Spotting media bias, part one of many

Let’s talk about how to spot Media Bias, and thus avoid the derangement that is symptomatic of Media Damage.

The press use language in a particular way when they want to downplay something bad, and it’s all about tone of voice: The active voice speaks, the passive voice’s words are spoken. The active voice makes the person or thing who caused something explicit in the minds of the reader. The passive voice puts rhetorical distance between actor and action, in a way where you don’t even have to mention the actor.

This trick is occasionally very revealing. Let’s look at a recent example, coverage of violence at a rally a few days ago in America. Last year, something very bad happened in Portland, and it caused a lot of right-wing figures very concerned about free speech to want to assemble a year later to spread their message. For some reason, a certain group of people were opposed to this. Violence broke out and a local newspaper published an article on what happened.

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In defense of Antifa

I’ve heard a lot of talk and seen a lot of articles equivocating antifascists with fascists, or implying they are just as tyrannical or harmful. I think this is a false narrative and actively abets fascist movements by damaging some of their most effective opponents. But there are plenty of reasonable people who look askance at the people blockading and yelling at neo-nazi rallies or who feel intimidated by them, and these arguments may well be convincing to them. I feel this should be challenged.

Fascist movements are a useful tool for union-busting and breaking apart leftist movements, so no wonder a narrative enabling them is getting sponsored by the corporate media. I have no media platform, but I am not afraid of discussion with people who think antifascists are bad. I’m going to set out my case as clearly as I can and try to answer the most common arguments I’ve seen in the process.

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Royal Wedding Post

The Royal Family in this country are now slightly less pale. The bride requested an African priest to give a benediction at the ceremony. I was talking with a friend today about how this is a big break from tradition, good and significant in its own right, but I have other friends have talked about this event in very negative terms, that having a black priest does a lot of whitewashing for an institution that once enslaved, raped and violated black people.

Both those views are right in their way, but I personally am closer to the latter, and where you fall depends I think on whether you believe actions speak louder than words.
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Free speech and debate with the far right

Recently a friend, in a conversation related to freedom of speech, spoke about how it was important to let all sides be heard and discussed no matter how obnoxious, even if you disagree with them, because that sharpens your own worldview and it means you’re not hypocritically dismissing someone without hearing their full arguments.

I got to thinking about this. Free speech and civil debate is a rallying cry for the alt-right and I feel it’s worth talking about what that means.

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Patriots are Stalkers

What is a Nation?

I remember years ago talking to several Greek acquaintances in a cafe in town. They were telling me about how while Cyprus was partially occupied by Turkey, Cyprus was historically a part of the Greek nation, because of the culture Greek people shared there and how historically the two countries had been linked. This got me thinking about what these things really were, and I came to the conclusion that a nation was a matter of opinion.

A country, you can define quite objectively. It’s a piece of land where a particular government has a monopoly on the use of force within its borders, where they can arrest people and the like. And culture you can also define with some level of objectivity, by looking at language and the way people interact with each other, and so on. Culture is more fuzzy because multiple cultures can exist within a population or even within a person, collections of cultural traits may not be universally practised by everyone who considers themselves part of that culture, and it bleeds across borders between countries. But still, it’s possible to measure it.

Nations are something else again. Two people can disagree about what borders constitute a nation; to some Turkish nationalists, parts of Hungary belong to Turkey by right, and Syria, and Cyprus and Greece as well. You can back this position up by arguing history but it really comes down to subjective opinion – how far back do you go? Do you go as far as the Ottoman Empire? Or further, to when the Greek-speaking Byzantines ruled Anatolia? Those opinions over where the borders stop, those attempts to make fuzzy culture into a hard national distinction, can conflict between people in a way that is irreconcilable.

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Doom and Decorum

I’ve been thinking about the at times intense and even violent imagery I use when I talk about this country, and what has been happening to my friends and neighbours. I am vitriolic, I admit, and people I respect have voiced the worry that my harsh and cruel words are opening the gate to, and actively fanning the flames that could lead to political violence.

Here’s the thing – it’s already happening. What is it to deliberately take the food from the mouth of a child but abuse? All across the country there are children arriving at school unfed and malnourished; this is child abuse on the scale of entire populations.

The BMJ recently published a study estimating that austerity had been responsible for around 120,000 deaths in the UK, most of them due to lack of frontline staff in social care, and damage to the health service thanks to austerity and plundering contractors. These people didn’t just die without being killed; your grandma choking her life out unattended on a hospital trolley was murdered, as if Jeremy Hunt had his hands around her neck.

A few hundred people burning to death in a towerblock, people starving after being sanctioned when their bus was late to the jobcenter, the squaddies shivering to death in the streets up and down the county – I don’t know how much more clearly I can say it, this is political violence! The only reason that the gears of society have kept turning is that the worst parts of austerity affect maybe 5-10% of us; the rest of us have to work harder and our money buys less, but we’ve not had our necks on the block. The Tories have targeted with sadistic precision the folks with the least power and the quietest voices, but during the next financial crisis we will all be fair game and you should know it.

The reason for all this suffering and death is that we’re living in a decaying society, fronted by the venal, punishment-obsessed ideology pushed by the Conservatives. The unbelievably wealthy people who sponsor and direct these monsters want it all. They. Want. It. All. They want the rest of us to be beaten down into a subservient and broken mass-man who beg for the privilege of working for them, and they want all the brown people in the global south to just stay in their dustbowl and mine astatine for the new nucleonic iphone battery until they starve, with massive walls bedecked with guns and overflown by drones to keep them in their place.

The thing is, it won’t pan out that way. People don’t quietly die, they get violent. Environmental terrorism is right around the corner, and beyond that I’ve spoken before about how precarious our personal finances are in this country and how we’re one major recession away from collapse. When there is chaos and mass suffering, moderation goes out the window; look at the Russian revolution in 1917, which started with the beautiful ideals of liberation and socialism and turned into the red terror and Stalinism. Moderates and politeness cannot survive a crisis. You should be grateful for my vicious words; they are a grim but clear intonation of what lies beyond the dark horizon.

It’s the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

On this auspicious anniversary, let’s take a journey into my mind palace. Can you imagine, with me, how things could have been? Imagine if, in 2008, by which time the true cause and nature of the war was obvious, we’d fired every journalist that was part of the human centipede that shat out lie after lie about the desperate need to invade Iraq. How about if we’d defenestrated every politician and official who pushed for the war, if every pundit who shilled for it had been hurled into the Thames. Just think for a minute about how much smarter and more interesting our public discourse would be, and how much better run our country would be, if opposing the transparently fraudulent ur-disaster of the 21th century was a litmus test for credibility.
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