Category: freedom
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Male and Female Privilege
Following on from yesterday’s post on white privilege, here are two further lists on male and female privilege: The Male Privilege Checklist I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity…
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White Privilege
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, is an article by Peggy McIntosh on the invisible privileges of being white. I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my…
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Media Ownership and Mergers
Neatorama on media ownership – The Big Six of US media (via Link Banana). Last year I linked to a similar chart, from 1991, showing the media ownership of The Big Ten multinational conglomerates. Mother Jones has an appealing visual representation of 25 years of media mergers and how the biggest media conglomerates in the…
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Working With Children – Fear & False Accusations
This news report comes as no surprise. While in the past, adults would have helped children in distress or rebuked those misbehaving, there was now “a feeling that it is best not to become involved”, it said. Report author Prof Frank Furedi, of Kent University, said: “From Girl Guiders to football coaches, from Christmas-time Santas…
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The “iPod Tax” and the Desperate UK Music Industry
How did this one sneak in under the radar? The UK’s Music Business Group is requesting that a tax be levied on technologies that allow ‘format shifting’. To you and me that means that if you can transfer or copy your music from it, to it, or using it, it should be taxed. The reasoning…
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Unsubscribe from Human Rights Abuse
Unsubscribe is an Amnesty International campaign asking you to ‘unsubscribe’ from the human rights abuses undertaken around the world in your name. Illegal detention and torture are just two of the acts that are common place in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and guilty or not, people deserve better treatment than what they currently get…
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Photographer’s Rights in the UK
This morning I read an interesting BBC News article titled Innocent photographer or terrorist? that tackles the issue of illegal stop and searches of photographers and the growing incidence of this in the UK. A good accompaniment to my previous post, The Photo Police. It reminded me of this handy little booklet on Photographers’ Rights…
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The Photo Police
All too often we hear stories of over-zealous security officials hassling innocent photographers doing what comes naturally: taking photos of beautiful structures in the public domain. It appears this is now happing in Dubai with people with SLRs being prevented from photographing the awe-inspiring Burj Al Arab hotel (in order to “protect the hotel’s image”).…
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Overestimating Threats Against Children
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read. …there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have…
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Tragedies ‘Warping Government Policy’
Good to see someone in power and in the public eye stating this for the record. Government policy is often badly formed because it is drawn up in response to tragedies and problems, the Government’s new head of risk management has said (Sam Coates writes). Rick Haythornthwaite, head of the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council,…