The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
hmmmmm.... what kind of culture generates this kind of politically manipulative content, and calls it free speech? It is incitement, and it undermines the meaning of Free Speech.
Free Speech is the political and legislative directive that the State must never seek to prevent honest political and cultural discourse amongst the people, or any of their associations.
It was not thought of as Freedom to Incite or Manipulate using relative beliefs to escalate bigotry.
Those freedoms already existed under Law as religious freedoms.
Set out your belief, set up a text, a church and register as a charity.... belief what you like, convince others to adopt same belief, get them to pay all your life expenses, and more. Manipulate and incite as much as you want, do not aim at the State.
That was the context in which modern Free Speech emerged.
--- Be honest ---
A short graphic video covering the progression of news presentation since the 1500s, right up to tomorrow and the foreseeable future. There's a fundamental design flaw in public service political and general news presentation.
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aphorism : "we are not our skin, we are the person within, skin deep is colour blinded."
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I think this graphic video is quite cool, clever, direct, unassuming.
Please enjoy!
Here's my take, my opinion if you will.
Opinion posing as prima facie evidence for public news content is fake news.
If we understand public news function as informing the reader, informing the population at large, with reliable accurate record and knowledge of matters that affect their lives, so that they might agitate for improvement of society, as the population are the majority. Seems like a reasonable concept. As such it remains so.
An opinion page is not news, nor is it information. Telling people what to think embedded within text content that is not reporting the event, that is instead forming an opinion for the reader to agree with based on known biases. Is not Public News.
Let people form their own opinions based on honest information. Lay out all the facts and evidence, record the witnesses testimony, say who did what, what it was , what the outcomes were and then listen to what response the population has to that accurate information - with a lean towards forming evidence based understandings being the normal, the cultural normative of transparent democratic governance. Context. The condition in which we are forced to live our lives.
I don't think it's a lot to ask, even though I know those who would reject that, and adopt a defensive stance are indeed mighty institutions populated by people who have internalised the cultural values of the institutions.
They will defend the institutions as if defending themselves, their sense of self informed by internalising system values.
What are those institutional values?
Prime among them are Wealth and Power, for without either one cannot do much, certainly one cannot wage war without both in ample supply. And so forth.
Those values if they become an end on and of themselves will always corrupt and distort human relations, and disrupt healthy relations between different parts of our human family, our species.
Fake news tries to mask that and spread choice making and behaviour rooted in emotionally charged reactive opinion as a democratic weaponisation of the voting system. Get loads of angry people to vote, based on different themes, set them against each other. Sell ads while doing that - it is the exact same industrial process.
It needs to stop.
Utter cruelty.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
The AI snaps were made by Luca Allievi using Midjourney. (Luca Allievi/SWNS)
AI generated image of the much loved late Queen Elizabeth II, on the decks, mixing it up. Obviously fake.
To the Editor
This morning, an article in The Guardian newspaper discussed the potential of AI generated content that could pose a risk to political elections.
The solution is quite straightforward.
Yet nobody seems prepared to articulate it.
Targeting people who present with biases, lack of accurate knowledge, fears and worries with content designed to exacerbate the emotional reactions associated with those vulnerabilities, in order to drive behavioural change that can be exploited for political gain, is the problem here.
Many media are utilised to do this. It is not something new.
What is the best term to describe this activity?
It is grooming. It is psychological and emotional abuse.
AI increases the scale and precision of delivery systems of such content.
We know that the problem is already part of current political activism. Brexit, Trump, anti-LGBTQA+ 'activism', misogyny, anti-abortion have all 'influenced' elections. Cambridge Analytica and SCL are two well known entities proven to have engaged in this kind of content delivery.
The solution is Legislation that defines this activity, and makes it a criminal offence to engage in this activity. Such legislation does not impede or limit Free Speech, it protects Free Speech, in as much as it sets a standard of evidence, honesty and integrity as an essential element of Free Speech. Such legislation is protective, rather than oppressive.
It does not impede Freedom of Religion. What it might do is create a firewall between Religious Belief and Secular Governance, which in my view, is an essential step, long overdue.
Human Rights Legislation and evidence is the basis for healthy Governance, and Human Rights Legislation protects the rights of Religious communities and individuals to practice their respective faiths.
Kindest Regards
Corneilius Crowley
London
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
A week of Committees and Hearings, pop-corn delights of bullies in full flow, their flawed arguments exposed, their tactics revealed, their bile discharged in one case to a patient, calm and willing witness and in the other aimed at a patient, calm and willing Committee.
If you ever need to watch something to remind yourself you are not a bully, that you'd prefer to not have to vote for bullies, the combined 1O hours of public legislative broadcast questioning under oath of the past few days might have something to offer.
To be honest, I didn't buy any pop-corn, and I watched less than three hours of both combined. Others watched it, and reviewed it so that I, lazily, languidly, did not have to.
To have watched it all, live, would have been too much for heart. Heartbreakers.
The drama.
Boris Johnson and The House of Commons Privileges Committee.
On one side of 'the pond' we had a High Official ex-Prime Minister being given a chance to speak his defence, facing an allegation he intentionally lied to Parliament.
Johnson, ex-Pm, Brexiteer Virus Spreader, ex-Mayor, of Bridge to Nowhere infamy, Press Pundit Hack blustered and obfuscated and tried to bring in the entire Civil Service as part of his defence as he dished up shared blame by association. Johnson's tactic - "If I can't blind them with brilliance, I must baffle them with bullshit."
And so he tried on the "I'm obviously an idiot." without saying "Obviously, I'm an idiot." ploy. Innocence by virtue of stupidity.
He wagged his fingers, he accused the committee of bias, he opined he would not accept their ruling if it went against him. That and so much else. Raw Sewage in the river.
Apparently expensive treatment advice, piping at 5K£ an hour, to no avail.
It was exhausting, listening to slippery eel talk - the only thing he didn't do was use a Latin allusion. I might have missed it.
Tik Tok, The US Congressional Hearings and a ban
On the other side of 'pond' we see High Officials of the Government, carrying out a version of The Salem Witch Trials, attacking a patient, composed and willing witness, denying him the chance to fully speak in his own defence, or indeed his companies defence.
TikTok is being accused, without foundation, of being an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, engaged in nefarious operations designed to undermine The American Way by influencing America's children. They are so accused as a cover for lack of legislative regulatory protection of private data.
TikTok's response is to politely spend 1.5 Billion dollars to store all data on US Soil, under US independent Third Party control, with an all American workforce. And much else that sets a new high bar for regulation of Social Media platforms industry.
Good strategy. A strategy that the likes of Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and a myriad of social on-line interactive user content generation platforms that carry advertising would rather not be put in place.
Surplus Behavioural Data
The real meat of this matter, privacy and the collection of what is known as 'surplus behavioural data' - in short the entire inadvertent on-line activity and behaviour of each and every user - and it's analysis and utilisation is, of course, off the books. Because there's the advertisers alchemical gold - an analysis of current observed and measured human behaviour trails among users of the digital online content creation wannabes, categorised into thousands of very specific characterisations, many of them emotionally charged, easily triggered, vulnerable to manipulation, or for other purposes. A dollar sign on every bias. Advertisers will pay well for that access. Google will never sell it's trove of 'surplus behavioural data'. The other data we create as content, etc, is largely already in the open. All our financials, company info, car licence etc have long been shared, even prior to interwebs.
Personal data, most of which is already available for a fee, is not the issue at the heart of the Internet of Beef.
The Internet of Beef.
The online argument marketing community generating arguments that never resolve into coherence, based on biases, in order to increase engagement so more eyes see more adds. As have done most News papers ever. It's nothing new here.
It was discovered again via the emergence of online Forums and platforms of any and every kind where eyes are on screens and typing to each other, and it very quickly became integrated in to Capitalist dominance of the interwebs as a marketing tool. A dollar on every bias. Hey, people can even design products no one needs, out of toxic materials, that a certain variation on biases might trigger a sale, and make just enough useless stuff to saturate that market, extracting wealth from vulnerability. This is serious stuff, my readers. One cannot look away. This cannot stand unregulated, at any level.
Surplus Behavioural Data allows mass study of specific vulnerabilities, biases, emotional state, psychological state, moods, impulses, fears, triggers, and has led to a categorisation system which the tech companies hold close to their chest. They do not sell that data.
The social media companies sell the ability to target any selection of the thousands of specific categories they have generated by analysing trillions of hours of behavioural data, and send advertisers content to targets presenting with those variable attributes, thus increasing likelihood of a confirmed sales to ad placed ratio. That is their business, the provision of free tools to create content and share it - the user/consumer experience - is their draw.
So back to TikTok's faux spy trial... and the sophisticated, layered bully tactics routinely deployed de riguer when one is plainly in the wrong, in public. Unapologetically. Self righteously. Legislators?
Remember Johnson above? Exactly that.
Tactics
One tactic was for an official to cut short his or her speech, having made and allegation or attribution, so that Mr. Chew could not take time to answer the question, to explore it for better clarity. Bloody rude behaviour anywhere. Mr. Chew was stoic. I think the Congress has bitten off more than it can chew. We'll see why below.
Here's a more moderate instance, there were many more, in quick succession, that were downright repulsive and arrogant.
A staring, glowering semi-circle of angry men and women, nursing a well paid anger, implying that Mr. chew and his company might well be supporting genocidal , secretly grooming American children for the Chinese Communist Party, to undermine American culture; they accused his company of numerous other wild conspiracy theories. The same group had within it people who did not understand how WiFi works as part of the internet.
Congressman A : "If I have TikTok on my mobile phone, does TikTok have access to my Wifi?"
5 hours of this kind of behaviour, with some attempts by Mr. Chew to present a rational, evidenced case, and irrationality and conspiracy theory being presented as a righteous rebuttal of TikTok's case.
Belief and bile. Bible. Make believe, Mystical World. Fantasy and Imagination. Patience and equity. These are things I think about. A life examined and all that wisdom guff.
The presence of cruelty and bullying eradicates wisdom as the base of the dynamic, which is not restored in full until the cruelty and bullying is stopped, and further harm prevented, with an eye to a long term solution. Prevention is better than the cure, though in the case of FacebookGoogle vs TikTok, what they are preventing is a mature regulatory system for all social media, one that is democratic, transparent and effective.
Backstory - money cows chased.
Turns out TikTok had taken away a huge share of the US and Global advertising market. From Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.... Ooops!
A better product gains more users because it is a genuinely better product for sharing social content, in terms of it's ease of use, ability to share, algorithm designed to enable natural virality. The users inadvertently decide what is most popular, most effective. And yes, it is designed, like all social media to draw eyes to advertisements. TikTok intentionally chooses a more democratic content selection, Period.
All the social media platforms sell advertising access. That is the business model. They sell access to users who create content who, whilst viewing content, will see advertisements. Simples.
TikTok's algorithm is much more attuned to emergence, democratisation of content feed, and the deliberate restriction of content that is inciting harm in any way is part of what enables that democratisation.
TikTok has made it clear in their current operations that they are going to set new standards, beyond those in place for the social media industry, to a higher standard. Facebook et al do not want those higher standards turned into commercial legislation.
That's the service that has drawn 15O million US users in. Democratic flow of information. It's what 'the interwebs' was redeployed to do, away from the Military Industrial Complexes hegemony.
Now who is likely the most pissed off about all of this loss of advertising market share? Who might want to kill the neighbours golden goose, out of spite and malign business practice? Hmmm... Those who will lose profits, and those who will lose voters might form an alliance in such a situation.
Turns out someone spent a small fortune generating conspiracy theories about TikTok, and making them go viral.
Turns out someone spent a small fortune on a number of political lobbying firms, and donated to certain public representatives.
"Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been paying one of the most prominent Republican consulting firms to run a nationwide campaign to sow distrust about one of the company’s top competitors, TikTok, according to a new report from The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The firm, Targeted Victory, reportedly planted op-eds and letters to the editor in major local and regional newspapers across the country. A Targeted Victory director told staff that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to emails obtained by The Post.
“TikTok is the real threat”
News of Facebook’s decision to hire the firm comes only a few weeks after the company declared that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. Meta’s recent earnings report said that Facebook’s active users dropped by almost 500,000 at the end of last year.
Several of Targeted Victory’s op-eds contained links to negative news coverage about TikTok and were often bylined by influential community figures and politicians, including Democrats. The Post reported that none of the columns disclosed their connection to the Facebook-funded firm.
Over the last few years, Facebook has been under fire by Congress for allegedly holding an illegal monopoly in the social media industry. During a 2020 hearing with tech CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, lawmakers cited internal company documents suggesting that Zuckerberg would go “destroy mode” if Instagram, a then-nascent competitor, refused to be sold to the social media giant. "
Anyway, that's so not speculative. This is all well documented. It's an interesting story indeed. How they do it.
And of course, Meta contributed donated funding to Democrats and Republicans alike to help make their case water tight, and carefully built their political combat troops, up, to fight for their Freedom from healthy competition.
Free Market my arse!
In any setting if bullying is happening and not being stopped, Freedom has ended. Period.
So what I think about these two visual overloads of bullies in action is this - in both cases we see what bullies do when they internalise political power as if it was a part of themselves, at which point it becomes blind entitlement. The freedom to make false accusations in public, to repeat known falsehoods set out as rumours as if they are true in public as their natural, God given right. The freedom to shout down the person representing TikTok, caricaturing him as a Chinese Communist Party asset for the public gallery since there is no verifiable, reliable evidence supporting that claim at all.
The Freedom to bully, using language to bully, to incite more bullying. Without consequence. By right.
Indict Putin and Blair and Bush?
That said, the matter of Johnson is minor compared to the outstanding matter of Blair, the War Criminal. Seeing as no indication that Parliament will indict Blair exists, and certainly StarmerFriedLabour won't, Parliament and the parties involved remain as unindicted War Criminals. Make of that what you will.
It's a mess. The whole hierarchy cult of wealth, power and might is a mess, and it's causing so much harm.
Whatever you may think, the fact is that I didn't mess it up, and you probably didn't mess it up, and there are those who are messing it up, big time.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog. I sincerely hope it makes some sense, and is informative, for you.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
The word 'woke' is being used by right wing bullies as an insult.
What they don't get is that it is a compliment.
I am woke (ish). I'd rather not be acutely aware of Racism, in the sense that Racism is just so un-necessary, a cruel invention, designed to set workers at each other in order to prevent us from joining hands and confronting the Ruling class owners. I wish it did not exist. I am not glad to be aware of it. However Racism was invented, and until we un-invent it, I think I need to be acutely aware of it, and how it functions within existing hierarchies of power, wealth and violence as an institutionalised weapon in the class war because that class war is causing so much harm. Being asleep to the existence of that war is no longer an option.
Origins of 'woke'.
The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to globalBlack citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.
"Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America. Lead Belly’s usage has largely stayed the common, consistent one ever since, including during one notable brush with the mainstream in 1962, via the New York Times.
That year, a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians."
Source: Vox - really interesting article, well written and obviously worth the read, gives a way better history of 'woke' than I am presenting here, and brings the recent 2000s story to the forefront.
Turning gold into lead, and failing.
When 'woke' moved from within the African American community into wider use, over the last decade or so, the alt right tried to turn it into an insult, without realising it is a compliment.
The alt right white supremacist misogynists hated that the African Americans had such a cool, clear and simple word that indicated an acute and historically accurate political awareness: that really boiled their piss into steaming clouds of rage. Cool and right.
They are also really, really irritated that they cannot use their own word 'N8gg8R', yet African Americans can and do use it freely, lovingly among themselves. lolz.
It's a really interesting dynamic. You can feel the dirty, gagging yet impotent rage when the bullies try to turn the word 'woke' against people seeking a pathway towards confronting and impeding racist oppression.
For the alt-right and white supremacists, labelling me or you as 'woke' is their attempt at being insulting.
It is a way of dismissing the other person, as a put down and as a way to avoid the evidence. It is always used at the other person.
Being dismissed in the middle of a discussion or interaction can trigger a reaction, hacking the amygdala, shutting down cortex.
The bullies know this.
That usage of the insult is designed to trigger the target into anger, derailing the frontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain.
That is a trap.
Never react with a counter strike.
Just point out the truth. "Why thank you, I am woke! So kind of you to notice!"
What ever it is, what ever the discussion. Just place the evidence.
Don't worry about convincing or persuading. Just place the evidence, calmly.
That way the bully has no traction. That way the bully loses. Watch the steam from his or her ears, notice the reddening of the cheeks, the thin beads of sweat, the squirming incoherent rage. Let it sizzle.
Which is why Piers Morgan walked off set.
He lost, in public, to the truth, calmly told.
Some one asked on twitter : "what is the opposite of 'woke'?"
I wrote the following.
Bully.
Bully is the opposite of woke.
The opposite of woke is not asleep. Being asleep is not the opposite of woke. It's possible to not know something, to be genuinely unaware. If someone is genuinely asleep, one cannot blame them for not hearing or seeing an emerging danger.
Being awake and a bully: that is the opposite of woke.
Racism is bullying.
Misogyny is bullying.
Xenophobia is bullying.
Nationalism is bullying.
Nativism is bullying.
Hating the vulnerable, the poor, the disabled is bullying.
Externalised Costs is bullying.
Profiteering is bullying.
Hierarchies of Power and Violence are bully cultures.
All of these are the opposite of woke.
When an Oligarchy or Plutocracy is occupying democratic legislatures, excluding the people, and in co-ordination with those who mediate existing public discourse by controlling the bulk of public news media - that is bullying.
Online political grooming is bullying.
Free Speech is a responsibility to be honest, truthful.
Free Speech is not a licence to be a bully.
Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of lies and various logical fallacies targeting vulnerabilities.
The bullies hide behind Free Speech - to do this they deliberately describe it inaccurately.
The origin of Free Speech is that a Government may not block or harass or oppress a citizen from speaking truth. That is what it means. Nothing more than that. There's an element of Religious Freedom associated with it though that is the least part of the meaning. Religious truths vary, are relative to one another and often do not mirror social material reality. That is why Religion is less than useful when deliberating on policy that concerns the shared spaces between us, the commons. The care of the commons demands honesty and evidence above all else.
The meaning of Free speech is that those in Power cannot be allowed to sanction anyone for speaking truth to the community, in public, about the behaviour, actions and outcomes of those in Power. That honesty is critical to any democratic system.
Whistle-blowers are essential to any community's integrity and they must be protected.
Transparency makes any system safer.
Evidence matters.
When the British Prime Minister dismissed Zero Community Transmission strategy as impossible and impractical in spite of the evidence that it is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania, that was bullying. He was using the power of his position to make sure that no honest discussion of ZCT would be allowed in Parliament, thus undermining Free Speech.
Free Speech was never meant to suggest anyone can utter whatever lies, falsehoods or misinformation they like as manipulative tools in any public fora, as tools that exploit other people's vulnerabilities in order to secure any economic, ideological, political or religious advantage.
I think that kind of behaviour is criminal in intent. I know it is criminal behaviour.
Exploiting another human beings vulnerability in order to groom and then exploit that person is a criminal action. It is pure evil. In the sense of a lying nasty venal assault on the integrity of the psyche of the other person for personal gain.
I do not subscribe to any concept of Evil as outside of human action - there is no Satan, no Santa Claus, no force of Evil outside of human behaviour and action.
Free Speech is a Responsibility, it is neither an automatic Right to a free-for-all nor is it a Privilege.
The Responsibility: that when speaking to the commons, the shared space between us all we speak truthfully, transparently and honestly, we speak to the commons and be attentive to be evidence based, to be as good a listener as a speaker and to acknowledge what is verified, reliable and true as such, and to also acknowledge beliefs as made up, as guess-work at the very best. This responsibility is absolutely critical in any matter that concerns the welfare of millions or billions of people who share the commons. It is a fundamental humane duty of care, and cannot be abrogated.
Free Speech is not a right to promote beliefs over evidence in action on matters concerning the shared commons, the welfare of people and their lives.
Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of language and various logical fallacies.
Lots of very clever abusive people hide behind Free Speech - the correct way to deal with that is to identify what is being done, name the precise tactic, the logical fallacies, the half truths, twists and spins and show how they inform the agenda that is being driven, and to do so in full transparency.
This blog is a REALLY useful in helping with this.
"Very few people, when put to the test, have the integrity and moral courage to stand up against bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and corruption. The targets of adult bullying are selected often because they DO have the moral courage to challenge; many people will pass by on the other side.
A target of adult bullying is most often chosen because of their strength, not their weakness. Research showsthat targets of bullying tend to have highly developed empathy, and sensitivity for others, a high degree of perceptiveness, high moral values, a well-developed integrity, a strong sense of fair play and reasonableness, a low propensity to violence,a reluctance to pursue grievance, disciplinary or legal action, a strong forgiving streak and a mature understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue.
It is vital, therefore, that all decent humane people who wish to participate, contribute and engage with the deliberations on how we deal with matters that concern our collective welfare (and our individual well being) are educated to become adept at this process of confronting the tactical arsenal that bullies, ideologues, demagogues, populists and others with malign intent bring when they present their theses in the public domain, such that they are clearly identified, their tactics exposed, their activity inhibited, disabled and prevented in the first instance, thus protecting the commons from avoidable harm.
Our collective safety and sanity demand nothing less.
Free speech is a responsibility, and the primary responsibility inherent in free speech is to speak truthfully.
A healthy family, community or Society treasures honesty and fairness in all matters.
We have a personal and collective responsibility be honest and fair because we do live together and our action or inaction affects each other,and feeds into the future to affect lives of people as yet unborn.
This responsibility is a constant. It is a fundamental standard. It's the very essence of adult maturity.
Free Speech is a social and personal responsibility, a response ability; we must not let it be sullied by those who are turning it into a propaganda truism, with an ideological agenda.
The men who took their guns into the offices of a French satirical magazine and murdered those people showed nothing other than their own deep and ugly dysfunction. Their actions cannot be defended or qualified or 'explained away'. They are utterly wrong. They are extreme bullies. It was not an attack on free speech. It was an attack on humanity, on humane values and on innocent people. It was and is terrorism.
Yet one has to challenge the manner in which the idea of free speech being undermined by these attacks is being used as a tool to drive deeper divisions amongst the grass roots of Society and to mask the realities of State terrorism. It's not that simple.
When the mainstream media and Government can prove to me that they are
speaking truthfully, then the concept of free speech might have some
real material meaning and value.
When mainstream media and Government actively support Survivors of many kinds of abuse in their desire for justice and resolution, by releasing all the files they have on various matters, ranging from colonisation to pedophile rings operating within Institutions, corporate lobbying that finances political parties and influences their decision making for commercial purposes, through to covert military operations, torture programs initiated and maintained by Governments and much else besides, then free speech might have some meaning.
As it is, people's emotions
are being intentionally manipulated into supporting a false meme, into
portraying free speech as an active process that defines this so called ' Western Democracy' as practiced by Power, which is, if we are honest enough to admit it, the deliberate propaganda of a power structure that is willing to exercise extreme violence to retain, enhance and expand it's power over people and land.
It is blatantly obvious that 'Free Speech' in this context is of the same calibre as 'Bringing Freedom and Democracy' on the backs of a Military invasion, when it comes to how Power actually operates.
Ask the Survivors of the Parliamentary pedophile ring, of Jimmy Savile where their free speech was, when they reported crimes committed upon their minds, bodies and souls, to UK Police forces, and were dismissed, ignored or intimidated.
Ask the young women of Rotherham where their free speech was when they reported crimes committed against them?
Ask the Iraqi relatives of the 350,000 children under the age of 15 who died extremely violently in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 how their free speech was nurtured by the 'bringers of Democracy' and the Western media.
350,000 Children who died in 'counter insurgency' initiated by the occupying powers, after they had annulled local elections held successfully all over Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004, once Saddam and his power structure was deposed, a counter insurgency which was aimed at destroying Indigenous multi-cultural Iraqi Nationalism, which produced the successful elections that undermined the occupying powers unspoken intent. A counter insurgency that traumatised an entire country, and from which the likes of IS have emerged.
Ask the aboriginal peoples around the world where their free speech or their cultures and land tenures that pre-date the creation of State systems are being respected.
It must also be said that deliberately goading someone, in order to
stimulate their anger is not free speech, it is antagonism; just as the antagonised violently attacking
someone who has goaded them is not free speech.
Both are equally irresponsible and avoidable actions. Neither is driven by a real need, in human terms.
Those who antagonise others with an ideological agenda behind it do not deserve violence served against them. They need help. They need to be confronted with the negativity of their behaviour through rational and honest discourse intended to nurture understanding.
The appropriate human response to any abuse of free speech must be honesty, clarity and fair mindedness, not violence.
Those who would stoop to violence to get their way, to serve their
agenda need to be exposed and stopped from being bale to act out their
violence. I doubt that there is much that can be done to help those who
are truly predatory, mercenary or professionally violent.
Such violence is psychologically immature.
The intentional manipulation of peoples emotions is predatory.
Do not fall for it.
Think For Yourself, Question Authority.
Don't make it up. Be honest and fair, above all else.
The issue of free speech is about enabling a fullest disclosure of all
the facts related to any matter so that a critical analysis is possible.
Critical analysis reveals that ordinary folk get hurt by how Power
operates. People are hurt and
abused on ALL SIDES of War. THAT is the real issue here. Those who refuse a critical analysis, enable War.
I don't believe that the Jewish people as a group of people are behind
this,(see Daniel below et al) but I do sense that Power has always used
Religious devices to divide people, to mask their true intent.
Nor do I
believe that Islam per se is a threat, any more than Christianity is a
threat, or Judaism is a threat, or the spiritual practices of America's
Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal peoples peoples is a threat.
These are faiths, and on the personal level can be a guide in life.
Yet when they are allied with Power, they all become something different. It has to be said, based on the evidence, that
Spiritual Ideologies that surpress the truth, even if it is accidental,
can be a threat when they have access to Power.
In the 21st Century, when we know enough about children's psychological
development, especially from birth and infancy onwards, when we know
biologically mandated empathy requires a suitable nurturant environment
for it's fullest expression, when we know so much more than the school
texts provide on our collective histories, there is NO EXCUSE for the
kinds of behaviour Power perpetrates in it's own agenda of retaining
power.
Likewise, once the data - the outcome of true FREE SPEECH - has been presented to a person, they must address it or they are part of the problem.
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