The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.
This is easy to show. Read through Hill’s “report”. Then zip to 20 minutes and 55 seconds of the recording of Assange speaking at the event Hill misreports, and simply listen to the applause from the Oxford Union after Assange stops speaking.
Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.
Much of what Hill wrote is not journalism at all. What does this actually mean?
“His critics were reasoned, those who queued for over an hour in the snow to hear him speak were thoughtful. It was Julian Assange – the man at the centre of controversy – who refused to be gracious.”
Hill manages to quote five full sentences of the organiser of the anti-Assange demonstration (which I counted at 37 people) while giving us not one single sentence of Assange’s twenty minute address. Nor a single sentence of Tom Fingar, the senior US security official who was receiving the Sam Adams award. Even more remarkably, all three students Hill could find to interview were hostile to Assange. In a hall of 450 students who applauded Assange enthusiastically and many of whom crowded round to shake my hand after the event, Hill was apparently unable to find a single person who did not share the Rusbridger line on Julian Assange.
Hill is not a journalist – she is a pathetic grovelling lickspittle who should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
Here is the answer to the question about cyber-terrorism of which Amelia Hill writes:
“A question about cyber-terrorism was greeted with verbose warmth”
As you can see, Assange’s answer is serious, detailed, thoughtful and not patronising to the student. Hill’s characterisation – again without giving a word of Assange’s actual answer – is not one that could genuinely be maintained. Can anybody – and I mean this as a real question – can anybody look at that answer and believe that “Verbose warmth” is a fair and reasonable way to communicate what had been said to an audience who had not seen it? Or is it just an appalling piece of hostile propaganda by Hill?
The night before Assange’s contribution at the union, John Bolton had been there as guest speaker. John Bolton is a war criminal whose actions deliberately and directly contributed to the launching of an illegal war which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yet there had not been one single Oxford student picketing the hosting of John Bolton, and Amelia Hill did not turn up to vilify him. My main contribution to the Sam Adams event was to point to this as an example of the way people are manipulated by the mainstream media into adopting seriously warped moral values.
Amelia Hill is one of the warpers, the distorters of reality. The Guardian calls her a “Special Investigative Correspondent.” She is actually a degraded purveyor of lies on behalf of the establishment. Sickening.
Villager, people don’t have wars. State power structures have wars. Show me one spontaneous war. When the people rise up, they do so against the power structures, and it’s called an uprising or a revolution.
Men go through a brief period between puberty and parenthood where they are susceptible to the warmongers’ propaganda to the point that they will fight enthusiastically, but if they survive, the experience changes most of their minds. A few maintain their aggression longer and become potential warmongers themselves. But those two facts, exploited by the power structures, are enough to sustain war.
@cryptonm
Mate there are kids going hungary in the world, yet I c an buy a 20′ inch musical Fireman Sam. To go with all the crap we have available.
What would be easier to make?
I do not know what to say but, as it is we ain’t working for a better world for everyonend opportunities to promote goodness in us all.
@Clark
“Pure guesswork here, but check the small-print. Anything on stallman.org or eff about it? Who controls the encryption? Corporations, perhaps? The governments give away a fairly cheap resource (before the people wise-up and do it for themselves), but the corporations get to read everyone’s communication? I’ll put £10 on it…”
Too de-centralised, why would they want a system where they’d have to be practically sitting on your doorstep, when they can already tap the lot once it inevitably enters the wired network. Citizen based open-access however where you have no idea, and neither does anyone else have any idea who’s using it or your’s, means they would go after the fixed wireless station’s owner, but still have to get local to find who may have or is using it –if interested enough they can. Future net appliances will be big brother friendly, accepting remote queries for cpuid, real hardware mac addresses than soft ones (with ipv6 and no NAT, devices could have globally unique ip’s) as well as divulging interesting content of storage media. Tale-telling black-boxes capable only of running closed source proprietary software, obeying remote command and control interfaces. The only future is open source and generic hardware. See the above bio-initiative link also for a wet-ware technology reset …
habby
1. I’m measuring them against a standard, in a variety of areas. One of the standards is knowledge and expertise and another is their preparedness to speak what they know.
2. Old fogey and old fart are quite similar.
3. Knowledge of Belgian colonialism even for quite a long time doesn’t qualify you as an old fart. You may for example now believe that colonialism was quite wicked and not something to be reimposed today under its contemporary moniker “liberal intervention”.
You may however think that empire and colonialism is a brill killer app, like Niall Ferguson and be, as you say, an old fart in a very smelly old diaper.
Villager, here’s a lovely little maxim. I don’t know if it is used in biology, which is the field in which it applies, but it is from a biology science fiction novel:
That’s the principle in operation when your body prevents, say, your liver cells from embarking on reproduction of their own. And it applies when power structures bend the will of individual people to do things against their own best interest.
Ascribing war to individual aggression is as incorrect as ascribing individual aggression to the body’s cells.
I agree Jay, most of what is manufactured is worthless useless crap. Most of the people in work produce or sell worthless crap, most of the pollution comes from producing this worthless useless crap, most of this stuff ends up in a skip or tip in short order. As long as someone’s making money and people are stupid enough to be easily convinced they want it.
It’s all about face, vanity, conspicuous consumption. It isn’t a new phenomenon even in this country 150 years ago, the industrial revolution on the whole turned out in volume, not practicable usable necessities, but the equivalent clutter and junk as sought and bought now; ornaments, shiny buttons and buckles, impractical fashionable attire, cheap facsimilies of items they imagined the kleptomaniac ‘better’ classes obsessed over, imitating those vacant classes whom they aped in every way. No food on the table but such elegant plates. I’d guess then around about half and now around three-quarters of all in employment produce or do things which have absolutely no practical or social worth whatsoever.
Villager, my above two comments answer your question as to why we see war from humans, and not in most other species: humans organise into structures but other species don’t. The occasional exceptions prove the rule, like “wars” between colonies of ants. Again, it’s the structures that are at war, and the structures control the individuals. In the case of the social insects, this is achieved through the whole colony being descended from one queen.
Your ‘Wifi for everyone’ Clark reminded me of an incident some years ago when a neighbor knocked my door, laptop in hand and complained she had ‘lost’ her web connection. I noticed she was trying to connect to my router SSID!
She explained my son had ‘set-up’ a connection for her some months back and she was paying him £5/month for the connection.
So much for cyber-savvy teenagers.
Habbabkuk, the Heineken ad reminds me of another ad-line: I used to be an accountant until I discovered Smirnoff. So yes, i understand your point about the Takeover Code. And yes, that kind of compulsion would definitely be violence.
Let’s take a different scenario. Lets say there are a hundred of us living together in a village. Somehow this village is The World. Let us say 20, 30 or 40 of us, maybe even 10 are wise-men who have seen the truth that violence begets violence and love begets love. And, we actually live in that way day-to-day in grace, goodwill and respect. It is not contrived so our brains are wired for such natural response. We share this way of life with others regardless. What happens? Is this not going to influence other people? Won’t we be creating a better society? The 10 or 40 awakened men would engage in dialogue in relationship. Relationship is life; without relationship, there is no life. They would help point out with their fund of wisdom the profound truth that killing another human being is the worst ‘sin’.
Now is that not consciousness at work–the transformation of its content? I admit when there is something i don’t know. I think its important we recognise what we don’t know as much as it maybe, if not mores, what we do know. People come here full of themselves, boasting how much knowledge they have. In fact we, all of humanity know so little, it become ever more important to recognise how little we know. Which is why i go on reminding myself and other ‘modern’ humans here that we are but a Type Zero Global Civilisation. Seven billion idiots, dancing in the dark, on a pinhead in the Universe and I am one of them. Taking ourselves so seriously that we are happy to slaughter our own species.
@ Cryptonym
Thank for you reply, what would be achievable regarding welfare of people world wide could be reached through the making of simple decisions.
As for the structure of society, planting and nurturing the planet could keep us busy.
Cryptonym, 4 Feb, 5:16 pm:
Like I said, we need to see the small-print, or rather, the actual proposal. The traffic will probably be routed through central points that can be monitored. That, or as you say, only identifiable devices will be permitted to connect. I’ll bet that they’re making the proposal to pre-empt a “People’s WiFi Movement”.
Thanks for the Bioinitiative link.
Mark Golding, that made me laugh out loud. That’s a cheeky lad you’ve got there; I hope you’ve charged the money back from him!
Villager, I offer the things I’ve learned because I hope that they may help, as well as to make myself feel more worthy. This is a sort of enlightened self-interest, as would be teaching that violence be-gets violence and love be-gets love.
Maybe you live in some horribly violent place. I live near Chelmsford, not far from London, but when I visit these places the level of violence is notably low. Humans are not hell-bent upon violence, and war is caused through structure. I offer this in the hope that it comforts you, and helps you to feel more at ease with human nature, which we both share.
Clark, thank you very much for all you responses. Lest you misunderstand, i’m not in anyway ignoring you. Just going to take a break and hopefully engage further.
Re: “Maybe you live in some horribly violent place. ”
Yes its called Planet Earth! Which is a beautiful ‘blue’ planet but the society and consequent structures we have built are ugly as Hell. And most of its inhabitants live in the hope that there is a Heaven, a better place somewhere out there, after life. Life is supposed to be precious, it is. This should be our Heaven. For the butterflies it is! And if we can not make this our Heaven forget about finding it elsewhere!
Btw, an interesting fact about butterflies. One single love-making session of a butterfly, when you adjust for relative average life-lengths, is equivalent to two-years in human life.
Let that not detract from the seriousness of our conversation.
Did anyone know that there was new body called the College of Policing, based in Coventry?
‘College Of Policing Limited is an Active business incorporated in England & Wales on 1st October 2012. Their business activity has not been recorded. College Of Policing Limited is run by 3 current members. It has no share capital. It is not part of a group. The company has not yet filed accounts. College Of Policing Limited’s risk score was amended on 06/12/2012.’
http://companycheck.co.uk/company/08235199
The head of it is the ex Chief Constable of Hampshire, Alex Marshall.
http://companycheck.co.uk/company/08235199
The college, like ACPO, is a private limited company as you can see. Who funds it, how and why was it set up etc etc ???.
One of its directors Stephen Rimmer was a director of JSSC, another limited company. The acronymn is not explained but on Company Search it is described
‘Jssc is an Active business incorporated in England & Wales on 9th July 2003. Their business activity is recorded as Justice And Judicial Activities. Jssc is run by 13 current members. and 1 company secretary. It has no share capital. It is also part of a group. The latest Annual Accounts submitted to Companies House for the year up to 31/03/2012 reported ‘cash at bank’ of £2,993,385, ‘liabilities’ worth £904,701, ‘net worth’ of £2,501,494 and ‘assets’ worth £3,363,393. Jssc’s risk score was amended on 07/01/2013.’
All these directors. http://companycheck.co.uk/company/04826715/JSSC Do the many names ring any bells?
Good one Mary, diligently opening the structures to view.
Yes, where’s the public’s feedback control over this one? What, it doesn’t exist? Well I never…
resident dissident
3 Feb, 2013 – 8:39 pm
@David
“Most of the dictators in the world have been created and sustained by the West. That’s the whole point.”
“I think that this is difficult to argue with the bigger most significant dictatorships in Russia and China – which continue to support many dictatorships elsewhere.”
Syria aside, which dictatorships do Russia and China support? Just for the record?
Thanks Clark. One of the JSSC directors’ names was Paul McKeever. I knew it was familiar.
College of Policing pays tribute to Paul McKeever
College Of Policing – College Press Releases
Written by Peter Mandich ([email protected])
Friday, 18 January 2013
CEO Designate Chief Constable Alex Marshall has today paid tribute to Paul McKeever, the national chair of the Police Federation, who has sadly died.
Mr Marshall said:
“I was shocked and saddened to hear the news that Paul McKeever has died today. Paul led the Federation, at national level, since 2008 with exceptional passion and determination. He was a big voice in policing and a highly impressive public speaker, and he will be a loss to the policing debate. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.”
http://college.pressofficeadmin.com/component/content/article/45-press-releases/583
@Clark “Look, climate science is a huge topic, it’s bound to submerge any discussion about Assange and the Guardian’s obvious smear campaign against him. And if you’re really so enthralled about letting Mother Nature have her way, why on Earth are you using the Internet? Surely, shouting distance is all we’re allowed. No, don’t answer that”
OK, only a bit more from me on this, not meaning to distract from Assange and the Guardian – but then again, look at the thread so far…
…to note that you did not answer, even with a one-liner, or a yes or no, my short challenge regarding pole shifts and the inevitable burnout of the sun…
Martin Rees, holder of the Mastership of Trinity College, Cambride, probably the most prestigious academic post in Britain, strikes me as insane, as much as George III was insane, when he says – as if he believes it, because the loony probably does – that what people do now will significantly affect the world for billions of years to come.
That’s a truly nutcase variation on the usual farewell speech in which the outgoing Prez tells the assembled throng that ‘during my presidency we have experienced momentous events, and during the incumbency of my successor there are likely to be many more'</em?)…
Billions of years? Like yeah, right. And I'm Jesus Christ, right at the fulcrum…
This is important, because there is function for apocalypticism, and there is going to be a major collapse fairly soon…
I have to observe that your arguing techniques in the sentences following your first one are naff. You and I both use the internet. That doesn’t make my opposition to the view that ‘we’ should aim to ‘control the climate’ hypocritical or mistaken. There’s a difference being recognising the reality that one lives in this society and, on the other hand, believing that going with the flow thereof is the only sane choice…
For the record, in the kind of society I want, no, there would be no internet.
I assume that in the kind of society you want, there would be. Where do you draw the line? Would there be Twitter? Would there be 10,000 step campaigns and pedometers?
OK I realise I am trying to continue this…but it’s interesting…my motives are good…
Jay: “As for the structure of society, planting and nurturing the planet could keep us busy.”
Good one, Jay.
There is an old Chinese saying:
If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a week, get married. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, become a gardner.
LastBlueBell
4 Feb, 2013 – 12:12 am
“…serious shortcomings within the Swedish legal systems, that among many other things found:
* Manipulation of evidence, and verdicts based on inconclusive evidence
* Partial prosecutors
* The courts overlooking outright failures in the underlying investigations.
* Insufficient examination of the plaintiff’s stories.”
Sounds very much like the Lay magistrate system here in the UK. I kid you not!
Thanks again LastBlueBell for your enlightening Swedish statistics.
Change of topic. So they found Richard III bones under a parking lot? He must have been killed looking for where he’d tethered the horse he would have given his kingdom to find. Unless Shakespeare was having us on.
Change of topic. Serious. Here is Dady Chery talking to Carlos Gomez about how we might honour Aaron Swartz.
http://www.dadychery.org/2013/02/04/how-might-we-honor-aaron-swartz-an-interview/
A different company search site says this about JSSC. Curiouser and curiouser?
Jssc was registered on 09 Jul 2003. The business has a status of active. They were founded by Custodial Care National Training Organisation, Community Justice National Training Organisation, and Police Skills and Standards Organisation. They have 1 subsidiary. The company has assets totalling £3,406,195 plus total liabilities totalling £904,701. They owe £133,631 to creditors and are due £45,740 from trade debtors. As of their last financial statement, they had £2,993,385 in cash reserves. Their book value is £2,501,494, and the value of their shareholders’ fund is £2,501,494.
https://www.duedil.com/company/04826715/jssc
Why these private companies for what are national state services?
Villager, for when you return…
Humans have already invented the solution to war. It is democracy, where the people get to choose leaders who won’t subject them to war. However, current implementations of democracy are inadequate, for a number of reasons. Here are some I can think of, in the order it occurs to me to mention them.
Current “democratic” systems aren’t democratic enough. Voters get to cast thirty or so votes in a lifetime. But the “elected representatives” get lobbied almost continually by vested interests. They share their allegiance with corporations who pay them as “consultants”, or promise them well-paid jobs after their term in government, or just plain bribe them or blackmail them.
Democracy requires that the voters be well informed, but this function is currently handled mostly by media corporations. These corporations benefit ($£) from war, so they misinform the voters and encourage war-like attitudes, and they refrain from showing the full horror of war lest it evoke empathy.
The largest democratic units are too small. It can be in the interests of the people of country A to conquer weaker country B, but the interests of the people of A and B together is to cooperate rather than fight.
The corporations have continued to grow, and now some of the smaller countries are less powerful than some of the larger corporations. Global corporations can “play off” one democracy against another.
Democracy is too slow. When a government decides to go to war against the will of the electorate, they can’t be voted out before it is too late.
Democracy is too crude. Voters get to vote for one national representative, often out of a choice of only two who could possibly win. This means that there is often no good choice, or one candidate represents a good foreign policy but a bad domestic policy, and the other vice-versa.
Habbabkuk
4 Feb, 2013 – 9:08 am
Doug Scorgie wrote at 17h43 on 3 February ;
“I have no doubt that Assad and his military have committed crimes but I doubt they amount to more than those committed by the rebels and the western false-flag attacks on civilian targets”
“They should all of course be held to account”
At last! Thank you and well done, Resident Dissident, for obtaining this admission! He took his time making it.
Habbabkuk; resident dissident did not obtain an admission from me.
What I said was my long held view on the matter.
It is strange that some, like you, ignore the crimes committed by an entity you support (Israel for example) and focus only on the crimes of those entities you don’t support (Hamas for example). I acknowledge crimes are committed by all sides in a conflict.
LOL. From the local rag here.
A ROYAL Holloway graduate is appearing on cinema screens across the world playing al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
Drama alumna Ricky Sekhon, 29, landed the role in the hugely touted and multi-Oscar nominated film Zero Dark Thirty, which opened in the UK last Friday.
http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/entertainment/film_and_cinema/s/2128224_drama_graduates_eyeopening_bin_laden_role
I wonder if this Ac Tor believes the story about the character he played. Did OBL die years back from renal failure? Was the Navy Seal action in Pakistan a psyop? Is Alki Ada for real? Do bears ^^^^ in woods?
N_, shall we hop over to the previous thread? I should have thought of that earlier…
Clark
4 Feb, 2013 – 2:07 pm
“When problems are complex, the human mind has a regrettable tendency to simplify; often this takes the form of choosing one “side” or the other. The corporate media exploits this…”
This brought to mind a time when I worked for a large supermarket. The manager told me that the company commissioned psychologists for advice on things like product placement and other tactics to draw customer’s attention to help enhance sales.
Advertising companies no doubt do the same but what about political parties? After all they are trying to sell something as well.
I wonder if this explains why the policies of all three major parties in the UK are practically indistinguishable. Are they using behavioural psychology advisors?
See:
http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2010/11_December/behavioural-psychology_64_04.html
Davy,
So you’re measuring M. Laurent Louis and Max Keiser against standards in a variety of areas, including “knowledge and expertise” and “preparedness to speak what they know”, and against those standards you find them “good”.
Splendid! But whose are the standards you measure them against : are they your own standards or are you using standards which have found general acceptance and are set out somewhere?
If you’re using your own standards, then we would have to know what you consider to be a “good” level of knowledge and expertise and we would also need to be able to evaluate your own level of knowledge and expertise in order to reach an opinion on whether you are, in fact, capable of evaluating the knowledge and expertise of others.
If the latter, then it would be interesting to earn what those standards are, with as close an indication of sources as possible.
It may be unkind of me, but I hazard the guess that you have no particular knowledge or expertise in the majority of the matters which preoccupy Messrs Louis and Keiser and thus reach the conclusion that you are not really qualified to judge their own knowledge and expertise.
Re. “preparedness to speak what they know” : leaving aside the question of what they do actually know (as opposed to what they proclaim to be the true state of affairs), I don’t really find their “outspokenness” to rest on any particular qualities of “goodness”. As already explained, M. Louis has a general election coming up and he very much wants to remain a member of a chamber he claims to despise, whereas Mr Keiser, as much showman as serious analyst, works for Russia Today TV, which is about as independent of the Kremlin as the BBC is of Westminster and Whitehall.
****
On the last bit of your post, you are equating colonialism and liberal intervention. In my opinion they are not the same things at all.
You are a treasure here Mary. The College of Policing it seems is a private interim structure erected to support the National Crime Agency during the phasing out of the public National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA).
http://www.npia.police.uk/en/16761.htm
A key company article and function of the College is the assimilation of raw data from intelligence, the Police National Database, community surveillance and other information entered into the Police On-Line Knowledge Area (POLKA) so that a public information sharing strategy can be effective and generate a positive impact on the reduction of major crime esp. terrorism, explosives, drug trafficking and public order (mob rule).
http://www.college.police.uk/en/16173.htm
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/about-us/parliamentary-business/written-ministerial-statement/npia-transition-update/?view=Standard&pubID=1016151
The work set out also includes enhancements to surveillance and preemptive measures using the latest technologies – UAV’s????
As expected with this coalition the police service including support services such as forensics etc is undergoing privatisation. Theresa May and her Home Office must ensure this will improve quality and efficiency, implant trust and build public support.
OY VEY!
@ Doug Scorgie (20h21)
Ah, so it was your “long-held view on the matter”, was it? A long-held view kept nicely to yourself as far as this blog was concerned, until Resident dissident squeezed it out of you.
And while you’re trying to demolish me; you could try to quote me accxurately and not leave out an important element of my original post. Which was : when making comparisons of how deadly the Syrian regime is, you have to also take into account the last 30 years duirng which Syria has been run by the family firm of Assad the Father and Assad the Son.
And lastly, I’d be very glad if you could find one post of mine that so much as mentions Hamas. And if you look carefully, you’ll find that most of my posts which mention Israel (there are few of them) do so in a negative way. But hey, what’s a little bit of accuracy when Dou’s in full, indignant flow?
All in all, not one of your better posts (beta double minus at best). I think a sabbatical would do you good.