Monthly Archives: May 2007

Something for the Weekend

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on May 18, 2007 – 11:27 am
Filed under Everything Else, Media (Films & Music), Politics, Sci/Tech

A few links to keep you online this weekend:

  • http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html

    We all (should) know that the majority of the world’s media holdings are owned by a handful of media conglomerates, but this is a novel way to display the information.

    Albeit slightly outdated (1991), Mark Crispin Miller’s article and the corresponding visual shows vividly how in the early 1990s America’s media was majority owned by just ten corporations. However, in the 16 years since its publication not much has changed - but now 90% of America’s media is owned by not ten, but just six of these corporations that have grown tremendously: Disney, Viacom, AOL Time Warner, News Corp., Bertelsmann AG and General Electric.

    Wonder why this matters? Read about the Monsanto bovine growth hormone controversy to get an idea.

Enjoy!

Philosophy… Quick, Now!

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on May 16, 2007 – 3:55 pm
Filed under Books, Politics, Sci/Tech

Philosophy books, by their very nature, are for the long term; written to make us think about certain aspects of life on a more-than-temporary basis and to - hopefully - get us to carry their ideas with us. However, particularly with the older texts, they’re also ridiculously long and nigh-on impossible to understand due to a poor Greek translation!

[Enter stage left: Glyn Hughes] “That’s where ‘Squashed Philosophers’ comes in! The books which defined the way The West thinks now… in their own words… but condensed and abridged into something like readable.”

I apologise for the dramatics, but Glyn Hughes’ website, Squashed Philosophers, is one of the best websites I’ve Stumble’d Upon in quite a while, and the idea behind it is so simple: take a long, complex text and create a new, condensed version of it without sacrificing the original words or important facts and/or ideas.

With 51 books so far and the 52nd in progress, I was most impressed to see that the philosophers chosen for the ‘project’ also include non-classical figures in western culture and thinking. For example, Freud’s ‘Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis’ is present, condensed to 6,847 words (13%) and has an estimated reading time of 27 minutes. Included in this is a further piece of text (also present in all the other abridged texts): ‘The Very Squashed Version’, weighing in at 466 words!

Others of note include Alan Turing (the ‘Father of Computing’), Hitler, Darwin and the usual suspects such as Aristotle, Sartre and Descartes.

That’s not all though… on the same website Squashed Writers is a list of (currently) 246 books - fiction and non-fiction - that have had the ‘Squashed’ treatment. In Glyn’s own words:

“All the books you think you ought to have read… in their own words… but magically Squashed into half-hour short stories.”

Magic or not, that’s not the issue - what we have here is a great selection of abridged texts that are the perfect accompaniments to the original to aid understanding or, if you really don’t have much time, as a replacement! I just wish they were released under a Creative Commons license (maybe ‘by-nc-nd‘ or ‘by-nc-sa‘ - non-commercial as the book is sold on Amazon).

[Exit stage right: Glyn Hughes]

[Standing ovation]

Scientology, John Sweeney, and the Panorama Documentary

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on May 15, 2007 – 3:55 pm
Filed under Media (Films & Music), Politics

Reporters shouldn’t lose their temper when dealing with even the most obnoxious and impossible people. This is a simple unwritten rule of journalism because by displaying your anger you can make others feel that you’re too emotionally involved in a story to report it in an unbiased manner.

For those that watched John Sweeney’s Panorama exposé on the ‘Church’ of Scientology yesterday, you’ll know what I’m referring to.

Sweeney is an exemplary investigative journalist and has previously won awards for his reports on human rights abuses in Chechnya, Kosovo and Algeria, and for his investigations into miscarriages of justice against mothers of cot death victims. His most recent subject? Scientology.

In his flagship role as a BBC Panorama journalist, he wanted to see if Scientology’s past as a (and I quote) “brainwashing cult” has persisted since the claims emerged in the mid-80s. The resulting documentary (along with a whole host of other recent Panorama documentaries) is available online for you to view at the main Panorama website. It’s fascinating - and scary - viewing, and I wholly recommend it to anyone looking to fill a 30 minute slot in their schedule with some interesting viewing.

Watching the ‘Church’ of Scientology employ investigators and henchmen to follow Sweeney and his team around is, in Sweeney’s own words, “creepy”, and seeing the Scientologists also constantly film the crew in order to create a ‘counter-documentary’ on the Panorama team - forcing them to discuss private matters in bathrooms - is also pretty, well, wierd! This documentary has now been released by the ‘Church’ of Scientology on its own exposé website and (somewhere) on YouTube, as well as DVD copies being sent to 100,000 MPs and ‘notable individuals’ around the UK.

The reason for both documentaries getting so much media exposure isn’t because either are particularly well produced investigative documentaries, but because of an outburst by John Sweeney aimed towards a high-level Scientologist. Recorded by the Scientologist’s own camera crew, the eruption was released on YouTube to attain sympathy for the ‘Church’ and as a sort of advertisement for their counter-documentary. Disjointed from the BBC documentary this outburst is actually quite amusing and achieves its goal of turning the viewer ever so slightly away from the BBC documentary. Put it in context however, and a different story emerges…

After lengthy discussions and a week full of intimidation, Sweeney was eventually allowed access to interview Scientology members at an exhibit the ‘Church’ had set up in LA… ‘Psychiatry: Industry of Death’. Taken to the (appropriately named) ‘Mind Control’ section of the exhibit, Sweeney was confronted with the Scientologist notion that psychiatrists were to blame for the rise of Nazi Germany and, in particular, the genocide of the Holocaust, and as such there needs to be a “global obliteration” of psychiatrists (or pseudo-scientists, as Scientologists like to call them). It was here, when questioned about a previous interview with a ‘dissenter’, that Sweeney ‘lost it’.

Thinking back on the incident, Sweeney has apologised to all involved and has said “I can’t wait to get back to Zimbabwe: hiding in the backs of cars from Robert Mugabe’s goons is a damn sight easier.”

Panorama - Main Page
YouTube: Scientology’s video of the outburst
Scientology website regarding the documentary (BBCPanorama-Exposed.com)
BBC follow-up on the documentary, with further stories about Scientology
The Guardian’s commentary on the controversy