Well, you presuppose too much by including the UK in the Free Countries of the world.
It only has an unwritten constitution of precedent and cultural expectation of freedoms. But no guarantees. If the home secretary is evil (as she currently appears to be), your freedoms can be flushed them down the toilet, and there is almost no legal limit to the state’s power to do it.
It’s not a country. It’s a collection of small countries under a united parliament. One of them is currently making an escape attempt
And I assume the rest are owned by private corporations… that makes them better somehow? If state run media runs the risk of becoming propaganda tools, corporate media can be propaganda machines for big business. Both can cause huge distortions in how we understand the world and make decisions in a democracy.
Hmm, diabolical evil seems to be a tradition inaugurated by Michael Howard, and enthusiastically adopted by Jack ‘rendition’ Straw and David ‘ID cards’ Blunkett. Then they started getting lazy for a while, but Theresa May is really owning it.
She could be the Scottish Independence campaign’s best hope, now that Nigel Farrage has mostly shut up.
It doesn’t - it rebuts the original assertion that the UK press is somehow monopolised by one owner. Usually people saying that are referring to Murdoch, who, compared to the BBC, is a pretty small player… In any event, twitter, and the internet more generally are making media ownership less and less important.
I read a few posts about humanity, governments, political parties, racism, xenophobia, and how evil the Home Secretary is.
My take away was that a human life was used as a political football but the headline talked about wasted taxpayer money.
Except that for the majority of people, the internet is now being filtered through large corporations–google, twitter, facebook, what have you.
Plus, I think @Kimmo is from Australia, where I think Murdoch is a much larger media player (I could be wrong there). Here in the states, too, we have far less diversity in media ownership, with a few corporations owning the most prominent media outlets that many people rely on for information. My point is that both can be problematic.
In regards to the sudden cold-stance a few people can be seen to adopt toward danegeld in this thread, I think it would go some way to adding to a greater understanding.
It would, literally, be adding to the conversation, adding back to the conversation.
The motivations of that commenter can be far more easily understood in the rest of the thread by being able to view the previously posted trolling when he stepped over the line and made it obvious.
If I had just posted a general reply to the thread, @'ing the commenter it would have stood. As he has chosen to hide the comment, the criticism of the comments leading up to and informing the current comments undermines the commenter’s present stance and makes clear the logical fallacies he is relying on to make his (current) point.
So, I weighed all these motivations for posting against not taking action that might cause slight offence to someone whom I have recently witnessed being a cold hearted scoundrel; and chose not to post.
Not because I think it would be wrong. Not because I think it might cause offence to the original poster.
…but because by deleting his previous comment danegeld has created an atmosphere of uncertainty about his motivations and (like viewers new to the thread) taking a neutral stance, I would be undermining my own position by taking what would in many other cases be seen to be an excessive action.
Maybe sometimes, twisting the knife can be the same thing as adding to the conversation but it might not be worth the hassle.
I’m just gonna @ people’s trolling bullshit from now on.
