Comments by "Acid Joke" (@PWMoze) on "Double Down News"
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Another sobering bulletin.
Great use of the clips from 'Don't Look Up', a movie which found a great way of illustrating humanity's inability to process the enormity of climate change. The divisive nature of mainstream media debate, as evident from what COVID has thrown up. Constipated political systems. Self serving political figures. The failure of policy makers and global leaders. The complicity of corporations and self serving media interests. All are illustrated brilliantly in the movie.
If we trully are as unable to act decisively as that movie suggests, George is wasting his breath. We all end up like Jonathan Pie, bereft of hope and beaten by our own inability to cut through the fog of prevarication.
DD News, please start posting videos of practical steps that can be taken by isolated individuals watching videos on Youtube to avert this catastrophe? Political steps, protests, boycotts, personal life style changes, dietary changes, consumerism, consumption, employment, investment in sustainable solutions. All of it. Doom mongering is of no practical use at this stage. People need to have a sense of what they can actually and effectively do.
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@scotchegg3419 He has made (and still makes) films that sensitively and accurately reflect lives as lived by people who are not usually depicted in the mainstream.
'Kes' is my favourite but: 'Up The Junction', 'Cathy Come Home', 'Raining Stones', 'Poor Cow', 'Riff Raff', 'I, Daniel Blake', 'Bread and Roses' are all worth checking out too. Just to mention a few.
They are as far from 'porn', as you put it, as you could possibly get, as porn is simply voyeauristic and doesn't have compassion. They do deal with poverty of course, with empathy and accurately and that is the point.
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What next? 51% ownersip by fans/community groups, an independent body overseeing the PL, wage caps for players (and agents), proper provision for Sky/BT/Amazon broadcasting revenues to be shared by the whole football pyramid. Also, let's bring down UEFA and make it an elected/representative body, answerable to the national leagues that similarly ensures broadcasting revenues are shared fairly. While we're at it why not reform FIFA along similar lines? Football is currently financially broken, Barcelona, Real, Inter, Totenham, Man Utd are billions in debt. The only clubs not carrying huge debts are the German 50+1 clubs like Bayern Munich. The billionaire owners think they can solve this by fleecing the fans agan and again, eventually doing so with a global streaming, American franchise model. Football fans must sieze the moment before they take our beautiful game away! COME ON YOU IRONS!
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I am not an 'anti-vaxer' but I have made the following observations:
At first we were assured in the MSM that if you got vaccinated you couldn't contract Covid. We now know that is not true.
We were also told that all age groups had an equal need to be vaccinated to make us all safe and protect the NHS. We now know that younger people are much less vunerable to Covid and vaccinating them did not protect elderly people, as it was the government putting infected people in care homes that represented the greatest risk to the most vunerable.
We were assured that you couldn't spread Covid if you were vaccinated, hence the necessity for less effected age groups to get vaccinated. We now know that isn't true either.
On the basis of those assertions we were encouraged to think we would all need regular boosters. We now know that not to be true as boosters do not stop you contracting Covid, suffering with it and in some cases even dying.
We were given very little acces to discussions around these assertions, to the point that people who did platform discussions expressing concern or scepticism were subject to virulent mainstream condemnation by the media. ill informed celebrities even waded in with their essertion of the dogma. Neil Young vs Joe Rogan comes to mind.
We were not told that Pfizer had bought the intellectual property of the vaccine (developed at public expense) to then sell it back to those countries who paid to develop it at a huge profit, not at cost and not in the least bit subsidised for third world countries and those in desperate need. Pfizer are now one of the most successful Corporations in the world who's shares have soared despite a very shady past and many ongoing outstanding legal problems.
We were never warned that the public would eventually only offered the Pfizer vaccination and that the provider of that vaccine actually had a huge influence over the MSM, through advertising and direct investment, and cculd control the debate over their obvious monopoly.
We were not told that Pfizer researchers and even the BMA were concerned that data collected during trials of the vaccine 'lacked integrity' and that the discussion of these concerns would be removed from platforms such as Facebook and Youtube.
We were not told that unqualified employees of various media platforms such as Facebook and Youtube would have the power to close down and remove the discussion of these kind of concerns without explanation, justification, debate or the opportunity to a defence.
We were not told that without a vaccine you could be discriminated against to the point of requiring an identity card or that your bank accounts could be frozen by the state if you were to actually demonstrate against compulsory vaccination as in the case of the truckers in Canada.
We were not encouraged to think of it as the state taking control of our bodies or to question the necessity of that situation.
No one expected the right to freedom of speech and expression on this subject to be limited or your right to independently research the facts relating to this circumstance to be limited of directly censored.
We were not warned that there may actually be more than one valid way to view this whole situation and more than one orthodoxy, even in the science that supports the vaccine's use.
We were lied to, manipulated and made to accept some very fundamental rights being undermined.
But apart from that the vaccine is okay.
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As a jounalist I think Peter imagines that if the mainstream media were to focus more fairly upon suffering caused or contributed towards by the West it would actually make a difference? It would have been very ironic if the British Government, encouraged by an informed British public, had insisted upon a no fly zone over Yemen, considering that most of the Saudi fighter bombers were sold to them (and maintained) by British Aerospace. Most people who give a damn know about it and are powerless to effect it politically.
Meanwhile, in the UK, our involvement with the Saudis is entrenched. We find ourselves pleading with the Saudis to sell us more oil (and to buy our football clubs) if we are to boycott Russian fuel exports, regardless of very well documented human rights violations and 80+ executions hurriedly carried out prior to BJ's state visit. Our very valuable arms exports are inextricably linked to the Saudis and their cruel regime.
Subsequently, not only does the rest of the world suspect that the West (and more specifically the UK) is entirely lacking in any kind moral or ethical consistency (Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq) but most informed Westerners see it too (Oman, Quater, Saudi Arabia etc) and struggle to find any way to influence that situation. Despite how well or ill-informed they may be by the Western mainstream media.
But to describe our values as being explained by 'racism' isn't entirely fair.
If that were true, why were we not concerned when the Russians originally invaded the Dombas region, the Crimea, South Asetia or Chechnya?
Could the important factor be geographical proximity? Could it be the extent to which the agrressor threatens our own stability? Could it be that some geopolitical crises are simply easier to explain to the public? Sometimes the causes of the struggle are not clearly understood. Yemen is a good example, it is an inter Islamic religious conflict in essence. Understandably Western audiences are loathed to make judgements in such situations and don't fully understand the disputed issues. Hence the lack of interest from news editors. Its not that Westerners don't care or because they are 'racist'.
Of course the Western mainstream media is biased as to which narratives it choses to promote. But so are the Arab, Chinese, Latin American, South East Asian and of course the Russian news outlets. The Chinese are currently promoting the idea that Putin is a charismatic ally who has legitimate security concerns through their own state controlled media outlets . They are not focusing upon the Ukrainian suffering because it would not serve their narrative. The Indian mainstream media is similarly refusing to denounce Putin because of their own percieved 'neutrality'. Even the media outlets in Turkey and Israel are steering clear of making overt moral judgements about the Ukrainian crisis. However, they all report upon the USA and the West on a daily basis with great disdain and critical scrutiny (not entirely inaccurately).
Why do we expect the Western media to have a different modus operandi when it comes to issues relating to our own stated allies and enemies?
Media coverage doesn't lessen the suffering of the oppressed peoples of the World and only journalsists expect it to? It has never significantly improved the situation for Palestinians, it is not doing any practical good in Myanmar and international awareness of the plight of the Uighars in China is not helping them either.
Mass media coverage even serves to trivialise suffering sometimes and we all know it can sensationalise or even diminish armed conflicts when it becomes complacent.
My point is that; it is a lazy argument to suggest we don't focus upon certain global conflicts because we are racist.The Ukrainian crisis is getting wall to wall coverage because it may just be the most important event in European and global politics in a generation. It demands coverage and analysis because, like 9/11, all our notions of political order, global politics and economic certainties are being destroyed by it.
Yemen, Myanmar, The Uyghars, Afghanistan will all be overshadowed by this unfolding event. Even with meticulous coverage by the Western media, we will all be helpless as we watch it unfold, unable to minimise the suffering of the ordinary people involved in it.
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Human migration will characterise the next few decades as vunerable and disadvantaged populations chase security, resources and economic opportunities.
Nation states will either deal with that reality in a humane, ethical way: efficiently processing, accomodating and employing migrants, or become high security gated communities, at war with the inevitable flood of human traffic from less developed regions.
Those that chose the latter will necessarily develop dramatic and brutal disincentives to migrants and refugeees, severely penalising those that get caught trying to enter illegally and sending out a propagandist narrative to their own populations of security and protection. They may even describe this brutality as 'fairness' as Priti Patel did last week.
International law protecting migrants will inevitably begin to change to favour the developed nations. Treaties protecting the rights of the vunerable will be increasingly minimised or simply ignored. Once one nation begins to distance itself from international conventions others will gladly follow, like Denmark seem to want to follow the UK's lead and we want to follow Australia and Isreal. International law in the future will not protect human rights, but rather the rights of soverign states to protect their own borders in whatever way they choose. Probably violently.
Citizenship will become as valuable a commodity as housing and employment. Those without citizenship will experience terrible hardship, persecution and will be vunerable to exploitation. The state will develop laws that retain the right to remove citizenship from individuals and groups, for a range of reasons, social control being one, economic policy being another. The wealthy and the influential will enjoy the security of full citizenship and all the benefits that brings while the poor and vunerable will live in fear of their citizenship being withdrawn or limited as a punitive measure of social engineering.
Places like Rwanda will be only too willing to exploit this situation for their own economic and social reasons. Human rights and humanitarian issues will not be a priority and the developed nations, exporting their surplus human cargo, will be happy to turn a blind eye to these concerns. This will be the social policy for migration and displacement in the dystopian future of scarcity and cruelty, with the likes of Priti Patel as the architects, cheered on by hate fuelled mainstream media outlets and misinformed populations believing their countries are 'full up' despite the job vacancies and skill disparities.
With climate change. wars will be fought over resources such as oil, gas, food and water and those conflicts will create further waves of refugees and economic migrants. Will racism effect policy? Yes. Most countries make little effort to disguise their own ethnic, religious and cultural bias and this will of course feed into which populations are seen as 'good' migrants and which are 'bad'. Skin colour may be a factor but so might caste, ethnicity, religion, language, heritage or the nature of the conflict being escaped from. Like the differences we see in the UK in our response to refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and The Ukraine.
In the end we will all have to decide how we wish our own nations to proceed and hold our leaders to account. Otherwise people like Priti Patel will proceed, believing that they are serving the will of the people by being cruel and inflexible. I'm sure her plans for exporting people to Rwanda, like some kind of grotesque parody of a human trafficker, will not ultimately proceed. But I also think her plans are an indication of what the future may hold if we do not guard against it. Otherwise we may end up simply launching unwanted people into the Sun on one of Elon Musk's privately owned space craft!
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Everyone seems very certain that Zionism is the root cause of the current catastrophe. Is it worth also mentioning the subject of Hamas?
Here are some undisputed facts, supported by a large range of international, objective sources.
Hamas fire missiles aimed at civilian targets, missiles which often land on their own side of the boundary, killing Gazans.
Hamas have failed build any civilian bomb shelters, preferring civilians to meet the missiles 'with their bare chests'.
Hamas refuse to allow civilians to use their complex of tunnels as bomb shelters.
Hamas have, on many occasions, refused to allow civilians to evacuate when warned of missile strikes on their homes.
Hamas have, on many occasions, appropriated food and drink provided by NGOs, refusing to allow it to go to civilians but giving it to their fighters instead.
Hamas fighters have used civilians as human shields and have used civilian buildings (such as schools, hospitals and civilian homes) for military purposes, making them targets for the IDF.
Hamas fighters do not distinguish themselves from civilians by the wearing of military uniforms.
Hamas committed atrocities against civilians on Oct 7th, filmed them and broadcast them on social media.
Hamas have stated that they would commit simililar acts repeatedly if they could.
Hamas have taken hostages and still refuse to release them even though this would probably shorten the conflict and civilian suffering.
Hamas leaders have prosecuted this conflict from the safety of Doha in Qatar while the civilian population of Gaza has suffered the repercussions.
Hamas have used international aid, intended for the relief of civilian suffering, to further their military objectives.
Anyone would think it was Hamas who are waging war against the civilian population of Gaza!
Is their objective of resisting and destroying 'Zionism' worth all the suffering? After all, 2 million Muslim Palestinians are currently living in safety within Israel's borders and some have even joined the IDF to defend their homes against Hamas and Hezbollah.
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Notice how often Western systems are described as oligarchies lately? It seems people are increasingly able to infer it from the evidence. The owners of the corporate media, big pharma, big tech, the military industrial combine, the top bankers, the hedge fund managers, the land owners and the landlords; all serving each other's interests and intrinsically linked. Out of touch and out of reach, unelected and unaccountable.
You can see the evidence of their hands on the steering wheel more blatantly at the moment, with huge energy profits while people live in fuel poverty, food poverty, housing in crisis, taxes rising, benefits falling, inflatiion rising, war, conflict and struggle. And yet there are some that are still making profits. Even the COVID crisis has made some people much wealthier. Wealth going to the wealthy while the poor slip into inescapable poverty. Time for a change.
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@samirabenalia6473 Those that lived in the region in the past were indeed different ethnicities. The Greeks were not Arabs, nor were the Romans, the Persians, the Christian Crusaders, the Seljuk Turks, the British or the French. Even the ancient Egyptians were not ethnic arabs as they share very little DNA.
But we now know from studying DNA that a person's ethnicity is more like a spectrum than one simple set of characteristics so it is more than likely that the 'Arabs' of which you speak are partly Greek, Roman, Persian, East African and even Indian in their ancestry.
Unlike you I prefer to learn history from objective sources based upon scientific evidence, therefore I can be pretty sure there was no such person as Adam, no Noah who lived at a time when the whole world was flooded, no Abraham and even no Moses. When you talk of them you are not talking about history you are talking about religious mythology, there is no historical evidence for any of them.
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@samirabenalia6473 Thankyou for your reply. I have read parts of the Qu'ran, although I could never read it completely as I do not have the time or the inclination. However I have visited many Islamic countries, I have some very close friends who are muslims so I think I have a good knowledge of your religion, better than most English atheists at least.
Even if I were to read the Qu'ran and all the Hadiths from cover to cover I could never believe it's contents because it's teachings involve believing in too many things I think of as unproveable, improbable and downright impossible. For example, I do not accept that The Prophet split the Moon in half, nor do I accept that water flowed from his fingers any more than I think a winged horse took him up to Heaven to meet all the other prophets or that he flew from Mecca to the mosque in Jerusalem and then back, all in one night.
I do not want to disrespect your belief system but it seems strange that not only do you allow yourself to believe in devils and djinn, but you also believe that Satan sleeps in your nose each night. I wonder what other fairy tales you believe in.
By the way, I feel the same way about Christianity if it makes you feel any better. For example I don't believe a man came back from the dead after being crucified. Nor do I believe in a man walking on water, turning water into wine, casting out devils, making blind people see, making the lame walk, curing leprosy and raising the dead.
I would not trust an adult who sincerely accepted such things. Atheists require proof, the faithful are happy with nothing more than belief even when the subject of their belief is obviously nonsense.
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@samirabenalia6473 Thankyou for your reply Samira. I would like to respond to your comment, allow me to take one point at a time.
1. I did not for one moment suggest that all things have to be seen or touched to be believed or understood. That is not what 'science' means. Science can prove all sorts of processes, forces and energies by means other than seeing or touching them, for example we all agree that gravity exists: Sir Isaac Newton managed to describe it, predicts its affects and measure it using maths, without ever being able to see it or touch it.
2. The way a foetus grows in the womb is not the work of any entity other than the mother. it is a scientifically provable process of cell division, each cell being assigned a function by the DNA it contains. The reason why this seems miraculous is because it is a process that has developed over thousands of millions of years, becoming more complex through evolution. Try reading 'Climbing Mount Improbable' by Richard Dawkins.
3. Of course animals have perception (sensory awareness) and cognition (conscious understanding). An animal species without those qualities would become extinct very quickly. Of course there are lesser forms of life that may lack cognition but that is because they don't need it to exist and multiply. Try reading 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins.
4. Modern communication devices (or any other aspect of modern life) did not come about because of miracles. They came about through incremental technological developments based upon some original (and often quite simple) scientific discoveries and understanding. The mobile phone did not spring into existence fully formed any more than homo sapiens did.
5. The fact that primitive people from the past would find modern technology miraculous does not mean it is miraculous. It just means technology has developed beyond their understanding. Rather like a modern person attributing a complex medical procedure's success to a divine intervention, when it's success is entirely due to a long process of medical developments, techniques and principles being taught, learned and added to by many generations of hardworking, brilliant doctors.
6. I too believe in death but I have no reason to believe that a living organism continues some kind of conscious life after their physical shell has ceased to function. I certainly don't believe that after a good man dies, God chooses to reward him with a 72 virgin wives and 80,000 servants, in fact, to me, that sounds terrible, more like a curse! Despite this, my heart is open and so is my mind, I just choose to reject superstition and primitive beliefs based upon ancient mythology.
7. I am not asking you to do anything for me, so don't worry, if it turns out you and all the other muslims are right (and all the billions of other people who have ever lived and I were wrong) I shall ask God why, if he wanted me to be a believer, did he in all his wisdom choose to make me an atheist.
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@guidovaughan3096 Thankyou for your response.
Of course many ancient cultures understood that gravity existed but Newton was the first to explain, describe and predict it using mathematical principles.
'Western' Science has always acknowledged the contribution to human development made by pre-existing ancient cultures, such as the ancient Chinese, Indians or Greeks; universities still teach Socratic method and the logic of Aristotle for example. But ancient 'ways of knowing' are not, and have never been, an equivalent to scientific method or scientific understanding.
As far as zero is concerned; the Babylonians and Mayans first used it (as a place holder) in the 7th century BC or before, but you are correct in as much as it was first used as an actual number in the 5th century by Indian mathematicians. That numerical system came to Europe via Persian and Arabian mathematicians.
By the way, just to reassure you, there is no such thing as 'Western' Science just as there is no Southern, Eastern or Northern Science, there is just Science. It may have been developed in the West at one time or another but scientific knowledge is not owned by 'the West' and is free to be studied, understood and applied by all humanity. My sadness is that people from certain cultures (see above) choose not to use it or are prevented from doing so because of a culture of superstition and ignorance.
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We need more figures in the media who can challenge the liberal elite's intellectual, centralist bias and communicate a different narrative. People who can represent normal working people with a left of centre voice, as clearly the Parliamentary Labour Party no longer sees this as their responsibility and does not provide this anymore?
Mick is brilliant at cutting through the bias, the predjudice, the stupidity and the lack of balance. He has endured some shockingly rude, dismissive and biased interviews (Kate Burley on Sky was an all time low in unbiased presntation of the facts) and still provides clarity and good sense grounded in real world experience.
His rise to prominance has highlighted how utterly dismissive the mainstream media is of ordinary people and working class concerns. They mock him and his colleagues as stupid because of their working class accents, they repeat the same ill informed tropes ( higher wqges = inflationary spiral), they set one group against another (Nurses vs Rail workers), they deny the right of working people to collective bargaining calling them 'greedy' if they ask for more than they are being offered, and mostly they mischaracterise industrial action as 'holding the nation to ransom' in an effort to demonise unions. One interviewer on GMB even asked Mr Lynch was a Communist Revolutionary! Insulting, patronising and dismissive.
Every time Mr Lynch speaks on a UK tv or radio outlet he highlights the need for organisations such as Double Down News.
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