A new video I made. Riding through Peckham and down Old Kent Road to get to my buddy Toby's house. Really happy with the results and to have actually finished something.
Friday, 3 June 2011
Monday, 16 May 2011
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
I'm Mad as Hell
A montage of footage from the Anti Cuts Protests in London on March 26th 2011.
Filmed & Edited by Paul Evans
Voiceover taken from Network (1976)
Filmed & Edited by Paul Evans
Voiceover taken from Network (1976)
Monday, 21 March 2011
Summer Drags Its Feet
A beaut of a poem just arrived in my inbox courtesy of our good friend Todd. It talks about a day about three years ago when Todd, Will and myself roadtripped to Thorpeness and camped out by the sea for want of something better to do with a sunny day.
Summer Drags Its Feet by Todd Murphy
We went to Old Joe’s Range.
Nicked a load of golf balls.
Drove down to the coast
and hit them to the sea.
It was dark as hell
and you couldn’t see them.
The waves were heavy
and you couldn’t hear the drop.
Good fifty golf balls,
just twatted into nothingness.
Looked around at stones and stars
but failed to find a reason.
Photos taken by Tom Gilfillan on a separate visit to Thorpeness
Summer Drags Its Feet by Todd Murphy
We went to Old Joe’s Range.
Nicked a load of golf balls.
Drove down to the coast
and hit them to the sea.
It was dark as hell
and you couldn’t see them.
The waves were heavy
and you couldn’t hear the drop.
Good fifty golf balls,
just twatted into nothingness.
Looked around at stones and stars
but failed to find a reason.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Mudchute
First sunny day of spring so me and Baxter went for a skate.
Filming by Baxter
Music & Skating by Paul
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Saturday, 5 March 2011
Friday, 4 March 2011
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Friday, 14 January 2011
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Monday, 10 January 2011
British mass media.
How effective is the British mass media at scrutinizing government policy? By Will Appleton
The British government is often described as an umpire state, but who umpires the umpires? (Gaus, G. 2003; 224) And whose actions are exempt from any kind of substantive scrutiny, if deemed non-governmental? Business? In this essay we will scrutinize both the content of policy deliberation, implementation and it’s exposure in mass mediums. After all, is it not a glaring contradiction to describe something of mass exposure as only British? We will discuss later jingoism portrayed in sports nationalism. Is there a single policy and process that is not at least propagated and influenced by international experience and interdependence? Are we looking through the right lens? Was Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt right when he said the British media was the envy of the world? (Red Pepper, 02/01/11) Or can we talk of an ideological hegemony in the framing and priming of certain stories? Is Dialectical Materialism a question of class solidarity in the progression from modern capital inequality to Marx’s reality of composed ideas of spiritual and often paradoxical philosophy? (Lukacs, 1972; 1) Is man’s fear of hegemony the necessary evil echo that gives us the prisoner’s dilemna and clear lines between peace and violence, health and safety? Ideology according to Althusser, meaning “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. (1984; 36) Socially then, can we comprehend of a contiguous structuralism in British journalism? Mass media describes, “the methods and organization used by special social groups to convey messages to large, socially mixed and widely dispersed audiences” (Trowler, 2001, p. 1) Are we then talking of oscilating mutually substantive social groups in faith, to hold a public good is to have an identity, a face and a history in good balance with expectations, Marx’s stateless utopia was a question of diversity in equality of employment, the distributor’s role being as marginal as possible, atlas shrugged. (Rand, A. 1992; 2) So the hiearchies of media management and production, regulation and employment are interdependently wholesome and representative across all variations of resource utility as human identity in which speech is a pre-requisite for action and action development in which the who is obvious to the whole audience, and agonizingly concealed from the actor (Arendt, H, 1958; 179). This Article divides the whole British isles right after a sporting event in the communal calendar, the euro ’96 football tournament in what was said to be an antagonizing movement against black British people who preferred even, the German side with divisively centralized and subordinated language the article commands respect and gives none, (Telegraph, 01/07/1996) it ignores the circumstantial geographic and economic pre-requisites for existence, driven and unanimous, this is what Karl Marx represents, a unity in alienation from uneven immigratory rights to marketisation.
Adorno talks of communication in terms of markets and un-even marketization, in which actions and people are rationalized by ‘the preponderance of the object’ as passive subjects. It can be argued that the rise of the digital commons has reshaped the audience; meaning there is not the same stratification of styles and preferences, only individuals pushing the limits of their imagination. This he saw as healthy participation, without tradition it is non-identical, non-conformist, unlike the commodity fetishism of the enlightenment liberalism (1994, 94) he blames a replicable world of materialised needs and dependencies exploited by parsimony of negligence in which even books are questionable for their authenticity in economic worth, both writing and reading time in it’s existential history, inevitably though humans will find props to lean upon and drag them behind, to both distract and ignore the fearful and greedy enlightenment individual whilst dispossessing itself of their wage surplus worth.
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves… You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learnt nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” Socrates, “Phaedrus” (Mcluhan, M. 1996; 113) Academia is divided by two conceptions of humanity, one in which humans are greedy and must surpress others to improve their own situation, and those who believe humans to be naturally sharing and equal, those determining technological expression and those determined by it, “This is the ultimate paradox we should bare in mind; today’s prevailing ‘psychologization’ of social life (the deluge of psychological manuals from Dale Carnegie to John Gray, which all endeavour to convince us that the path to happy life is to be sought within us, in our psychic maturation and self-discovery; the Oprah Winfrey-style public confessions; the way in which politicians themselves render public their private traumas and concerns to justify political decisions) is the mask (or mode of appearance) of its exact opposite, of the growing disintegration of the proper ‘psychologocial’ dimension of authentic self experience.” (Gordon.) As Williams, a prevalent Marxist in the mid 20th Century, tells us, “A good society depends upon the free availability of facts and opinions, and on the growth of vision and consciousness – the articulation of what men have actually seen and known and felt. Any restriction of the freedom of the individual contribution is actually a restriction of the resources of a society. “ (Williams, 1962; 1245) Williams like many other marxists, felt strongly that communities, not individuals, were capable of managing the total resource pool; consumption, production and communication. In this way, the ownership of the means of production necessitates and entails the ownership of the means of communication. (Williams, 1982; 53)
Politics was defined by Lassner as ‘who gets what, when and how?’ (Bernhagen, 2010) in this way, government can be seen as a mutual guardian of ossified economic ascendancies, we will ask whether newspapers, magazines, radio, television programming, and the rise of the digital commons has been effective at democratically representing the varying mobilities of citizen resource dependency, and the concurrent emotions of these priorities, or whether it can be described as more of a reactionary wolf-pack (Alia, 2004; 90), hunting for distracting and entertaining scapegoats? Are the media moguls simply guardians of the general will and pioneers of the common good or should we follow a Habermasian Scepticism? Does this legitimacy affect the common individual? On this point we will later contextualise with media coverage of; Weapons of Mass Destr(u/a)ction, Protesting Students, and Rupert Murdoch, the hegemony of advertising revenue and the cultural imbalance of entertainment broadcasting, treading the important margin between state and class warfare; exclusion and inclusion from what is often called the western political canon. Newspapers like the sun, after all, have been able to query the mental conditions, and social suitability of citizens based on varying a circumstance, never once querying the importance and legitimacy of self-rule in its entirety.
“The Lead story on page1, front page versus inside page, the size of the headline, and even the length of a story all communicate the salience of topics on the news agenda.” (McCombs, 2004; 2)
Barriers to entry and media plurality are the subjects of interdisciplinary dialogical consciousness, and their frequency describes the phenomenological construction of knowledge and power, but what is a mass media without a mass audience? Is it sensible to use the price mechanism on a public good as important as knowledge? Is it fair to pit journalists and readers against each other in this heavily competitive market? To allow certain combinations of words to become the basis of a bonus or redundancy; is it votes (words) or resources (actions) that truly decide the welfare of each citizen? Is population control not of greater importance than any singular democracy of Forbes 500s? We are, after all “a democracy by default.” (Held, 1993, 325)
Guy Debord, the father of post structuralism and legitimized graffiti seems to have been influenced by Hitler’s view that “the bigger the lie the more likely people will believe it” (Ruhe & Ruhe, 2005; 258 ) when he says that “Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in gerneral; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the recent past. The evidence for this is so glaring that it hardly needs further explanation. With consummate skill the spectacle organises ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood. The more important something is, the more it is hidden.” (1990; 13-14) Referring to demographic variations in priority, is it fair to have a system where the majority (60%) of the electorate are able to abstain from minimal policy deliberation through the vote, where welfare benefits are given higher priority than full-scale employment and language is made compulsory? Was it fair to broadcast the clip of Sadaam’s Statue falling? (Guardian, 10/12/2010)
“An expert is someone who articulates the consensus of people with power” (Chomsky, 1991)
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, (1994; 4) talk of Edward Bernays and the American production of ‘Public Relations’ in the road to manufacturing consent and legitimacy with huge overhead costs entry and exit in this industry are notorious, however we can argue easily that media influence is dwarfed by educational influence, in which every citizen of every civilised western democracy has to endure an education that they are passive to, with repetitive facts and rules imposed, do they not become linguistically institutionalised? Callinicos (2001; 51) shows us the saddening correlation between a father’s earnings and the son’s mathematic ability. These kinds of inequality are mutually substantive in that they sustain working poverty and effortless wealth. The contrast in resource allocation cannot and is not conveyed by disposable words and images, only personified emotions and actions.
Can we say truly, that global policy is the result of ‘the better argument’ and not that it is the result of varying potentialities in tension with mass resource gain and loss? It is clear that the information gathering skills of the british mass media were not deemed as reliable as those of the mi6 during the preparation for the war on terror? (Guardian, 30/05/2003). Weapons of mass destruction are a linguistic tool to convey the need for a distant war, but empirically the media could not differentiate between a ‘war on terror’ and a ‘war is terror’ attitude. It would however be inadequate to blame the communication of a minority to the majority, as during this period, military recruitment thrived of it’s own accord. The source problem then being the production of lethal machinery and lethal energies, for the six richest nations in the planet are also the six largest producers of armaments in the global industry of death.
Government policy defines what is valuable to our communities, by removing us from our original social positions of pro-active unity, constitutions and laws are not effected for security fears from the group but in protecting the individual from its own relational self. Rawls and Rosseau follow similar lines in defining the need for a contractual self that is resource based, established on equal necessities and clear self drive (Dryzeg, Honig & Phillips, 2006, 49). So expressing caution or audacity is not a question of universality but particularity within culturally agreed norms and practices, appropriateness and inappropriateness are inseperable from a cost benefit analysis based on preliminary, binary yes and no answer systems. Without an access to these systems worldwide we cannot truly call ourselves ourselves? For we have not striven to integrate the human sociably and contractually.
“rank and file soldiers under the pressure of battle develop all the advances in military tactics. The job of good leadership is not to say that they have all the answers, but to take the best of what is invented by the rank and file in the midst of battle and to generalise it throughout the army. Any revolutionary party that is worth its salt is about learning from people in struggle and generalising what it learns throughout the class. The party learns from the class, but it is also the mechanism by which every section of the class learns from the best experiences of struggle.” Engels (Rees, 06/02/2004)
To say finally, the scale of communicative deficiency worldwide is concurrent with the scale of productive and allocative deficiency worldwide. The Global mass media has failed to transpose environmental social, and cultural problems from one territory to the next in a hunt for fairer resource allocation. Global Mega Damn building has been emancipated to the scale of contaminating the flows of global habitual eco cycles and livelihoods, the mono-cultural mind-set of varying employments has been negligible to say the least, a media that stood for the rights of self determination would be wholly concerned with our global demography and lop-sidedness, our mutually abused rights to life and death, peace and security, movement without displacement (Roy, A. April 1999). “The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.” Can we say the 48,000 dams worldwide are a matter of mobilized consensus? Or suppressed dissidency? The 2 trillion dollars and upwards spent on the constructions (WWF) Or the Fordist economic drive of the 1950’s for road construction and combustion fuel and the subsequent eternal oil crises from 1973 to the latest BP disasters exposing dependencies. We are reminded of Chomsky’s definition of expertise, when he says “It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers” (Chomsky, 1981).
The scale of human brutality (soldier, policeman, or gangster) is often said to be hushed by normative senses, to maintain docility or pragmatism, but what it really does is legitimize all action under individual humanity, so that a majority are exposed to the isolated minorities negligence’s, global corruption has an incalculable damage and 850 million people are currently hungry (Acton, Volume 16, Number 2). According to Wiki-leaks, the guardian was issued with 10 secret gag orders in 2009 alone, talking specifically about the Minten report; which highlights the damages caused by Trafigura and it’s contractors in dumping toxic waste and putting 100,000 people in hospital was forbidden by court injunction. (Wikileaks, 14/10/2009) Wikileaks is independent of funding and revenue dependency, because it has such low fixed and variable costs of production. It is also based on voluntarism that means the quality of journalism is substantive rather than procedural, and it’s not territorially accountable to hegemony.
In 1997, Tony Blair became leader of the labour party, labeling himself an advocate of a ‘new labour’ there was very little discussion of the edited clause four of the labour party constitution in which it vowed to protect workers rights to organize, yet the media continued with the spoon fed language of ‘new’ labour instead of representing the de-aligned partisans with the truth, elections are regularly conveyed as majoritarian and consensual, as opposed to diverse and fragmented. So to call Tony Blair’s leadership a change for either better or worse is a vast underestimation of the power his words and fists wield (Guardian, 05/10/1994).
The un-utilized power of communication in Britain is one of petition and advocacy, instead of polling opinions to founder stories, stories founder opinions. It is very rare to see unanimous action from the industry, firm, or employee. Inconsistencies in policy are forgotten and embedded across vast arrays of revenue dependent medias; the competition commission and monopolies commission have not been summoned or provoked by headline advocacy, instead journalists seek to convey both sides of the argument, in this they advocate indecisiveness and agnosticism, Tesco and Rupert Murdoch (Red Pepper, 02/01/11) represent a devastating potential withdrawal of wealth from the British cyclical flow of income so much that they, personally, are socially accepted necessities, not for their service but their fear and greed. Another example would be the Independent police complaints commission, which is accountable to the chief inspector of the British police, thus dependently it measures complaints not individually but by noticing only large anomalous detractions from the average on scape-goated individual officers, with 29,000 complaints only a 100 were investigated in 2009, we call this democracy representative? (indymedia, 08/04/2009) So is it more worthwhile to question the effectiveness of words and pictures in influencing policy implementation, than the journalist wielding them? After all “votes count, but resources decide” (Stein Rokkan, 1966, p. 105) we know that policy is inseparable from it’s ideological identity, and that all stages of problem solving will enamor the logician with yet more problems, can we know without democratic polling whether riot officers represent an optimal allocation of resources? The mass media has inaccurately defined the male and female, child and adult identity, through commoditization and alienation, the individual has been robbed of it’s anonymity and authenticity; the female robbed of it’s social peace-time supremacy and enthusiasm. It is not just the media who has failed to hold itself accountable through scrutiny, but all industries and employers in the UK.
Bibliography
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Callinicos, Alex (2001) Against the Third Way. Polity Press
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(Gordon, ‘Has the “New Economy” Rendered the Productivity Slowdown Obsolete?’, passim http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.163.4854&rep=rep1&type=pdf . [date accessed: 4/01/2011]
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Guardian, Norton-Taylor, Richard. (2003) Mi6 Led protest against war dossier http://realnews247.com/mi6_led_protest_against_war_dossier.htm [date accessed: 09/01/2011]
Guardian, White, Michael (05/10/1994) Blair defines the new Labour http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/1994/oct/05/labour.uk [date accessed: 9/01/2011]
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McCombs, Maxwell E. (2004) Setting the agenda: mass media and pubic opinion Polity Press. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QhqeQfgxVu0C&pg=PA162&dq=mccombs+2004&hl=en&ei=RqspTZmCNIywhQewtfSUAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mccombs%202004&f=false [date accessed: 02/01/2011]
Mcluhan, Marshall & Quentin Fiore. (1996);The Medium is the Massage Penguin Books Ltd.
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Rees, Jon. Leninism in the 21st Century 06/02/2004 http://www.ft.org.ar/notasft.asp?ID=1764&i=3 [date accessed: 05/01/2011]
Rokkan, Stein (1996); ‘Norway: Numerical democracy and corporate pluralism’ Yale University Press.
Roy, Arundhati (1999) The Greater Common Good. Friends of Narmada River http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html [date accessed: 03/01/2011]
Ruhe, Brian & Ruhe, Pria (2005) Freeing the Buddha: diversity on a sacred path—large scale concerns: a course on major aspects of Buddhism plus a dangerous collection of essays Motilal Banarsidas Publications. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e9mz9yg74wAC&dq=hitler+bigger+the+lie&source=gbs_navlinks_s [date accessed: 05/01/2011]
WWF: Dam Facts and Figures http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/water/dams_initiative/quick_facts/ [date accessed: 03/01/2011]
The British government is often described as an umpire state, but who umpires the umpires? (Gaus, G. 2003; 224) And whose actions are exempt from any kind of substantive scrutiny, if deemed non-governmental? Business? In this essay we will scrutinize both the content of policy deliberation, implementation and it’s exposure in mass mediums. After all, is it not a glaring contradiction to describe something of mass exposure as only British? We will discuss later jingoism portrayed in sports nationalism. Is there a single policy and process that is not at least propagated and influenced by international experience and interdependence? Are we looking through the right lens? Was Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt right when he said the British media was the envy of the world? (Red Pepper, 02/01/11) Or can we talk of an ideological hegemony in the framing and priming of certain stories? Is Dialectical Materialism a question of class solidarity in the progression from modern capital inequality to Marx’s reality of composed ideas of spiritual and often paradoxical philosophy? (Lukacs, 1972; 1) Is man’s fear of hegemony the necessary evil echo that gives us the prisoner’s dilemna and clear lines between peace and violence, health and safety? Ideology according to Althusser, meaning “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. (1984; 36) Socially then, can we comprehend of a contiguous structuralism in British journalism? Mass media describes, “the methods and organization used by special social groups to convey messages to large, socially mixed and widely dispersed audiences” (Trowler, 2001, p. 1) Are we then talking of oscilating mutually substantive social groups in faith, to hold a public good is to have an identity, a face and a history in good balance with expectations, Marx’s stateless utopia was a question of diversity in equality of employment, the distributor’s role being as marginal as possible, atlas shrugged. (Rand, A. 1992; 2) So the hiearchies of media management and production, regulation and employment are interdependently wholesome and representative across all variations of resource utility as human identity in which speech is a pre-requisite for action and action development in which the who is obvious to the whole audience, and agonizingly concealed from the actor (Arendt, H, 1958; 179). This Article divides the whole British isles right after a sporting event in the communal calendar, the euro ’96 football tournament in what was said to be an antagonizing movement against black British people who preferred even, the German side with divisively centralized and subordinated language the article commands respect and gives none, (Telegraph, 01/07/1996) it ignores the circumstantial geographic and economic pre-requisites for existence, driven and unanimous, this is what Karl Marx represents, a unity in alienation from uneven immigratory rights to marketisation.
Adorno talks of communication in terms of markets and un-even marketization, in which actions and people are rationalized by ‘the preponderance of the object’ as passive subjects. It can be argued that the rise of the digital commons has reshaped the audience; meaning there is not the same stratification of styles and preferences, only individuals pushing the limits of their imagination. This he saw as healthy participation, without tradition it is non-identical, non-conformist, unlike the commodity fetishism of the enlightenment liberalism (1994, 94) he blames a replicable world of materialised needs and dependencies exploited by parsimony of negligence in which even books are questionable for their authenticity in economic worth, both writing and reading time in it’s existential history, inevitably though humans will find props to lean upon and drag them behind, to both distract and ignore the fearful and greedy enlightenment individual whilst dispossessing itself of their wage surplus worth.
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves… You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learnt nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” Socrates, “Phaedrus” (Mcluhan, M. 1996; 113) Academia is divided by two conceptions of humanity, one in which humans are greedy and must surpress others to improve their own situation, and those who believe humans to be naturally sharing and equal, those determining technological expression and those determined by it, “This is the ultimate paradox we should bare in mind; today’s prevailing ‘psychologization’ of social life (the deluge of psychological manuals from Dale Carnegie to John Gray, which all endeavour to convince us that the path to happy life is to be sought within us, in our psychic maturation and self-discovery; the Oprah Winfrey-style public confessions; the way in which politicians themselves render public their private traumas and concerns to justify political decisions) is the mask (or mode of appearance) of its exact opposite, of the growing disintegration of the proper ‘psychologocial’ dimension of authentic self experience.” (Gordon.) As Williams, a prevalent Marxist in the mid 20th Century, tells us, “A good society depends upon the free availability of facts and opinions, and on the growth of vision and consciousness – the articulation of what men have actually seen and known and felt. Any restriction of the freedom of the individual contribution is actually a restriction of the resources of a society. “ (Williams, 1962; 1245) Williams like many other marxists, felt strongly that communities, not individuals, were capable of managing the total resource pool; consumption, production and communication. In this way, the ownership of the means of production necessitates and entails the ownership of the means of communication. (Williams, 1982; 53)
Politics was defined by Lassner as ‘who gets what, when and how?’ (Bernhagen, 2010) in this way, government can be seen as a mutual guardian of ossified economic ascendancies, we will ask whether newspapers, magazines, radio, television programming, and the rise of the digital commons has been effective at democratically representing the varying mobilities of citizen resource dependency, and the concurrent emotions of these priorities, or whether it can be described as more of a reactionary wolf-pack (Alia, 2004; 90), hunting for distracting and entertaining scapegoats? Are the media moguls simply guardians of the general will and pioneers of the common good or should we follow a Habermasian Scepticism? Does this legitimacy affect the common individual? On this point we will later contextualise with media coverage of; Weapons of Mass Destr(u/a)ction, Protesting Students, and Rupert Murdoch, the hegemony of advertising revenue and the cultural imbalance of entertainment broadcasting, treading the important margin between state and class warfare; exclusion and inclusion from what is often called the western political canon. Newspapers like the sun, after all, have been able to query the mental conditions, and social suitability of citizens based on varying a circumstance, never once querying the importance and legitimacy of self-rule in its entirety.
“The Lead story on page1, front page versus inside page, the size of the headline, and even the length of a story all communicate the salience of topics on the news agenda.” (McCombs, 2004; 2)
Barriers to entry and media plurality are the subjects of interdisciplinary dialogical consciousness, and their frequency describes the phenomenological construction of knowledge and power, but what is a mass media without a mass audience? Is it sensible to use the price mechanism on a public good as important as knowledge? Is it fair to pit journalists and readers against each other in this heavily competitive market? To allow certain combinations of words to become the basis of a bonus or redundancy; is it votes (words) or resources (actions) that truly decide the welfare of each citizen? Is population control not of greater importance than any singular democracy of Forbes 500s? We are, after all “a democracy by default.” (Held, 1993, 325)
Guy Debord, the father of post structuralism and legitimized graffiti seems to have been influenced by Hitler’s view that “the bigger the lie the more likely people will believe it” (Ruhe & Ruhe, 2005; 258 ) when he says that “Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in gerneral; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the recent past. The evidence for this is so glaring that it hardly needs further explanation. With consummate skill the spectacle organises ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood. The more important something is, the more it is hidden.” (1990; 13-14) Referring to demographic variations in priority, is it fair to have a system where the majority (60%) of the electorate are able to abstain from minimal policy deliberation through the vote, where welfare benefits are given higher priority than full-scale employment and language is made compulsory? Was it fair to broadcast the clip of Sadaam’s Statue falling? (Guardian, 10/12/2010)
“An expert is someone who articulates the consensus of people with power” (Chomsky, 1991)
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, (1994; 4) talk of Edward Bernays and the American production of ‘Public Relations’ in the road to manufacturing consent and legitimacy with huge overhead costs entry and exit in this industry are notorious, however we can argue easily that media influence is dwarfed by educational influence, in which every citizen of every civilised western democracy has to endure an education that they are passive to, with repetitive facts and rules imposed, do they not become linguistically institutionalised? Callinicos (2001; 51) shows us the saddening correlation between a father’s earnings and the son’s mathematic ability. These kinds of inequality are mutually substantive in that they sustain working poverty and effortless wealth. The contrast in resource allocation cannot and is not conveyed by disposable words and images, only personified emotions and actions.
Can we say truly, that global policy is the result of ‘the better argument’ and not that it is the result of varying potentialities in tension with mass resource gain and loss? It is clear that the information gathering skills of the british mass media were not deemed as reliable as those of the mi6 during the preparation for the war on terror? (Guardian, 30/05/2003). Weapons of mass destruction are a linguistic tool to convey the need for a distant war, but empirically the media could not differentiate between a ‘war on terror’ and a ‘war is terror’ attitude. It would however be inadequate to blame the communication of a minority to the majority, as during this period, military recruitment thrived of it’s own accord. The source problem then being the production of lethal machinery and lethal energies, for the six richest nations in the planet are also the six largest producers of armaments in the global industry of death.
Government policy defines what is valuable to our communities, by removing us from our original social positions of pro-active unity, constitutions and laws are not effected for security fears from the group but in protecting the individual from its own relational self. Rawls and Rosseau follow similar lines in defining the need for a contractual self that is resource based, established on equal necessities and clear self drive (Dryzeg, Honig & Phillips, 2006, 49). So expressing caution or audacity is not a question of universality but particularity within culturally agreed norms and practices, appropriateness and inappropriateness are inseperable from a cost benefit analysis based on preliminary, binary yes and no answer systems. Without an access to these systems worldwide we cannot truly call ourselves ourselves? For we have not striven to integrate the human sociably and contractually.
“rank and file soldiers under the pressure of battle develop all the advances in military tactics. The job of good leadership is not to say that they have all the answers, but to take the best of what is invented by the rank and file in the midst of battle and to generalise it throughout the army. Any revolutionary party that is worth its salt is about learning from people in struggle and generalising what it learns throughout the class. The party learns from the class, but it is also the mechanism by which every section of the class learns from the best experiences of struggle.” Engels (Rees, 06/02/2004)
To say finally, the scale of communicative deficiency worldwide is concurrent with the scale of productive and allocative deficiency worldwide. The Global mass media has failed to transpose environmental social, and cultural problems from one territory to the next in a hunt for fairer resource allocation. Global Mega Damn building has been emancipated to the scale of contaminating the flows of global habitual eco cycles and livelihoods, the mono-cultural mind-set of varying employments has been negligible to say the least, a media that stood for the rights of self determination would be wholly concerned with our global demography and lop-sidedness, our mutually abused rights to life and death, peace and security, movement without displacement (Roy, A. April 1999). “The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.” Can we say the 48,000 dams worldwide are a matter of mobilized consensus? Or suppressed dissidency? The 2 trillion dollars and upwards spent on the constructions (WWF) Or the Fordist economic drive of the 1950’s for road construction and combustion fuel and the subsequent eternal oil crises from 1973 to the latest BP disasters exposing dependencies. We are reminded of Chomsky’s definition of expertise, when he says “It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers” (Chomsky, 1981).
The scale of human brutality (soldier, policeman, or gangster) is often said to be hushed by normative senses, to maintain docility or pragmatism, but what it really does is legitimize all action under individual humanity, so that a majority are exposed to the isolated minorities negligence’s, global corruption has an incalculable damage and 850 million people are currently hungry (Acton, Volume 16, Number 2). According to Wiki-leaks, the guardian was issued with 10 secret gag orders in 2009 alone, talking specifically about the Minten report; which highlights the damages caused by Trafigura and it’s contractors in dumping toxic waste and putting 100,000 people in hospital was forbidden by court injunction. (Wikileaks, 14/10/2009) Wikileaks is independent of funding and revenue dependency, because it has such low fixed and variable costs of production. It is also based on voluntarism that means the quality of journalism is substantive rather than procedural, and it’s not territorially accountable to hegemony.
In 1997, Tony Blair became leader of the labour party, labeling himself an advocate of a ‘new labour’ there was very little discussion of the edited clause four of the labour party constitution in which it vowed to protect workers rights to organize, yet the media continued with the spoon fed language of ‘new’ labour instead of representing the de-aligned partisans with the truth, elections are regularly conveyed as majoritarian and consensual, as opposed to diverse and fragmented. So to call Tony Blair’s leadership a change for either better or worse is a vast underestimation of the power his words and fists wield (Guardian, 05/10/1994).
The un-utilized power of communication in Britain is one of petition and advocacy, instead of polling opinions to founder stories, stories founder opinions. It is very rare to see unanimous action from the industry, firm, or employee. Inconsistencies in policy are forgotten and embedded across vast arrays of revenue dependent medias; the competition commission and monopolies commission have not been summoned or provoked by headline advocacy, instead journalists seek to convey both sides of the argument, in this they advocate indecisiveness and agnosticism, Tesco and Rupert Murdoch (Red Pepper, 02/01/11) represent a devastating potential withdrawal of wealth from the British cyclical flow of income so much that they, personally, are socially accepted necessities, not for their service but their fear and greed. Another example would be the Independent police complaints commission, which is accountable to the chief inspector of the British police, thus dependently it measures complaints not individually but by noticing only large anomalous detractions from the average on scape-goated individual officers, with 29,000 complaints only a 100 were investigated in 2009, we call this democracy representative? (indymedia, 08/04/2009) So is it more worthwhile to question the effectiveness of words and pictures in influencing policy implementation, than the journalist wielding them? After all “votes count, but resources decide” (Stein Rokkan, 1966, p. 105) we know that policy is inseparable from it’s ideological identity, and that all stages of problem solving will enamor the logician with yet more problems, can we know without democratic polling whether riot officers represent an optimal allocation of resources? The mass media has inaccurately defined the male and female, child and adult identity, through commoditization and alienation, the individual has been robbed of it’s anonymity and authenticity; the female robbed of it’s social peace-time supremacy and enthusiasm. It is not just the media who has failed to hold itself accountable through scrutiny, but all industries and employers in the UK.
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Sunday, 9 January 2011
Friday, 7 January 2011
A Bunch of Photos I Took While I Lived In Greenwich
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