Bloody London Olympic Boycott

by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices Wed May 09, 2012 08:35

A Chara Wage????,

I accept the basis of what you are saying and that editors have to do their work as best they can too, which means with the best intentions in the world articles will get pulled. Other than considerable frustration I have no hard feelings about that.

The problem as I see it, is that we are competing against the corporate press of spin and disinformation for headline and attention. This article below is what schools are teaching prospective journalists:

" Headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. So, from a copywriting and content marketing standpoint, writing great headlines is a critical skill.

Here are some interesting statistics.
On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of your title, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

Remember, every element of compelling copy has just one purpose — to get the next sentence read. And then the sentence after that, and so on, all the way down to your call to action. So it’s fairly obvious that if people stop at the headline, you’re already dead in the water.The better your headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people.

I have an awful lot to learn and I need all the help I can get about certain issues I have passionate feelings about. I understand you have your job to do and I accept that a lot of what I write will not get published. I do understand the confines everyone is working with and I am grateful that a platform such as Indymedia Ireland exists in the first instance.

We will disagree again in the future, if we both stay true to ourselves but such is life, diversity and reality.

Is mise le meas

brian

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE FASCISM !

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Wed May 09, 2012 04:32

brian,
Lefty has a point. We've previously hidden quite a few of your posts here but we'd much sooner have you as a positive contributor writing decent well researched articles couched in more measured language about the topics you are interested in (which I know you are well capable of) rather than us having to hide intentionally over the top / provocative ones that set out deliberately to break our guidelines. If you try to work with us here rather than against us then we can all benefit. Your posts stay up, we have less moderation work to do, and the public get some thought provoking interesting articles to read.

And when I say provocative, I don't mean the ideas themselves so much as the manner of the presentation. OTT headlines coupled with scatalogical pictures and wildly exaggerated statements, quite tangential to the often quite valid points you want to make in some cases. Clearly shooting your message in the foot instead of working with us to get it out there which is the point of you taking the time to write and the point of the volunteers here keeping this website going.

We also believe Marian Price should be released and has been horribly treated. We also have grave reservations about some of the same things you do, such as how corporations cynically shirk their direct social responsibilities while simultaneously spending huge amounts on advertising, as you discuss above. Or the many underhand political machinations of the british state in regard to Ireland historically and ongoing. So if you could maybe just try to tone down the language / hyperbole / images a bit and maybe try to be somewhat more careful with fact checking etc then there's no reason we can't be friends here. The current situation benefits nobody.
All the best
rgds
wageslave (personal capacity)

by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices Tue May 08, 2012 20:23

Greenwashed similar to whitewashed, is a form of spin or subtle lies in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to push the perception of aims and policies that are environmentally friendly. Sometimes to increase profits, sometimes to gain political support, it manipulates popular opinion to support otherwise unethical or criminal exploitation.

Lefty, thank you for your constructive criticism and I am taking on board what you say. Yes I do go over the top sometimes in trying to make a point but the problem I have aside from massive censorship all round is to get people's attention in a world of intentional disinformation and spin. I also have more of an innate sense of trust with people working with E.Q rather than I.Q. . Please do not misunderstand my anger with hate !

GREENWASHED

by lefty Tue May 08, 2012 18:19

It has to be said that American TV is probably doing more damage to our culture than the english ever did! A constant barrage of american dumbed down non culture and consumerism and propaganda from our televisions has left us as idiot clones of americans.
Plus, most of the corporations monetising the olympics are US corporations. NIke, mcdonalds etc.

American non culture and mindless consumerist ethos is a pathological global mind virus and destroyer of cultural diversity worldwide, replacing it with fake plastic shit idiot monoculture.

by lefty Tue May 08, 2012 18:07

ok brian, when you explain clearly why you use the word genocide like you did in your follow on comment then it comes across much better. Perhaps if you wrote the articles you post here in that kind of more measured language then they would not be hidden and more people would get to read them and think about what you are trying to say.

Speaking for myself, I generally find hyperbole and exaggeration very off putting, wheras your more measured reply above made your point much more effectively and engaged me instead of putting me off. I mean this constructively. I'm not just having a go here. Tone down the hyperbole and exaggeration. Write more of your articles like you wrote that comment. You will still be able to make exactly the same points but people will be more inclined to read them and take them seriously. Just my 2c worth.

I'm glad to see somebody is posting about the insidious corporate stealing of the olympics brand to help sell us more crap we don't need. Good follow on comments brian thanks!

by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices Tue May 08, 2012 07:07

Please excuse the errors in the rushed reply above.

The Olympic Games have prostituted themselves to be the most effective marketing platform in the world to billions of consumers in more than 200 countries around the world. Money generated by business partnerships amounts to over 40% of Olympic revenue. In exchange sponsorship, companies get marketing rights in territories, category and various Olympic logos and images.

The following companies are TOP Partners for the London 2012 Olympic Games. McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Panasonic, Acer, Atos, Dow, GE, Omega, Proctor & Gamble, Samsung, VISA and Nike. Organisers in London along with the International Olympic Committee are policing everything to protect more than 53 sponsors and partners from normal business. Businesses who did not pay sponsorship from £5 million to £100 million policed out by officials.

Small businesses with venues in east London won't be allowed to operate normally, with one owner saying, "What they talked about was winning the Olympic bid based on diversity, support for the local area and support for the local businesses, but we've been shut out." While the Olympics are accused of using the Games to "greenwash" unethical corporations who sponsor.

The Olympic so-called TOP sponsors pay a minimum of $100m each for 10-year contracts, while Tier One sponsors for London alone have paid £40m each. London 2012 organisers have raised £700m locally. Dow's sponsorship is controversial as campaigners claim it has debts because of its1984 Bhopal disaster in India, which killed 20,000 people. Recently protesters led by MPs including London mayor candidate Ken Livingstone have many more grievances. BP is also a target of protest groups which includes the UK Tar Sands Network believe the extraction of polluting tar sands combined with the Deepwater Horizon disaster make BP "one of the least sustainable companies on earth".

Rio Tinto using metal from their controversial Utah mine make the medals while being the number one emitter of toxins known to harm human health. Greenwash Gold 2012 Campaign has condemned multinational sponsors such as BP, Rio Tinto and Dow Chemical Company, paying huge sums to become Olympic sponsors, stressing these three companies alone have caused environmental degradation, damaged public health and failed to clean up their pollution.

London's Orwellian Blood Olympics carry criminal sanctions for violating the exclusivity of elite sponsors' brands with special hit squads of "brand police" forcing pubs to take down signs of free TV viewing, to removing stickers with the brand-names other than those products made by the games' sponsors. The special hit squads of "brand police" are also sending takedown notices to YouTube and Facebook of anything related to occupied Ireland, political prisoners of conscience, internment without trial or games visitors who have the cheek to post personal images for friends to see. These rules have been made criminal ones, so violating the sponsors means the "brand police" will end up imprisoning restless Londoner natives.

Images or words suggesting a link with the Games is also criminal. Any two from the following list: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve combined with London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze is another likely term of imprisonment. London's Olympic bid insisted on these restrictions to get sponsors, making promises to restrict free speech and personal expression. As Olympic sponsors insist on even more restrictions and surveillance than the previous games suggesting a promise in the near future to imprison all non-attendees and permanently tattoo sponsors' logos such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, the British Crown on the faces and chests of all those non-ticket-buyers fro British Occupied ireland.

London Olympics claim to be the greenest ever has been dismissed vehemently as “corporate spin” by human rights groups, who launched a campaign against the toxic blood sponsors. Aside from the British Empire itself being accused of crimes against humanity in Occupied Ireland, Meredith Alexander the Olympics “ethics tsar” has resigned in opposition to the chemical firms’ who sponsors and will lead human rights activists from the United States, Canada, India, Ireland which is gathering international momentum. She said Britain has broken its promise to be the greenest games ever, by picking toxic sponsors such as Dow one of the most polluted sites on the planet; a major mining polluter, Rio Tinto and BP who are involved in the dirtiest form of oil. BP was responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in Alberta, Canada a carbon intensive operation, polluting and damaging the eco system.

There is nothing green about the Bloody London Olympics, certainly not from any real Irish people left in Occupied Ireland, Britain has more political prisoners of conscience per head of the population than China and it certainly engages in more fascist censorship than the People Republic or even Hitler's Nazi book burners of Munich ever did. NO ! the whole corporate set up and Orwellian backdrop of the London Olympics is bloody indeed.

by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices Mon May 07, 2012 21:54

"A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan. '
- The London Times, editorial, 1848

Fair enough you make good points but if you look at the definition of genocide below, bearing in mind the minimum of one and half million Irish ethnically cleansed, with other reliable estimates putting it at over 6 million, even greater than the Jewish holocaust and with the reality of ongoing British policy it still continues.

For example there is good grounds for calling the death of 10 hunger striker and the deaths of many hunger strikers before them part of the ongoing activity of holocaust, The same concentration camp policy of internment without trial with Marian Price and other traditional Irish republicans is a policy that in reality is a form of ethnic cleansing. British genocide in Ireland, an allegation of horror that trumps the Holocaust for its sheer inhumanity is based on a calculated policy by the British to ethnically cleanse Ireland.

Are not some of the goals of the British imperialists being currently achieved in occupied Ireland and others already come to fruition? Indeed in all of Ireland is not widespread poverty still existing that drives the Irish from the land the almost. Can you not see in part the total abandonment of the Irish language, the self-hatred and inferiority complex that exists with many Irish people who have become west Brits or a culture that has in many ways become very similar to that of Britain ?

Genocide
"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group",[1] though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars.[2] While a precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.".

I have often said, and written, it is Famine which must consume [the Irish]; our swords and other endeavours work not that speedy effect which is expected for their overthrow.
- English Viceroy Arthur Chichester writing to Elizabeth I's chief advisor, Nov. 1601

A Sign in Belfast of the British Holocaust In Ireland

by lefty Mon May 07, 2012 19:05

Well, there is no ongoing "genocide" in Ireland. Thats quite the exaggeration I think. but I think you have a point all the same about the country holding the olympics needing to be held accountable for it's past and present human rights abuses.

Among those is the treatment of Marian Price, war on Iraq, afghanistan, Libya, weapons sales to Bahrain and many others, The surveillance state being set up, civil liberties violations, support of sanctions on Iraq, Syria and Iran etc etc etc.

This is what happened to china when they held the olympics. Damning critiques came out of every media outlet about them.

What's good for the gander is good for the goose I say. However I won't hold my breath waiting for fair play from our servile media orifices.

Because In our propagandised media, human rights abuses only exist if you are not the fascist police state US or one of their good friends.