There’s yet another worrying development in the parents vs education story: Conservative politician Andrea Leadsom says that parents should get to decide when their children “become exposed to that information”.
When it comes to same-sex relationships, it’s interesting (in a disturbing way) how many people think of them as somehow inherently sexual, in a way heterosexual partnerships are not. Most schools now have several pupils with two mums or two dads. It’s important for all children to be exposed to representation that reflects this, in the same cartoon-character, age-appropriate way heterosexual parents are.
Children are not being taught about what people do in bed. As Devon writes:
Sex education at the age of 4 is generally restricted to a “pants are private” message and to helping children understand consent and that they must tell if someone touches them inappropriately. I think we can all agree that they’re never too young for that.
Of course, Murdoch’s media empire isn’t just antipodean. He controls the likes of Fox News in the US and the Sun and the Sunday Times in the UK, all of which have played a crucial role in making racism (and anti-minority hatred generally) mainstream: for example, the Times’ Â columnist Melanie Philips has the dubious honour of being namechecked in the manifestos of two right-wing mass murderers, Anders Brevik (who killed 77 people in Norway) and the Christchurch murderer.
To inspire one mass slaughter is unfortunate. To inspire two…
But while Murdoch may well be the biggest offender in terms of demonising minorities, he isn’t the only one.
On Sunday, the Express asked: was the terrorist radicalised during a trip to the UK?
It’s an interesting question. Maybe he saw one of these.
The Sun and the Daily Mail fear he was radicalised by extremist content too.
On the subject of extreme content, the Mail’s website provided a direct download link to the killer’s entire manifesto. Downloading and reading it may well be an offence under the Terrorism Act. And the Mail, Sun and Mirror all broadcast extracts from the killer’s video in defiance of requests from the New Zealand police.
And of course, it’s not just newspapers. BBC’s Newsnight has played its part in the mainstreaming and promotion of far-right figures; in a sign that something is truly rotten in its editorial policy, its idea of an appropriate guest to discuss the Christchurch massacre was a spokesperson for the extreme far right group Generation Identity. GI fans include the Ku Klux Klan. And of course it’s in the dog whistles of right-wing politicians such as Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Zac Goldsmith.
I’ve written about stochastic terrorism before. Stochastic terrorism is when you don’t commit terrorist acts directly, but you create a climate that incites others to carry out violent acts. The very people claiming to be heartbroken about Christchurch are actively fuelling the hatred that caused it, and that will cause more violence in the future.
Atrocities like Friday’s represent the very worst of human nature, but they don’t take place in a vacuum. Unless those in positions of power stop normalising the far right; unless they stop appropriating the language of racists and promulgating their ideologies, they shouldn’t be surprised if they have to express more faux disbelief over more innocent victims, while continuing to abdicate responsibility for their fate.
I’m not usually affected by news events but the terrorist attacks in Christchurch had me in tears this morning.
As if the events weren’t horrific enough, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun have all put auto-play video from one of the terrorists’ cameras on their front page and surrounded it with adverts in a shockingly cynical attempt to make money from the dead.
And the comments sections on Breitbart – to which President Trump posted a link while the news was breaking – on Reddit and in many right-wing British newspapers are packed with people celebrating the murders and downvoting expressions of grief and empathy.
These things are connected.
As the NY Times’ Wajahat Ali wrote on Twitter:
Pay attention. Take this extremist ideology & terror threat seriously. Be wary of politicians, academics & media heads who give it a platform and spout it under the guise of “free speech” and fighting “political correctness.” Look out for each other. Love each other.
After ongoing protests, a Birmingham primary school has suspended its “no outsiders” programme, which teaches children about equality. The protesters have done the usual religious thing, accusing the school of “promoting gay and transgender lifestyles.” It’s been reported as a muslim protest but many of the parents protesting are christians; the lessons have been reported as “LGBT lessons” when they’re also about religion, race and disability.
No Outsiders is about teaching children that “there are no outsiders here!” I know this because the programme is available online, as are presentations to parents about it.
Here’s a slide explaining the ethos.
The characteristics of the Equality Act are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation.
As the course’s creator Andrew Moffat MBE explains: “we have to find ways to encourage children to choose to sign up to living in a multicultural and multi-faith UK, where they can live alongside, work alongside and get along with people who are different to them.”
Cancelling the lessons sets a terrible precedent. The aim of the lessons is to teach children “to recognise and celebrate diversity and difference in their own communities and in the wider society.” Letting the intolerant shut them down is entirely the wrong lesson to teach children.
After far too long, far-right puppet Tommy Robinson has been kicked off Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram for flouting the rules on hateful conduct.
in this moment, the conversation we should be having—how can we fix the algorithms?—is instead being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online. It would be good to remind them that free speech does not mean free reach. There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.
…The social internet is mediated by algorithms: recommendation engines, search, trending, autocomplete, and other mechanisms that predict what we want to see next. The algorithms don’t understand what is propaganda and what isn’t, or what is “fake news†and what is fact-checked. Their job is to surface relevant content (relevant to the user, of course), and they do it exceedingly well.
That efficiency gives the likes of Robinson disproportionate visibility and influence, something the social media giants still don’t seem to have woken up to. If they can’t prevent the likes of the far-right from gaming the system, then they need to do a better job of keeping them off their platforms.
We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when records began on a global scale. We are adding planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate faster than at any point in human history since the beginning of industrialization.
We can no longer stop climate change. It’s already happening. But if we panic, we can at least make it slightly less catastrophic and deadly than it would otherwise be.
For years, we have read in newspapers as two degrees of warming was invoked as the highest tolerable level, beyond which disaster would ensue. Warming greater than that was rarely discussed outside scientific circles. And so it was easy to develop an intuitive portrait of the landscape of possibilities that began with the climate as it exists today and ended with the pain of two degrees, the ceiling of suffering.
In fact, it is almost certainly a floor. By far the likeliest outcomes for the end of this century fall between two and four degrees of warming.
Wallace-Wells rightly says that complacency is a huge problem, and that individual acts are pointless if we don’t do anything about, say, farming and industry:
Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply. Conscientiously flying less is a lot easier if there’s more high-speed rail around. And if I eat fewer hamburgers a year, so what? But if cattle farmers were required to feed their cattle seaweed, which might reduce methane emissions by nearly 60 percent according to one study, that would make an enormous difference.
…No matter how bad it gets, no matter how hot it gets, we’ll still have the ability to make successive decades relatively less hot, and we should never stop trying. There is always something we can do. It’s too late to avoid a 21st century that is completely transformed by the forces of climate change, but we have to do everything possible to make the future cooler, safer, and healthier.
One of the most frightening theories I’ve heard about climate change is that the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world know full well what climate change will do, and they want it to happen.
It’s called “exterminism”. Rather than worry about saving the poor, feeding them, educating them, ensuring clean air and water for them… why not just let them burn? If you have sufficient resources, you can survive the eco-apocalypse and return to your rightful place in a world that no longer has to worry about all those inconvenient poor people.
If people believed such things, they wouldn’t be investing in climate change. They’d be buying bunkers.
I wrote about the horrors of unvaccinated children the other day. This is a great example of the problem.
The article is about Shanelle Cartwright, the wife of an Australian rugby player. Over 400-odd words it regurgitates nonsense she posted on social media, describing her refusal  to vaccinate her kids as a “controversial decision”.
It’s not a controversial decision. It’s a dangerous decision that could threaten the lives of other people’s children.
This happens constantly in media, in all kinds of subjects: someone refusing to accept settled science is portrayed as part of a debate where both sides have equal value. But they don’t. The Earth is not flat. We landed on the moon. The Holocaust happened. Climate change is real. Barack Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. Vaccination saves lives.
A recent study found that nearly 10% of Americans think vaccines are unsafe. That doesn’t mean that nearly 10% of Americans know more than science. It means that nearly 10% of Americans are idiots.
I briefly subscribed to a Reddit section about stupid people on Facebook. I had to unsubscribe again because the sheer, grinding, unrelenting idiocy of it was making me fear for humanity. It’s just wall to wall insanity: nurses claiming that the sun can’t damage your skin, people telling cancer patients to forget chemo and cut down on sugar instead, people sharing graphics showing that vaccinations include a range of lethal chemicals including dihydroxen monoxide.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is better known as H2O.
I wish I was making this up.
Never mind asking whether these people should be given a platform. I don’t think they should be given cutlery.
It’s really very simple: idiots shouldn’t be given a platform to spout idiocy unless you make it really, really clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about. We generally don’t give column inches or air time to people who believe that the world is flat, because it isn’t. But with vaccination, climate change and other hot-button topics, we repeatedly give idiots a megaphone. And every time we do, we legitimise their bullshit and the world gets a little more stupid.
Almost 50 geoscientists have urged the government to commission an urgent review of the fracking earthquake limit, which they suggest should be raised to allow the industry to expand
Of the 48 people that signed the letter, I could not confidently identify 9. I think one works for BP and another works for Shell. Many are not experts in any recognisable way. But it doesn’t really matter. Because, of the remaining 39, all have links to gas and oil companies.
…Several signatories openly brag about their industry funded research. Many used to work for oil and gas companies. Quite a few still work for those companies. And others are not even practising scientists, but directors of a business in the energy sector.
This isn’t just yet another example of how The Times and its sister titles often publish advocacy and rarely bother to check credentials. It’s part of a wider problem where supposedly independent experts are nothing of the sort.
The Taxpayer’s Alliance is a good example. It keeps its funding secret because it doesn’t represent the ordinary working stiffs it claims to; it’s an advocacy group for the super-rich, who fund it out of their very deep pockets.
Whether it’s the super-rich pretending to be ordinary people, religious fundamentalists claiming to be ordinary parents or anybody else with an agenda pretending they don’t, every time they’re given a platform the platform provider is failing its viewers, its listeners or its readers.
The anti-vax movement is profoundly anti-scientific, and repeats the non-existent link between autism and vaccination popularised by the thoroughly discredited charlatan Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield, sadly, is still peddling his nonsense and thousands of parents believe it.
It’s important to stress here that vaccines are among the most studied medicines in human history. There is no link between vaccination and autism. None.
The parents who campaign against keeping children alive aren’t malicious. But they’ve fallen victim to the same thing that drives climate change denial or flat-Earthism: I can’t see it, therefore it can’t exist.
It also ties in with anti-government, anti-expert sentiment. How dare you tell me what I need to do to protect my children?
This isn’t a movement of stupid people, or uneducated people, although some anti-vax posters on social media might persuade you otherwise. The demographics skew heavily in favour of reasonably affluent, reasonably well-educated middle-class white women.
It’s cruelly ironic that vaccines have fallen victim to their own success: we no longer see the victims of the diseases they eliminate. My generation and the generations after me haven’t grown up around children whose limbs have been destroyed by polio. We haven’t seen people’s faces scarred and distorted by smallpox. We don’t know of brothers or sisters who died from whooping cough.
If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
The parents’ murderous delusion could kill not just their own children, but other people’s children too. Some children don’t have the luxury of choosing whether to be vaccinated or not: they’re too young, or they don’t have access to health care, or they have medical conditions that would make vaccination unsafe, or they’re still in the womb. With a successful vaccination programme those children are protected: herd immunity means that it’s effectively impossible for dangerous diseases to exist in a community, so the likelihood of these children being exposed is near zero.
That only works if most children get vaccinated, though. When the numbers fall even a little bit, below 90 to 95%, herd immunity disappears and preventable, deadly diseases recur. That’s exactly what’s happening now. For example, in Clark County – part of the same state where the anti-vaxxers were protesting – just 78% of nursery school children have had the full slate of vaccination. 43 of those unvaccinated children have contracted measles. In the US alone, more than 9 million children are currently at risk of contracting measles as a result of under-vaccination.
This isn’t an argument to be won on facts, on debating whether or not vaccines are safe. The anti-vaxxers have seen the evidence and simply choose not to believe it. The only way to change these people’s minds appears to be to show them the horrific consequences of the diseases the vaccines prevent, and the danger they’re putting so many children in.
Drill musicians Reds, K Trap and Mischief. Image from YouTube.
As long as people have made music, other people have tried to censor it. The famously miserable song Gloomy Sunday, originally published in 1933, was banned by the BBC until 2002. George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows was banned in 1940 for its supposedly smutty lyrics. More recently, bands were banned from airplay during the Gulf War for having the wrong name, such as Massive Attack. And of course there have been attempts to ban entire genres of music such as heavy metal and gangsta rap.
It’s easy to laugh at this stuff, but sometimes it’s deadly serious. Take the case of drill music, a genre so subversive it can land you in prison for performing it. Guess which repressive regime that happens in?
The case is deeply disturbing, because while the police claim that drill incites violence the two musicians have not been charged under the pertinent legislation. The instrument used against them was a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO), the latest incarnation of the infamous anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).
As Malik writes:
Skengdo and AM were served with an injunction without having been convicted of a crime. Breaking the injunction is a criminal offence. They’ve been criminalised for making violent music without having been convicted of any offence of violence.
I don’t understand drill music; it’s not really aimed at the oh-so-lucrative white middle-class middle-aged trans demographic. It may well glamourise violence, and it may well be linked with gang activity. But the law exists to protect all of us, and part of that protection means that we should not be criminalised without due process.
Index on Censorship is no fan of drill music, but it points out that this is hardly the first time minorities have used music to describe their lives.
Drill is less about inspiring violence and more about providing a narrative of lives defined by violence. They are telling the stories of their lives, minus the sugar-coating, just as other writers, poets and musicians have done before them.
They continue:
The right to freedom of expression is considered by many to be a cornerstone of a modern democratic society. Countries that fail to adequately protect this hallowed right – routinely censoring journalists, writers and musicians whose speech challenges and offends those in power – are rightly regarded by the West to be the worst examples of dictatorial, autocratic regimes.
Free expression is not the same thing as freedom from consequences. But there appears to be a curious double standard here.
The press’s free-speech brigade are quick to defend the speech of racist populists such as Tommy Robinson, of alt-right dog whistling and of all kinds of repellent individuals. Freedom of speech, after all, means freedom of speech for views many people will find repellent. And yet the Spectator and Spiked and all the other Voltaire-misquoting defenders of offensive expression have been completely silent about the censorship and criminalisation of drill musicians.
It’s strange, isn’t it? They defend the speech of the white Tommy Robinson, of the white Count Dankula, of the white Milo, of various other white alt-right types – sometimes even the speech of white people who are actual neo-Nazis. And yet they’re completely silent about the ongoing censorship and criminalisation of black musicians. I wonder what the difference could be?
