Noam Chomsky wins - we don't have a free press

I am absolutely shocked by the bias in both Guardian and BBC. Particularly the BBC which has allowed Labour MPs in the rebel group to slander Momentum as "dogs" and "thugs" without the least bit of proof that there is any violence given or threatened by Momentum, which as far as I can see is ordinary supporters of Corbyn like me.

I expected bias in the Murdoch press, and any press which is owned and operated by someone with an axe to grind, but I really expected better fromthe Guardian and the BBC. They say that you only notice how inaccurate reporting is when you are close to a story, but this is more than that. They are using negative words to describe Corbyn, allowing claims that he lost the labour vote on remain although 62% of Labour voters voted remain, nearly as many (1% less) as the SNP who had all their MPs onside and campaigning for remain.

That there are newsnight journalists tweeting unattributed negative rumours on twitter accounts which identify them as being from Newsnight is shocking to me. They obviously are partisan. I feel I've wrongly argued in my head with Noam Chomsky for 20 years that our press are not as biassed as he said, only to have him win the argument, because they are.

The Guardian does publish occasional positive articles, but in the main it is a constant stream of hogwash from the partisan Polly Toynbee - who, I'm sorry, should be disbarred from writing anything at all with such a personal grudge against Corbyn. And neither the BBC or Guardian are challenging the renegade MPs on the fact that they can launch a leadership bid any time, and should do this or shut up if they believe in the democracy in the Labour Party.

There were marches yesterday all over the country for Brexit and those are reported. There were also marches all over the country for Corbyn, and those have not been reported. The BBC have a one line report in their Corbyn article on the website, saying there were marches in Leeds and Liverpool of about a thousand. Liverpool was 3000 at least and there were also marches and demonstrations in Durham, Cornwall, Cardiff, Hull and many other places.

They allow Angela Eagle to spin the lie that support among party membership is decreasing while 60,000 people have joined up in the last week. most of them, if my twitter and facebook groups are anything to go by, are joining because they are appalled by the behaviour of the PLP and the antidemocratic nature of the challenge to the leadership. It's scandalous that they allow her space to say things like that and don't properly balance with some facts.

Start the week with a bit of guilt and shame

Listened to Start the Week on Radio4 this morning as I sorted recycling for the tip.  The theme was guilt and shame, and there were a variety of guests.  For those unfamiliar with the programme, it consists of a presenter and a round table of topical people who have usually published books or directed plays, talking about a topical theme, or one drawn together from their books etc - or unusually just a series of discussions on the topics of their works.

Jon Ronson, one of my very favourite writers and broadcasters, was one of the guests today, as he has recently published a book about internet shaming.  Go and explore his website!  There is a lot to enjoy.  To be honest I didn't pay very good attention to the other guests which included someone who thought public shaming has its uses, a man who is directing an Arthur Miller play with a related theme, and an academic talking about Judas.  If you want to hear the programme it is on the iplayer, available free to anyone in the world on the BBC website, and I believe it is available as a podcast too.  Tom Sutcliffe is the presenter, who also presents Front Row from time to time and the Saturday Review, all worth listening to, and they keep me up to date with what's happening/coming out/hot.

They talked about public shaming, and refusing to be shamed, and the feeling of guilt, and whether Judas could be culpable for betrayal of Christ if it was part of God's plan.  What they didn't talk about, and what preoccupied me, was the idea that innocent guilt is impossible to assuage. If you are guilty of some transgression you can do penance, apologize all those other things.  The sort of thing I was thinking about was survivor guilt, rape victim guilt, the sort of experience which makes you feel guilty even though you have done nothing wrong. I suppose the ironic-tweet-that-everyone-took-seriously IS an example of this sort of guilt.

It occurred to me that the Catholic Church has always been very hot on guilt, while giving people an easy way out of their guilt.  Once upon a time you could buy your way out by paying for hapless monks to pray for your salvation, or you could buy indulgences, a sort of get-out-of-gaol-free card for naughtiness.  Then there are the other penances that people put themselves through - self-flagellation, doing pilgrimages, walking on your knees to a shrine etc.  My mind goes off at a tangent wondering if those count if you enjoy them....

Inevitably quite a lot of the talk was of the internet and its shaming tactics, but it seems to me that those are only skin deep.  I'm sure it is an uncomfortable experience to be shamed by the internet, but the ephemeral nature of the medium is that today's scandal is swept up and away through the stream of tweets and on to another thing.  It is different when people take their grievances offline too and threaten to kill or rape, or contact a woman's employers and demand that her head should roll.  That's of a different order altogether.  But for most stupid things said on the internet, they're here today and gone tomorrow.

The other type of guilt and shame... the things we did and regret, the things which were done to us and we feel guilty for, those things are ingrained deeper, but it is possible to let go of them.  If it is true that no experience is necessariy good or bad, it is just what we make of it, there must be a way to reframe the experiences which give us cold sweats in the middle of the night and make us hope for a large black hole to swallow us up.  Anthony Robbins talks of viewing an experience as though on a tv screen and shrinking it down, enlarging it, changing the memory.  Emotional Freedom Technique talks of running through the experience and changing it so that it no longer has the emotional power to control you.

In the end, guilt and shame are all tied in with what you believe about the world, and what you believe about yourself, and thus your way of handling it has to be individual too.  People, as someone once said, believe what they believe whether they like it or not.  It's true, and especially true of our memories of shaming or painful things.  It seems ironic to me that we might have more difficulty dealing with those things we haven't done - far more than those we did, which clearly point to the victim of our action and a means of reparation.

In the case of unwarranted internet shamings, where people have said ironic or sarcastic things and the irony has been lost in the translation, the ability to repair the damage is an ephemeral thing too... for although the twitter stream moves on, it entombs the things we have stupidly said, and they may take on a life of their own in a way that a scribbled note, letter, casual remark in the pub, never would have done. 

It's a good programme, thought-provoking, intelligent and interesting.  Listen!

Sherlock Episode 3 review

It seems odd that the only online review I can find for Sherlock episode three is the Guardian review... and that even then Sam Wollaston wasn't paying attention.  I fear that the revered Caitlin Moran may have written a stunning review of the series behind the chargeable wall of the Times this week.  I shan't be seeing that, then.  I loved the series... if a set of three counts as a series. It wasn't perfect, and as Sam and several of his commentees mention, the biggest mistake in the last episode was the inclusion of a scattering of stars in the alleyways of London - I should think the last time that sort of sky was seen over London was during the blackouts of the Blitz.

There were a lot of loose ends left untied, not least, supposedly, the fate of the protagonists, although that was assured after the popularity of the first episode, I should have thought. Maybe the papers exhausted their stock of superlatives after the universal acclaim for the first episode, which was widely reported, and declared a triumph.  There was a little bit of grumbling about the updating to present day, and the messing around with the plots of the stories, but even the Conan Doyle geeks on the Guardian review comments had to admit that the spirit of Sherlock is something recognisable to anyone who is familiar with the stories.

The least convincing part is still the relationship with the police. While the admirable LeStrade must necessarily struggle with his work in order to allow some room for Sherlock to appear and leave him standing, the CSI approach (with Holmes having better equipment, more time,  and newer technology than the police in the UK would be likely to have or be able to afford), especially in the fast moving world of forensic science, might have been a better way in?  Whether he has some sort of humdrum job he only ocasionally does, in the laboratories of Barts, or simply squats in an unused room at his own convenience and waits to be kicked out, was never explained unless I blinked and missed it.  However, these are minor quibbles.  The plots are meant to be tosh of the highest order and rely on a parallel universe where criminal gangs use grafitti instead of texting and send messages via hapless bomb-laden members of the public rather than the traditional letters cut from newspapers.

It was exciting, and though one might have to disable the critical toshometer in one's brain in much the same way that generations of children have done for Dr Who, rather like Dr Who it had me on the edge of my seat half tempted to flee behind the sofa while the hanging on cliffs was afoot.  I enjoyed it.  I liked the length of the episodes, I liked the pace, I liked the actors, I liked the way in which London was, starry skies excepted, mostly a recognisable place which felt like London (even if, as one viewer claimed, it was mostly Cardiff).

I profoundly hope that more episodes will be written and made, and hope that they manage to do this quickly without sacrificing the hunger that was evident in the first three.  I enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch enormously, and thought Martin Freeman was a perfect Watson to Cumberbatch's Holmes... though he isn't the first actor that would have sprung to mind had I been in charge of the casting, I think it was inspired. He manages to be extraordinary in an ordinary way, and to be the public in a way that has turned previous Watsons into shambling old fools, without succumbing to that at all.  Of course, his presence was a device that Conan Doyle wrote in to enable someone to ask the damn fool questions or feed Holmes a bit of commonsense when cleverness failed to make an obvious connection, and of course to give Holmes someone to show off to, when he had solved some part of the puzzle in hand.

I enjoyed the background characters , the chases, the settings and styling.  Well done, BBC.  More please, as soon as possible.

The BBC have refused to broadcast an appeal for Gaza, on the basis that it would call into question their journalistic independence.

I am rather puzzled by this stance, which seems to be a new idea for the BBC. They have previously broadcast appeals for humanitarian aid (in Darfur for example), without worrying about whether this would affect their judgement or impartiality in news reporting.

In some ways I believe that taking this stance is less impartial than simply allowing the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to make a judgement about which humanitarian disasters warrant urgent aid. Currently, Israel is not in need of humanitarian aid, and if they were, I hope the BBC would broadcast an appeal for them too. I am not partisan, I would want any country, or group of people in dire need of aid, to receive it.

To be truly impartial the BBC must not make political judgements about humanitarian aid, and should leave those decisions to the charities working in the field.

Ali is due to have his colonoscopy this afternoon. He had to take mega doses of laxative last night, hasn't had anything to eat since 4pm yesterday, and now can't drink again until after the procedure. I wish there was something I could do to protect him from this, would take his place in an instant... but I can't.

To keep my mind from obsessing about it, watched Bonekickers from last night on the BBCiPlayer. You know how things can look sooo good on a trailer and then within a millisecond of starting to watch an episode you can tell that they are sooo bad? This is one of those.

The plot is ludicrous... they didn't just invent a love affair between Boudicca and a Roman soldier, but also suggested that the Roman had kept her secretly in a chamber below the Roman baths in Bath, and had invented an incendiary bomb many centuries in advance of their actual invention AND that he was responsible for the burning of Rome in revenge for the death of his mistress.

The acting is poor and the writing too... actually they crammed a whole series worth of plot and backstory into the space of one hour long episode, and in places this required the actors to deliver an incredible amount of completely fantastical information at a rate of knots. There was a backstory element of a romance between two of the characters which didn't ring true... they didn't behave like people with a history. And there was a lot of banter between rugged professor and young student which would have a real student running for the forms to report him for sexual harrassment... it seemed old fashioned, and inappropriate. He wasn't even witty about it.

The sets were so dreadful, I could have done better with a bit of plaster of paris and a roomful of children... in places it definitely won the award for the least convincing rock and stone in the history of television.

You know how sometimes things are so bad, they're almost good? This isn't like that. It's obvious the people involved have no faith or belief in their product, they simply contrived a television series out of a formula. On paper it might have looked good. On the screen it did NOT.

I cannot believe that the BBC has sunk to this level of awful... didn't anyone see how bad it was? You begin to lose faith in the BBC to withstand the commercial pressures upon it when they broadcast something so unremittingly bad that I can find nothing good to say about it.

And if I spoiled the plot for anyone... you can thank me later for having prevented you from wasting a whole hour of your life.

The BBC reports on a report from Whistleblower about nurseries, which dovetails nicely with my earlier posting about a woman who couldn't understand why friends thought she shouldn't put her five month old baby into a nursery in order to go back to work full time.

The shocking news that children are not well looked after in many of the nurseries around the country is not news. Even if you had the best nursery nurses in the country, a one to 13 ratio between the nursery nurses and babies makes it impossible for them to do anything but crisis control. They can't look after the babies properly.

Any parent knows that it can be a full time job to look after one baby properly and meet their needs. The idea that one person can do that for 13 babies is laughable. All over the country, in nurseries good and bad, children are lacking stimulation, lying in wet and dirty nappies.

My Quaker meeting in Uxbridge leases out the old building to a nursery during the week, and many of the older members regard this as tantamount to a social service. It's a dark building with high windows though. I would not have left any of my children there. I don't know whether the people there are good, bad or indifferent nursery nurses, but the building is totally unsuitable as a nursery. If the OFSTED inspectors were doing what the general public expect that they should, they'd have closed it down.

As a society, children have a low priority for many people, and our society's Victorian attitude that children ought to be quiet and not disrupt life for the adults is pervading everywhere. Mothers are being made to feel that they are odd or even destructive if they want to be with their children and particularly if they wish not to work in order to care for their children.

It's astonishing to me that there are not more tragedies involving children in nurseries. The biggest tragedy though will not emerge for some years, when these children become parents themselves and begin to inflict what happened to them on their own babies.

In a rich country like the UK, we have the opportunity to be giving our children a much richer childhood than their ancestors experienced. Instead, we are giving them money and things bought at the expensive of shoving them into nurseries as babies and schools to be tested to destruction throughout their childhoods. It's nuts.