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I see and hear this little piece of dudely wisdom far, FAR, too often. It represents such an massive break from reality, and yet this harmful trope continues onward. The usual suspects make their appearances, privilege, misogyny the unexamined life – reasons but not excuses for not being in the know when dealing with the basic issue of should we treat women like human beings. It should be concise answer. It almost never is because there inevitably is that lovely word ‘but’ appended to the answer.
Oh yes, women should be treated as human beings, but this Feminism stuff has gone to far.
Yes, women should be treated like human beings, but why all the hate for men why can’t we all just get along?
Yes, but we’re already equal, so what’s the big deal?
The most basic rule when dealing with oppressed classes of people is – shut up and listen. *You* (privileged while males, for example) do not get make the call on saying when someone is genuinely oppressed or when their oppression is done, or anything to do with what they are experiencing as a member of that particular oppressed category. Get over yourself and realize that your opinion has no magical qualities that make it better than those of others, sure it has been the default in society for ages now, but that is changing slowly and will continue to do so whether you are with the program or not.
Feminism is fighting the good fight attempting to make society a better place for women. Feminism is dealing with the mischaracterizations and stereotypes that hurt women in our society, but the fight is far from over. I may have already posted this video, but I found the extended trailer of Miss-representation on youtube. Thank you Sociological Images.
Listen, reflect and take the time to think about what is being postulated. Enjoy.
Liberal viewer does his usual exemplary job of describing the media. Faux News never fails to deliver when it comes to making sure that the interests of the people are marginalized and put forth in the worst possible light. The OWS movement has brought new life into the economic debate in the US opening new avenues of debate and discussion that were previously off-limits.
Media Lens does fantastic, if grim work, in describing the system we live in. We are insulated from other narratives other ideas, other peoples sufferings. How can a public become informed with no other sources to cross reference? You cannot triangulate with only one point. Media Lens, Al-Jazeera and other alternative news sources provide those points for those who have the resources to find out.
The Statistics of Western State Terror (click title for link to full article)
“Ten years later, the violent consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan are truly appalling. A Stop the War video, ‘What is the true cost of the Afghanistan war?’ details some of the appalling statistics:
9,300 Afghan civilians have been killed by International Security Assistance Forces, i.e. Nato.
380 British soldiers are dead.
£18 billion of UK taxpayer’s money has been spent.
The war is costing Britain £12 million per day. The same amount could employ 100,000 nurses (at £21,000 annually) and 150,000 care workers (£15,000).
A study by Brown University in the United States estimates an unimaginable combined sum of up to $4 trillion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, ‘cautious estimates’ of the total civilian death toll exceed 40,000 people, of which:
25.6% killed by ISAF forces.
15.4% killed by anti-government forces.
60% killed by poverty, disease and starvation.
In particular, the horrendous killing of Afghan children in US air strikes and night raids gets scant coverage, if any, before the Western media swiftly looks away.
There are now three million refugees from Afghanistan: 30.7% of the world’s total, exceeding the figures of 16.9% from Iraq, 7.7% from Somalia and 4.8% from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
74% of the British public want the occupation to end either ‘immediately’ or ‘soon’.
Very little of this reality made it into the largely uncritical coverage of the ten-year anniversary of the West’s aggression against Afghanistan.
In the conclusion to a new report for Stop the War, David Swanson provides a stunning example of the media’s systematic bias:
‘On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported “the deadliest day of the war” because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.
‘But compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.’
But the deaths of Afghan children, and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, are seemingly of little consequence for most Western journalists who would rather focus on the ‘progress’ and ‘achievements’ of the Nato ‘campaign’. “
Set phasers to bloviate!
The problem with “Climategate” and the rest of the braying noises emanating from the general direction of the climate denialist camp is that their claims are false. Being factually incorrect is not a particularly deep concern for fox news, but in science it matters. It matters a lot. The ‘scandalous’ emails circulated through the media were presented stripped of context and manipulated to be viewed in the worst possible light. If one propagandist reporter had actually bothered to do their homework they would have quickly seen the emails for what they were, mere correspondence between scientists, no booga-booga conspiracy attached.
17 minutes is a long time for a video, but well worth the view if you at all interested in the actual facts of the manufactured Climategate hullabaloo.
Busy weekend folks, blogging was low on the list of priorities. Therefore I steal the Media Lens Email alert and repost it for your viewing pleasure. It is a meaty one, many links and a nice take down of the corporate media.
MEDIA ALERT: WIKILEAKS – THE SMEAR AND THE DENIAL
PART 1 – THE SMEAR
“Journalists don’t like WikiLeaks”, Hugo Rifkind notes in The Times, but “the people who comment online under articles do… Maybe you’ve noticed, and been wondering why. I certainly have.” (Hugo Rifkind Notebook, ‘Remind me. It’s the red one I mustn’t press, right?,’ The Times, October 26, 2010)
Rifkind is right. The internet has revealed a chasm separating the corporate media from readers and viewers. Previously, the divide was hidden by the simple fact that Rifkind’s journalists – described accurately by Peter Wilby as the “unskilled middle class” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/10/comment.pressandpublishing) – monopolised the means of mass communication. Dissent was restricted to a few lonely lines on the letter’s page, if that. Readers were free to vote with their notes and coins, of course. But in reality, when it comes to the mainstream media, the public has always been free to choose any colour it likes, so long as it’s corporate ‘black’. The internet is beginning to offer some brighter colours.
If Rifkind is confused, answers can be found between the lines of his own analysis:
“With WikiLeaks, with the internet at large, power is democratised, but responsibility remains the preserve of professionals.”
This echoes Lord Castlereagh’s insistence that “persons exercising the power of the press” should be “men of some respectability and property”. (Quoted, James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility – The Press And Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.13)
And it is with exactly this version of “responsibility” that non-corporate commentators are utterly fed up. We are, for example, tired of the way even the most courageous individuals challenging even the most appalling crimes of state are smeared as “irresponsible”.
Thus, Rifkind describes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a frighteningly amoral figure”. In truth, journalists find Assange a frighteningly +moral+ figure. Someone willing to make an enemy of the world’s leading rogue state in order to expose the truth about the horrors it has inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq is frightening to the compromised, semi-autonomous employees of corporate power. Assange’s courage is the antidote to their poison.
A separate Times editorial comments:
“Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life.” (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)
Again, the truth is reversed – it is The Times, together with virtually the entire mass media, that is notable for its “heedlessness of human life”, for its endorsement of the West’s perennial policy: attack, bomb, invade, torture, kill based on any crass pretext that can be got past the public. As WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson politely told the WSWS website this week:
“The media is getting much too close to the military industry. They are not following the changing moods of the general public who are increasingly opposed to the wars.” (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/wiki-n02.shtml)
In the Daily Mail, Edward Heathcoat-Amory’s article raised the important question:
“Paranoid, anarchic. Is WikiLeaks boss a force for good or chaos?”
After all, “The Wikileaks supremo lives a bizarre peripatetic life, with no house and few belongings…” He also has “disciples” whom “he ruthlessly manipulates”. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1297917/Is-Wikileaks-boss-Julian-Assange-force-good-chaos.html)
As for Assange’s motivation: “His critics says he’s motivated by a desire for personal publicity.”
Like Rifkind, Heathcoat-Amory is appalled by Assange’s lack of “ethical judgments”, his “cult of secrecy, with no accountability to anyone”. Lack of accountability can indeed be a problem. Heathcoat-Amory, it should be mentioned, is of the Heathcoat-Amory Baronetcy, whose humble “family seat” was at Knightshayes Court in Tiverton, Devon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightshayes_Court
In The Times, passionately pro-Iraq war commentator David Aaronovitch recalls the main theme of his questions to Assange: “from where did WikiLeaks derive its authority and to whom was it accountable”. And from where exactly does The Times derive its authority? To whom is +it+ responsible? Its advertisers? Rupert Murdoch? Aaronovitch continued:
“And this is where something strange happened. Questioners wanted to know from Assange just how he and his team decided which documents to publish, which to redact, which to leave unpublished… Not only would Assange not answer these questions, it was almost as though he regarded them as illegitimate… I could tell that the overwhelming reaction was surprise at Assange’s refusal to engage in any discussion about himself as anything other than an uncaped crusader.” (Aaronovitch, ‘Enigmatic WikiLeaks chief keeps his guard up,’ The Times, October 2, 2010)
Strange indeed, because in fact Assange has addressed these questions numerous times (See here for a recent example: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/26/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange_on_iraq). Aaronovitch focused on Assange’s jacket, his shirt, his shoes – “incredibly long and pointy black winkle pickers”. The very fact of the focus suggested something was not quite right. The unsubtle implication: Assange was unsavoury, strange, sinister.
A Daily Mail reporter described Assange as “somewhat bizarre-looking”.
An Independent news report referred to the “sometimes erratic behaviour of Wikileaks’ founder”. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/secret-war-at-the-heart-of-wikileaks-2115637.html)
In an interview with ABC News (Australia), the Independent’s Robert Fisk derided Assange as “some strange code-breaker from Australia”. (http://is.gd/gzdKc)
Dan Jones wrote in the Evening Standard: “Assange is slippery. He is a master of the moral non sequitur… Do we really want the definition of what constitutes the public interest resting in the hands of a highly politicised neo-anarchist like Assange?” (Jones, ’There are limits to the freedom of the internet,’ Evening Standard, August 2, 2010)
Again, the level of self-awareness hovered around zero.
The Daily Telegraph observed: “the publication of classified documents risks endangering the lives of both soldiers and those who collaborate with them.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/8084891/Wikileaks-A-very-leaky-argument.html)
+Failure+ to publish the documents risks the lives of the inevitable next target of the US-UK killing machine in Iran, or Yemen, or Syria, or Venezuela. At this point, the only people capable of stopping the “coalition” is the public they are supposed to represent.
The New York Times’ Hit Piece Read the rest of this entry »
Behaving as media should.
Whistle-blowers usually take great risks to get out information to the public. I suspect that it was not WikiLeaks fault that this individual has been arrested, but rather a reverse engineering by the US military of who had access to what and where.
“The army intelligence specialist charged with leaking U.S. military secrets to the WikiLeaks website has been moved from Kuwait to a military jail in Virginia.
In a statement issued Friday, the U.S. army said Pte. Bradley Manning was flown Thursday to Quantico Marine Base, where he will be held while awaiting trial for leaking top-secret military intelligence to WikiLeaks, a site devoted to publishing leaked government and other sensitive documents.”
Mr. Manning, allegedly, has been a very naughty and very busy bee, apparently he is also responsible for the video from the gun cameras of attack helicopters shooting up civilians in Iraq along with the thousands of documents made available on WikiLeaks.
“White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the leak of tens of thousands of secret military documents already has jeopardized the lives of Afghans working with the U.S. and its war allies.”
If our media had actually been doing its job and reporting about what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would not have had the need for this particular leak. Instead through our journalistic mandarins continue to go meekly through their routines of obedience toward elite power. Journalism is not performing its original function any more, that is bringing the news to the people. Battered by calls for “objectivity” and “balance” what we get is a tendentious smear of propaganda; this vile pap masquarading as “news” for consumption by the public.
A side note, Mr.Manning will probably be publicly drawn and quartered for his heroic actions Al Jazeera opines in their article about the WikiLeaks source:
“In a statement, the defence department said Manning was transfered to the US “due to a potentially lengthy pre-trail confinement because of the complexity of the charges and an ongoing investigation.”
Our correspondent said that the US military wants to use Manning to send a message to future whistleblowers.
“If you violate the trust of security clearance, you will be prosecuted,” she said.”
A rational decision by the US military, but I do not think it will really help their security situation much in the long run. Too much malfeasance, for too long involving so many individuals, one will always have the temerity to challenge the system. This may not have happened if our media was less complacent when it came to analyzing and presenting facts about the current military imbroglios. There is some hope though.
The media is being slowly replaced, people can see the inherent bias in the system and now are cross checking and consulting many sources for a better view of what is happening in the world. So when I hear the newspapers bleating about their costs going up and advertisers leaving them I have no sympathy. If they did their job, people would buy their product. As is, who needs to see elite opinion reiterated for the nth time only in a different medium?
MediaLens is keeping an eye on the bias of Western newspapers reporting in the Middle East. Shorter version: Israeli dead are much more important than Palestinian dead.
MEDIA ALERT: WHEN FACTS AND PROPAGANDA COLLIDE – THE BBC BENDS OVER BACKWARDS TO ACCOMMODATE ISRAELI CLAIMS
When a Thai kibbutz worker was killed in Israel by a rocket launched from Gaza last week, BBC News online gave the incident headline coverage flagged up on its home page. (BBC news online, ‘Rocket fire from Gaza kills man in southern Israel’, 23:42 GMT, Thursday, 18 March 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8574138.stm)
By contrast, the killing of two Palestinian teenagers, Mohammad Qadus and Osaid Qadus, by Israeli soldiers on Saturday was buried at the end of a short news report on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Middle East visit. Even worse, the BBC’s footnote simply echoed Israeli propaganda that “no live bullets were fired, only tear gas and rubber bullets”, despite ample evidence to the contrary. (BBC news online, ‘UN chief says Gaza suffering under Israeli blockade’, 11:26 GMT, Sunday, 21 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8578611.stm)
Yesterday morning, we joined with a number of media activists in sending complaints to the BBC. We emailed Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. We asked Bowen why BBC News so often channels the Israeli version of events without proper scrutiny. We pointed out that, in contrast to the BBC, other news media had given the tragic killings of Mohammad Qadus and Osaid Qadus significant prominence, while also providing strong evidence that directly contradicted Israeli claims. For example, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported that the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem had obtained an X-ray of Osaid Qadus’s body that refuted the Israeli army’s assertion that “no live bullets were fired”. B‘Tselem commented:
“Rubber-coated steel bullets will not enter and exit the body in that way. It’s very clear these injuries would not have been caused by any kind of crowd-control measure. The army’s explanation is simply impossible and not consistent with the evidence.” (Ma’an news agency, ‘Army explanation “simply impossible”’, 22 March, 2010; http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=270326)
Likewise, the Guardian challenged Israeli claims on the use of live ammunition, reporting that “a hospital x-ray of Osaid Qadus, seen by the Guardian, showed a bullet lodged in his brain.” The Guardian added:
“Ahmed Hamad, a doctor at the hospital who treated the two, said the x-ray showed a ‘classic, pure metallic bullet’. He said both boys had injuries with small entry wounds.” (Rory McCarthy, ‘Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops near Nablus. Two teenagers killed day after boys, 15 and 17, shot in village’, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 March 2010 14.22 GMT; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/21/palestinians-shot-dead-isreal-nablus)
The Independent was also able to verify that a conventional bullet was “lodged in the brain of Osaid Qadus”. (Donald Macintyre, ‘Two more Palestinian youths shot dead by Israelis in bloody weekend. X-rays show deaths were caused by conventional bullets but military claim only rubber rounds were fired’, Independent, 22 March 2010; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/two-more-palestinian-youths-shot-dead-by-israelis-in-bloody-weekend-1925044.html)
We concluded our challenge to Bowen:
“Why, by contrast, has the BBC provided an echo chamber for Israeli propaganda on the army killings of these two Palestinian boys? Why were their deaths buried at the end of a report on Ban Ki-Moon’s visit? Why not give headline coverage, as you did when rocket fire from Gaza killed a man in Israel?”
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