels feel the need to cover this story.
They did because Islam is very much part of the media narrative of extremism. In fact, it is a huge part of it along with fascism.
Of course the debate themselves allowed for people to make the legitimate point that this is a custom and one wouldn’t dream of objecting to it if it were occurring in another country.

American Right

But in a media world of civilisation clashes and the like, this story ‘fits the narrative’ despite the fact that the event itself was rather inconsequential.
And even if debate is fair and allows all points to be made, the very fact that once again Muslims are on television justifying themselves and their customs allows that discourse of extremism to thrive which, at its extreme, we find the axis of evil.
The American Right are then free to grow unfettered, hiding behind the respectable (relatively) umbrella of Republicanism.

Suicide

So it turns out that extremism is pretty subjective. Of course, committing suicide to kill others for the sake of it is a form of madness and is therefore extreme.
But to react to it by declaring entire countries evil was also extreme and pretty infantile to boot.
This declaration put all Muslim under scrutiny and sees them now defending basic customs on the news.
The media can argue that in this instance it was in fact highlighting the ridiculousness of the minister’s actions.
Perhaps they should start highlighting the ridiculous extremes of the American Right too.

Never-changing story: The EPL and the class system

2009-08-13T06:16:00.000-07:00

A book has applied freakonomics to football and suggests that we actually like the predictability of the English Premier League.

The EPL has become the most powerful football league in Europe, making fortunes in domestic and syndicated football rights.

Yet, not only is the winner a pretty obvious affair, but in fact the top four places have been dominated by the same quartet: Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool.

These teams do have huge support; but add the support of the other 16 teams together and that is a huge number of people with a vested interest in a team that has a virtual zero per cent chance of winning.

Upsets

So why are predictable sporting events so entertaining in this day and age?

The obvious argument is that the games themselves are exciting and that each week there is some form of upset.

But there is also a strange pattern to the EPL which mirrors society. How our expectations are shaped by society are reproduced with remarkable symmetry in the EPL.

The reason why supporters remain entranced is because they reshape their expectations, just as we do in daily life.

Upper classes

In our eyes, the top four are like the aristocratic upper classes. We can never be like them and so should not compare ourselves to them. When occasionally they fall, we take our pleasure from that. Or we simply admire their greatness.

Thusly, instead of expecting to finish higher than Man Utd, supporters simply look forward to getting a draw or win in a one off game.

In the EPL, there is a bottom tier and middle tier. The same ‘class comparison’ can be made.

For the bottom tier supporters, simply not being relegated becomes the aim. They expect and masochistically enjoy the many maulings which are handed out by the top group. Is this not the ameliorated working class who are forced to accept benefit and low pay and are told to be thankful they have roofs over their heads?

American dream

Then you have the middle tier EPL clubs. All aspirational, but modified aspiration. A European place or a run in a cup competition just as our middle classes may aspire to a modest house and position in line management.

In some senses, we Europeans are too pragmatic to believe in the American Dream, where an ordinary guy can rise to the top. Our sporting competitions certainly reflect this.

A truly free, emancipated society would not tolerate such injustice and predictability.

Yet, paradoxically it is the United States of America, with its entrenched survival of the fittest culture, where the most egalitarian sports leagues exist. There, the fantasy of the American dream appears to live in some form or other.

The book I referred to was called Why England Lose.

Topless Putin: smells like Big Brother

2009-08-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Why are we so obsessed with our leaders' vacation choices?
Vladimir Putin has raised the stakes to new levels with shots of him riding topless on horseback in Siberia. He spent the days before diving to the bottom of the world's deepest lake.
Before that, he has co-piloted a fighter jet and apparently saved a television crew from a rather angry tiger.

Gordon Balboa

I think we will mercifully spared shots of Gordon Brown doing Rocky-style press-ups or attempting to re-imagine the opening scene of Baywatch as an economic metaphor.
For Putin, images of his derring-do tie into the powerful nationalism and misogyny which abounds in Russia and eastern Europe, which remain, in part, cradles of old school masculinity.
Russia is no longer the Soviet superpower; its old satellite states like Poland cosy up to America , exemplified by Warsaw's support of the Iraq war.
Yet Russia still has huge influences over vital energy reserves. Not to mention its vast nuclear arsenal.

KGB man

Nonetheless there is also a sense, here of the intoxication of fame. I'm sure the hard boiled spy Putin gets a kick out of being pictured as an action hero as Nicolas Sarkozy does being pictured as a lothario.
It seems whether you are all-powerful or entirely feckless the lure of notoriety is irresistible.
In the UK, the PM's holiday became a big issue as the right wing press used it as a way of attacking Tony Blair and his faux popularity with luminaries such as Cliff Richard and the like.

Spinless copy

News websites dolefully followed suit. But they omitted most of the spin and so we are left with a story about where the PM goes to put his feet up.
Now it's a regular occurrence and my understanding is that outlets justify it on the basis of 'historical posterity'. Of what relevance this will be to those sifting through post-apocalyptic wreckage is somewhat baffling.
This is what happens when personalities replace politics. So desperate is the search for identity that we look for clue in the minutiae of our leaders' lives as if it is the only hope we have to discover who these men are.
And it's true that very honest decision a politician makes is firmly behind closed doors.

Consenus rules

I am not suggesting conspiracies; merely suggesting that in the age of consensus, it may be in the little decisions of daily life that we can understand who are politicians truly are.
Of course the politicians are quick to latch on to any break of their carefully coiffured image.
Holidays are firmly politicised and sure enough Cameron and Brown have both stayed in the UK, 'showing support' for their domestic tourism. Brown has gone further, doing some 'private' voluntary work which was, er leaked to all and sundry.
So now holidays are out.
What little details will we scrutinise next to try impregnate the assiduous visage of the automaton 21st century politician?

The Wire: some reflections

2009-08-05T05:14:00.000-07:00

It may be the greatest television show ever made and having just finished it I thought I might share some thoughts on the subject.

In structural terms, The Wire develops narrative with an extraordinary novelistic precision. This level of craft in television is highly unusual. In addition to using novelists to write scripts, the two men behind it have an almost obsessive interest in the criminal underworld. One is an ex cop, the other a crime journalist who spent a year on the streets of Baltimore analysing the horrors of the capitalist underclass.

A pretty remarkable starting point for any TV show. The show was surely the first to give an authentic voice to the largely black America of this social class. Gang crime is generally mythologised to the point of religious absurdity (Godfather, Sopranos) if they happen to be white of Italian descent. Generally, other criminal gangs are caricatured and provide fodder for heroes in Hollywood blockbusters.

Ruthless

The Wire offers fairly uncompromising social realism. These black gangs are clever but entirely ruthless. They have no interest in legitimacy and exist almost in parallel to the rest of America. Even in Baltimore, run by a black elite, this maxim remains true. In season one, perhaps the most fitting moment occurs when one cop admits feeling guilty over persuading someone to testify because he knows there are no resources to protect that witness.

This is the beauty of The Wire. Rather than propagating capitalist myth (which many shows do both consciously and unconsciously), it, in fact, offers a very powerful critique of it. Crucially, it shows the remarkable complicity between mainstream economics and the drugs industry. So remarkable is it, that the FBI does not even regard drugs as a priority. Drug money funnels its way through all avenues of Western society untroubled. The gangs may be violent; but its leaders will inevitably die and be replaced.

The characterisations of its criminal characters are also fascinating. Stringer Bell is the dour wannabe economist who allows himself to be robbed by lawyers and politicians. In a way his plight shows the hopelessness of the cause for people of the underclass. Even with money and guns, he is still left humiliated by bureaucrats with faultless confidence.

Greene's boy

Marlo comes into the series latterly. While Bell precisely follows a set of rules (the game), Marlo is a more nihilistic character. He is almost sexless, a throwback to Graham Greene's Pinky of Brighton Rock, a man who desires power for the sake of it and kills relentlessly. He is the future, a child of the underclass who does not appear to dream of anything better even in his deepest subconscious.

The Wire's portrait of America is bleak but compelling. Its central point, I believe, is to suggest that there is no war on drugs. Instead, the policy is to fence in the underclass and let them fight it out. This is the brutal, pragmatic logic of our economic system at work.

What future for the blog?

2009-07-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Damian McBride affair was posited as a great scandal for the Labour Party. A Gordon Brown confidante emails what were apparently made-up smears to a colleague in what he thought was a private chat. Somehow, they get into the public domain and he is sacked. Gordon Brown hilariously began a TV soundbite saying he took "full responsibility" before finishing it by giving Mr McBride the boot.

But is this the real story here? What this high-ranking spin doctor was discussing was the creation of a Labour blog site which would act an engine of innuendo and gossip, all aimed at discrediting the political right.

This is what the power elite seems to believe blogging is for: an unsourced, unaccountable method of attacking opponents. If the blogosphere is being polluted by such a masked agenda, this makes it potentially a far more dangerous vehicle for distortion than newspapers or television.

Yet at the same time we have Nightjack, a critically lauded blog unravelling the daily routine of a police detective. When the writer was unmasked, the police demanded the blog be shut down. And who unmasked this writer who was providing articles of a clear public interest: step forward, The Times.

So on one hand we have organisations with no interest in the 'internet idealism' - of a democracy of bloggers exchanging views - viewing cyberspace as offering the ultimate form of cowardly bullying, anonymous posting.

On the other, media organisations unimpressed by those usurping their function unmasking what, in days gone by, may have been one of their sources.

Blogging offered a whole new form of utterly non-corporate, not-for-profit communication. But it may be a lamb to the slaughter if the big boys either join the party in disguise or simply turn the music off when it suits them.