BBC Newsman takes blaming the victim to a new low.

In essence a BBC News presenter accused a severely disabled man of provoking and posing a threat to the police and thus justifying them forcibly removing him from his wheelchair twice during a protest. Jody McIntyre stood up to the absurd questioning very well but jeez those questions should not have been asked by anyone with any kind of grasp of reality.



To better understand why this happened I suggest two older posts:

Firstly Noam Chomsky explaining to another BBC man of a very similar mode to the above asshole interviewer about the propaganda model. Note Andrew Marr's reactions and how that thinking might well lead to how Ben Brown behaved above.

Secondly Mark Ames' coverage of anti-IMF protests in 2000. Note the media reactions and behaviour to that situation and the inherent similarities.

Weekend Watch

Well my second ever weekend watch is two days late. Doing well.

Anyway here is part two of the Power of Nightmares:

Buy Silver, hurt JP Morgan

I've heard rumblings about this before but didn't really know what was going on. Heres all round cool dude Max Keiser explaining it in less than a minute:



More details here

Adventures in wikipedia bias.

For reasons that are beyond me I decided to look at the wikipedia page for Libertarianism: this page. I noticed that there is no mention of any criticism of Libertarianism nor a link to a page that does cover criticism. I thought this odd because I was sure the page for communism did have such a link, entirely reasonably, its important to know the flaws of every ideology. So I checked the communism page. Yes, theres a whole section dedicated to criticism AND links to other criticism pages.

Not a huge deal, afterall Communism isn't the most popular ideology and different wiki pages have different formats anyway. So I looked at the socialism page (it was linked at the top of the communism page and I'm lazy). Of course Socialism's failings also have their own little section. at this point I stopped and went in a different direction but we'll come back to that. Lets look at other ideologies' pages on wikipedia. Anarchism... no, theres certainly no section and a ctrl + f of the page doesn't turn up anything. Liberalism sort of has a criticism section but not really. Conservatism has no section or links. Fascism, perhaps unsurprisingly, does have a section one in need of expansion no less.

So from a brief sampling of ideology pages it seems the only pages to escape mention of criticism in their summary are Conservatism and Libertarianism. While I readily admit the Liberalism criticism isn't quite the same it is mightly convenient for right wingers only their articles don't directly mention criticism at all.

Anyway, back when I first discovered this I mentioned it to a friend and he jokingly suggested editing the page. I decided to first look at the talk page to see if this was an issue. At the top of the talk page is this:
and absolutely no mention of a criticism section on the talk page. So it seems that wikipedia is a site anyone can edit as long as it doesn't affect right wing interests.

However, while searching the archives of the libertarianism talk page I did find a link to the Criticism of libertarianism page so its nicely well hidden but it does have some good information:

Of particular interest to economists is the "New Zealand Experiment," which began in 1984 when Roger Douglas became Minister of Finance and began radically restructuring the country's economy to fit the libertarian model.[10] Over the next 15 years, New Zealand's economy and social capital faced a steady decline: the youth suicide rate grew sharply into one of the highest in the developed world;[11] the proliferation of food banks increased dramatically;[12] marked increases in violent and other crime were observed;[13] the number of New Zealanders estimated to be living in poverty grew by at least 35% between 1989 and 1992;[14] and health care has been especially hard-hit, leading to a significant deterioration in health standards among working and middle class people.[15] In addition, many of the promised economic benefits of the experiment never materialised.[16]

which is pretty darned damning. You can find it with the footnotes etc here

Twitter censoring wikileaks hash tag?

This was indirectly linked by Wikileaks on twitter but its worth repeating. Basically theres a fairly compelling argument that twitter, for political reasons, is not showing wikileaks as a trending topic.

Freedom of speech only matters if it is related to regimes that are the enemy of America, such as Iran, it would seem.

Another possible attempt to undermine Wikileaks

It seems someone is leaking cables before Wikileaks or perhaps ones Wikileaks never intended to release: Something weird is going on


thanks ahm

Bernie Sanders is a good Senator.

Hell probably the only good senator:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OtB298fHY

Weekend Watch

This is a new feature that is neither innovative nor requiring effort on my part so maybe, just maybe, I'll keep up with it. As you may well be able to infer this feature is about encouraging you to watch worthwhile stuff, generally documentaries and lectures. At least for now I'll try to alternate between the two. For the next three weeks we'll be watching babby's first geopolitics aka The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis. A three part documentary about the similarities between the rise to prominence of the Neo-conservative and Islamist movements.

This is part one.



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1320822957676559056#

I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't before.

The final nail in net neutrality's coffin?

The FCC Chairman has announced his plans for the Net Neutrality Bill. No one seems especially happy about what they have to say but I'm inclined to believe this reaction given how much of a friend to Corporate America the Obama Administration has been.

I suppose anything this good wasn't going to be allowed to last.