Manufacturing Consent – Page 3

Can’t find Wikileaks?

Published on December 5, 20101 Comment

Try this: http://213.251.145.96/. No luck? More mirrors.

Meanwhile, Counterpunch on the reality behind the rape charges against Julian Assange:

Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

However, before we absolve the Swedish police as unwitting, if zealous, dupes, please note that Swedish law strictly forbids police and prosecutors to release to the media the details of any rape-connected complaint. The Expressen had all the details of the case, including the names of the accused and the complainant, within a matter of minutes. Please note further that the right-wing tabloid Expressen belongs to the Bonnier family, the biggest media owners in Sweden, who are not only pro-American but very much pro-Israel, too. As you know, the pro-Israeli lobby is warmly supportive of America’s Middle Eastern wars, while Assange and his WikiLeaks have the potential to undermine America’s weakening support for the war.

Wikileaks is a necessary corrective force against all our governments, as the past decade has proved that our socalled western democracies do everything to escape public accountability. Having a dedicated organisation that is able to provide us with the 21st century equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on a regular basis is a good thing. So donate.

Types of skepticism

Published on July 20, 2010

In the midst of a discussion about woo, medical science and the (misplaced?) priorities of people like Ben Goldacre at Daniel’s site, he asks an interesting question:

What interests me is that the strategy of marginalising the “anti-vaxers” and treating them as fringe loonies who didn’t have to be listened to worked so much worse in the medical sphere than similar strategies worked against “conspiracy loons” in the political sphere.

While I’m not sure his characterisation of the MMR “controversy” is accurate, it is interesting to see how quickly these fears about the MMR jab causes autism were taken up by the media and respectable, mainstream politicians and media commentators. This in contrast to e.g. the runup to the War on Iraq, where the quite obvious guff about Saddam’s WMD was barely questioned until years after the fact, with those skeptical of the evidence being given little hearing. Why is it that one type of skepticism, no matter how ill-founded, found an eager audience in the British media, while another type of skepticism, with much more evidence for it was dismissed as conspiracy theory?

Because one story slotted right into existing rightwing media narratives while the other doesn’t. The tabloids, especially the Daily Mail have always been suspicious about government propaganda about health care, mistrustful of the NHS and medical science and friendly towards alternative treatments. Having real true “scientific” evidence that the NHS and Labour were poisoning our children with autism was too good to pass up. Meanwhile, why would these same tabloids be skeptical about a war they supported anyway?