Tag: Julian Assange
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Persecution, prejudice and propaganda
What do you make of a situation where a UN investigator reads a certain name, and says “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection”? He says he didn’t even read the email about that person, because he’d been convinced this wasn’t a topic he…
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From Assange to AI
You forget the year, you forget the order of events, some names escape you but certain experiences stay with you, hard and bright and real, and inform everything you do for the rest of your life. Like being a part of a gathering after dark in Parliament Square, a gathering called ‘Occupy Democracy’ – hearing…
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Ithaka: the disaster that slipped past you
I watched Ithaka last night. I hardly ever watch telly, and like many people these days, when I watch a film, I’m generally doing at least two other things at the same time. Himself watched it too. We sat side-by-side, and watched in silence, and in the two interruptions for adverts (it was on ITV)…
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Another War to End All Wars
I remember I remember a ‘cross over’ lecture by Chomsky, when his reputation as a political commentator was beginning to overtake his reputation as a linguist. (He made one mistake, okay? The ‘language acquisition device’ was a red herring. That’s what academics do – they posit theories to be tested and write about them. The…
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If you were honest, what would you say?
Or Janice’s Goats ***Long Read *** I used to think I lived in a free country – born in the UK in the 1960s, it was a long time before I questioned the idea. Even when I discovered it wasn’t entirely true, I was still aware that as countries went, our country in the 20th…
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Telanon
You don’t just not need the mainstream media – you need to liberate yourself from it. I focus here on one newspaper and one TV channel because they tend to be the last ones people give up – the ‘best of a bad bunch’, as it were. Like many people (including you, probably, if you’re…
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Don’t shout at me about Assange
We don’t trust the media on issues we know about, because we are equipped to see the lies and the smears – and yet we tend to believe them on issues we don’t know so much about.