Making Changes

The time has come for me to refresh my blog. I’m starting to build up quite an archive, so it’s probably best I do it now.

You can now find me at http://steviews.wordpress.com. Thanks to @freborn for suggesting the name!

Avatar: Has Cameron Trumped God?

There’s one message from Avatar that really stands out:

Nobody wins in war.

It’s 2154, and mankind finds itself on another planet, continuing with the same old capitalist greed and desperate pursuit of wealth. This time, since our planet has apparently been sucked dry, we’re at it on somebody else’s. The humans clash with the ‘primitive’ indigenous people of ‘Pandora’, failing to understand why not everybody gets their desperate ‘need’ to consume, over-indulge and improve things that don’t need improving. Naturally, they’re baffled as to why this indigenous tribe won’t sacrifice their livelihoods so these narcissistic men in suits can reach their ridiculously high expectations for their annual profits.

It’s basically a Western/Sci-Fi mash-up, but instead of ‘cowboys’ and ‘Indians’ it’s ‘Humans’ (Americans) and 10ft tall blue people (the Na’vi). Humans show up inside giant weapons and attempt ‘diplomacy’. They offer the Na’vi the chance to live as humans do with roads and technology, in true British colonial style, disregarding the fact the Na’vi are happy with their natural, modest and sustainable way of life. What’s important to them is the tree that happens to sits above precious resources the humans have their eyes on. The tree is life to them, and home to a deity that, unlike the invented gods of our world, actually plays a part in their reality.

Neytiri, Princess of the Na'vi tribe under corporate fire

So the humans bomb them and a whole load of death and destruction happens. It’s at this point, with every innocent being that perishes, we really get to know how unnecessary all the killing is. If one side would just stop, nobody need die. But the humans push, their weak attempt at ‘diplomacy’ fails and they push until the whole place is on fire and then they push some more like a fat, demented child desperately trying to get candy from a piñata. There couldn’t be a more appropriate moment for a film that assaults capitalism, corporations so desperate and possessed by profit that they don’t care about things like human rights and respect for living beings, including their own kind.

This part reminds me of companies like Shell and, the company I’ve worked for part time for every year I’ve spent in education, Pizza Hut. The pressure from desperate-to-please-shareholders management trickles down to the bottom, where the waiting staff have to precisely memorise 1001 rules, and even the best waiters that customers love have to drop their own intuition and follow the carefully researched procedures on how to wait tables. In fact, I’m reminded of almost every company that exists in the capitalist world. An exception being Google, whose slogan (and secret of success) is ‘Don’t_be_evil‘. This enables them to ‘waste time’ on projects that might not generate a profit and improve things for the benefit of its users rather than to boost revenue. I hope this mantra catches on soon. All of this echoed through my mind as I watched corporate honcho, Parker Selfridge, whine about the millions of dollar bills he could be making if the Na’vi would just give up everything they know because he wants them to.

Parker Selfridge resisting reasoning from Dr. Grace Augustine

Besides pacifism and the evils of corporate greed, there’s one more (probably unintentional) message. To all those religious people out there who say “there has to be a god because look how beautiful our world is” – I just saw a world a hundred times more beautiful than ours. Contrary to common misconception, creativity is intelligence, and this kind of suggests humans could have done a better job designing our world, from plants and animals, right through to the lousy humans that inhabit it. In fact, we have done a better job – watch Avatar and see for yourselves what’s missing in this world.

The Catwalk to Success

Success is something all parents strive to help their children achieve. You give them the best education, the toughest discipline and the most nurturing care, but can only really lead a horse to water. If it doesn’t drink, you may look back with regret and ask yourself what went wrong.

Monike Demikoski grew up in a dilapidated wooden house just south of nowhere in Brazil. Her father, a wife-beating alcoholic, did little to make her feel safe in her own home, while her mother, a bipolar schizophrenic, did even less to make her feel loved, nurtured and emotionally secure.

What I know of her life story resonates in my mind as I watch four beautiful models strutting down a catwalk just off the sunny beach of Jurerê Internacional. The Miami style array of second homes belonging to many a Rio de Janeiro millionaire is the perfect setting for a spectacular display of creative talent. As stunning and petite as she is, Monike isn’t modelling; she’s the designer. Accredited with making the dresses on display here. She graduated at just twenty years old, a year younger than her peers, with a degree in Fashion Design at the University of South Santa Catarina (UNISUL) in Florianópolis, a fashionable tourist hotspot in the south of Brazil. Her journey so far can only be described as phenomenal.

‘Just Love’ at Jurerê Internacional by Monike Demikoski. Photograph: Roberto Forlin

‘Just Love’ at Jurerê Internacional by Monike Demikoski. Photograph: Roberto Forlin

Before Monike was three months old, her mother was sectioned following an incident involving her husband and a baseball bat. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was hospitalised for four months before being allowed to rejoin her violent husband and two children, both under the age of five, without a social worker in sight.

The seven years that followed saw Monike and her brother fending for themselves, with only sporadic help from their unhinged mother and wild, erratic abuse from their drunken father. Their parents divorced in 1997, and a legal battle for child support began, one that is still unresolved today thanks to the chaotic Brazilian ‘justice’ system. With no financial aid from their father and no benefits from the government, their emotionally detached mother grew ever more absent; burying herself in work, while making barely enough money to pay the bills and feed her children.

I got a job at 13 to help her after the divorce. For a while we didn’t have enough money to pay all the bills and we often went without food for days.

In  2004, Monike’s brother moved to Florianópolis to start a new life. They persuaded their mother to join him, and there she found a better-paid job. It looked as if their fifteen-year struggle was finally coming to an end, and Monike applied to study Art at the public university in the city.

Higher education is free in Brazil; but places are limited and competition is fierce. The only students prepared for entry exams are those lucky enough to have received expensive private education. Public school students are ill equipped to pass the exams, the only alternative is a costly private university.

Monike was denied a place at the public university, but her mother agreed to sacrifice her salary and borrow to invest in a private education for her, but on the proviso she studied business administration; ensuring a greater financial return and lower risk on her investment. One semester into the course, and her performance revealed how incompatible she was for such a dry and unimaginative subject. Seeing a student run fashion show at the university inspired her to transfer to a course that would allow her creativity to flourish.

Three years later, she stands backstage at the fashion show of Jurerê Internacional, watching her designs parade down the runway before joining the models for a lavish applause from the spectators. After the show, she dons one of her dresses and networks for the duration of the after party at the luxury outdoor beach resort.

After a local newspaper published an article about her designs and her appearance at Jurerê Internacional, she was spotted by the organisers of the Donna Fashion show and invited to be part of the biggest fashion event of the region.

Soon after Donna Fashion, her mother’s illness took a turn for the worst. Now in full time care, her mind is completely consumed by the illness that burdened their lives for so long.

Donna Fashion. Photograph: Férias no Sul

Monike lives alone in the city now. She works as a window dresser between fashion events to pay the rent, dreaming of one day leaving her creativity-starved homeland and heading for Paris, a city brimming with fashion, culture and inspiration.

Academic collection for the regional jeans wear company ‘Felipe Ferreira’.

I work as a window dresser for a clothes boutique now. I live alone; my brother moved abroad and my mother is in a psychiatric hospital.

Second semester UNISUL project.

Monike never experienced what it’s like being a horse led to water. For her, the hopes of a successful future were always a mirage in a harsh desert. It’s been a twenty-year long struggle, but now she’s finally breaking free from a life of continuous traumas, barriers and setbacks; with the door to success wide open in front of her.

Monike Demikoski (centre) with her ‘Just Love’ collection. Photograph: Trip Fotos

End

Villain or Hero? It’s All Relative.

A thought struck me tonight about Meredith Kercher. I imagined how her family and friends would have described her after her death and wanted to quote one of them and make the point that all murder victims are described in the same way, but are any of them made aware of these nice adjectives when they were alive? We really don’t appreciate what we have till it’s gone.

However, searching Google for Meredith Kercher gave me this:

Anyone notice the slant here? It’s all about Amanda Knox. I know very little about Kercher, but I could tell you tons about Knox.

Ok, maybe that’s because Knox’s trial is now, that’s what’s current, and Meredith’s death was two years ago. But is there any chance the media is allowing us to forget something here? Like the fact this woman was found dead in a pool of her own blood a whole night and half a day after Knox neglected to call the police? That Knox was the only one with a key to the flat, and immediately after Kercher’s death a failed attempt was made to make it look like a break in? That she desperately accused Patrick Lumumba of doing it? More to the point, that she was found guilty by a court of law? So why the hype?

There’s a tendency to take sides in international affairs. Knox is American, most of the British media are naturally more inclined to take America’s side than admit they’re part of Europe. But this situation requires tact; Kercher, the victim, was British. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has sprung up during this case to describe Britain and America, referring to an ‘ancestor’ shared by the two separate nations, thus bundling us as all into the same ‘family’. America gives it a bit of the old ’special relationship’, British media hops right  aboard and voila: a media frenzy and support for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Knox versus the Italian justice system. It’s even been suggested on Good Morning America that the reason for Knox’s conviction lies not in the murder she is evidentially guilty of, but in the ‘anti-Americanism’ of the Italian court of law.

Would we really prefer to believe Knox was convicted because she’s American? Despite her Italian boyfriend earning himself almost the same conviction despite allegedly not even being the one who stuck the knife in? Is the brutal murder of a young woman like Meredith Kercher really not enough to make people put down the patriotism and look at facts from a neutral perspective? If not, I guess it’s lucky the death penalty is illegal in Italy.

Death By Politics – The Aftermath of the Iran Election

If there’s an award for Human Rights Violator of the year, the Supreme Leader of Iran must surely be preparing his shameful acceptance speech, thanking God and all his supporters for getting him where he is today. At the very least, he’s owed one for Most Publicised Human Rights Violations, thanks to the perseverance of the Iranian people and their commitment to freedom and democracy, and to Twitter for providing a medium to transmit their message.

The regime is renowned for playing political chess with the lives of those who hold an opinion. Last year, 28 year old Ehsan Fatahian was arrested for associating with a Kurdish political party. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but after his appeal to the decision, an additional charge, ‘revolt against God’, appeared and the penalty became death by hanging. On the 11th November, 2009, he was executed, a move dubbed by Amnesty International as “a retaliatory act against the assassination of some government officials in Kurdistan in September”. Put simply, death by politics.

Arash Rahmani, another death row victim, was, according to his lawyer, ‘pressured’ into confessing, making his conviction invalid under Iran’s penal code. His lawyer also asserts that Rahmani’s sister was forced to watch him being interrogated on at least two occasions, and a pre-written confession was given to him to sign as a condition of his sister’s release.

On 13th June 2009, I watched Twitter explode shortly after the election came to a sudden end. Two thirds of the votes counted and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner with 62% of the vote, while the people’s favourite to win, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, had a mere 34%. Perhaps Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had a few extra million votes on everyone else… He is backed by God after all.

It didn’t take long for a mass protest movement to form and for Mousavi to be placed under house arrest. Despite heavy censorship, tech savvy Iranians found ways to bypass government barricades and get the message out to the world – the Iranian people’s right to choose their leader had been infringed.

I won’t surrender to this charade.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Independent Reformist Party of Iran, June 2009.

#IranElection, a tag that labels ‘tweets’ with a searchable subject, became Twitter’s permanent number one Trending Topic for the weeks that followed the alleged freud – in other words, literally the most talked about subject on the net, the only place such a thing is truly measurable. Publicity intensified on the 20th June, when a young woman protesting peacefully in Tehran, Neda Agha-Soltan, was caught on video taking a bullet straight to the heart from the Basij – the Supreme Leader’s army of militia. Graphic footage of her death spread virally via YouTube, giving the world an emotive, visual insight on how the Iranian government reacts to protests against its authoritarian stab in the heart of democracy.

Hoping to brush the movement under the carpet, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged Iran to accept Ahmadinejad as its leader. He labelled the election a ‘divine assessment’, while banning rallies, and blocking websites and mobile phone transmissions – further incriminating himself in the scandal. If this election really was God’s will, why such fear of free-flowing information?

Aside from the aforementioned victims of Iranian politics, 12 other Kurdish activists have been sentenced to death for various charges, such as ‘membership of opposition parties’, ‘revolt against God’, or ‘corruption on earth’.

In the wake of the of the post-election anarchy, the government has been handing out death sentences to those it considers key figures in the protests, ignoring condemnation by the United Nations of such unrepentant human rights violations.

How long will governments such as these continue disposing of lives just to make a point in their petty rows with other nations and oppositional political parties within their own borders?

On that note, I leave you with a disturbing yet powerful message from Amnesty International, a message that I only hope will be enough to save people like Arash Rahmani from the unnecessary and brutal interrogations that occur for such trivial reasons.

Arguments For Euthanasia.

As far as we know, death is inevitable. Most of us fear it, some realise nothing matters once it’s happened and for some of us, it can’t come quickly enough.

If by cruel chance you can no longer breathe without a machine, live life outside a hospital, or even just exist without excruciating, inescapable pain, you may well choose to bring death forward on the schedule.

However, you can’t. It’s against the rules; the rest of us have agreed that it’s best this decision is left to God and his infinite wisdom. So get used to the pain, it’s going to be with you till the very end.

We put our pets to sleep when they lose a couple of legs, incapable of doing everything they live for. Why do we refuse to show human beings the same respect for their dignity and suffering, even when they beg for it?

Because God said so?

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”

- Genesis 9:6

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

- 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

God said a lot of things we no longer adhere to.

Because our disdain for people is rife and we think doctors that train for over a decade so they can save lives might get a tiny high from ending the lives of a vulnerable old ladies against their will? So that happened once, but let’s not pretend there are heaps of doctors out there itching to go on a murdering spree. Be realistic.

If it’s because capitalism has no qualms about forcing suicide to cut costs, then you need to fix the system, not deny people the right to end their pain and suffering humanely.

We now have ‘deathers’ in America, those who support extensive profit from healthcare and an excessive generation of weatlh among the rich, but can’t fathom the idea of euthanasia because it gives their own kind the license to kill. Are they afraid because they know what they’re kind are capable of?

This is just a fundamental lack of understanding and empathy for people that suffer in ways we can’t begin to imagine, and fear of things to come that just isn’t grounded in reality.

Murder is horrifying.

It does make us uncomfortable.

It is something we can’t bear to think of happening to us.

But when it comes to a person who decides death is preferable to the alternative, this is not a decision you deserve to control.

What Happens Next?

I wanted to take a Humanities and Social Science this year to get me into Journalism school. You’d think Media would be a good introduction to Journalism, but I ruled it out from the start. Thankfully, I got bumped off the Humanities course due to an administrative error*. My only options were Media or Education studies, and even then I considered Education as if Media wasn’t the obvious choice. I was finally inspired to take Media by the person who would become my tutor, someone who actually knows a thing or two about it.

I told her all the reasons anyone had ever convinced me of for not taking Media, people who hadn’t ever actually studied the subject. It seems there’s a common misconception that studying Media is just watching TV for credit, my intellectual, but highly prejudiced, father clings to that opinion very tightly. He hates TV with a passion, often without even considering the content. The message was particularly clear from him. Maybe he never realised TV is just an alternative platform to plays, books and… life. It’s story telling, and everyone has a story.

But I’ve learned some quite inspiring things from film studies. In particular, the realisations I came to after watching the film ‘Un Chien Andalou’, which completely turned narrative on its head. I found myself attempting to predict what would happen next throughout the entire film, but couldn’t. I was never aware of this kind of prediction process I go with every film I watch, and I think there’s a tendency to do it with life too.

Films, if you think about it, tell the same handful of stories over and over with only minor differences. I gradually became more and more frustrated with each shot in ‘Un Chien Andalou’, as my brain had to work harder and harder to understand what was going happening. We don’t like to think too hard with a film, like children we prefer to know what’s going on, and be reassured that everything will be resolved in the end. As in real life, there were no guarantees in this film, nothing was predictable and it’s disturbing.

We view the world as we do our films: Each character has a part to play. We record the parts we’ve seen others play, then assign those parts to other people when we meet them, feeling safer pretending we know how that person is going to play out.

But life isn’t a story, as much as we’d love it to be. We think we know what complete strangers are like, what they’ll do and how they’ll respond to us when we map things out in our head. We think they’ll respond the same way characters do in films, but we neglect to realise that in film, every action and conversation is controlled by the scriptwriter. Reality is bent to work for the hero of the story. Some people even go as far as to pretend that life is controlled by a director, just so they feel safe thinking they know what will happen. When you wonder why all these bad things happen to you in particular, you don’t understand that there is no reason. There is no director taking your life in any given direction, you get just what is thrown at you by chance and it’s no indicator of what’s to come. Your life isn’t one of those stories about a person who suffers all the time then one day everything changes for the better, resolved.

There’s no director. We are the only ones in control of anything, we are the only ones who can make life better for ourselves and those around us. Don’t leave anything to play out in the way you think it will based on yours or anybody else’s past.

*This would be one of those moments one might interpret as ‘divine intervention’. The part that makes life a ’story’ controlled by a writer.

…And the award for ‘Bigot of the Year’ goes to…

In reaction to Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail, 21,000 complaints were lodged with the Press Complaints Commission. Just desserts just don’t come much sweeter than this.

When the BBC decided to air an episode of Russell Brand’s weekly radio comedy show last year that contained a joke too far, with Jonathan Ross telling Andrew Sachs, “Russell fucked your granddaughter“, the Mail had a field day. They led a campaign for heads to roll and the BBC to apologise.

The difference between ‘Sachsgate’ and Moir’s column is, Moir mean’t every word of what she said and still stands by it. Jonathon Ross and Brand just got carried away trying to be funny. They both apologised, Brand cancelled his show, Ross was suspended and the BBC were fined £150,000. The editor that approved her piece to be published validated the content as acceptable and not in the least bit hate mongering.

So does the Mail apply the same standard it reserves for the BBC to itself? Apparently not. They’ve labelled it a ‘debate’, suggesting Moir’s drivel is still a totally acceptable, if not wholesome opinion to have and of course publish as credible for its readers to agree with and regurgitate to friends and family.

I think this comment posted beneath that very statement says it all.

Fascinating how the Mail does not understand England anymore – its stance here (‘we’ve done nothing wrong’!) is the stance taken now by a clear and diminishing minority of the British people, most of whom were repelled by this nasty and vindictive article. The response to the article – the most complaints about an article in years and years – shows decisively why the Mail’s narrow minded readers will never again form a majority of the people of this country. This constituency is dying out.

Pete, Macclesfield, 19/10/2009 12:10

Why does a woman with such a cynical, twisted view of the world have a stage? Because she has an audience. An audience that will pay to read what they consider reliable justification for the explanations they’ve created for things in the world they don’t understand particularly well.

Do You Want to Fix Britain’s Immigration Problem?

Are you tired of the enduring the occasional phone call to an Indian call centre? Do you think Britain is full up? Do you blame immigrants for our social security system and unemployment levels? And are immigrants stealing your jobs?

Read what Wikipedia puts very well on this subject and relate:

Xenophobia is a dislike and/or fear of things that are unknown or different from ourselves. The Dictionary of Psychology defines it as ‘a fear of strangers’. It not only means a fear or aversion to persons from other countries, but of other cultures, subcultures, subsets of belief systems; in short, anyone who meets any list of criteria about their origin, religion, personal beliefs, habits, language, orientations etc.

While some xenophobes will state that the “target” group is a set of persons not accepted by society, in reality only the phobic person need hold the belief.

While the phobic person is aware of the aversion, sometimes hatred, of the target group they may not identify it or accept it as fear.

As with all phobias, a xenophobic person is aware of the fear, and therefore has to genuinely think or believe at some level that the target is in fact a foreigner. This arguably separates xenophobia from racism and ordinary prejudice in that someone of a different race does not necessarily have to be of a different nationality. In various contexts, the terms “xenophobia” and “racism” seem to be used interchangeably, though they can have wholly different meanings (xenophobia can be based on various aspects, racism being based solely on race and ancestry).

For xenophobia there are two main objects of the phobia. The first is a population group present within a society that is not considered part of that society. Often they are recent immigrants, but xenophobia may be directed against a group which has been present for centuries. This form of xenophobia can elicit or facilitate hostile and violent reactions, such as mass expulsion of immigrants, pogroms, or in the worst case, genocide.

The second form of xenophobia is primarily cultural, and the objects of the phobia are cultural elements which are considered alien. All cultures are subject to external influences, but cultural xenophobia is often narrowly directed, for instance at foreign loan words in a national language. It rarely leads to aggression against individual persons, but can result in political campaigns for cultural or linguistic purification. Isolationism, a general aversion of foreign affairs, is not accurately described as xenophobia.

A political poster of the far right National Party of Germany.

Ignorance Causes Fear. Fear Eats the Soul.

What started as a media class today with a screening of the 1974 West German film Fear Eats the Soul, ended as a sociology class, with a heated debate on prejudice, racism and ageism.

The film is set in Germany, and it’s about a 60 year old woman who falls in love with a younger man after visiting an Arabic bar in her neighbourhood, attracted by the exotic music and her own curiosity. The bar is shocked at the appearance of a German, and she uses the rain as an excuse for her being there. The bartender tells Ali, a young Arab in his late thirties, to ask her to dance so she would feel more welcome. He reacts with initial prejudice, calling her an old woman, but then agrees. Our teacher had told us the film would be shocking, so I’d already guessed that these two would hook up. After walking her home and engaging in some conversation, the two develop an attraction for each other and she invites him in. They get a bit drunk and she sets up a bed for him to stay, after discovering he shares a bedroom with a dozen other immigrants. In the night he gets up and enters her room, and they talk for a while. Before we know it, he’s stroking her arm, then we cut to the following morning where they wake up together. Most of the class is in shock.

Being a gay man, I’ve faced a certain amount of prejudice about relationships myself and have come to the conclusion that it is of nobody’s business but their own if two people fall in love and want to be together. Quite why the friends, family and entire neighbourhood of the parties involved have to get involved themselves is beyond me. Why do they have to make this couple’s life so difficult simply because they can’t deal with the age gap? She’s lonely, he’s shunned and rejected by a racist society and they make each other happy. Why do you have to ruin it because you can’t get your head around it?

I’ve gotta tell you, you can’t get your mind around it it’s because your mind is too damn closed. If you can’t comprehend something that isn’t part of what you know about the world, you tend to come to the conclusion that this is because it’s wrong. That would be ignorance. Stop it.

So by the end of the film, one student says “She was just using him for his body, none of this love at first sight stuff happened here”. I told him that it wasn’t about his body because she was clearly in love with him. The only reason she felt the need to pull his arm out and show his muscles to her friends was because they were showing an interest for the first time and that’s what they chose to be interested in. This behaviour was driven by her own craving for social acceptance and having her old life back, the life she was forced to give up after she married this man. She was forced to choose one or the other, not because he expected her to, but because her friends and family did, they were unable to understand this social situation because it was not the same kind of relationship everyone else has. It’s just love, but it looked different to the way they were used to or have experienced for themselves.

Needless to say, it went over one student’s head and she decided to let me know “That’s just your opinion though, innit?”. No, it’s the plot of the film. I guess that’s your polite way of telling me I’m wrong and you don’t agree because their relationship challenged your paradigm. The film demonstrates that both Emmi and Ali are guilty of the same faux pas, when Ali decided to pretend he didn’t know who she was when she turned up at his place of work because his co-workers laughed about this “grandma” who appeared to be begging him to come home. How anyone with a ’soul’ could laugh at a distressed, vulnerable woman in her sixties like that is also beyond me.

But of course the clue is in the title. Fear really does Eat the Soul. These people, Emmi and Ali’s friends and family, and the two students in my class, really didn’t like the idea of a sixty year old woman being married to a man in his late thirties. They totally lost all compassion and respect for them both as they did everything they could to make it clear this relationship was not ok. But why? Why is it not ok? Because it’s weird? Because it’s icky? Or because it’s just not the kind of relationship you would consider? Not a single rational, valid reason to lose your ’soul’ over it.