Freedom of the Press

It is so childish when the rich and the famous complain about the intrusion of the press and the need to restrain their freedom to poke and delve. On the one hand these self same people are more than happy to expose their private life to the glare of publicity and the wider public attention when they have a product they choose to flaunt. Then, having incited the general public's appetite in their doings, cry foul when the public with their whipped up interest, want even more gossip about their private doings, when they have decided they no longer want to be a public and now choose to live off camera.

There is one fundamental truth behind all this, a plain, dull, uneventful life does not generate any news worthy of any interest. Only those who claim privilege, advantage and special treatment find themselves compromised by their inflated sense of importance. As such prime candidates for debunking and taking down a notch. The last thing we need is a shackled press with restrictions on when, where and how they can seek out the truth. The famous and rich are powerful with access to to all manner of means to bar, ban or conceal uncomfortable truths. It would also be exceedingly convenient for the government if they too could call on the same restrictions to prevent the airing of news that might be embarassing to them. A free press is our only hope of lifting that armoured curtain and exposing the flagrant abusers. So an absolute no to legal statutes which restrict the press and favour concealment by the rich and famous.

Which is not to endorse an unrestained press free to rampage over all sensitivities, able to traumatise at will people  already going through tragic circumstances. There can be no justification in the hounding survivors of some dreadful tragedy, just to get a column inch of newspaper or a photo opportunity. What it comes down to is, if you find the means of getting a 'story' distasteful, lacks respect and consideration for people who rightly deserve our heart felt smypathy, then cancel your subscription, standing order or diret debit and refuse to buy copy from those who show a consistent disgrade for decent standards. We get the press we deserve and that we support by continuing to buy their shameful exploitations. 

As a last resort of course the rich and the famous can take the press to court if they publish false information or invade their privacy. Then twelve respectable men, or their surrogates, will decide on the merits of the case and hopefully award punitive damages if found to be true. This is the best route to curb press excesses. Granted not a route for the common person but where the rich can take the strain the rest can follow.


Except of course it is not a level playingfield as it has been heavily scewed by the press Barons. The papers are now run by amoral proprietors, formerly Maxwell and now Murdock, where circulation, at any price, is the mantra. Circulation equates to increased share standing. The Papers are now just a route to ever greater gilt edge status leading to ever more powerful and gargantuan media conglomerates. What price truth, compassion, integrity or even principles when the proprietor insists on circulation at any price? Which underling is able to stand ground and gainsay? See also Living the Make Believe for getting people back incharge of running companies and restoring proper social values. Without this, the usual corporate greed of profit first results in a disregard for the normal human decencies being the norm and being ingrained in the corporate psyche. Just remember that if you do not like that which is being done with your complicit approval then say so loud and clear. Refute your association with it and tell the world.

Checks and Balances

In this vision of a new egalitarian society where we set aside the old first to the post winner takes all and instead work together to ensure everyone gets a fair share there will inevitably be problems. Leaders will emerge that the crowd will follow, most will be mainstream but some will be waywards off the regular tracks. Far rather than new rules and regulations are drawn up to prohibit or restrict them we have to encourage them to flourish. Regulation leads to centralism and totalitarian control. The opposite of the desired route of collective decisions meeting local needs and desires. The mavericks are needed to push the boundaries beyond the norm of conservatism. 



With flourishing contrast and compare examples widely available and highly visible, it is unlikely that communities will be led too far off the proven middle ground before they self correct. But there will always be the exception, and from time to time an exception will emerge that is hell-bent on self destruction along with his followers. What is Society to do? Their community, their choice, at what point can or should the collective wider society step in? What if the maverick leads them deeper and deeper into financial ruin they can never ever hope to recover from? Debts only the wider society can possibly bail them out of. 


So the question is when the wider societal community is put at risk by a community who has the authority to countermand their self-selected choices and who can instigate due redemption and ensure it is extracted? In the end it is the coming together of fellow communities to say this step is a step too far, we hold you to account for your wilful choices. Just as a parent would to a wilful teenager. The teenager has to be given the chance and support to try out a new and different lifechoice but the parent has to be the ultimate safety net to say that is just too far and takes us beyond what we can countenance. Check and balances. Always looking to see what impact your actions have on your neighbours and accepting that they have the right to comment and criticise your actions when they impinge on their freedom to make choices. None places themselves where others becomes disadvantaged. Throw away the centralised rules and regulations and let goodwill and commonsense rule us.

Fair Cop?

For the record I am underwhelmed by this whole Police Commissioner vote thing. The government advertising to whip up public interest really says it all for me. It is the classic 'which slice of the pie' do you want. Stop car vandalism or stop drunk louts or stop house thefts or stop speed abuse or stop drug pushers. The answer is of course all of the above and some more as well. The problem is there just is not enough pie to go round.

What I take exception to is that the government retains tight control of the permitted expenditure and manner and methods to be employed in policing our country. The Police Commissioner is just the 'locally elected' fall guy to take the heat of accountability off from the government decisions which make it impossible to attain the public's policing aspirations. As an aside, 'locally elected' of course equals a political parties nomination with first loyalty to the Party not the electorate.

Just yet another deliberate, cynical tactic by the government to divide to rule. Make someone or organisation 'accountable' at local level to take all the blame complaints and criticisms. Whilst retaining all meaningful control back at central government, preventing them for exercising and employing new innovative and structurally different ways of skinning the impossible cat. They were devised by government so government could escape public blame for failing to adequately source and fund an effective police force.

Smoking Mirrors

The Media reflects but also modifies the society it mirrors. The Media can only survive and prosper if it hits the funny bone every time. So it always has concentrated on permutations of the gory, the tragic, the spectacular, the shameful, the lusting and the voyeuristic. It is just that nowadays the media has so refined its targets, honed in on our subconscious trigger, it can hit the G-spot of sensitivity each and every time. This is distorting our perception of what we are, how we respond and is leading us to adopt new attitudes that are not reflective us as people or a society. The media distortion of us and our view of our reflections is channelling our future reactions, the role model we hold and use to navigate life by.

When our favourite soap 'deals' with a difficult issue, what ever it is this time round, child abuse, family rape, racial hatred, partner beating, gang banging, let us just stop and pause for thought. They are not 'dealing with it' they are cashing in on horrendous social issues, using those issues to pull in viewers and push up their ratings. We must learn to rush to our social networks, by twitter or facebook or what ever and challenge all those simplistic, one dimensional characters and situations and scream out loud, this is not true. Life is much more complicated and convoluted. Life is not simple black and white with  a single start and stop point. Protest out load that their representation is selling us and all victims, so so short. The emotional nightmare of love in jeopardy, distrust and hate cannot be conveyed by one line put downs.There is no one person walking off into the sunset or taken off to jail, or some such simple resolution. Everyone that comes into contact with the events is tainted and carry the corruption onwards about their person for years into the future and on into all their furture relationships. Get that across and then you are 'dealing with it' and doing us all a service by sharing the visceral agonies of life when it goes off the rails.


The next time we surrender to a fantasy world, to escape the gritty realities, let us hang on to some semblance of logic, connection, plausibility, some portrayal of life as all of us do experience it. As we lose ourselves in impossible relationships, gut wrenching bodies torn asunder and mechanical Armageddon, just pause and reflect you are a member of the human race that has to negioate, deal and some how live in a kind of harmony with all other humans. This is not the way life is. Again use your networks and protest out loud at all improbable, implausible plots characters and situations. Beyond your experience sure but not beyond any imagaineable reality. Escape yes but keep some semblance of realism. Keep it possible to translate back to a life we actually have to live. Ridicule plots that jump from one imponderable to another and another without any rythme or reason ever offered. Suspense, oh yes but not adondonment of all logic.

Time for us shape the media we use to reflect the society we aspire to be. Do not accept being pandered to, do not accept pap, stand up and demand to be treated as an adult going about in a adult world. Challenge all that offer anything other, use your voice.

Keeping to Rules

Some rules such as we shall not kill one another, we shall not take what does not belong to us, we shall drive on the left and give way to the right are plain simple ways of organising ourselves so we can live together with the minimum of friction. We regard these self-imposed rules as universal, cast in stone, everyone in our society subscribes to them without question. Some where in the layers apon layers of these rules we adopt to guide our path through life we reach rules which are clearly old-fashioned and not to be followed any more, like chew each mouthful thirty times, like never go out unless properly dressed in coat or jacket and hat, like never to jump a queue or always make way for those weaker than you.

Then there are those other rules and regulations imposed on you by authority. You shall pay your TV licence, you will not drop litter, you cannot enter private property, if your tyre treads are less than that specified you will replace or risk a penalty imposed you. All sensible elaborations of our self-imposed rules which help keep the wheels we rely on turning with the minimum of friction. Even though we might chafe at the detail the general principles seems loud and clear.

To live within the protection of our society we all accept we have to surrender to authority. Go along with decisions from others on how or what we may or must do. It is accepted that we abdicate any right to decide the reasonableness, or appropriateness for ourselves. We will do as we are told, without question, without challenge. This is the proper price to be paid for living within a community that shields, protects and nurtures us all on a broadly equitable level.

We expect our leaders, those in authority over us, to be decisive even proactive, to stop wrongs and injustices occurring and to make restitution to those that have been transgressed against. Now that our leaders are chosen and require a minimal mandate from us, from time to time, they need to be seen to be effective. They need to flex their use of the powers granted them to do things, make things happen. What we end up with is a culture of knee jerk responses. Every incident that claims some notoriety must result in a counter reaction. Some new law, some new regulation has to be passed to demonstrate to all that our leaders are effective and in control.

So we live drowned in a plethora of control, rules, restrictions and sanctions, some good but by far away most, with the benefit of time, too hasty and failing to deal decisively with the issue. A deluge of rules often inconsequential, contradictory, irrational and almost all failing to connect with any universal sense of pragmatic fairness and propriety. A deluge precipitated by and drowned out by the media whipped chorus clamouring for our leaders to do some thing about some incident or other.

We humans are complex social animals. We each have our own individual take on the world. No one person sees the colour red the same as another. Enough of us can compare and agree that what we are looking at is red but the red as sensed by each of us might well be different. If we cannot have something as basic as seeing the colour red in common, what chance is there for any of us to agree on a rules which are fair and right for all of us. Society, life and us as a social organism are so complex that no sets of rules, no matter how voluminous, can ever even nearly prescribe our behaviour. Calling on our leaders to fix it is the ultimate cop out and doomed to failure.

As I have explored before in Saunter to Totalitarianism there is no substitute for each of us taking responsibility for what is going on around us. Not our current leader, not our government, not the local councillors, but us, the me. What am I going to do. If something is going on I do not like, it is for me individually or collectively with my neighbours or my community to sort it out. Not someone else, me. Not defer to some remote agency, but to get stuck in and decide an effective way to resolve the mutually agreed nuisance. Woe betide if you agree to restraints that come back to bite you. This is not a charter for vigilantes, after all a child of yours might be a culprit or victim. No just people using common sense and pragmatism to resolve issues that are pertinent to them. Learn from their mistakes and refine their conclusions next time round. So what if our nation becomes diffuse with different codes of conduct, dependant on where you are. So what if you feel out of place moving around within an new strange community. Perhaps this is right and proper that you pay attention to wishes of the community you now find yourself within. Maybe there really should be several speeds in our nation between city to town to village. Perhaps differentiation is actually the missing ingredient of what makes a community and in the end ties us together as a homogeneous society.

Hysteria

How many accusation's does it take to prove guilt, ten, or hundreds or thousands? Point is an accusation is just that, an accusation. Sure a hundred tend to indicate that something was not right and thousands mean that there is certainly something wrong that has taken place. So the media storm surrounding the Jimmy Saville exposure sounds as if all the accusations have been proven. He is guilty as charged, a pervert, a child abuser. It is unfortunate that he is not now with us to defend his name. 

To date the accusations are just that and have yet to be examined as to their reasonableness. Before jumping in on the witch-hunt let us all just pause for a moment. Accusations come in all shades from the spurious, to the 'me to', to retrospective remorse, to the full on corroborated, clear, without a shade of doubt. Before vilifying a reputations of many decades standing it is worth pausing to check how the accusations stand up by applying all the usual standards we use when considering any serious accusation. Is there corroboration, is there a sequence and patten, what degree of abuse from the inappropriate, to the over familiar to the outright violation, was it consensual (at the time) and how plausible are the claims in all the circumstances?

What I think of the man, Jimmy Saville, does not come into it but neither do I hold a candle for Saint Jimmy. I certainly do not want to minimise the distress and years of guilt that lay behind these accusations. What we do all need and want is the full extent of the truth to come out, as best it can, after all these years. Was Saville a solo operator or did he work within a circle of similar predators? Did his fame endorse an over-familiar attitude to the young people his work put him into close contact with? Were (and are) the codes of conduct for 'famous' TV personalities robust enough to deal with the mania of groupies throwing themselves at or worse making themselves available to their target idol? How can a solo operator, or a small close knit group, operate with immunity for such a long period in such a large organisation that I suspect is riddled with gossip and innuendo.  Who else knew and were complicit in his exploitation over so many years?

There is a lot more behind this story than just the vilification of a once idol to millions. Let us avoid the trap of using hindsight judgements of our sophisticated age with regard to minors, sexuality and abuse and not use them in place of the mores of twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. Be sure, place guilt where it is found, but first let us be a little circumspect with all these accusations until we better understand their strength and where they lead us.

Safety Insanity

There is a prevailing obsession about speed and how speed kills. So obsessed are we that the plans to make a 20mph speed limit widespread across Towns are being welcomed as enlightened, a worthy regard for the sanctity of life. These plans are just bonkers, pure lunacy out of disconnected thoughts. Speed cannot kill. I have sped on many legal occasions and I have never ever killed. Policemen are authorised to speed excessively but their extreme speed kills no one. No it is driving errors, inattention, poor judgement, misunderstanding of reactions times, road dynamics and even pure mischance that kills. Sure speed does aggravate any outcome but is not the cause. 

None of us want to endorse behaviour that might result in the death of a innocent bystander. Being born, getting out of bed each day and going about the world is high risk behaviour that might result in your death. We know life is risky. We take a calm and measured view of the risks. What are the chances of misadventure today? Negligible. Will the bolt come out of the blue? Probably not. We weigh the chances of risk against our need to get on with life whilst taking sensible precautions to minimise the inherent risk out there.

The society we live in depends on our means to get about quickly and efficiently from one part to another. We live in cosy suburbs, away from the bustle of the city centre, because we can travel easily. We live out in the countryside away from the smells and sounds of the busy towns because we enjoy the peace and quiet yet can just as easily pop into town to go to school, or shop or work. The convenience of our world is based on being able to smoothly, easily and tirelessly move about with tolerable time expenditure. We choose not to spend hours on the business of moving from one part to another at the costs of work or family life.

In an ideal world, the world dreamed of by the planners way back in the 1960's, it was simple, traffic separation was the solution. Keep cars and people apart and problem solved. Except of course life was not that simple and has only got worse since those heady days of idealism. Just consider the range of legitimate road users that must be allowed for, mobility scooters, pedestrians ranging from the fit to the slow, roller blades, racing bikes, mountain bikes, buggies, motor bikes, horses with or without carts, cars, stretched limos, buses, trams, van lorries and transporters in all shape and sizes. Each of these legitimate forms of travelling on our roads has it own unique, widely different speed, manoeuvrability, reaction time and ability to read other users intentions. The simplistic vision just does not work, we cannot possibly separate out all those disparate road users. We have to accept they are all mixed together.

So the solution then is a 20mph widespread speed limit. Slow everything and everyone down to the slowest common denominator. In a crowded city with congested roads, crowded pavements and a 24/7 society it is just reflecting reality, that is as high as the hopes go. This nation does not comprise wall to wall cities. It has regions of great density and still has areas of very low density with the bulk of the land with a rich mixture inbetween. Many many town and villages have uncongested roads and pavements that scarcely ever see a pedestrian and a night time where the roads are deserted. So the odd road user on such roads as these should be restricted to just 20mph! This is tunnel thinking just as blinkered as the simplistic vision of traffic segregation. Our society and our lives are structured around being able to move easily and swiftly between locations.

Once apon a time, pedestrians hovered at the edge of the road calculating when there was a sufficient gap between moving cars to make it safely across the road. How times have changed. Nowadays pedestrian walk out as it pleased them across the road in the expectation that all vehicles will fully anticipate their intentions and make passage for them. Neither of course of behaviour is appropriate. What is relevant is that each and every road user has to have regard for the needs of any other road user and to be patient and considerate to those other users. In a mixed society we have to allow for and cut slack for all those others we must by necessity jostle with.

If only 20mph speed limits were definitive. Rearrange society and life based on 20mph and there would be no road casualties, ever. Would not happen, in congested streets, in adverse weather conditions or the unexpected bolt of of the blue, life would still be lost. And we as a society would have sacrificed all the benefits of being able to move about freely, for nothing. The viable speed is totally dependant of the conditions at that time, not some generalised norm. No, lives are lost by errors made by road users. We each have to take responsibility for our own decisions. There can be no hiding behind rules and regulations. We each must judge the time, the place and the conditions as and when we make those judgements. It is our decision alone, each and every time. Failing to anticipate an erratic driver as equally as failing to see a juvenile about to make a rash choice. We each have to assess all the variables like time, weather, visibility, congestion, probable movements as we make our navigational judgements. Information about other users and their limitations, information about causes of accidents, information about black spots that have above average accidents, information fed to a society that fully accepts it is each persons own responsibility for the safety of all other members of their society, that would all help. Coupled with a mature acceptance of the inherent risks in life with an acceptance of their probabilities. Each road user has to be aware and take responsibility for their actions and the affect on all other road users. No blanket traffic restriction is going to better that.