Chomsky said that violence works
You might wish it isn’t true, but its hard to disagree with him.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category.
Does AlJazeera English brainwash you?
Well, if you get a sudden urge to go out and buy stocks in an energy firm in Qatar, then yes. Or if you buy a new Toshiba Tecra, then yes. Then again, thats probably because you’ve been watching the advertisements and not the news.
So why is this news channel controversial? Put quite simply, they don’t have a watershed. They will show any clip, no matter how scary/bloody/happy at any time of the day. If Bush says something, they show it. If Bin Laden says something, they show it. In fact, theres not much they won’t show. When the Russian Georgian conflict/invasion/defence operation/<insert your opinion here> kicked off, they interviewed the following people:
- Dmitry Medvedev – President of Russia
- The Georgian Foreign Minister
A short list of other people that are have conducted interviews with in the past few months are:
- Hans Blix – Former UN weapons inspector
- Hamid Kharzi – President of Afghanistan
- Nigers Environment Minister
- Anwar Ibrahim – Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia
- Ehud Barak – Current Isreali Defense Minister, former Prime Minister
- Chimon Peres – President of Israel
- David Cameron – Leader of the Conservative party, UK
- Jaime Bermudez – Columbian Foreign Minister
- Mahinda Rajapaksa – Current Sri Lankan President
So does AlJazeera brainwash? Maybe a better question would be, how many other news outlets make as many interviews? Of course, everyone should always read a broad spectrum of news, but for international relations, this is a good start.
$700 billion isn’t enough
It doesn’t fix greed, bad ideas, or worse still, embedded contradiction. You have no freedom, just rights, fact. house.gov is down, so if you were looking for a copy of the new proposal for the $700 billion bail out, you’ll have to wait. So Pelosi tells Wall street that the party is over. CEO compensation is going to be regulated. What, you mean they can’t decide for themselves how much they get? That is a restriction of their freedom, and quite likely a form of terrorism.
They’ve only just started emphasising the need for accountability. The first draft was essentially a blank cheque. Clinging onto a patchwork solution shows serious lack of fore sight, which is a pity, given that their governance effects billions of lives. To think that they want to export this form of governance to the rest of the world, completely unaware of the huge array of caveats.
On a more positive note, it will push the public to pay more attention to public affairs, internal and external. That you chose your future for yourself in a consenting manner doesn’t make it ok when it all goes wrong. It just means you implemented a bad idea. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Lets think a little more about the matter, or hire someone smarter than us.
