A global city?
There have been a number of posts on 'truth' - what it means and whether it's possible - they've sparked interesting debates and have given us room for thought
Johnathan Ree but on a basic level of being mis-informed and duped by those in positions of power we have to be pro-active. We have to examine what we are told more carefully.
this link maybe tenious - but how are we to live in our own cities or envisage a future for a children at the cost and destruction of other cities? Those cities less powerful than us?
If we are told that a war is necessary for a particular ideal (democracy...yeah I know we've done that one) or as self-defence....or as a way of saving a people under threat...then our sons fight, kill maim & lose little bits of their souls with some semblence of humanity in tact.
(it always astonishes me when I watch Rememberance Sunday on t.v. - old, old crippled men being pushed by old men, being followed by middle-age men being...well you get the picture? It's a never ending parade of damaged war veterans. What happened to the war to end all wars then? Are they having a laugh?)
Would we go to war to line the pockets of the fat cat corporations? Of course not. That would be obscene wouldn't it? Perish the thought.
To kill, maim & destroy for profit....that wouldn't go down at all well with our 'Christian' leaders - they may come across as....well less than Christian.
And that wouldn't elicit the required response from the electorate. (I'd like my sons safe, alive and well please. Any chance of me opting out of this war?)
Why are we in Iraq? Why does Mr 'History Will Be My Judge' Blair insist on playing the 'I'm a good Christian man and there are things I know so....I can't go into too much detail..ahem. ' 'the first casualty of war...' blah blah.
Well lets be a little more pro-active in our 'search for truth.'
. The War Profiteers'. -
'Acclaimed director (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so.'
'Brave New Films' are both funded and distributed completely outside corporate America.'
I await accusations of - well all sorts really.
The truth is that if you do not make things a matter of public record and transparent then you get these kind of things.
Who decides if these things should be open and transparent, well, the folk who get a lot of funds from big business.
the term global village has been much banded around of late, but what exactly is a 'global village'
I have my ideas of course but what of the author and others. Are we all talking about the same thing here or totally different concepts.
Please define! After all if this discussion were taking place in a coffee house somewhere I think we would at some point early in the piece offer a definition of what we were talking about
You are right Fitz 'global village' is bandied around freely as a
metaphor for the way technology enables us to cross time & space in an instant -
I was using the term 'Global City' ironically. In relation to the content of the post i.e.
if we accept that what we do 'here' in our own city has an effect on
other cities across the globe then we need to know what is being done
in 'our name' by those in positions of power.
Sorry Esther but still confused - just define it for goodness sake in simple terms for the majority of Liverpudlians to understand - or else were are all in risk of forgetting the majority and just catering for what we consider to be the elite; the educated; the interlects - talk to the PEOPLE in the vanacular!!
Keats: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
The first quotation is slightly frightening, the second is modest, made by a traveller at the beginning of a great journey. And there's another way of speaking:
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."
(1 Corinthians 13)
None of these ways of speaking have run out, passed their usefulness, it's just that there seems a need for a more immediate fix. Perhaps truth is just that practical thing, being distinct from an out-and-out falsehood, that leads them to their reward, for those who need this. Impatience is at the bottom of our problems.
No comment, feeling a little abused right now.
These are hard times..and..yes, I do realize there have been "hard times" in the past. This seems different though. So much violence passed off as relligious in nature but it's really NOT relgion..it's power and money. Always been that way..since the point in time when written history began. Most of us fall for the line..it's religious..most of us are dead wrong.
NO MORE I LOVE YOU'S
Phrases like these are losing their meaning through misuse.
This is what Annie Lennox's song is really about.
There's a split between what the young see before their very eyes, and the way Blair, Bush, and "the establishment" say it is.
Establishment is reminiscent of 60's satire, That Was The Week That Was etcetera. But that doesn't mean a new establishment hasn't come about.
Only yesterday I was reading this (by John Harris) in the G:
'...predicated on the post-Thatcher rule that no government must ever stand still. The days of manifestos built on "safety first" and consolidation now seem positively antediluvian. So, terrified that New Labour may fall victim to the dread fate of seeming complacent - and, just maybe, also driven by the idea of permanent revolution that coloured the young Trotskyist days of ... Blair and his allies spin out the politics of hopeless contradiction. Our public services have never been better, but they are in need of drastic reform. Our young people are saluted for their record exam passes, and then maligned as the yobs whose menace is seen as uniquely modern. Overall crime rates are stable ... and yet the home secretary announces an urgent new crackdown. For every supposed triumph, there is an apparent failure; for every policy yang, a corresponding yin. ...'
So it's hardly surprising people get confused about truth.
The world is full of spin doctors these days - and they can spin the truth in so many ways it becomes unbelievable!!
"I await accusations of - well all sorts really."
Are you the loose cannon of the blog? If so, good. What can be said to your barrage of points, your Agincourt? Take a walk along the north bank, as opposed to the South Bank (of Melvyn Bragg's show's fame). Try to imagine being prime minister and not being impressed.
In the days many of those buildings went up, our country's survival depended on the Nelsons and the Wellingtons, and a while later people like Churchill (if there were any others quite like him). My drift is that for a long time, and it's possibly not even over yet, we had to be defended against foreigners who'd do us harm. Actual nations, like Germany, who'd turn their productive capacity and ingenuity into wrecking as much of that city as they needed to in order to get their way.
No matter how abhorrent you, I, or any other still-young-at-heart thing might find warfare, we've had to know how to practise it in order to defend against it. I don't see anything ignoble in this. The words remain "Defence" and "Defense".
I've just watched Le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" again, on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ4, and that time must seem fantastic, unreal, to those too young to recall the Cold War. Unfortunately, just as a lot of the borders of Middle Eastern countries were drawn after the heat of world wars, so much of what has happened recently has been coloured by thinking still in place from the cold war era.
I really would be interested in what people think about the content of the film.
if we accept that what we do 'here' in our own city has an effect on
other cities across the globe then we need to know what is being done
in 'our name' by those in positions of power.
No I don't accept this at all and think everyone is too busy in their own cities cleaning up the mess each day that they don't give a t...s about what we are doing in our city, apart from envy each other from time to time.
that the money makers and laundrers of all cities are moving money around can affect us all in some way and our economies.
And anyway wasn't decmocracy supposed to afford us the knowledge about what those in power were doing in our name. didn't we sign on the dotted line, last election for this to be so?
The film? - sounds like no one saw it
The film? From the link you've given I'd say don't let your head be turned by one voice, try to listen to many.
The truth is very hard to take, for some people, so they prefer to vote in liars ?
seems to me that democracy is very hard to take; very hard to do, but unless we make the effort, all the time, the chances of being duped are very high. Isn't truth something we have to constantly construct, together, checking each other out, reading, talking, thinking...doing what we are doing here....this *is* it!
(food needed now, after all that efffort ;-)
Great Article. I am going to try to see "Brave New Films".