We can’t let this go on: Aylan Kurdi

A few days ago when I signed this petition the number of signatures was at less than 10,000 – as you see, the signatories have blasted past 120,000, and if David Cameron upholds his own policy on petitions (as he failed to do in the past over the NHS) Parliament now needs to consider this for a debate.

Aylan Kurdi is the small child who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and whose photograph, dead, is on so many newspaper front pages today. Aylan was three: Galip, his five-year-old brother, and Rihan, his mother, also drowned. The only survivor was his father, Abdullah.

I hope Abdullah’s permission was obtained by each of the newspapers who chose to highlight the refugee crisis with the body of his dead child. I cannot imagine, I cannot begin to conceive, the hell of suffering and loss Abdullah Kurdi is in, to lose your children and your partner in a desperate effort to escape with them to a safe refuge.

We can’t let this go on: Rukhsan Muhammed

On 29th November 2013, a photojournalist on a rescue boat in the Aegean Sea took the photograph below of Rukhsan Muhammed struggling to keep her child Mirwan alive. Later, the photographer sold the image to Anadolu Agency (a state-run press agency in Turkey) which licenced it to Getty Images:

Rukhsan Muhammed, one of the passengers of the boat carrying Syrian refugees to Greek Islands fights for her life after the boat sinks at Aegean Sea near the coastal city of Balikesir, in Turkey on November 29, 2013. Rukhsan Muhammed told a new aspect of her family’s dramatic escape, to Turkish authorities during her appearance in court this week. She explained that following the accident she used her suitcase as a means of life preserver to keep her 1,5 years-old child, Mirwan Muhammed, from drowning. But despite of all her efforts her son fell off the suitcase and got lost amongst the waves.

Who is Denis O’Brien?

This time last week, I didn’t know anything about Denis O’Brien.

Here’s what I learned in the past seven days.

Denis O’Brien was born in County Cork, Ireland, on 19th April 1958. He is probably Ireland’s richest native-born citizen. He owns Communicorp, a media company launched in 1989 that now owns 42 radio stations in 10 European countries (the UK, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Ukraine), including all Irish radio stations not run by the state broadcaster RTÉ.

The UK radio stations owned by Communicorp are: Capital South Wales, Capital Scotland, Heart North Wales, Heart Yorkshire, Real Radio XS, Smooth East Midlands, Smooth North East, Smooth North West.

He also has a controlling interest in the Independent News & Media group, which, in Ireland, comprises the Irish Independent, the Irish Daily Star, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday World, the Evening Herald in Dublin and several regional newspapers: and, in Northern Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph Group. He also owns telecoms provider Digicel, which is based in Jamaica, incorporated in Bermuda, has about 13 million wireless users, and operates across the Caribbean, Central America and Oceania. A listing of companies owned by Denis O’Brien can be found at OpenCorporates.

Abuse online

Men get attacked for their opinions and their actions.

Women get attacked for their opinions and their actions, and also get attacked for being women.

Leo Traynor was attacked by the son of a friend, viciously and horrifyingly threatened over a long time: when he met The Troll face to face, the 17-year-old boy – confronted with the human reality of what he had done – burst into tears and could only say

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry. It was like a game thing.”

Lindy West was and is repeatedly attacked by many men who are bitterly affronted that a woman should question whether rape jokes mocking rape victims are either funny or acceptable. One troll decided to set up a Twitter account in the name of Lindy’s father, who had recently died, to tweet his insults and threats: he used a photo of her father as his Twitter icon. Lindy didn’t block-and-report (both Twitter and Facebook are notorious for regarding verbal harassment as not a violation of their “community standards”): she wrote about how that attack made her feel on Jezebel. (Her troll emailed her the next day to let her know that it had only just occurred to him that she was a human being with feelings, that he was sorry, and that he was quitting.)

There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit. I am attacking someone who never harmed me in any way. And for no reason whatsoever.

One of the things Lindy West said:

One of the pillars of conventional wisdom about internet trolling is that internet trolling just happens. You hear this all the time, from even the most progressive allies: Oh, well, it’s the internet. There are trolls. Trolls troll the internet. Rape threats are like oxygen. Whatareyagonnadooooo. So, I’m just supposed to accept that psychological abuse is built into my job and I’m some thin-skinned rube if I complain about it? Easy for you to say, Señor Rando. Not only is that framework supremely unsatisfying for me personally, I’d go so far as to say that it’s a dangerous and patently false myth. Internet trolling does not “just happen.” It is not some mysterious, ambient inevitability that affects all internet users indiscriminately.

Internet trolling is a force with a political agenda.

When Prime Ministers Make Promises

On 14th April 2011, David Cameron made a promise:

So, taking all this into account, I believe controlling immigration and bringing it down is of vital importance to the future of our country.
That’s why during the election campaign, Conservatives made a clear commitment to the British people…
…that we would aim to reduce net migration to the levels we saw in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now we are in government, we are on track to meet that aim.

Nick Clegg thinks that the problem with that promise was that it was undeliverable:

“I said to David Cameron he shouldn’t make the commitment because it was inevitable he was going to break it because you can’t control the net figure… We said we were not going to do it as a coalition government. It is very embarrassing for the Conservatives. They made a huge amount of fanfare about it and they were warned by me and others ‘Don’t do this, it doesn’t make any sense’.”

(If you are a white UK-born LibDem supporter, however, the Conservative/LibDem government responsible for this is “The best UK Government of my lifetime”, so there.)

Labour think they’ll pick up votes by pledging to have more controls on immigration.

(Though in fairness, Diane Abbott condemned the mug as “shameful” and the pledge as a problem, for which she was predictably condemned in the not-at-all racist Spectator. (There’s just something about Diane Abbott they don’t like.))

Cameron, Clarkson, and gross misconduct

Hitting one of your co-workers at work is gross misconduct; an offense for which you can be summarily dismissed.

If it is true that Jeremy Clarkson hit a Top Gear producer, then the BBC have no option but to sack him. (Clarkson was, reputedly, on his final-final warning, though presumably the BBC were thinking more of something along the lines of a “joke” about sexual abuse at the BBC, such as Clarkson tweeted in May 2013, or some other racist or sexist jibe on the show, rather than a clear-cut case of gross misconduct.)

Two eyewitnesses are reported in the Mirror to have told journalists that Jeremy Clarkson’s bad temper was kicked off by his getting back to the hotel and discovering that as the kitchens were closed, he would get only only “soup and a cold meat platter” instead of the steak dinner he’d wanted.

An onlooker said the star, who had been drinking rosé wine, launched into an expletive-filled tirade using “every bad word you could think of” and ranted “so there’s no food” when he was told he would not get the steak he wanted.

Free condoms and homeopathy

Conor Pope of LabourList wants to believe the Green Party are not a threat to Labour’s chances of winning in May and are not a major party.

In fact, Conor Pope thinks the Green Party are a joke and Labour shouldn’t be frightened of saying so.

He writes of the Green surge:

The latest Green surge, I would wager, comes largely from ex-Liberal Democrat voters. They are another party whose supporters are seen by too many within Labour as faithful who have lost their way, rather than actual opposition. A huge number, of course, ‘came home’ to Labour following Nick Clegg’s foray into the rose garden with Cameron five years ago. We have come to lose them because we have already treated them as though they are our voters by some divine right.

There are certainly left-wing voters who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 who will never be voting LibDem again – they voted Liberal Democrat because they believed this was a party that would push Labour from the left, not a party that would give us a Tory government most of us never voted for. Those left-wing voters were already lost to Labour because of the Iraq war, because of hospital PFI, because of tuition fees – for any of many reasons for rejecting Labour on the left. I think Conor Pope is right to say that Labour assumed that it could simply scoop up those votes as the only left-wing party remaining, without needing to change any of the right-wing policies which drove left-wing voters away from Labour.

I was a fairly consistent Labour voter: I plan to vote Green in May 2015. I am not alone.

Conservative Public Relations

Somehow it seems typical of The Sun that they would employ as head of PR a man who thinks it’s amusing to tweet soft porn at women journalists and politicians, and who has no idea how to say “I’m sorry, I was wrong to do that” when called on it.

“No More Page 3” is one of many feminist campaigns I neither oppose nor particularly support: I agree with people who have said there are more important issues (but, no one says you have to always campaign for the most important issues) and I agree with people who point out that the rest of The Sun is problematic too. But, always, the existence of Page 3 is an anti-feminist absurdity and I would be glad to see no more of it. The campaign against Page 3 is exactly the kind of campaign that enrages anti-feminist men, and so is a good thing.

Also, “Page 3” is easy-access material for the kind of man – or boy – who thinks it’s amusing to humiliate girls. It’s bully-fodder.

The Times announced earlier in the week that The Sun intended to drop Page 3. The Times being The Sun’s stablemate, both owned by Rupert Murdoch and operating out of the same building, this was regarded as a reasonably solid news even though The Sun’s response was “no comment”.

Leaders debates: BBC bias

The BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 will be holding three four debates before the general election in May 2015.

One of them, reasonably enough, will be a head-to-head between David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

Another two, also reasonably enough, will include besides the Conservative Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour Party (still predicted to be Labour Prime Minister by a narrow majority), the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the LibDems, Nick Clegg – even though the LibDems appear likely to see their 57 seats drop to 18 after 7th May 2015.

The fourth debate will privilege a minor party above the SNP and the Greens: Nigel Farage, who is not an MP, whose party is still predicted to have no MPs after 7th May 2015, will get to take part in a four-way debate with Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg.

Cheese and whine

The Official Twitter account of Président Cheese is @PresidentCheese. They’ve been on Twitter since 21st March, and in two months they’ve managed to acquire 125 followers.

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