The Murdoch Conspiracy
Posted: April 28, 2012 Filed under: General Musings | Tags: climate change, Leveson, Murdoch, Murdoch Conspiracy, NewsLtd 1 Comment »
Conspire is about conspiracies. If you wanted to count them, you could find at least ten, if not more, intermingled throughout the plot. All are related to politics, the press and power. Some are sinister, some are not. The trick is knowing the difference.
I’m interested in conspiracies. I’m interested in the way that open, democratic and supposedly educated societies are very easily led into thinking they are making decisions through their own self interest, but are actually being ‘brain washed’ by vested interests. My particular fascination of late is the interrelationship between vested interests that fight action against climate change, and activists like myself who try to expose these self interests and enlighten the public that they are being conned. This is not an easy task.This week Rupert Murdoch has been answering questions at the Leveson Enquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the UK press. It has been clear to me from a very young age that the Murdoch press operates in some ways as a large scale conspiracy. This might make me sound like a paranoid internet troll. But think about it for a second. A conspiracy is defined as:
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
The Murdoch press, in the UK, USA and Australia, is chronically addicted to performing illegal, wrongful, or subversive acts. The Leveson Enquiry is showing this in spades. Murdoch has built his media empire to influence the political opinion of the masses, in order to impose his will (or ideology if you like) and get what he wants (more power and more money). We should not take this for granted, yet somehow we do. It was not until his illegal activities were uncovered, in the form of phone hacking, that we paid any close scrutiny to his overall behaviour and influence on our society.
I’ll give you an example of subversive activity that is being played out in Sydney, through Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. Most people expect a newspaper to present the news. Amazing that. They expect the news to be a balanced appraisal of the facts. They just want to know what is going on in the world, and expect journalists to be ethically prepared to report facts in an unbiased way. Unfortunately, only a very small percentage of our community thinks about whether this is what they get. Most read the news, believe what they read and never question the motives or ‘vested interests’ of those people producing that news.
In this report called ‘A Skeptical Climate: Media coverage of climate change in Australia’, the authors, who are academics in the field of journalism, found that between February to July 2011, the percentage of stories negative towards the Carbon Price policy compared to stories positive to the policy in the Daily Telegraph was 89%. Balance would be 50%. It’s not hard to see from facts like this that the Murdoch press is waging a war against action to reduce the catastrophic effects of climate change. If you don’t notice this empirically for yourself, then you are being had. Tied to this is their war against climate science, which is equally as blatant for those who care to look.
Under anyone’s definition, the Murdoch press perpetrates conspiracy. Climate change is one area. There are many others. When Murdoch decides who he wants to win an election, they invariably do win. This influence is undemocratic, it’s damaging and until our society wakes up and enlightens itself to the conspiracy, it will go on unchecked into the future.
Astroturf Reviewers on Amazon
Posted: April 15, 2012 Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Amazon Reviews, astroturf movement, Fake Reviews, Taki Oldham, tea party 3 Comments »
Long-time followers of this blog will have read before my comments on the importance of getting feedback on your manuscript, from people other than your family and friends. I have had my manuscript, Conspire, read by a beta reader, and Times of Trouble was reviewed by a manuscript assessor. Feedback is important when you’re in the final stages of completing a novel, as it gives you a chance to improve your work. Post-publishing, reader feedback takes on a new importance – as reviews of your work are a key source of publicity and promotion, especially for e-books on Amazon.
Times of Trouble has been available online for a couple of years, and it has received some great reviews on Goodreads and Smashwords. It is quite common for new authors to get their family and friends to publically review their work. I’m not that concerned with this, as even if these reviews are completely biased, in most cases the family member or friends would have read the book and have every right to provide their review online. What really concerns me, however, is that there are nasty people in the world, who spend time giving books bad reviews because they don’t agree with their central themes. These are people who haven’t read the book and their interest in writing negative reviews is to further their political or religious agenda, to undermine their competition or to just be a horrible person.
Yesterday I watched this documentary, which is a bit out of date now, but still fascinating. It’s called The Billionaires’ Tea Party, and is written, directed and presented by Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham. Taki did a tour of the US to find out more about the Tea Party movement and where it originated. As part of this research, he attended training sessions for the Tea Party activist movement. Suffice to say he soon discovered this was not, in fact, a grass roots movement, and was actually funded by the likes of billionaire industrialist, David Koch, who use fake grass roots support – astroturfing – to further their own self-interests (to get even richer than they are already). The propensity for large groups of Americans to fall for this scheme is astounding. Going back to the topic of this post, there was one scene in the film that horrified me. Taki was in a workshop run by Austin James, from American Majority, where the group were learning how to become ‘digital activists’. James described digital activism as follows:
“We identify the medium, we learn the medium, we manipulate the medium. It was the printing presses then, it’s the internet now. That’s where we influence the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. The Tea Party’s got us running up the hills, the American Majority is trying to give you the tools, the muscats.”
What he said next made my blood boil:
“So, here’s what I do. I get on Amazon, I type in liberal books, I go through and I say one star, one star, one star, one star {audience laughs}. The flip side is go to conservative, libertarian, whatever, find their products and give them five stars. So literally 80% of the books I put a star on, I don’t read. So that’s how it works, ok.”
He then goes on to say that he spends about 30 minutes a day giving bad ratings or reviews to liberal books and movies. Work he has never seen or read. This is completely unethical. It makes me really sad and angry to think that right wing ‘activists’ believe this is acceptable behaviour. Not one person in the group showed any sign or outrage. They were, instead, laughing like it was oh so very amusing. James’s message was that you win over the hearts and minds of your side of politics, by denigrating and lying about anything that doesn’t suit your opinions. (Think climate change).
Times of Trouble is not a political story, so wouldn’t be vulnerable to this sort of fakery. But Conspire is extremely vulnerable. It’s a progressive thriller, whose villains are based on the very people who fund the Tea Party. It’s disappointing to think that it might get bad reviews from people who have never even read it. It’s also disappointing that people who join movements like the Tea Party are so willing to be taught how to ‘manipulate’ their audience, by being deceptive and straight out lying.
The Hunger Games – 1% vs 99%
Posted: April 6, 2012 Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Capitalism, Hunger Games Capitalism, Hunger Games Socialism, The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games Metaphor Leave a comment »
This week I saw The Hunger Games movie. I haven’t read Suzanne Collins’s books and hadn’t really heard much about the movie, apart from the fact that it was incredibly popular, as are the books.
The movie cinema was full of teenagers, unsurprisingly since the movie is about teenagers killing each other for blood sport. It wasn’t until the poor, working class Hunger Games contestants arrived in the capital to compete against each other (kill each other) that I cottoned onto the underlying theme of the story. It’s quite blatantly a story about what happens when social democracy fails. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, this observation isn’t giving the plot away. Very early on in the story, you learn that the nation of Panem (presumably a futuristic America) has been divided into 12 districts. This was done after the government squashed an uprising by the workers against oppression (think Occupy Wall Street), 74 years earlier. Since the rebellion failed, Panem has become an even more oppressive totalitarian state, and the inhabitants of the 12 districts live in poverty, without electricity, running water and in clothing that looks like it’s been around since the early 1900s. Each district has a different blue collar industry, such as coal miners, luxury goods manufacturers, stone and carving, fishing, electronics and transportation. The Hunger Games competition is run by the government, partly to entertain the rich people who live in the capital (called Capitol), and partly to punish to workers who were involved in the rebellion. A boy and a girl in each district are offered up for the games like some sort of sacrifice to the gods, or the capitalist pigs in this case.
When the contestants get to the capital, it is like a different world from the districts they have come from. The buildings are futuristic, but also have a very fascist Germany feel to them. It might have just been me, but I felt like a Nuremburg Rally was about to begin. The people in the capital are blatantly rich – their clothing is ultramodern and very formal, like what you would call ‘couture’. They love watching the Hunger Games for entertainment and they all share a similar slimy, smug, joker-like grin. Like the cat that ate the canary. I’m not going to give away what happens in the movie, but suffice to say that I was 100% convinced that the story was a metaphor for the way in which the rich and powerful in our society (think the 1%), control and limit the power of the working class, for their own benefit.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and I look forward to seeing the next two, and will likely read the remaining books. When I got home from the movie, I was interested to see if other people shared my view that the metaphor for the movie was a futuristic state where the 99% have failed in their uprising, and the 1% have extended the gap between their wealth and everyone else, to a point where the two groups are worlds apart.
To my surprise, there wasn’t a huge amount written about this aspect of the plot, either in mainstream media or the blogosphere. There were some notable articles, such as this one in the Huffington Post, titled The Hunger Games and the Death of Winner-Take-All Capitalism. A lot has also been written about Collins’s comments that she came up with the plot after flicking between a reality television show and a news story about the Iraq war. I eventually found this YouTube clip where she names two of the books that have influenced her writing as Lord of the Flies and 1984. Collins also makes the point that she doesn’t use her writing to preach, but she’s happy for people to draw their own conclusions about what the book might mean. She then goes onto say that people might take different things away from her story, such as thinking about children who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. She then says it might prompt you to “think about choices your government, past or present, or other governments around the world, make.”
Clearly I see the world thought a very biased prism, and the political undertones of the plot screamed at me. The millions of teenagers around the world watching this movie are likely more interested in the love scenes. But I think the underlying themes will strike a chord for some people. Surely China is going to censor this movie! The ironic line that keeps ringing in my head when I think about The Hunger Games is one that is said many times to the contestants… “Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds always be in your favour”.
Class Warfare – Australia’s Untouchables
Posted: April 1, 2012 Filed under: General Musings 1 Comment »
Yesterday I saw the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I give it five stars. This is not why I’m mentioning it in my post. One small part of the film got me thinking about the Australian class system, and why it is the way it is.
In the movie, there is a servant working at the hotel who is from the Indian ‘untouchable’ caste. I’ve always hated hearing about the caste system in India. Such entrenched disadvantage and discrimination is terrible for a society. That train of thought got me thinking about whether Australia has an ‘untouchable’ class, and, influenced by this article I read in the SMH by Peter Hartcher, I’ve decided we do. But unlike India, where the untouchables are poverty stricken, Australia’s ‘untouchable’ class is the richest people in our society. It seems to be that this sub-set can do or say anything they like, and remain completely untouched by criticism or scrutiny.
As an example, apparently Clive Palmer, mining billionaire, can get away with saying that the Greens are financed by the CIA in a conspiracy to bring down the Australian coal industry (WTF!), and can then days later joke that he only said it to help the LNP’s chances in the QLD election that weekend. A party to which he has donated millions of dollars. Australian journalists report this all as if Palmer has every right to ‘play’ the media and the public in this way. Supposedly because he’s rich. So why does his wealth make him so untouchable? Why can he say and do anything he likes and the media will report it as genuine news, when anyone with half a brain can see that his only motivation in life is to further his own wealth? He’s not fighting against the carbon tax because he doesn’t believe in climate change. He just doesn’t give a shit that the climate is changing. As long as his wealth is growing, his needs are met. In Hartcher’s article, Greens leader Bob Brown was quoted as saying: “This (Clive Palmer’s comments) has generated more publicity in Queensland than the whole Greens campaign. Our campaign launch had zero coverage.” This situation is completely beyond ridiculous. Every time Palmer, or fellow mining billionaires, Rinehart and Twiggy open their mouths to let out a belch of tax hating, wealth loving, greed promoting, self-interested gibberish, the media report it as fact and such very important fact at that. Wake up people!
The Australian public on the whole have a very strange attitude towards class. I assume it’s similar in most western societies, where a large proportion of the middle class would like to think of themselves as upper class, and do their best to espouse this belonging by being derogatory about the working class. I see this attitude a lot through two of my passions – football and politics. I’m a passionate supporter of my football club, Port Adelaide. My club has a long and proud history of success (even if we are going though a bit of a dry period at the moment). I support this club because my grandpa did, and my dad and now my whole family. The club has working class roots and these days has a huge mixture of supporters from the very poor, to the very rich. Having been back in Adelaide for a couple of months now, I am reacquainting myself with the way that many in this city use snobbery about Port Adelaide to make themselves feel like they belong to a higher class. Basically, by being derogatory and rude about Port supporters, in most cases to our faces, they are making themselves feel like they must have achieved some sort of status in the world, as only those who aren’t working class could be in a position to degrade the ‘bogan ugg boot wearers’ from Port Adelaide. If I didn’t find it so offensive and downright annoying, it would be amusing. Similarly, I believe many people in this country vote for the Liberal party because they believe that this signals that they are not working class, and have thus achieved something in life. Little do they care, or try to understand, that the Liberal party doesn’t exist to support middle class Australia.
Perhaps the division between left and right wing in this country is much simpler than I am making it out. A study by Canadian academics has shown that “right-wing ideology forms a ‘pathway’ for people with low reasoning ability to become prejudiced against groups such as other races and gay people”. In my experience, you can add class to this list as well. All you people out there with low reasoning ability, who think Clive Palmer is untouchable because he is rich, and think that by being derogatory about Port Adelaide you are embedding yourself in a higher class, perhaps it’s time you had a think about what is motivating your prejudice.
