News or Propaganda??  

Posted on by Opher

 

Who can you trust? The answer appears to be nobody.

 

Many people have stopped listening to mainstream news programmes on TV because they believe they are thinly disguised propaganda. They are probably right.

 

I lost all faith in the BBC when they deliberately inverted the sequence of events at the Orgreave Coke Plant in the Miner’s Strike. It was a deliberate editorial policy that was intended to misrepresent what had happened and place a pro-government slant on events. It was a lie.

 

Sky is even worse and as for Fox and most American news networks – they are blatantly biased.

 

Newspapers all have a distinct bias and slant the news according to their editorial policy. Most of the tabloids are atrocious, lying establishment scandal sheets. Some of the rubbish they come out with is so blatant propaganda that Goebbels would be ashamed. Even the more serious ones have their establishment bias – they are owned by wealthy people who want to express their own views.

 

The whole news machine drip-feeds the messages that the establishment want the population to believe. Seemingly Socialism cannot possibly work, Corbyn is a lunatic, Russia is the enemy, Assad is a monster, ISIS was not set up and financed by the West, North Korea is a monstrous place, Iran is behind much of the terrorism in the Middle East and wants a nuclear bomb to blow up Israel. But who knows?

 

What are the messages that they want us to believe?

 

Well one thing is certain – the system is set up and works for the top 1% at the expense of everybody else and they mean to continue this grossly unequal system. They want us to buy into the narrative they put out through the TV and newspapers. The establishment owns the media and controls what we think. A lot of what happens around the world is a profit-making project for rich people.

 

So many people put their faith in other sites on the web which they believe provide an unbiased view of world events.

 

I do not believe that those sources are unbiased. I believe they too have a bias and an agenda. They are as much propaganda as anything else. We are attracted to the views which reflect our own and reject all others. There is great danger in that.

 

So where do we turn to?

 

I do not think there is anywhere. What is best policy is to access a broad selection, weigh it up, think and keep an open mind – above all THINK and don’t buy into any one view.

New age of censorship? Is this a real dilemma? The destruction of art!

Posted on by Opher

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I was made to think quite hard yesterday when I was reading an article about the 72 year old artist Graham Overden.

Overden is a quality artist who has work displayed in the Tate and other galleries. I am unfamiliar with his art but for such galleries to display it suggests that it has merit. He specialised in painting of young prepubescent girls and rural landscapes.

Overden obviously had an attraction to young girls. He was prosecuted and found guilty of six counts of indecency and one of indecent assault for which he received a 27 month jail sentence.

A judge has now decided to go through Overton’s art work, including his collections of work by other artists, including Sir Peter Blake, and deciding whether they are obscene. If they are considered indecent they will be destroyed.

I found this disturbing. This seems to me to be a return to State censorship that has repercussions for everybody.

I do not condone what Graham Overden has done. Young girls should not be sexualised or used as sex objects, let alone physically abused.

I suspect that the young girls who posed for Overden were doing so with their parents’ consent?

This threw me into a number of thoughts:

Are we entering a new age of prudery?

Should we have censorship of art?

Should art be destroyed?

Are some subjects, such as young girls, now off limits for photography and art?

Could some of the photographs I innocently took of my children, who seemed to have a predilection to throw off their clothes, now have to be viewed in a different light?

Is obscenity in the eye of the beholder? Can a photograph/painting of a young girl be viewed as purely aesthetic by one person and as sexual by another?

Do we have to reassess everything a person has done in their life if they are a convicted paedophile? And does that negate all their output?

I had to think hard about some of these issues. This is what I concluded:

I think paedophiles have an illness. If they have an unhealthy sexual attraction to young girls or boys they should suppress it and seek treatment. If they abuse young children they should be punished and be treated.

I do not think any art should be subject to censorship unless it incites violence or hate crime.

We do seem to be entering a new age of prudery on sexual matters. I think all matters of sex between consenting adults, of whatever gender, in private, is purely up to them.

I do not believe a judge has any right to destroy works of art. That smacks of the Nazis burning books.

I do not believe anyone can see in the mind of another. If they view something as sexual in their heads then that is up to them. The Victorians covered legs on pianos because they found them sexual, while round the corner they had brothels.

If some people find a work of art sexual that is up to them.

It is only natural to reassess the work of an ‘artist’ if they are convicted of a crime. But it does not invalidate their work.

Naked people are not sexual. They are aesthetic, including children.

Sex is not obscene. Abuse of underage children is obscene.

Artistic freedom should be sacrosanct.

Now those are my views. What do you think?