Scientific research and education cannot be segregated from thorough consideration of socioeconomic reality. No model can be prescribed to the society in disregard of the latter, delegating the resulting disarray to market mechanisms — the code phrase for the subjection of the public to new situations through corporate state’s neoliberal adjustment of policies. Thus engineered applications of change are marked by a lack of smooth adaptability and transition, the solutions being anything but an authentic alternative for the people, forced rearrangements instead, manufactured with other interests in mind than theirs.
Neoliberalism yet, heedless as it is to civil demands, is about modelling its systems and throwing them into the middle of society; from where the wild wild west of enterprise takes off and over. Not just like that, of course. In the case of technology, the techno-optimist propaganda endeavors to depict a top-down and non-transparent technology as something that should be, could be trusted and uncritically adopted. The revolutionary character of such a change is clamored endlessly to cloak the impositions in the design.
Likewise, in ‘the rise of the machine’, the in-progress electronification of everything, or the techno-capitalism, the society is defaulted to mere ‘adopters’. Without revealing the full extent of processes and intentions which would expose the inconsistencies of claims as well as incompliances and risks of practices for the public, the advancements brought forth penetrate through the individual, social and planetary life from head to bottom, to make it measurable, manipulable and monetizable, as neoliberal ideology loves to have everything.
In the high-decibel, multimedia-boosted trumpeting of the novelty, well-received by the gold-rushing profit-motivated ‘me-too’ masses of white entrepreneurs, other voices who are critical of its already visible and likely outcomes, hinting at where all that leads to, are (made to be) not heard.
The machine ‘rises’ on a unilateral track determined by business and military interests, and its applications as such will not bring about the free leisure and creative society of the humanity’s dream. On the contrary, the costs of change and its failures accumulate on people as unemployment, deprivation and degradation of own resources, even displacement, and increasing erosion of civil domain. Brutal policy shifts supplement the change; deregulation in all policymaking, privatization in economics, control through surveillance of civic life, and even armed conflict are a few of the measures taken to disengage the stakeholders from the context. Today, sovereign nations’ affairs are being staged and directed through data from ubiquitous surveillance of world’s citizens. On this level of abuse, sovereign states can be waged war upon, wars can be broken in a country through manipulation of its closely observed citizen groups, ruthless client armies can (be made) appear as if overnight in an already neutralized country to shape the course of events. This is only a part of the envisioned rule of the machine.
‘The rise of the machine’ is subjugation of people through technology. Custom-developed in private and well-funded labs to be packaged and served to the market, without concerning itself with hazard-freedom in physical and socioeconomic sense. Ensuing societal and environmental problems and the responsibility to address them are to be billed to the public domain, but the benefits are kept.
Enslavement of scientific advancement into single-track paradigms to the benefit of corporate interests and the detriment of humanity is unfortunately concealed by the never-ending bombardment of a false sense of improvement of the individual and social life, which aims to hide the very truth that voids the propaganda itself: that we are treated as illiterates. As long as the knowledge -the picture- is fully accessible and visible only from its designers’ side, we are forced to stay in the dark. Propaganda is to render people unaware and unsuspecting while they are buying into something that is flawed, incomplete or (too experimental, too obscure to be) completely known to them.
Whereas, in fact, in the simplest terms, a public research environment such as the university is to be a place of people (academicians) who are in the know, and who, with this knowledge of theirs, say NO to malpractice. Exhaustively critical approach and resistance in the face of coercion are inherent principles of true science. Which by definition excludes the production and dissemination of false premises.
We need to get literate in the sense that we understand the schemes that are imposed on us from every direction. And we need to expose them, too. Ed Snowden recently mentioned that we must shift the middle ground of literacy. He showed the world that the locks could be broken open; we need others to wide open the door, and break other locks.
As Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg expressed in the same session, with each courageous person taking the risk to expose the truth, others’ reservation to do the same will diminish more. We need to find our human voice back. In everything that has been taken from us by deceit. Many of us have been asking ourselves for a while, how much longer can we take it? Non-stop murdering of children, genocide of peoples in Gaza happening now in this moment revealed how humanity is in a state of being disregarded, how we let ourselves be rendered so passive and ineffectual, asking the same two questions; ‘how can this genocide be let happen?’ and ‘how have all of us not yet been able to jointly stop this right now?’
Citing Henry Giroux, “higher education must be understood as a democratic public sphere — a space in which education enables students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, claim their moral and political agency, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others. Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make authority and power politically and morally accountable while at the same time sustaining a democratic, formative public culture. Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values and learning offer a glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values, critical hope and a substantive democracy. Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens, and such demands point to the necessity of an education that is broad-based, critical, and supportive of meaningful civic values, participation in self-governance, and democratic leadership. Only through such a formative and critical educational culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents, rather than merely disengaged spectators, able both to think otherwise and to act upon civic commitments that demand a reordering of basic power arrangements fundamental to promoting the common good and producing a meaningful democracy.”
Research and education need to return to being ‘universal’, and become freed from serving as extended corporate labs for ‘applied’ science. We need a free, truthful, people-oriented scientific development, and have to reject the receiver’s status of a unilateral and non-transparent technology, and the narrowed-scope scientific (!) activity behind it. The research needs to comprehend all parties and angles -including those from other disciplines- to a given context before proposing a particular solution. From economy, natural sciences, technology to law and finance, science in every field is demanding liberation from neoliberal paradigms, in broad participation and consideration of the majority of people.
in defense of people who are so long maligned and so mercilessly denied justice…
Aggression, or armed conflict (war) is a tool of the ruling classes that levels the ground of politics or economy. Stuart Chase refers to this saying ‘but the best thing of all for trade is war’ (Stuart Chase, Where’s the money coming from? — pp.4). For the system lost lives do not count; the outcome does. Without minimal questioning of the insanity of a system that relies on inflicting human misery to survive, wars and conflicts are stirred around the world, from out of nothing. The inherent crisis-prone nature of capitalist system needs the war. It is the enforcement of consumption via destruction. In the system’s logic, it is but one option among others, in the sense that human lives are mere inputs or expenses.
It is also the way to prevent undesirable yet inevitable demands of liberty and justice.
“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” −George Orwell, 1984
A truly advanced society is intelligent enough to demand liberty, transparency, and rights for themselves as much as everyone worldwide. Warfare with its deprivation brings them back to their vital concerns; need to survive, need to secure enough food, shelter..
Concocting a common enemy scenario is another effective way to block rights, transparency and demands of social justice, as it is effectively implemented in the western world, its allies and client states since September 11th, 2001. Everyone was supposed to follow the leader who rallied the society around the single supreme goal of defending the homeland, fatherland, motherland..a bit of discerning look-through would reveal whether the argumentation pointed to a real threat to existence, or if the whole thing was a self-serving hoax.
“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies”, “one against all”, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
War is not between people. It is not natural, it is man-made. People are not natural enemies of each other like a snake is to a mouse. There is plenty of everything for everyone, only the few grab and block them from fair distribution and enjoyment. That few buy their hit men as politicians, and the media as their 24/7 propaganda and lie machine to hide criminals and disguise all crime. The interests and stakes in a war are not people’s. On the contrary, they only lose. Lose loved ones, everything they did in a whole lifetime, their beautiful country with all the life on it that made it theirs.
Losing a loved one, most of all losing a child is not comparable to any pain. All mothers, fathers, lovers and siblings of the world can stop a war if they know what it is to have to (!) go through that. only then one asks the most heartfelt WHY. Only then one sees through the game played upon humanity.
You cannot stop a war unless you categorically reject and stand up on your feet against it, no matter what.
The asynchronous socioeconomic states of countries were further taken advantage of by global powers in creating spheres of permanent enslavement, either by direct colonization, or by approaching weaker communities to abuse their developmental desires by promising each of them incompatible goals, as a result of which their inevitable clashes set the stage for the imperial state to usurp the control of events in alignment with their behind-doors ends. Britain was ruthless in playing this evil poker. Arab-Jewish problematic is their lifetime achievement. There wasn’t any such thing as Arab-Jew conflict before first funded Zionist settlers dispossessed poor Arabs of their land by forcibly buying it. Indigenous Palestinian Jews, too, had objected that back then. Israel was erected by Anglo-American force by driving out 1200 year-old residents.
Imagine driving out the Spanish from Spain, or Germans from Germany, Russians from Russia. This is what has been done to Palestinians.
Iraqi and Syrian people had not been, either, killing their fellow citizens in unprecedented bloodbath even though they had autocratic regimes. Since the invasion of the sovereign country of Iraq based upon lies by US-Americans, UK and their allies, thousands of years old civilization has been annihilated and civil populations massacred. All for the plan to dominate the oil-rich Middle East.
“Obviously, there are theological differences as well as political and social differences. But the fact is that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites managed to live in the same country for a long time without killing each other, and they lived in the same neighborhoods. They intermarried — I am half Sunni and half Shiite. I am one of many Iraqis who was born into these mixed marriages. Sect wasn’t really a part of the national consciousness. I was born in Iraq and I’d never in my life been asked if I was a Sunni or a Shiite. And I didn’t know who among my relatives or neighbors or co-workers or colleagues at school were Sunnis or Shiites, because it wasn’t an issue. It’s not that people were tolerant toward each other — they weren’t aware of sectarian backgrounds. It’s similar to some areas in the US where you don’t necessarily know what Christian sect your friends belong to. You might know, or you might not know. That was before the US intervention. The US destroyed that Iraqi national identity and replaced it with sectarian and ethnic identities after 2003. I don’t think this is something that many Iraqis argue about, because you can trace the beginning of this sectarian strife that is destroying the country, and it clearly began with the US invasion and occupation.” Raed Jarrar — Iraqi citizen who had to leave his country during the invasion
Sectarian-tribal schemes were deliberately devised and terminal destruction unleashed in Iraq. As the interviewer comments‘That’s not to say that Iraqis don’t have agency over their own country and lives — they could and should have worked on bridging the gaps. But it’s not easy to fix these huge political and religious differences when the situation is as complicated as Iraq — and when the US is funding and training one side of this conflict with tens of billions of dollars, it’s not easy to reach a point of national healing, where Iraqis work together and live in peace.’
Something is missing here; Iraqis lived with ‘these huge political and religious differences’ for centuries, both in their modern history and under Ottoman rule. There was noone working to forge hostilities out of them. He should have said, when the situation was made -out of nothing- as complicated as Iraq by the US invasion and its acts, as Jarrar clearly puts. how much relevance does it have to say Iraqis might have thought about ample historical lessons of their region on the consequences of western interference (again, with Britain involved), and hence stayed alert and stuck together? It was a life under invasion and at gunpoint.
Whereas for an average US-American nailed in front of his TV-Show the truth could be, citing the interviewer, as simple as (!), “Well, Sunni and Shia, they hate each other — it’s an ancient blood hatred and we have nothing to do with that. It’s not our fault that they’re at one another’s throats.”
See the effect of living solely by the propaganda to cover up own government’s schemes?! The media portrayal of the Middle East as a place of eternal turmoil with feuds, fights and violence. As if the locals of the Middle East are crazy people -unlike peaceful and sane westerners- who do not know to enjoy life’s beauties which abound around them, and instead take pleasure in claiming each other’s lives. Of course never once are the background agents behind the events detailed in the mediating-ergo-manipulating-and-alienating ‘news’.
Let me tell you. noone can yearn for peace more than a middle eastern youth, child or adult. if your governments’ hadn’t schemed this bloodshed, you could have been able to get to know for yourself by freely visiting this vast region of the most peaceful and welcoming people who value better than everyone the humanity and humans in all their diversity. Despite all that they have been made to suffer, they still are so. This is culture. Their soils bear the traces of the oldest history of mankind, of whole civilisations of the Fertile Crescent, which is termed not without reason The Cradle of Civilisations. See the map below, does the largest country on earth accomodate such a plurality? They’ve known how to live together for thousands of years, don’t worry. Just be a responsible human whose conscience doesn’t accept to be blunted and seeks the truth, and you’ll find it.
“Many people accuse the militias affiliated with the ruling parties that were supported by and funded by the US of being involved with this program of cleansing,” Jarrar continues.
“And it created a new reality. I used to say Iraq will never be separated or partitioned, because of the demographic realities. There were millions of Shiites who lived in what the US wanted to have as a Sunni partition, and vice versa. [Ed. note: In 2007, the US Senate passed a nonbinding resolution supporting “regional federalism” in Iraq that would have divided the country into three semi-autonomous regions along ethnic and sectarian lines.] Now that’s completely changed. Today, the new demographic reality has opened the door for sectarian war, it has opened the door wide for partitioning and for what has been going on this week.
So the deterioration we see today didn’t happen in a few months. It happened over a long, long period of time. There was so much destruction and death and displacement and ethnic cleansing imposed upon Iraqis before we reached this week of actual sectarian civil war.”
While Saddam had been a dictator, in his rule there were no daily mass murders and bloodbath, sects and tribes were not aware of (let alone be separated to erase) each other, the country’s people went about their lives and had a degree of exchange with the rest of the world that made them feel themselves a part of it. They were not hiding in bushes in starvation to escape from slaughter by their own people or imported psychopaths, as they do today. The western occupation led by US military carried out the targeted destruction of the thousand year old cultural heritage; ultimate disintegration is the way to the unconditional domination of a country. Exterminate culture, have the country’s people exterminate each other (and each other’s culture), and you have the country yours, in pieces.
Culture is defined as the whole of the joint stories of a people. Therefore the societies where people highly relate to each other have vibrant and rich cultures. The presence of culture (with its elements) is a bearing of the society, and implicitly of tolerance and co-existence between communities in it; cultural elements are everyone’s common good, which helps to imagine a community. Even an atheist can admire the supreme architecture of a particular mosque. A conservative person can appreciate a modern musical performance. Blow them all up in the air, and you have the next generations without any stories. how does this help the invader? to insert his version of everything including the stories. as if nothing ever existed on that ground before.
“Earlier, the proponents of intervention in Iraq did not use Saddam Hussein and his atrocities as standards for what the US would bring to the country. They promised some utopian ideals of happiness and democracy and equality for all. So the mere fact that they are trying to defend their crimes by comparing them to someone else’s crimes is actually evidence of their failure.
That said, Iraq under the former Iraqi government, before the occupation, was a livable country. It was one of the many Arab countries that had a dictatorship. Arabs have dictatorships all over the region so it wasn’t an exception. It was a run-of-the-mill dictatorship that was brutal in attacking and killing and torturing dissidents who opposed it. But as far as everyday life for millions of Iraqis, the standard of living was… okay. The country functioned. There were enough basic services provided to the people — education was free, health care was free. And the national identity was good enough to maintain the country’s territorial integrity.
In the 1990s these things started falling apart — after the 1991 war. We saw partitioning of the north of Iraq to what became Iraqi Kurdistan. People became a little bit more religious, and under the sanctions [that the UN Security Council imposed between the two Gulf Wars] there was more corruption. But it continued to function better than it did after the occupation even under the sanctions, which is amazing when you think about it.
Iraq was exporting an average of $100 billion worth of oil every year. That’s actually more than the budgets of Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and Egypt combined. And under the occupation — and after it — the government failed to provide its citizens with electricity, with water! With a decent road that they could drive on. The most basic services are not provided. Iraq has been among the most corrupt countries in the world for the last twelve or thirteen years, according to Transparency International.
So the short answer to your question is that before 2003, Iraq was not a very happy place to live, but it was home for millions of people. They went to work, and they had their basic needs satisfied. They could not express themselves politically. But after 2003, people still could not — and cannot — express themselves politically and they also lost all of the security that they used to have and all of the basic services.
So I don’t think many Iraqis actually would disagree that the US occupation and invasion and everything that happened after it made the country much worse.”
Criminal invasion of Iraq and underhandedly self-seeking military undertakings that lacked any clear humanitarian intent or perspective in Syria exterminated life on two countries. Streams of blood and mountains of rubble bore a sudden recent new element in the shape of a murderous client army emerged with a concentration of armed power that hinted at the vast support behind it. It was calling for God’s state, and blowing up mosques. Apparently they were relied upon to bring the desired order. Lots of guns for lots of weapon money. Lots of oil at the end, lots of oil money.
Peaceful protesters of Syria of 2011, too, have long waited in vain for the world’s people to compel their countries to take truly responsible action for the imperiled lives of Syrian people.
There is no way to describe what Iraq and Syrian people have suffered since 2003 and 2011. This barbarism is happening right now. Condemnation of genocides, massacres, oppressions in the recent human history are being voided.
We are our brothers and sisters. No human being benefits from the misery of the others. We must not leave each other defenseless, and war criminals without being held accountable for their crimes against humanity.
‘..all people of conscience would have to ask themselves why they have neglected to speak in defense of a people so long maligned and so mercilessly denied justice. It will be the beginning of the end for those perpetrating the injustices once people discover the human in themselves and refuse to quaver before the worn and age-old catch cries intended to savage reputations and ambitions and focus instead, as Leunig says, “on the plight of the subjugated, the ones most neglected, severely deprived and cruelly afflicted.” ’ says Sonja Karkar, the editor of http://australiansforpalestine.com, as quoted here.
“Cowardice asks the question — is it safe? Expediency asks the question — is it politic? Vanity asks the question — is it popular? But conscience asks the question — is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.” Martin Luther King, Jr
Reject being mediated and led by cowardice, expediency and vanity. Know the history. Have your own honest human contact with the truth of people you are taught to be your enemies. See their truth from the eyes of someone who went through what they had to. Ask bold questions. Let your conscience decide in judging for the justice that is due. Let imposed justifications be dispersed in the face of the realization of your human responsibility.
All the world’s sensible citizens must help truth and peace win, as we, the people of the world are all needed in the hard striving for them. To make permanent peace happen, we need to organise a determined international effort to exert the massive pressure to stop the bloodshed, and to continue the same efforts to bring justice to a century-old history of crimes against people.
Very many people are stunned at the sight of the genocide being committed, and at the fact that themselves are only walking by and watching it. It is not possible that we can only do that. We need to be creative. We need to socially design our reaction to the situation to make our demand count! Possibly by making truly useful use of the so much boasted-of connectivity of ours, after having until now made so much of most useless uses of the same connectivity which might well have served the inertia, spending every other idle second for typing in a ‘message’. It is now time to really connect to make a difference.
How can we stay where we are and stare at human onslaught day in, day out?
Only the will of both peoples joined with the unflinching will of all of us humans of this world -the only ones ever bound to fall victim to any bloodshed- can stop this. And bring the permanent peace. This is true here and anywhere.
All self-serving evil scenarios are made hidden from people, and people like ourselves -and never the schemers- are their victims. Directly or as the most indirect outcome, like the misfortune of people aboard the Malaysian plane. Can anyone expect not to be victimized in the state of the world we live in?
Figuring out the way to live together is the solution. With projects, workgroups, discussions in whatever form to join everyone’s voice, mind, domain knowledge, reasoning to establish peace and contribute to drafting an applicable culture of co-existence step by step.
This will mean a much longed-for step to act together, too, and will be an experience to apply the same unity to overcome any other problem and obstacle in the way of our joint peace and well-being.
Utter misery of Palestinian people must shake us off to act together to see in what state we are, we all are, delivering ourselves from the all-familiar mode of ‘joining in after things get initiated by others’. Which means nothing ever gets started. Encapsulation in imposed consumer worlds does away with our human potential of making a true difference, and is the reason why we feel as inert spectators incapacitated (or, worse, unwilling) to interfere with our own world’s state.
Contact with truth melts iron walls. It is the weapon against all weapons of divide-and-dominate. Let’s bring people’s conscience in contact with the truth, and then with each other. Let’s make it happen!
The Palestinian population is trapped and slaughtered en masse and left to their fate in deprivation of everything. International law and institutions (heaven knows what they are named as ‘united’ for) are a farce in passive spectating instead of having any role.
It is not a war that is happening now in Gaza. It is the practicing of something that has no end other than extinction of Palestinian peoples. It is therefore that these actions have been -this time more intensely- associated with those of Nazi Germany.
What will happen if Israel kills the last Palestinian, or the reverse? Will Israelis live in a country of peace and happiness built upon mass annihilation of others?
Will Israel enter history as the country of people who both suffered and inflicted genocide?
Israel state’s mass annihilation of Palestinian population and all their means (houses, hospitals, schools, farms) is on a par with the severest carnages of history. This is truly the indiscriminate claim on innocent lives identical to that of Hitler’s.
We all know that living together side by side, ‘the two-state solution on the respective pieces of land as existed before 1967′ has constantly been hindered by the escalators of hostility on both sides, in moments when it had the closest chance to success.
The peace is ONLY in the hands of the sufferers of the bloodshed; the people. Once they, the sufferers, DEMAND to live together or as neighbours in peace, a world full of bloodshed profiteers will no longer retain their position to hinder, suppress or sabotage it by ploys of negotiation, designating murder and ever-reigniting hate and hostility.
this demands OUR loud and persistent NO until success. FROM ALL OF US. NOW. Because this is no more a conflict. Humans cannot allow this to happen. If we allow it, we may not go around passing ourselves for humans.
People who weren’t yet born when Palestinian-Israeli conflict started comprise the majority of today’s world population. How long was the longest war in history? How many centuries ago was it?
The industrialization of football has become an open threat not only aiming at the game’s historically evolved human ecosystem, but, as it has become more widespread in the recent decade, at the very existence of communities and rule of justice worldwide. The whole problematic rests on an ongoing process with a long long past.
Football, closely tied to socioeconomics, naturally grew a public ecosystem around itself, one on a democratic -albeit not operative- open admission basis, allowing a presence for all economic, political and demographic differences within its spectacle, thereby making the event significant for the state authority as a means of social control, too.
Though football clubs have all along been run by businessmen, the organisation of football as business via regional or global tournaments would emerge and gain momentum much later than the public ecosystem had been recognized as an inclusively organic compound, making football inalienable to the society.
David Goldbatt writes, in his voluminous work The Ball Is Round, that post-WW2 years saw the global burgeoning of the football spectacle that overrode Europe’s colonialist claim on owning the sport, which was soon followed by the spectacle’s simultaneous transformation into a global event and full business enterprise via increasingly aggressive monetization of international tournaments — starting with 1974′s World Cup, or the taking office of João Havelange, the first of a mere duo of notorious FIFA Chiefs since (the long office terms would not only in their duration be likened to a throne). Ever-increasing possibilities of media technologies, then started with broadcasting, have been its underlying driving factor. The rest is a story of sponsorships, deals, broadcasting rights, sales and profits in every way possible.
And of sizeable chunks of corruption accompanying them. Goldblatt’s richly detailed book tells about the different ways in which the organization was a twisted one-man show under each of its mentioned rulers. This brilliantly crafted article on the corruption tradition (!) is also a must-read on how things are run under the roof of the body organizing world’s football, and why we ‘should’ care about it. It is striking to see how the last two world cups almost identically stink.
Today’s protests by people point to the level football’s businessification through these measures reached, now destroying communities and defying an over a century old organic ecosystem, corroborated by these ever-piling corruption revelations about the local and international governing bodies of football, huge sums of money circulating around in international event organizations ending up pocketed by organizing entities at the cost of wreaking havoc in lives of host country’s locals, and local ramifications of high-end international club tournaments in the form of perpetuated budgetary inequalities between clubs, which alienate clubs under competitive and financial pressure from their ecosystem, viewing the latter as customers, mere sources of revenue.
‘Havelange’s second insight was that the commercial potential of soccer had barely begun to be tapped. The 1970 World Cup, the first to be broadcast live and in color throughout the developed world, hinted at spectacular possibilities, but Rous’ antique FIFA had done little to exploit them. At his first dinner as president, Havelange encountered the German businessman Horst Dassler, the son of the founder of adidas. Dassler, an aggressive, manipulative entrepreneur who was then serving as the CEO of adidas France, had thought a great deal about how to capitalize on the explosion in the popularity of televised sport. Over a series of meetings, Havelange, Dassler, and Dassler’s partner, Patrick Nally, devised what eventually became the template for modern sports sponsorship. As the soccer historian David Goldblatt writes in The Ball is Round, the plan had four components:
First, only the very largest multinational companies, whose advertising budgets could bear the load and whose global reach matched the TV audience on offer, should be approached as sponsors. Second, sponsorship and advertising would be segmented by product type: There could be only one soft drink, one beer, one microelectronics firm, or one financial services company that could be the official World Cup product or supplier. Third, FIFA would have total control over all forms of TV rights, advertising, stadium space, etc. Any and all existing deals in a host country would have to go. Fourth, FIFA itself would not handle the details of the sponsorship and TV deals. Marketing and TV rights would be handed over for a guaranteed sum of money to an intermediary who would sell them on.
To cover the last part, the selling of TV rights and sponsorships, Dassler created a marketing company called ISL, short for International Sports and Leisure, and established an office across the street from FIFA headquarters in Zurich.
The combined effect of Havelange’s two insights was to covert FIFA into a sort of hydraulic cash-flow machine. Dassler and Nally brokered deals with huge companies — Coca-Cola was the first to sign on, in 1975. The money flowed into ISL, which paid FIFA a fixed fee for the rights. To enjoy exclusive access to the rights, ISL also made off-the-books payments worth tens of millions of dollars to FIFA executives.7 To preserve the power structure, FIFA ExCo members funneled resources — and ISL money — to the regional confederations that supported them. The people at the top made deals with big companies, then filtered cash to the people at the bottom in return for the votes that let them make the deals.’
Jim White of The Telegraph writes ‘We have for decades suspected Fifa of being the least transparent body in the sporting world. We watched as it claimed that the 2010 World Cup would transform South Africa, before wheeling out of the country with barrow-loads of booty, leaving behind a legacy of debt and white elephant stadia.’
Above NYT article by Dave Zirin points that ‘FIFA’s demands for security and infrastructure may end up displacing as many as 250,000 poor people, who live in the favelas surrounding Brazil’s urban centers. The cost of the games continues to tick upward, the latest figures climbing as high as $15 billion.’
Note that the events referred in the last three paragraphs date 2008, 2010 and 2014, in perfect succession.
An event that rakes in and leaves with a fully tax-exempt $3,5 bn from the country where over the half of people live under poverty line, leaving the country indebted and their people homeless, is harmful to the world, and has as much to do with people’s fun spectacle of football as a colonizer is detached from the goal of plunder.
This is why we need a new, clean football of our own.
The present mode of operation is driven by conceptual and subsequently physical amputation of the ecosystem’s organic constituents. The policy of homogenization to last detail by centralized and all-encompassing decision-making thus ensures full control. Technologies of control, notoriously known by all of us today, like electronic IDs for admission and cctv among others, are implanted into the envisioned operation of the spectacle. This was justified, as in other fields of life, by pretexts of reducing racism, violence and all such misdeeds, hiding the aim of sorting out the misfits and creating a sterilized environment for the clientele of fully monetized football, who, i.e. wouldn’t display any undesirable moods in connection with the broader socioeconomic realities of the moment. So that the white entrepreneur would have ‘an evening out’ with the kids..Football’s ecosystem was being downsized to those who could afford and would be no potential hazard to sterility. In a one-off and passively viewed spectacle format, the central bodies of regional and world sport claimed the say in any single show pattern, element and facility of this largest public event. On the other hand, the sincerity of their worries (!) about ending the violence in stadia proved very demonstratively to be a whitewash, indeed.
‘Every decaying institution rots from the head’ says Jim White. So, again, why care about decaying bodies (whose major concerns are far different from advancing people through football), instead of leaving them to decay at one forgotten corner?
Maybe our problem lies in not having secured an independent ecosystem from the outset. An ecosystem that one can clearly name of one’s own. One composed of football as the spectacle of aesthetics and inspiration, placed amidst audiences in a way non-manipulable by politics and secretive centralized systems out there allegedly to organize world’s (your) football.
Football is seeking people to develop its alternative ecosystem. We still have Russian, Nepalese, Indian people to save.
Every tipping point comes among ultimate stink of the old. Liberate football. Now.
An ad contains explicit attempt at lure and implicit reaffirmation of inertia: ‘Your role is to be down there (to consume), and ours is to be here (to decide)’. This is hammered down on human brains ubiquitously by the mind manipulation specialists of society (ad business, PR, mass media and other propaganda tools of the establishment).
The ad is a variable statement on how apparent set-up of the society of the given moment is to be. The statement’s content (lure) reveals the code of validation by status quo, while its mere presence (reaffirming inertia) being the validation of status quo.
Social media offers a sophistication of disguise of the latter presence by transforming the lure. Vast possibilities to create experiences in what ad now becomes ad world, a disneyland for mostly young unsuspecting preys, by which the status quo is validated and reinforced so safely like never before, are the manipulators’ tool to reap rich sales environments (whether to sell any agenda, you or a product) out of rich internet applications by concocting narratives of ‘acts of individuality’ defined by adaptation to commercial objectives of the ‘individual’s rejection of validation by status quo’.
The mind manipulators hence hailed online-digital revolution with hijacked premises such as empowerment and self-determination; these two were the headliners of the show, suggestive of individuals making (ad) statements as they please and having the chance to customize the contents of the statement, respectively. They created safely contained and encircled worlds in which statement-making was democratized and rendered reproducible, status quo offering everyone to get a brief taste of steering the ship.
The new statement-making species of consumer is declared the brave new individual against status quo, if you listen to these fastest in-house producer-propagators of BS buzz-remarks like ‘demanding consumer who knows exactly what he wants’..or ‘the user wants this’..whereas for any sane human it is evident that not the user, but the future in the mind of the mind specialist wants things to be that way and imposes upon ‘the exploitable’ a full pack of illusions of being able to express their real self if they own or become what the mind specialist wants them to, in the way he wants them to do so. Not in a forcible way, but through the ad’s much more efficient and durable world of consent — the lure.
Here every consumer would be the new master of his crowd, the decision-maker, the trendsetter, for a moment, hour, day..who was to exemplify what the crowd should (or he himself preferred to) consume. Manufactured retreats, ‘exclusive’ sanctuaries were virtually built for the consumer to make him feel at home and among friends, and to closely monitor him to get to know his nature-character. Penetration and capture of a person’s life down to his bowels were needed to replace his individuality with a seasoned statement-maker. The collage of validation codes of millions (a.k.a. ‘styles’) co-existed in infinitely disseminable images, personas, likes, unlikes, statuses, hashtags.
These were added as needed by the experience, the pillar of the new immersion kingdom. Shops, showrooms, websites, even streets and buildings were being turned into ‘experiences’, the magic gold rush word of informational capitalism. Even the very home of an individual (the limitlessly surveillable ‘smart’ home for the hyper-individual of the future..sure nobody mentioned this ‘ultimately synchronized comfort experience’ as such..nor what the whole technology entailed, or what good ‘ubiquitous’ connectivity as dictated paradigm was meant to be for the man). All was democratically open to spontaneous and mobile consumers who were trusted to never imagine asking disturbing questions. Experience replaces the real. Commercial entities jump in to replace a company’s public perception with a company as experience. Contrary to being publicized in the real picture that might likely bring exposure to criticism and protest, the experience is only to come in and enjoy. A good consumer knows not to spoil the party, and an ideal one learns to fall in love with that lifestyle bottle of table water. Apolitical state of the digital generation, as they are often referred to be in, can be based in having encountered their environment not as they in fact are, but through a flood of experiences. i.e. the hipster is a very royal and loyal breed in this regard.
Tickling of egos by mind men is dubbed as engaging in conversation. We all know that egoism is a deviation from one’s socialized individuality. Concealed in the abuse of one’s individuality by replacing it with relentlessly contrived egoism -portrayed as the culprits’ own profiteering versions of individualism- is that the individual as such is at best disempowered, a validator which the status quo loved to have do his work on an enormously magnified scale; an indefinite number of times every second.
Such validation statements are not a conversation, but ego satisfaction, which may become a personality problem with failed timely grip or the lack of a healthy process of socialization that stills the ego (‘With respect to the developing individual, a movement takes place from egocentricity to sociality during the process of growing up’ — Egotism). Status quo has always risen on the shoulders of egos yearning to cry out. Every communication taking place on this basis is a validation of its existing set of relations. Thus disguised is the perpetuation of the validation of status quo, by virtual production and self-validation of brave new consumers (In 21st century, romantic egotism has been seen as feeding into techno-capitalism in two complementary ways:[20] on the one hand, through the self-centred consumer, focused on their own self-fashioning through brand ‘identity’; on the other through the equally egotistical voices of ‘authentic’ protest, as they rage against the machine, only to produce new commodity forms that serve to fuel the system for further consumption.. — Egotism)
The individuality of man is not defined by material associations, and cannot be qualified or disqualified by making statements about them. It feels even ridiculous to write down like this, and as an insult to all the humanities, literature and art mankind has ever created with their natural diversity of treasures hidden in every man. The human mind cannot be manipulated into being a barren, homogeneous desert where only billboard ads are to be seen. Yet the problem is that the targets of manipulators are and have always been the most susceptible: the youth. Taking advantage in every way possible of their irresistible desire to abolish, to demolish the status quo. ‘Get them young!’ is in the foundation of ad business.
Theoretical obstacles like citizen rights are already overcome in this enterprise, through built-in full breach capacity of the design beyond anyone’s sight or knowledge. As long as people allow themselves to be mediated-between, within societal front-ends the inner workings of which they are not familiar with, designers of these will enjoy next to infinite freedom to manipulate them and their relations. Next to infinite, because the most ‘perfect’ system requires, thankfully, a human being (like Mr. Snowden) to run it at some point. So far.
Ask them what the purpose of all this experience is..you hear ‘man, what do you think? to be able to offer better suited products to every person, of course!’
No. To be thereby able to control. Because consumer is controllable. A free informed citizen is not. Because a man owning his human treasures won’t stay silent and motionless to the misery of his fellow man. But a barren man stands in apathy. Whole purpose of the statement-maker is to create the ultimate good consumer who will never be a trouble for the system, unlike a citizen is.
And once you need to deal with noone but the consumer you can control, it is a matter of consolidation of power to control what he is supposed to consume. Informational capitalism offers both; control people, control resources.
The true empowerment and liberating quality of internet is known and enjoyed by millions of people, and it is something totally different from what informational capitalism foresees. People need to break free, and, that is only possible by becoming and acting as real individuals in real contact with their surrounding. This may sound obvious, yet its opposite is what is massively propagated in whatever worlds set up for the vulnerable, young and old, who are ‘readily available’.
Anthropomorphism, or personification, is attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being (wikipedia).
The term implies a practice within the domain of cultural and artistic expression. Personification happening these days yet has anything but to do with storytelling.
Just as corporations cannot be granted the rights of citizens, the citizen cannot be de-personified or ‘metamorphed’ into a consumer subject. Citizens are not consumers and corporations are not citizens, but fully commercial entities.
Citizen denotes man entitled to dissenting judgment and acting upon it, among other rights. Whereas consumer does not entail any recognition of man or ‘individual’ as such. It solely refers to a single state of activity (consuming), which the party is by default expected and subdued to do.
The word ‘consumer’ is the definition of man in terms of his relevance to a corporation.He is meant to receive. He is the passive king (!) whose crown was forged by ad business, out of this passivity; just lie back and be served like a king.
Ceaselessly bombarded images, personas, statements, experiences offer royal modes of living and behaviour to adopt and stick around forever in the delusion kingdom. This is certainly not to the well-being of the man or society, however just as certainly good for the corporation’s faring – therefore it wishes more people to be transformed into the same state and go on to exist in there. That’s but one instance of why the corporation is not the citizen or the society; it has not only totally separate, but antithetical interests to the latter, too.
The consumer-corporation plain is devoid of the questioning of this staged kingdom, nor of latter’s practices or very existence; it inherently excludes from the picture all that lies outside the sphere of a transaction between the two. Thereby the ideological overemphasis on the word consumer instead of citizen is meant to neatly rule out any frictional surface in the talks over matters.
It may take pumping of gallons of fake individuality into his ego to rape the mind of man, so that he voluntarily gives up his entitlement to informed citizenship, and joins the royal party.
Though corporation may be expecting its citizen-like dressing up to go unnoticed, be ignored or even lured into, counting on a system spawning atomized individuals and glorifying self-seeking ‘economic individualists’ for whom fellow citizens are insignificant if they are not business partners, competitors, potential clients or matters of any tangible interest, things hardly work that way, and it does receive a considerable number of unwelcoming regards. Said system, capitalism, is born out of and dependent on the alienation of man to man (the system was originally named ‘economic individualism’. The socialists disparagingly called it ‘capitalism’ and it stuck), and through these spaces of vacuum in citizens’ own and joint affairs, the corporation attempts to sneak in to mimic (complementing) authentic elements from the life of individual or society. Wherever members of a community have strong relationships and a vibrant culture of living together prevails, this kind of mimicry immediately sticks out and does not get bought into, with citizens knowing themselves are not manipulable consumers, and that corporations are corporations, never to be regarded as one like themselves. Period.
Economics has been the subject of ongoing criticism as regards the neoliberal hegemony over its academic life, research choices and teaching curriculum. The critique can be extended beyond this discipline.
On this account, a knowledge-producing educational community that reinstates the core premises of scientific creation and dissemination is essential; uncompromised autonomy, with full access to resources in transparency, ample room for rigorous (interdisciplinary) discussion, and unrestrained passing on of the knowledge to wider society for everyone to avail.
The research and teaching/learning space needs to exist in both (infra)structural and intellectual barrier-freedom. The synonymous economic and political setup requires unconditional allocation of resources as well as administrative and operational independence, internally and externally. These imperatives enable scientific activity to be in-depth, interdisciplinary and stakeholder-inclusive, and safeguard the integrity of the contributors and their work against sneaking of half-truth and bad science into debates and teaching by whatever influence or interest.
Once no such jeopardy is allowed, present and future happenings relating to our personal and joint well-being, be them concerning technology, communication, economy, law or production, are no longer the outcomes of bad decisions and policymaking hidden from or disregarding of us, and prevention or prompt reversal of any misconduct made possible.
This equals the real information society of actively participating citizens in a truly holistic discourse with free transparent exploration and exchange of all knowledge, and one in which whistleblowers will not need to be longed for in order to know.
and which differs fundamentally from top-down paradigm of information capitalism, that is.
‘There is no difference between blood and blood! Murder is murder regardless of age and nationality.’
The family of Naftali Frankel, one of the three Israeli teenagers killed in the West Bank on 12 June, condemned the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in this statement.
In their severest pain and agony, they expressly reject the bloodshed, feeling another human being as innocent as their own child should not have been made to suffer the same fate, on the same motive…HATRED!
They refuse to endorse hatred which inherently has no winner but merely profiteers which are war business, warmongers and warlords.
The chance for peace is in the resolute public rejection of further conflict by both peoples, like Naftali’s family did. A human heart suffering the loss of a child, of a loved one, does not seek retaliation in wishing another to endure the same, unlike warmongering politics.
There is no insoluble conflict when hearts understand each other. Cries of weeping mothers, fathers, wives and siblings, when united and loud, can silence bombs and bullets.
‘No matter the different colors of our eyes, the color of our tears is the same’..these words, originally from a Turkish movie, tell it all succinctly.
I recently read this article with relevant angles on the privacy in relation to ubiquitous surveillance.
Indeed, given the known or yet unknown implications and scope of big data surveillance, whether done outright unconstitutionally or clad as consumer data collection at a supermarket checkout, our rights and freedoms in the broadest sense need to be at the core of any discussion of it, rather than vague derivations of privacy protection on an individual basis. The latter only means stepping on a playfield that surveillance actors seem to be eager to create in order to hijack the public discourse on the dimensions of unlawfulness.
The state and corporations have been attempting at setting the stage for discussion of an elusive harmless version of the matter, instead of the giant surveillance (control) machinery itself, drawing attention away from the unilaterally posed threat by state-private complicity to citizenship and freedoms of a constitution-based society.
We people are on a new terrain, obviously. Here it is no more about the secrets and intimacies that used to be selectively kept away by us in relations with our immediate surrounding. As regards the interviewees in the referred article, I tend to think of this as the reason for their confusions or varied degrees of permissiveness in privacy-centered questions; not knowing what they were faced with, hence, understandably, evaluating the act in terms of their customary perception of personal privacy. Inferring from the fact that the author’s submission of the paper dates at the pre-Snowden times, the interviewees’ answers and comments can with reasonable certainty be expected to have been highly altered since.
‘I have nothing to hide’
The same state of not knowing what to make of the newly emerged situation possibly manifested itself in this known stance for a time. This hinted at a lack of orientation to correlate the hidden capabilities of the giant machinery with their possible outcomes for the life as one knew it. before Mr. Snowden exposed the naked truth and instantly spurred this correlation on the part of people, the surveillance mechanisms evidently implanted and operational in different facets of our lives were regularly reported by organizations like EFF and FSF, yet did not present a warning that was tangible enough for many to prompt a collective action at large.
The objective and subjective privacy conceptions mentioned in the article seem to point to the same missing element: the bigger picture. the state deliberately keeps it out of its surveillance-compatible tale of make-believe privacy protection. whereas the citizens used to be unable to make an accurate, realistic assessment of it, due to the absence of its full scale from their sight.
All took place in transparency asymmetry, as the author duly refers. The underlying technology has been devised and used to gain asymmetric information advantage over people, the ends ranging from economic to oppressive, as Edward Snowden revealed, ‘these programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation’.
Stating that one has nothing to hide presupposes a knowledge of the whole purpose and scope of surveillance. Zealous extensive debate within the confines of individuality reinforces this deluded view. Whereas, in fact, the nature of the problem requires societal action.
terms of service, privacy policy & co.
the dual existence of these shop-window placebos of juristic personae and the invisible, ever-growing big time breach of law guaranteeing civic rights and freedoms is a vivid analogy in making the distinction between the official discourse on privacy protection and its alibi role in the desire to mask the perpetuation of control. We’ve been conned all along.
One remembers those uproars each time facebook changed its TOS in what was regarded as blatant violation of privacy..The article concludes with the rightful statement that a sanctified notion of individuality is a clear obstacle to grasp and act on violations that pose a threat on a public level. Another cited scholar says, “the idea of an ‘invasion of privacy’ has actually become too limited to account for what turned out to be a worrying and recurring issue of modern life”. we need to assert our right to transparency and to have full command and knowledge of systems affecting our lives, and design ones that do not spy on us. Any other talk of ‘control over own privacy’ merely reproduces officially crafted narratives, in other words, is outright fictional.
blogntackle 