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More useful information for the double XX crowd. :/ *sigh*.
An anti-government protest placard is seen outside Downing Street during a march to protest against the British government’s spending cuts and austerity measures in London on June 20, 2015. The national demonstration against austerity was organised by People’s Assembly against government spending cuts. AFP PHOTO / BEN STANSALL
Well, let us pause in complete shock as the Tories institute more cutting of public services and benefits. You may have heard that Austerity is the new black in terms of doing shitty things to societies. Austerity has destroyed Greece and rightly the people of Britain are fighting back.
“Thousands of demonstrators staged an anti-austerity march in London on Saturday, in the first major public protest since Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron won a general election.
Opposition politicians, trade union bosses and celebrities were among the crowds marching through the capital’s financial district.
Protesters called for the halting and reversal of spending cuts imposed by the previous coalition government and further measures proposed by finance minister George Osborne.
“We have seen a huge impact on our work at primary school,” said Sian Bloor, 45, a teacher from Trafford near Manchester.
“I regularly bring clothes and shoes for children and biscuits for their breakfast, just so they get something to eat. You can see how children are being affected by the cuts.” Bloor said.”
The wealth from the Regan-Thatcher era STILL hasn’t trickled down. This must be some very sticky money as seems to be residing in the hands of the upperclass and corporations who have gerrymandered the British polity to benefit them and screw the rest of society.
“Placard-waving protesters marched from the Bank of England and filed past the nearby Royal Exchange, as the sound of drummers filled the air, creating a festival atmosphere.
Some of the placards read: “Austerity Doesn’t Work”, “No to Cuts”, “Get the Tories Out” and “Austerity is Class War”.
“It will be the start of a campaign of protest, strikes, direct action and civil disobedience up and down the country,” said Sam Fairbairn of organisers the People’s Assembly.
“We will not rest until austerity is history, our services are back in public hands and the needs of the majority are put first.” Fairbairn said.”
The message from the people is always the same – more equal distribution of wealth, reinstatement of public utilities and welfare. The stuff that makes society prosper and run well. Of course, given the current neo-liberal fetish the Western world is stuck in, all of these things are the darkest of evils.
“Cameron clinched an unexpected election victory on May 7 that gave his centre-right Conservative party an outright majority in parliament for the first time in nearly 20 years.
The victory was widely seen as an endorsement of the Conservatives’ austerity programme and is likely to see a continuation of cuts to public spending as they seeks to curb a budget deficit of nearly $140 billion.”
Let us hope for another election soon in Britain, perhaps people will get their priorities straight then.
Who knew that fonts could create so much hate? :)
Listen to one woman speak of her experiences – magically becoming fully human when it was presumed she was male. Women and men experience so many things in society differently, sadly being treated as a human being is one of them.
For the most part, I had enjoyed the privilege I’d experienced. I enjoyed being a human being.
In her article she shares her experience as posing as a man – Alex Blank Millard – on Twitter. Read here what happened.
Almost all of us have had one. You race away from what you happen to be doing we the grand expectation of someone you know coming to pay you a visit for a coffee or whatever. But no, it isn’t like that at all. It is a stranger and their goal is to test your politeness and patience while they ramble on about trying to save your soul and getting to know Jebus and all that hullabaloo.
Another unhappy feature of this is that these proselytizers are usually so damned nice about the whole thing. So despite the fact you happen to be imagining opening one of your own veins and spraying them with your blood while commanding your high-lord Beelzebub to rain hell fire down them, instead one tends to smile back and politely nod and just wish that they would go away.
I find the door knocking proselytizers to be such a troublesome situation to deal with appropriately. Of course inappropriate responses cost more socially speaking, but seem to be a touch more satisfying.
I’ve always gone the polite route, but does anyone else have some slam dunk suggestions for dealing with situations like these? I’d like to increase the size of my bag of tricks, so to speak.
The recent terrorist shooting in South Carolina have brought the issue of racism back to the top of the heap in the mainstream media. I’m sure there will be deep introspective think pieces in all of the major dailies and magazines. Then, like any story the media deigns “having being milked enough”, the racist terrorist attack will be quietly shunted to the side while the next tragedy is cued up for consumption.
Consumption of news these days seems to be the problem though. We are expected to keep track of the world, hell even personalize our ‘news experience’, but that is not what being an educated, engaged member of society is all about. The 5th Estate is (should) there to monitor the centres of power in society and report their activities for the citizens of democratic countries can engage with and evaluate said activities. With so much of media today being focused on infotainment rather than critical analysis of important events how the the average citizen get the information she needs?
There are a couple of threads to pull apart with the questions being raised. Firstly, the idea that personalized news is good idea for democratic societies, secondly the role of infotainment media and lastly the effect of the professional media colluding with the centers of power in society. All three of these aspects work against the creation of active, informed democratic participation in society.
“Society” is the watchword here – the ludicrous amount of personalization options presented to us in North America society gives us choice – and we all know (or should know by now the neo-liberal taint associated with that concept) that the choice presented to us is really a form of atomization that keeps our fingers firmly off the pulse of society and rather, firmly on our own as we sail alone through society.
What comes to mind is an captioned black and white image (pro-tip:if you want to every reuse something save it the first time you see it) of people on a train all
A big tip of the hat to Bleatmop for tracking down this picture.
reading the paper. The witty caption was something like this – smartphones and technology have changed society darn much… You can see the obvious parallel being made; every buried in a newspaper vs. everyone buried in their smart phones. On the surface this is correct but I remember pausing then thinking that something wasn’t quite right.
That “something” was that reading the daily newspaper was a still a shared experience in society. You could talk to someone about an article, even a complete stranger, and it was likely that they would have read the same article and then you could start a conversation about it. How neat is is that? Today though, that is a much taller order as many people have tailored their consumption of news to their tastes and sphere of interests making finding a common ground with people that much more difficult. Talking to people about important issues is what community is about, especially when they have different views on what is the correct course of action. Hashing things out, being charitable, accepting an well reasoned argument are all part of living in a democratic society.
Democracy is not a streamlined affair, nor should it be, because our personal freedom and ethical concerns are at stake. When governments act unilaterally and secretly it doesn’t matter what personal choices you make, it is the society around you that is going to shit and your choosy-choices and personal experiences will also be circling the drain since you are part of said society(see Canadian bill C-51, NAFTA, Trans-Pacific-Partnership). So having a reliable, accessible, common base of public knowledge is important to democratic society.
Democratic society has given us many media choices but, coupled with the capitalist infrastructure that actually runs the show our media sources have conglomerated and become ensconced within the power structures of society. See Fox and Faux News for the most shining example of the marriage between news and corporate propaganda. The focus of much of our news media today is to sell advertising, while educating/informing the public on crucial issues facing society is quite far down the list. I shudder when I see how much of the professional media now resembles Entertainment Tonight rather than the venerable Front Page Challenge (The Fifth Estate, Marketplace, et cetera). It now takes a great deal of time just to filter out the dross to get to the important news that people should know about their society and even then one must take into account the bias and elite influence present within ‘serious news’. The importance of public broadcasters cannot be overstated here – public institutions such as the CBC, NPR, and BBC are more free from the elite consensus and can more accurately report on the issues without the elite’s point of view being considered the default (This is a relative judgment – see Media Lens for an annotated listing of how awesomely independent Auntie Beebs is becoming).
Public broadcasting, with all of its problems aside, is one avenue to escape ‘the preferred message’ being broadcast to society by the corporate media with their vested interests of the status-quo. This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory – the way the world currently works benefits a certain class of people and it is their best interests to maintain the current system because it keeps them at the top of the heap. No mystery present. This system also provides the answers to why certain problems keep cropping up again and again within society – inequality, institutionalized racism and sexism for example. There structures within society serve their purpose; the ‘right people’ profit from their existence and thus are maintained. Just look at the perspectives surrounding mass murders:
The evidence, but then put through the media filters and the very different result…
The NYT’s nails it, for once, and lays down a view into the systemic racism that permeates North American society. This is the story that needs constant repetition. Yet, watch how soon the white racial violence dissipates into the ether. This is not a fluke, not a statistical aberration, this is policy. And thus, because of the collusion of much of the media with the current centres of power, the problems that face our society are not adequately dealt with nor are they given the proper amount of time or analysis that would help the people of the nation understand these problems and what can be done about them.
For those in power though it wise to note that only so much tamping down of these systemic problems can be done. Eventually, these issues take a life of their own and people will take radical action to resolve these seemingly ‘intractable’ problems and not in the way that the nestled elite likes.
Leave it to Beethoven to capture the keen spirit of melancholic grief.
” The famous A-minor Allegretto is framed by the same unstable chord to open and close the movement. The form is ABABA with the opening section using a theme that is once again more distinctive for its rhythmic profile than for its melody. The movement builds in intensity and includes a fugue near the end.”
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