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?
That Rod Liddle bid for the editorship of The Independent in full:
By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.
You can see the sole reason Liddle was refused this position was that the powers that be were afraid of his blunt honesty, not because he’s just another rightwing asshole who thinks he’s entitled to lead a leftleaning paper, or because he has a habit of posting racist comments on Millwall supporter sites (under pseudonym, natch). Title courtesy of Charlie Brooker, who described Liddle a while back as “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.
Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe is the best media programme on the television at the moment and obligatory viewing for anybody interested in politics and the media. Just a pity it comes on so late.
One multiracial child responds to that Louisiana judge’s foolishness about not wanting to perform mixed marriages because it’s so hard on the children not being normal:
White people are funny like that; they think they are the normal, and everyone else is “multicultural” and “ethnic” and strange; they think they are the only way to be. But we outnumber you, you know. Right now, we outnumber you in volume of numbers – I’m an Indian woman, one in twelve of living humans is Indian and female, and one in six is brown (and stands up straight, and is strong, intelligent and beautiful, despite not being pale like you). Right now, we outnumber you; mathematically, we are the normal, and it’s only accidents of history that make you so proud of being white. (Even if we weren’t, we sing, dance and tan better than you. Deal.)
As you can see from the handsome picture on the left hand side of your screen, I’m somebody who has grown up seeing people who look like me on television, in the movies, in magazines and so on all the time, whose race, skin colour and gender were defined as normal by the media I grew up with. Worse, I grew up in the most whitebread part of the most whitebread province in the Netherlands, where a full three quarters of the average school class would be blonde haired, blue aryans and the rest would have dark hair. And although the reality of life even there has become much more …colourful… the media have lagged behind. White men are still the norm, anybody else the exception. it’s no wonder that we think we are normal, as people like m grew up with the priviledge of seeing our natural assumption of being the norm affirmed all around us.
But even the flawed reflection in the media of our multicultural societies has made that illusion less and less easy to maintain. The US never was a purely “white” country, the UK and Holland haven’t been one for a long time, but for a lot of people, like that idiot in Louisiana, this is a hard truth to swallow. Especially when the world turned scary again in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the War on Iraq and locally, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. This fear and discomfort forms what I think is the reason for Geert Wilders’ popularity, as well as a more widespread change of attitude in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has long had a reputation for being a tolerant nation, but this tolerance has quickly disappeared in the past decade. It’s not just Islamophobia, though that’s a large part of it, but it’s a general shift in attitude towards all foreigners. There’s much less willingness to accomodate strangers, less pride in being able to speak to them in their own language and a more explicit demand that they learn our language if they come over here — and that goes for Moroccan as well as English immigrants.
The governmental commercial shown above is a good example of this new attitude. It shows several “obviously” foreign people (i.e., not-white) trying to ask questions in their own languages of an authority figure only to be stared at uncomprendingly before the patronising voiceover starts talking about how much easier it is to learn Dutch. The focus is on the duty of these people to adapt, not on the government’s role in helping them adapt.
This change in attitude is widespread, not limited to Wilders voters, — I’ve heard plenty of supposedly liberal people saying that of course everybody who lives here should learn Dutch and that the government shouldn’t waste money offering information in any other language. I’m not sure what can be done to change this attitude again, but it would help if the government didn’t encourage it in its propaganda.
So yes, one of our little weaknesses is to watch cheery middleclass aspirational tv, anything that has either some celeb expert showing us how to improve our cooking, homes or lifestyle or some no-hopers being taught the same. In the latter category falls Virgin Cooks, a BBC Three series in which two members of the same family or household, both awful cooks incapable of boiling an egg at the start, are taught to cook properly and compete to win the big prize: to cook a three course meal for assembled family and friends in a real restaurant. A nice idea, not terribly original but entertaining fluff, if it wasn’t for the incredible number of upper middleclass douchebags the show insists on featuring.
Its not as if I didn’t expect a certain bourgeois bias in this sort of show of course, but usually some pretence is made at balance. Here however it seems as if every episode features some of the producers chums, public school boys all, for whom the show is the hardest thing they ever had to do in their lives. It all makes for a great five minute hate…
UPDATE: by which I mean that the contestants featured on the show are largely such knobs that the only enjoyment you can get out of it is by indulging in a spot of class hatred. There certainly isn’t any of the supposed educational content the trailers promised. Compare and contrast with Economy Gastronomy, another supposedly educational aspirational cooking show, again featuring reasonably posh well to do families but there’s a much greater emphasis on actually teaching something, there’s no contrived competition element and last but certainly not least the people eatured may be posh, but they have actual personalities. Virgin Cooks is lazy television, while Economy Gastronomy, unoriginal as it might be, is much better than it needed to be.