THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: SHOULD THERE BE CONGRATULATIONS TO ENGLAND IN PASSING INTO LAW THE EXPORTATION OF IMMIGRANTS TO RWANDA.

23 Tuesday Apr 2024

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( Twelve minute read)

Did you know that the very first convicts to land in Australia did so in 1788? (This was part of a transportation system that was put into place in Britain to ease their crime rates, primarily due to the rising levels of poverty created by the Industrial Revolution.)

A system of transportation was put into place in 1717. They believed that sending people to distant colonies would give them a second chance at life. Around 160,000 convicts had been transported to Australia during this time period.

The British government believed that Australia would be an ideal place to send their convicts because it was so far away from Britain, a more humane alternative to execution. They decided to use old warships as prisons, and called them ‘hulks’. The hulks began to run out of room so they moved the occupants’ as cheap slave labour to Australia.

The effects of this moment would change the fate of an entire continent that still has significant impacts in the modern world.Reuters Rishi Sunak attends a press conference at Downing Street in London

This time its not petty criminals that they are going to export to Rwanda but immigrants.

As I understand it. One-way ticket to Rwanda to have their claims to asylum processed there.

Under the proposal:

Rwanda would take responsibility for the people who made the more than 4,000-mile journey, put them through an asylum process, and at the end of that process, if they were successful, they would have long-term accommodation in Rwanda not the UK.

Rwanda will have the “capacity to resettle tens of thousands of people in the years ahead.

Rwanda’s human rights record makes it the ideal place to get rid of unwanted immigrants. 

In 1994, one of the worst incidents of genocide in modern history took place in Rwanda, where Hutu extremists slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

Rwanda genocide of 1994, planned campaign of mass murder in Rwanda that occurred over the course of some 100 days in April–July 1994. The genocide was conceived by extremist elements of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population who planned to kill the minority Tutsi population and anyone who opposed those genocidal intentions. It is estimated that some 200,000 Hutu, spurred on by propaganda from various media outlets, participated in the genocide. More than 800,000 civilians—primarily Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu—were killed during the campaign. As many as 2,000,000 Rwandans fled the country during or immediately after the genocide, is now a safe place.

The effects of this new law (yet to be signed off by their King,) undermines the core principle of the universality of human rights and breach’s the international Refugee Convention, which the UK is signed up to.

Under EU membership there was a mechanism to return asylum seekers to the first safe European country they passed through, but this returns scheme is no longer available to the government due to Brexit.

Slamming the door in the face of refugees, is cruel and nasty decision, which will do little” to deter people. Instead the UK, the government should be focusing on creating a system that protects the right to claim asylum and that prioritises both compassion and control.

How are we treating these humans?

Are we suddenly saying those coming from Ukraine, their lives are better value than those coming from certain other countries? I think it’s abhorrent.

Voyages of despair filled with hardship. There go I but for the grace of god.

Getty Images A British Immigration Enforcement officer and an Interforce security officer escort migrants, picked up at sea by a lifeboat whilst they were attempting to cross the English Channel

The theoretical cost for sending 1,000 migrants to Rwanda could be £169m – or £169,000 a person – in contrast to the £106m it would cost to accommodate them in the UK.

More than 45,000 people crossed the English Channel last year on small boats – so-called deterrence measures simply don’t work.

£100m was paid to Rwanda in April and that an extra £50m would be handed over next year.

Of the £290m allocated to Rwanda so far, only £20m has gone towards set-up costs of the deportation scheme.

That brings the total cost to £290m but does not account for the cost of actually deporting any migrants to the country, which could end up sending the bill over £400m.

Instead of returning to medieval practices, there is no reason that on arrival applications for asylum could not be examined

The apathic irony of all of this is that we consistently hear that the providers of care are struggling to recruit and retain enough skilled staff, which is having a knock-on effect on access to care services and leading to unmet needs. Around half a million people are waiting either for an adult social care assessment with more people than ever waiting for elective NHS care (6.7 million).

The latest figures for January 2024 show: Over 321,000 of these patients have been waiting over a year for treatment,

A care system is in gridlock.

Almost 100,000 people in the UK are waiting for a decision on their asylum claims.

“Our Illegal Migration Bill will help to stop the boats by making sure people smugglers and illegal migrants understand that coming to the UK illegally will result in detention and swift removal – only then will they be deterred from making these dangerous journeys in the first place.”

Where would I sent them.?  Not Rwanda but into Care industry’s or does England no longer want to be the nation that wants to help other people.

As Climate change without a doubt is going to cause mass migration overall, this decision is likely to bring greater clarity to an area of law that is both complex and frequently in the public eye.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S ARE OUR LIVES GOVERENED BY FEAR? THE FLIP SIDE OF HOPE.

21 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by in 2024 the year of disconnection, FEAR, Israel and Palestine, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Ukraine., Uncategorized

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( Twenty minute read)

How much of our lives is governed by fear?

Fear is an ancient and conserved response that served humans well enough before the advent of civilisation, but it has become distorted in modern societies where primordial fears can readily transform into phobias.

Fear is part instinct, part learned, part taught. Some fears are instinctive: Pain, for example, causes fear because of its implications for survival. Other fears are learned and also partly imagined.  Imagined threats cause paralysis. Real threats, on the other hand, cause frenzy.

For instance social media is now fanning, the flames of fear and disseminating misinformation quickly and widely with fake news.

It’s hard to fully understand the way fear shapes our world without addressing its relationship to anger.

And anger is important for those who profit from fear because anger generates action.

People are more vulnerable when they’re in an angered state. When we’re angry, we don’t pay attention to the details of complex messages, the more one person expresses anger, the more others express anger, and then it becomes a kind of spiral where the anger is ratcheted up and up.

Many bemoan online when social media platforms seemingly descend into ranting and abuse but a great deal of the anger we find when perusing our devices isn’t organic, it’s engineered – for profit.

Provoking anger is rapidly becoming the standard for many online operations.

Why?

Because fidelity of the source is taken by social media sites and search engines as key factors for their Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems to classify content.

In their defence, social media platforms are between a rock and a hard place because of their need to balance free speech against repression of damaging or hateful material.

It works because in our algorithmically driven culture the popularity of any given content is no longer driven by the number of eyeballs that see it, but by the level of engagement it generates.

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Fear sharpens the mind, which is why fear is used in campaigns, whether it’s public health, whether it’s to change people’s attitude to things like climate change.

Fear can steel resolve to do something.

After the second World War and the horrors that the world experienced, democratic countries became defensive.  In other words, they saw fear as an important tool for making sure that these kinds of perversions never happened again, but in the process of doing that, fear actually became too important as a component. It started to eclipse the very values that it was supposed to be protecting-  “enculturated” in fear – NATO.

But that’s not the whole story.

We can now register a fear with new characteristics in the fear taxonomy, and we could call it global fear.

.For example during COVID too much fear created apathy leading to disinterest and distrust.

What’s needed is a better public understanding of the role these emotions play in our lives, and a clearer appreciation that when emotions are manipulated, even good intentions can have disastrous consequences.

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Fear and anger are dominating our world right now, but are we being manipulated for profit?

Fear and anger abound – in our politics, in our social discourse, and in our expectations for the future.

When fear is pervasive in a system — and it’s pervasive in all of our systems — what that means is that we lose dynamism, we lose innovation. Fears put a stranglehold on our life force. Fear paralyzes us. Fear diminishes us. And the more we conquer our fears, the more meaningful our life becomes.

Fear and anger have been monetised, the result of deliberate manipulation by commercial and political interests.

The antidote for our current malaise isn’t simply to suppress our emotional extremes. In fact, both fear and anger can help positive social change by fostering a thirst for justice and even revolution.

The difficulty for people today is empathising or imaginatively trying to situate themselves in the future … It’s very, very difficult.

The growing fear-based discourse around climate change, for example, and the use of fear-laden expressions and words often backfires on those who deploy them. When someone like [UN Secretary-General] António Guterres uses the term ‘global boiling’ the problem is a lot of people in their daily lives are not experiencing a climate crisis, they don’t experience excessive heat, they don’t have wildfires on their doorstep. They just switch off.

While we tend to equate fear-based leadership with totalitarianism or populism, there are many instances in democratic countries where politics is coloured by the use of fear as a blunt tool of coercion.

More people realise that we’re living in a vicious cycle, where manufactured fear fuels anger and anger in turn blinds us to the recognition that our fear is misplaced. Take the discourse around “illegal” immigration.

As George Orwell’s warnings 1984 to the world which are now coming true as we move into an age of totalitarian Ai dictatorial -an age in which freedom of thought will be a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.

Totalitarianism relies on mass support so we need more people to realize what is at stake and start seeing all around us by taking the smart phone out of our ears.

With AI moving into the Physical world, algorithms are running more and more of life as we know it.

Combined they are evolving towards the same system, a form of oligarchical collectivism with manufactured fear.  The strategy of fear is one of their most valuable tactics.

Don’t let it happen. Face recognition becoming a thought or face crime.

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You see the state of the world.

It is not important who is at war or with who, it’s the removal of freedoms and constant surveillance which is now conducted through the smartphones we carry around in our pockets, with every sound you make, every movement scrutinised.

The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence. Everything fades into mist. The past is erased, the erasure is forgotten and the lie comes truth.

No one can stand aside, dont let it happen it depends on you

It’s understandable that we may worry about world events but fear is hardwired in your brain, and for good reason.

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War is peace freedom is slavery.

Israel is as we watch becoming a Totalitarian State.

How does one witness the cruelty of indiscriminate bombing? We cannot physically or mentally feel another’s pain, but we can empathize with it. We tend to still think of war as great power competition or as the Second World War.

The USA vetoed Palestine becoming a full member of the United nations then approved more than $61bn worth of military assistance to help Ukraine in its desperate defence against Russia, as well as billions for other allies including Israel and Taiwan.

The $95bn in total funding includes roughly $61bn for Ukraine (with much of the funding going towards replenishing American munitions); $26bn for Israel; $8bn for US allies in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan; and $9bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians in war zones, such as Haiti, Sudan and Gaza, though the package also includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025. The US has so far sent Ukraine roughly $111bn in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid since the start of the war more than two years ago.

The Israel bill includes about $4.4bn to replenish depleted US supplies given to Israel; $4bn for missile defence, including the much-vaunted Iron Dome, and $1.2bn for the Iron Beam; and $3.5bn to help Israel buy weapons. There are also provisions to make it easier to supply Israel with US munitions held in other countries.

What is what.

If you can have all the information that’s out there, crunch it into some kind of algorithm, that you can then target discriminately, proportionately.

The idea that machines are going to replace humans in wars  is fundamentally untrue.

We are seeing this to a certain extent right now, in Palestinian/Israel war with Ai deciding who and how to kill.  Both wars are is very much a battle of machines and soldiers, a high technology-driven conflict.

Where you can attack, use some surgically precise weapons, take care of the problem, eliminate your opponent and then extract yourself from a situation, has actually turned into a quagmire with new super weapons, whether it be cyber information warfare or artificial intelligence everyone wants to be ahead of the curve, right?

However, this approach also overshadows political considerations, including the causes of conflicts, obscures the costs of conflict, and creates illusions of quick and easy victories—all of which has led to two decades of war in the twenty-first century.

One of the problems here is this idea that you can simply solve problems by targeting them with cruise missiles, is simply not the case.

The belief that technology can help prevent war by creating a deterrent, is an illusion.

Wars will never be able to solve the difficult and complex political and cultural problems on the ground. Weapons can help produce ceasefires, but they cannot themselves create long-lasting, established peace.

Essentially, the idea that science can produce technologically advanced weapons so horrible that no one will ever want to fight is farcical. If we are ever going to get rid of war military culture it must be understood that it  does not exist in isolation.

Through the use of technology WE GOING TO CREATE WARS.

The rush to apply cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence to military systems is well under way. A new breed of techno-evangelists, many of whom stand to make billions if we go down the high tech path they are so aggressively promoting.

The application of science to unpick the supposedly immutable principles of warfare, making conflicts shorter and more humane, or eliminating the need for large-scale campaigns, found a home in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Such views reached their zenith with the advent of nuclear weapons and the logic of deterrence.

Importantly,  technology-based approach emerges as a counter to the deterrence-based approach. Although nuclear weapons had made war unlikely, given the risks of mass casualties and devastation.

There is a need for much greater restraint in making assumptions as to what ends can be achieved militarily. Replacing people with machines on the battlefield, will not result in ‘clean’ conflicts.

Where there may be feelings of anger and betrayal, or even a sense of exhaustion, not uncovering the truth may lead to conspiracy or a turn to an engineering-infused idealism—that smarter systems will produce better results next time.

High-tech wars transfers the risk from soldiers to civilians.

It envisions the military drawing on US advanced technologies, such as AI, cyber resources, unmanned systems and machine learning to offset or create an overmatch of adversarial capabilities. Reducing the time that it takes from identifying a target to destroying it (known as the “kill chain”) and diminishing or eliminating human input could be a recipe for unprecedented disaster.

The Ukraine war is been used as a proof of concept for their systems, and a marketing tool to boot – after all, what’s more attractive than buying “battle proven” technology?

Revelations that Israel has used AI not to spare civilians but to step up the rate and scope of its devastation of Gaza is just the latest example of why we need to think twice before acquiescing in the rush towards a world dominated by automated warfare.

Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. military and intelligence agencies awarded major tech firms contracts with ceilings worth at least $53 billion combined. Resulting in large military contracts to big tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

The idea that America alone has the ability (and the duty) to protect the world’s democratic societies; and a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a largely unregulated free market that prioritizes corporate needs is a farce. It is on the verge of losing an epic struggle for global geopolitical and economic supremacy—unless it can outpace China in the ‘AI arms race.

U.S. government for Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has suggested can plausibly be considered a case of genocide.

Russia’s or Israeli nuclear status means that NATO countries are unlikely to become involved in direct fighting given the risk of escalation.

The time to act is now, because nobody has any idea if we have cyborg fighting wars.

There is another response in play when there is a perceived threat to survival. Physical harm, threats to property used for protection, threats to self value that erode a desire to survive come from the Caveman part of our brain that dictate the innate need to run, hide, fight. As to what is coming next is anyone’s guess.

My guess is that it will be self-help.

Physical aggression and violence dictate fear. the use of run, hide, fight.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY SAYS; ENTERTAINMENT IS NOW BEYOND THE PALE. WHAT CONSITUTES ENTERTAINMENT? WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? IS THERE ANY LINE TO BE DRAWEN?

19 Friday Apr 2024

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( Ten minute read)

Even as violence is a concept that has long accompanied humanity, it is no easy task to make sense of what it is, or how it is exercised.

Ancient Romans flocked to carnage in the Colosseum.

Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone.

Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history.

The relationship between violent media and real-world violence has been the subject of extensive debate and considerable academic research, yet the core question is far from answered.

Portrayals of violence can manufacture our consent with government policies, encourage us to endorse the legitimacy of state power and state violence, and help determine who are “worthy victims”.

Results from the two studies suggest that socialization models of media violence may be inadequate to our understanding of the interaction between media and consumer behaviour at least in regard to serious violence.

Our media outlets from News to Gaming – Movies – Net flicks – Social Media – are saturated with violence.

More than 100 million people watched the gory Netflix show, Squid Game.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice wins Game Beyond entertainment.

This is a bit like benign masochism, the enjoyment of aversive, painful experiences in a safe context.

Whether or not screen violence is bad for us has been extensively studied and there are reasons to reconsider how much we like watching violence per se.

For example, violence creates tension and suspense, which may be what people find appealing. Another possibility is that it is action, not violence, which people enjoy. That it is violence being deemed off-limits that makes it appealing. It may be that it is justified punishment, rather than violence, that we enjoy watching.

All this suggests that media companies may be giving us violence that many of us don’t want or need.

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We should hence consider what other corporate, political or ideological pressures may be encouraging onscreen violence globally causing us to become disconnected with reality.

Movies lie about the real impact of violence on the human body – with almost 90% of violent actions showing no realistic physical consequences to the victim.

The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.

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The question of how humans came to be domesticated — at the will of a deity, independently, as some sort of evolved trait — has plagued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years.

It is tempting to try to answer this question by invoking biology and genetics, arguing that humanity is wired to be violent.

Whether humans will ever live in a violent-free, as digital technologies—such as social media platforms—become increasingly central to our daily existence they have become essential components in how violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, as access to and use of social media continue to expand across the world so does the violence enacted through these digital platforms become more common.

For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news and watch murder in all its forms.

What lies behind these episodes. Perhaps, some have argued, our intelligence and systems of culture, such as laws and social norms, are all that are holding that innate violence in check.

How good and evil may have come to co-exist in our unique species. Are humans, by nature, good or evil? The question has split opinions since people began philosophising. We have a low propensity for impulsive aggression, and a high propensity for premeditated aggression.

It raises a deeper question: Why did such an unusual combination of virtue and violence evolve?

A deeper understanding of how and why violence emerges, or doesn’t, might help us achieve a less violent future—or at least one in which we can better comprehend and manage our violence.

41% of people in the United States of America have suffered online harassment, from physical threats (14%) and sexual harassment (11%) to name-calling (31%).

But violence in digital environments is not only expanding, it is also becoming more complex as the evolving affordances, structures, and cultures of contemporary digital environments increase their scale, speed, reach, and visibility (Backe et al., 2018).

For instance, violence on social media is found in the new ways cultural and informational wars are enacted and deployed in the United States filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks and wars.

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It is a widespread phenomenon that directly or indirectly affects many aspects of our lives.

Nonetheless, digital manifestations of violence are often thought to be less “real,” “serious,” or “harmful” than those enacted face-to-face (Dunn, 2021).

Capitalism is a dirty word for many intellectuals but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

Warfare provides people with a semblance of psychological positivity in oppressed societies where other outlets are lacking.

Any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs. The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to do this makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.

War and other destructive capabilities are merely the flip side of the same uniquely human faculty that has enabled us to coexist peacefully, to innovate, to travel in space and shape our world.

The evolution of entertainment into a global landscape signifies a world where cultural boundaries blur, and creativity knows no limits. In today’s interconnected world, the entertainment industry has expanded its reach, influencing and captivating audiences worldwide with diverse content and experiences.

Entertainment has transcended geographical boundaries, morphing into a global phenomenon that unites people across cultures, languages, and continents.

Social media is cursed with pervasive and impactful harmful content. Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest?

Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another.

Film and television have long been seen as legitimate and powerful means to educate, inspire and empower wider society. To deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment – whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real world problems, or to make the world a better place.

The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.

The past two years have seen the most conflicts of any time since the end of the Second World War.

(The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.)

What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good?

The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.

Reaching beyond video to monopolise the attention of audiences in the home TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behaviour.

We are exposed to social media violence just by being there.

The amount of violent content has helped normalise aggression. The reality is that social media platforms have got a lot to answer for. In practically every situation where we’ve seen violence happen there has been some sort of connection with an online platform in some form.

Why are these social media platforms not being held to account?

Why are we so scared of asking really difficult questions and why are these social media platforms not putting more money back in the communities that are being affected by violence?

We don’t fully know the impact of social media.

But social media and the fact that something that is say in passing becomes written down, causes what might have been nothing to become something.

For most violence isn’t at all normal, but there is a proportion whose lives are far too full of violence because of inequality and poverty.

The key driver of violence.

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But what about games?

As our younger industry matures, what role should games play in reflecting and commenting on the world around us?

Already we have a number of implications that will define the future shape of the online entertainment market. As society seeks answers in the media they trust, streaming devices are now everywhere, pouring news into social media 7/7

People in entertainment, tries to make something for everyone/to make the most profit instead of making what they want, so personality and quality takes a hit.

There is definitely a cultural degradation taking place.

Violence is an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary digital environments.

Games beyond entertainment.

The advent of video games raise new questions about the potential impact of media violence, since the video game player is an active participant rather than merely a viewer. Video games that involve assuming the roles of aggressors or soldiers offer players the opportunity to be “virtual perpetrators.”

Rewarding players for successfully carrying out violent behaviour.

Online gaming communities, esports tournaments, and multiplayer platforms enable players worldwide to engage, compete, and connect in virtual worlds. Digital platforms have revolutionized entertainment accessibility. Social media influencers transcend borders, shaping entertainment trends and culture on a global scale, such as cultural sensitivities, censorship, and legal barriers that can hinder the free flow of content across borders.

There are fewer empirical studies of video game violence than other forms of media violence. Still, several meta-analytic reviews have reported negative effects of exposure to violence in video games. 

Content matters. much of the research into video game violence has failed to control for other variables such as mental health and family life, which may have impacted the results.

Given that effects on individual users may differ widely, policy discussion should be more focused on “more pressing” issues that influence violence in society such as poverty or mental health.

Rest assured that entertainment will need to master new forms of interactive entertainment — whether in video games, sports betting or the more social and communications-based services that thrive on smartphones — to keep audiences hooked.

There was no such thing as YouTube its their Tube.

U Tube now has a  War Channel created to appeal military enthusiasts around the world; offering viewers hours of programming on the American Civil war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine and all.

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Why are people less imaginative?

Because we all have the internet and other high-information sources that fill in the gaps for us.

Story telling, character-building, authenticity, and originality have all gone out the window, as entertainment has become largely an industry as opposed to a genuine creative outlet.

Game makers have the opportunity – and responsibility – to offer their players an appropriate and powerful means to get close to challenging issues or subject matter.

Games are brilliant at engendering empathy by allowing you to experience the life of other people first hand. As game makers and storytellers we have the ability to take our audiences to places they haven’t been or to feel things they have yet to experience.Soldiers with rifles walking on a leafy hill, with tanks in the background. As the Ukraine war enters its second year, Tufts experts weight alternative endings—and the possibility it won’t be resolved any time soon.

There’s the possibility of vertical escalation—meaning that Russia would use more advanced weapons, including nuclear weapons—on the battlefield. And there is the possibility of horizontal escalation, the war spilling over to other countries.

What if anything can be done?

Here are a few key recommendations, which includes improve regulations and legislation for social media companies, greater responsibility so tech companies are held accountable for inaction, and for young people to be involved in panels that are consulted on tackling online harms and the development of games, new content and online spaces.

Legislation in relation to social media platforms is needed, but it is one aspect in an array of required measures, including education, the need to address social inequalities, the need for transparency by companies, by governments who should be constantly aware of how fake violence on our screens serves real violence in our world.

Why?

Because exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world.

Yes, its true that  for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery , but society as a whole is another question.

An average American youth will witness 200,000 violent acts on television before age

18. 46% of television violence occurs in cartoons.

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The prevalence and impact of violence portrayed in media and entertainment and the near-ubiquitous portrayals of violence in various forms of media must remained a topic of intense scrutiny.

Fear is what, anxiety and depression, wars, domestic violence, relationship breakdowns, child abuse, terrorism, mass shootings, self-harm and all forms of violence towards oneself and others have in common.

All comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IS INTERNATIONAL LAW NOW A JOKE.

18 Thursday Apr 2024

Posted by in International laws,, International solidarity.

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( Twelve minute read)

The present moment finds the world as dangerously divided and on the edge of international violence as any in the last thirty years. Why?

You could blame #Bill Gates for this reason.

He was blinded by the good of connecting us all and our every actions in the world, with the Internet which has introduced an epochal change that is been used both for good and bad.

Since the internet became a thing (in a period of conflict and transformation of international relations) states use to be able to find new ways of discovering points of common interest and signalling willingness to conform to particular norms.

This is no longer possible as everything is connected to some other another thing, or event with an eroding of  International laws.

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The world faces many threats that require collective action for an effective response..

Climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and future pandemics, including those deliberately engineered using cutting-edge technology, may lead the list.

The present moment of crisis has many causes – geopolitical, economic and cultural and the Internet/ AI algorithms running social media and killing programs.

Russia’s armed attack on Ukraine and now the Israel war have prompted many to despair of international law.

What it means as a practical matter is that the formal adoption of new international rules through international agreements faces roadblocks that seem likely to persist for some time.

WHY?

Because suddenly just about everyone has a portal to cyberspace, a wonderful world with an amazing range of images, sounds and writing, further democratized connections and influence around the world through cyber-activity.

These developments are transforming our world. The difference from twenty years ago could not be greater.

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The cyber-revolution, an explosion in connectivity that increasingly allowed people to bypass central authorities to communicate, agitate and organize, unfolded during the first decade of the present century.

What is the value of a legal order that has no effective remedy in store against even the most blatant violations?

Global governance seemed to have overcome the burgeoning nationalism of the 19th century.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court arguably marked the end of history in the field of international law. Surely now we don’t need another war or the current wars, to open our eyes about the insufficiency of the post-1990 international legal order. 

The differentiation concerning the real-life implications of international law are now so profound with wars conducted with AI drones and targeting programmes, we are left to realize that even in cases so clearly in violation of the most fundamental principles of international law, international law hardly seems to contain power.

Due to the lack of centralized enforcement, how international law influences states and other actors in ways that are often implicit rather than explicit, influencing the cognitive, psychological aspects of human nature, rather than the faculty for rational calculus.

Our understanding of legal terms was guided by moral concepts, not anymore.

In the absence of effective formal international law-making, jurists face a choice that will require a lot of work on language and perceptions.

It is sometimes incredibly difficult to find out whether states choose their course of action due to cognitive or motivational biases or out of sheer self-interest.

In the case of international humanitarian law, we are likely to see entrepreneurial rules favoured by states that project military force into conflicts, either international or non-international, rather than those preferred by states that find armed conflicts unfolding on their territory against their will.

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I offer here a stylized and truncated narrative that focuses on two factors:

(1) geopolitical changes related to the use of force in international and non-international disputes, and (2) the achievements of information technology.

This is not the entire story,

The collapse of Soviet Union in December 1991, seemed to put an end to the bipolar regime that had governed international security issues since the Second World War. This opened the door to the possibility of a new world order based on the international rule of law. It became possible to imagine a world where international uses of armed force would rest on international consensus, reflected in the actions of the United Nations Security Council, and thus increasingly rare.

Worldwide, States walked away from the bipolar structure that had dominated international relations for the previous forty years. Many thoughtful people believed that we found ourselves in a new age of collective security and democratic peace with the international rule of law and peaceful resolution of international disputes replacing the threat of armed conflict and the risk of Armageddon.

After 1991, armed conflict did not disappear, but shifted and is still shifting to AI weapons beyond any human control, that will produce atrocities yet to be seen- forever wars. Al-Qaeda and Da’esh embody non-State parties to such conflicts. 

Forever wars, that spawn mass terror attacks resulting coalitions invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. ( the former with the Security Council’s approval and the latter without.) However conquest did not result in triumph, but instead in prolonged insurgencies that in many ways resembled the old wars of national liberation.

Resulting in a right to collective self-defence against non-State organizations operating on the territory of Syria and Russia and Iran introducing forces at the invitation of Syria’s government.

That are neither anti-colonial struggles of national liberation nor civil wars confined to the territory of a State. Rather, they involve armed struggle by non-State actors to bring about a regime change in a particular State or region that extends outside the borders of the contested territory.

As freedom spread from the virtual space to the physical space.

Cyber-tactics could defang authoritarian uses of targeted force by enabling elements of surprise and swarming for popular uprisings that resist State-sponsored suppression of protests.

The cyber-revolution, in the eyes of some, represented the death knell of violent authoritarian regimes and thus provided yet another path to a democratic peace. Such as the 2011 Arab Spring.

Authoritarians increasingly exploited the new technologies to survey and remove their adversaries.

Once an instrument of liberation, cyberspace increasingly became the place where States bolstered their defences against dissidents. The same technologies that gave states greater resources to leverage domestic social control also provided new instruments for prosecuting international conflicts.

These actors also can infiltrate online media so as to engage in disinformation and psychological warfare. The cyber-tools not only greatly multiply the efficacy of these interventions, but complicate attribution of responsibility. These malign capacities exacerbate both traditional international disputes and the prosecution of non-traditional armed conflicts.

Both developments breed instability and leverage threats to peace and prosperity. They also raise issues related to international humanitarian law.

This may mean developing rules with which states will comply while maintaining plausible deniability that their compliance represents a broader commitment to cooperation or any indication of the normative pull of the rule of law.

With the capacity to conduct over-the-horizon operations, typically drone strikes, against persons they believe to be implicated in imminent armed attacks have developed non-trivial standards and rules of evidence to constrain military actors in choosing whom to target.

Before it becomes impossible, international law must be updated to the technology it is supposed to operate in.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. ISRAEL WILL NEVER BE A SECURE NATION.

18 Thursday Apr 2024

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( Two minute read)

Indeed, Israel’s deliberate, industrial-scale murder of the Palestinian people under the pretext of “self-defence” won’t enhance its security or secure its future.

Rather, it will produce greater insecurity and instability, further isolate Israel and undermine its chances for long-term survival in a predominantly hostile region.

Without shedding its colonial regime and embracing normal statehood by excepting the rights of all its people in a one state solution ( not two state) its demise is not in the so distant future.

Israel’s colonial nature presently supported by the USA, dominates its behaviour at each and every turn wasting countless opportunities to end its occupation and live in peace with its neighbours.

It has multiplied the number of illegal Jewish settlements and settlers on stolen Palestinian lands and networked them through special bypass roads and other planning projects, creating a dual system, a superior, dominating one for the Jews and an inferior one for the Palestinians.

In the absence of peace and in the shadow of colonisation, the country has slid further towards fascism, enshrining Jewish supremacy into its laws and extending it to all of historic Palestine.

As they tightened their siege of the Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air prison, and dropped all pretence of ever allowing it to unite with its Palestinian hinterland in a sovereign Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is undermining its own institutions, and any chances of peace based or coexistence between two peoples.

To have any chance of living in peace it must address the root causes of the conflict with the Palestinians, namely their dispossession, occupation and siege.

Even with USA/ UK backing it has no chance of surviving among all the indigenous people of the region, who have coalesced more than ever before.

Israel can no longer use its fanciful theological claims to justify its violent racist practices. God does not sanction the slaughter of innocent children.

Israel has no good options after the war ends. If it continued on the same destructive path the demise of Israel “as we know it” is around the corner regardless of how much Palestinian, Arab and Israeli blood it sheds.

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The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians.

We have to understand: Israelis aren’t going anyplace, and Palestinians aren’t going anyplace.

Discussions of a two-state solution is now cobblers.

A decent number of Israelis and Palestinians have come to conclude that it’s not a solution, that the nature of Israeli behaviour, especially in the West Bank, makes a Palestinian state unviable.

How exactly, or who would drawn the borders, never mind decide how or who rules.

(A substantial line of thought [in Israel] is that it’s more important that Israel be Jewish than democratic.)

There are alternatives to a two-state solution — including a one-state solution, a confederation.

One of the biggest challenges for Israelis is balancing the need for a Jewish state and a democratic state. This could and can be achieved with a written constitution approved by international law. 

“If you have a one-state solution that gives citizenship to all of the natural-born residents of Mandatory Palestine — which includes Gaza and the West Bank — you don’t have a Jewish majority,”

It’s hard to imagine this kinds of possibilities in this moment, but the need for change is clear.

Iranian leaders have been among the sharpest critics of Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. Tehran has made no secret of its praise for those who attack Israelis, including the Hamas-led attack that Israel says killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7.

Iran blames Israel for the April 1 airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus that killed seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two IRGC generals. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being behind the attack.

If Israel was responsible, it would be the latest in a long line of attacks against Iranian targets.

A shadow war between Iran and Israel has grown over the years and with the recent Iran drone and missiles attack you may rest assured that if Israel targets Iranians nuclear sites the USA will be over the moon.

That will trigger not just a major regional war but threaten the very existence of us all.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT COMES TO IRIAN?

15 Monday Apr 2024

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Iran has scarcely been out of the headlines in recent months. But how far back does the history of Iran stretch?

Like me I am sure we know little or nothing of it history.National Flag of Iran | Iran Flag History, Meaning and Pictures

Long before Iran came to be known in the mid-twentieth century as one of the countries of the Middle East, for nearly two and a half millennia it was known to the Western world as Persia.

So here is a starting point for an exploration of the history of modern Iran.

The Islamic Republic has been in a state of influx almost from its start. It has managed to survive in this state of perpetual crisis — and sometimes even benefited from it — because confrontation, or anticipation of confrontation with a nemesis, that is with the United States, played into its hand. It gives the regime the pretention of legitimacy as the core to national resistance against Western hegemony and regime change. The sense of emergency hence contributed to its survival. Moreover, the ruling clergy and its associated groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, although a small minority devoid of the true support of a majority of Iranians, survived in power probably because of a strong sense of group solidarity.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented the first time in the modern history of the Muslim world that a movement dominated by the clergy took control of a state. Historically, this is a very unusual event, not just in the Islamic world, but anywhere. Religion and state were seen as two pillars of stability in Iranian society.

Shi’ism as a belief system, supported and reinforced by the region’s geopolitical complexity, preserved Iran’s socio-cultural identity.

Through the preservation of the language, Iran managed to preserve a collective memory of its past, which is also rather unusual.

Basically, the memory of Islamic conquest became the foundation myth for the sense of Islamic identity that emerged in Egypt, Syria and eventually Iraq. Iran was different. It preserved its memories of pre-Islamic times and grew quite proud of them.

Iran’s oil industry was basically a colonial industry created and developed by the British. A massive amount of the revenue went to the British government while a much smaller percentage went to the Iranian government. But even that share of the revenue was crucial for a nearly bankrupt Iranian state in the post-WWI era. It provided the necessary funds for greater centralization; for enforcing modern reforms; for strengthening the armed forces; and for the creation of an autocratic regime under the Pahlavis that no longer sought the traditional support of the religious establishment.

The Allied occupation of Iran in September 1941 was a rude shock to most Iranians.

Facing the soldiers of the Red Army, the British Indian Army, and soon after American military personnel seemed almost a surreal reversal of two decades of Pahlavi assurances of Iran’s reclaimed sovereignty and the might of the Iran’s Imperial Armed Forces.

The occupation triggered one of the most eventful episodes in Iran’s modern history and revealed persistent themes in the country’s recent past: the struggle for democracy. The gradual return to autocratic practices after 1953 put an undue end to Iran’s perilous experiment with participatory politics. Instead, an era of stability, albeit politically repressive, began to set in, and with the exception of a brief interlude in the early 1960s, it remained essentially unchanged until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The exile of Ayatollah Khomeini and the shah’s success, at least for a while, in silencing the forces of opposition generated a sense of royal self-confidence with an almost prophetic mission. The decade of 1963 to 1973 represented, with all its shortcomings, the best of the shah’s years: an age of economic development, success in foreign policy, and relative popularity at home.

Iran in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed an era of cultural florescence, a period remarkable for artistic creativity, the rise of new talents, and greater international exposure but also greater state sponsorship. Expressions of artistic and intellectual dissent, often transmitted through a language of symbols, emerged in cinema, poetry, and popular music.

The tumultuous events that led to the revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran were a classic example of modern popular revolution.  Out of a broad alliance of Islamic tendencies there emerged a militant clerical leadership, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Over the course of the following decade, Khomeini played a decisive part in defining the Islamic Republic.

Between August 1978 and February 1979, a period of less than seven months, Iran witnessed a revolution that brought down the Pahlavi regime and abolished the institution of monarchy, wiped out the privileges of the Pahlavi elite, and significantly weakened its secularized middle classes. In its stead Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates created the Islamic Republic, which aimed to establish the “Guardianship of the Jurist” (welayat-e faqih) as the only legitimate model of governance.

That Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts put their mark on the Islamic Revolution was more than an accident of history. At least since 1961, and with a greater resolve since 1970, clerical Shi‘ism explored ideological Islam and contemplated juridical authority as an alternative to secular power.

In less than a year after victory of the revolution in February 1979, the new regime managed to consolidate its base, build new institutions, and eliminate its contenders for power.

It conducted a referendum on the change of regime to an Islamic republic, ratified a new constitution, elected a parliament, elected a president to office, and established revolutionary courts, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts. All the while the newly established republic was engaged in major domestic and international crises that threatened its very existence.

A crisis of great magnitude was in progress, one that shook Iran’s relations with the outside world and initiated an adversarial encounter with the United States that shaped their relationship for decades to come.

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1979 November – Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage inside the US embassy in Tehran. They demand the extradition of the Shah, in the US at the time for medical treatment, to face trial in Iran.

The hostage crisis of November 1979 started an international tremor that for the following fourteen months would enrage the United States, preoccupy world media, appal public opinion worldwide, and irreparably damage the image of the Islamic Republic.

1980 22 September – Start of Iran-Iraq war, which lasts for eight years.

1981 January – The American hostages are released, ending 444 days in captivity.

1989 November – The US releases 567 million dollars of frozen Iranian assets.

The magnitude of this paradigmatic shift, and the way a conservative Shi‘i establishment transformed into a radical force of dissent, becomes all the more striking when we set the Islamic Revolution in the broader political and cultural contexts of the past five centuries.

2002 January – US President George Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil”, warning of the proliferation of long-range missiles being developed in these countries.

2002 September – Russian technicians begin construction of Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr despite strong objections from US.

2003 December – 40,000 people are killed in an earthquake in south-east Iran. The city of Bam is devastated

.2007 October – US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran, the toughest since it first imposed sanctions almost 30 years ago.

2009 September – Iran admits that it is building a uranium enrichment plant near Qom, but insists it is for peaceful purposes.

The country test-fires a series of medium- and longer-range missiles that put Israel and US bases in the Gulf within potential striking range.

2015 July – After years of negotiations, world powers reach deal with Iran on limiting Iranian nuclear activity in return for lifting of international economic sanctions. The deal gives UN nuclear inspectors extensive but not automatic access to Iranian sites.

2018 May-June – President Trump announces the US withdrawal from the 2015 international deal on Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran in turn warns that it will begin increasing its uranium enrichment capacity if the deal collapses as a result of the US move.

2020 January – Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, responsible for Iran’s military support for the Syrian government, killed in a US air strike at Baghdad Airport, prompting Iranian threats of retaliation.

2024 April  Iran fires hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation of Israel attack on its Embassy in Syria.

If the current regime caves under another popular upheaval, the outcome may not be promising at all.

The recent Middle East popular movements of political reform, such as the Arab Spring, have by and large failed. Likewise, any attempt toward a regime change through military option or covert operation almost definitely helps strengthen the regime’s popular base. On the other hand, if it is left to its own devices, will Iran become another China? Whether it moves away from a hostile ideological position to a more pragmatic regime with capitalist economy and friendlier posture toward the outside world is a matter of speculation. The recent U.S. departure from the Five Plus One nuclear deal with Iran, and the impending re-imposition of sanctions, does not offer a bright prelude for success of the latter option.

You only have to look at Israeli and the Iranian recent UN Security Council presentations after Iran’s direct attack to see that the Middle East is now a tinder box that no amount of Verbal is going to solve.

Iran’s ambassador repeated Tehran’s claim that it was responding in “self-defence” after the April 1 explosion at its Damascus consulate in Syria, for which Iran blamed Israel.

Israel will exact a price from Iran in response to Saturday’s attack when the time is right.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com