How to fix newspapers

I have added a section to my critical page on the Mass Media, with regards to newspapers and cheap sensationalist journalism, and their negative effects on individuals and society. Here is a bit of the next text, view the rest by clicking on the title, above!

• Stronger international laws against the public spreading of disinformation. Broadcasters should be placed under extra legal obligation to check facts. Many journalists avoid legal trouble by claiming that they don't know what stories are true or not. So, if it is scandalous and it will sell, then, they publish it without checking (or admitting) their sources. There needs to be an international body that specifically deals with mass-media outlets, proscribing to them a greater responsibility to check their facts, with the ability to suspend printing or publication once a certain amount of abuse has built up.
  
  
• Journalists should be required to be a member of a journalist association, which they get kicked out of if they produce very low quality information. Many developed countries already have such associations. It should especially be the case in wire agencies, from which most other news outlets get their news.

Some methods of curbing the press's abuses are good-hearted, but occasionally dysfunctional:

• "In 2008 the Slovak parliament introduced one to guarantee the subject of a story the right to reply, of the same length and prominence as the original" - this sounds good, because the idea is that the press will have to print criticisms of itself in its own papers with such frequency that they will be compelled only to publish accurate information. There is however a very unfortunate second part to that law - the right to reply stands even if the facts were correct. This would seem to me to lead to a barrage of responses from politicians and lawyers that abuse the right-to-reply principal, in effect, ending the ability of the press to be critical. In a healthy democracy, the press must free to be critical of governments and institutions.
  
  
• In Poland, an old law gives sources the authority to withdraw or edit quotations right up until the point of publication41. So when a paper tries to quote someone out of context, as they are often eager to do, the subject can withdraw their quote. Unfortunately, it seems like it can again be abused by officials to ruin newspaper stories in order to hide truth.
  

In short, it appears to be very difficult to concoct laws that allow individuals to protect themselves against ridiculous press stories, but where instititons and democracies are still subject to critical journalism without fear of recriminations. What would be an ideal is a world where consumers, as pointed out above, avoid the more outlandish papers, and where editors and journalists only try to produce responsible pieces. Unfortunately, neither is likely to happen.

The Creation of an International Military Force and the Fear of Progress

I've added some text to "Uniforce: An International Military Force" based on stuff I've written in "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" which traces a few historical battles between progress in defence (such as wearing camouflaged uniforms) and those who worried that changes in defence were too dangerous to contemplate. Experiments in pooled defence have so far proved successful and stabilizing, but, there are few attempts to explain this to the general public.

“Despite the advantages of pooled military defence, there is much public concern about things such as combined European defence, even though the advantages far outweigh the theoretical disadvantages. Because it is big, and new, there is much opposition to it even though the status-quos in international defence are widely acknowledged to be broken. [...]

Media coverage of the ESDP (common European defence policy) has been entirely negative, despite the commendation of senior military experts and diplomats in Europe. In the future, when a European or International military force exists, historians will look back and puzzle over what our problems were.
”
From "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)

There must be more effort to explain to the public the massive costs and disadvantages of having nearly every nation maintain world-faring military forces, to explain that some developed countries only have a defensive force (look at Switzerland) and have not been immediately invaded by their neighours, and that the African Union proves the principal of pooled defence. In practice, NATO and Europe are operating as if they had a unified worldwide force, and deploy it where is necessary. It makes sense to formalize this, so that it can be strengthened and made more dependable. But the public do not hear anything of these ideas or debates - they exist only in specialized military journals. While the mass media, which is inherently sensationalist and nationalist, is the main voice on international military issues, most people receive reactionary information that is biased against intra-national accords.

Neophobia and the Irrational Fear of 'Radiation'

I've added some text to "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" by Vexen Crabtree (2009):

We saw that in zombie films and other hollwood products often used the idea of 'radiation', sometimes in a very simplistic manner, to sow the seeds of fear and horror. There exists as part of the fear of the invisible and the unknown, a fear of 'radiation'. This is despite the fact that the colours of the spectrum and radio signals are both forms of radiation, along with infra-red light (all are merely different frequencies on the electro-magnetic spectrum). This general fear of immaterial waves plays a part in the unfounded fears of mobile phones. Dr Frank Barnaby, a specialist on military technology and nuclear physics, points out that this fear is also a weapon in the hands of terrorists:

“
'The true impact of a dirty bomb would be the enormous social, psychological and economic disruption [...]. It would cause considerable fear, panic and social disruption, exactly the effects terrorists wish to achieve. The public fear of radiation is very great indeed, some say irrationally so.'

The effect is that, in the dirty bomb, terrorists have a particularly dangerous weapon only if the media continue to mislead people into believing it is particularly dangerous.”

From "Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)

Nick Davies, a journalist and media analyst, warns that as long as the media publish sensationalist articles and news that is not checked for scientific accuracy, such fears will continue to be spread in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Life is Mostly Procrastination

All those things that you pursue to make yourself happy... such as good food, nice music, adorable pets... all those things are just placeholders.

The things in life that make you happy are generally not the things that give your life worth.

In other words: Watch out for all those addictive little pleasures that take up lots of time, but will be completely forgotten as soon as you die!

United Kingdom: National Successes and Social Failures

I have redesigned my website on the UK; it still has the same-old pages on British trash culture; religion, secularisation and religious minorities; UK immigration, and summaries of why others in the world might dislike us British, and what the UK gets right as a country (our down to Earth nature lets us avoid extreme politics and fundamentalism, for example).

Humans and Food!

I have added some to "The Food Chain" by Vexen Crabtree (2007):

Dr Richard Wrangham of Harvard University notes that cooking is a behaviour found universally in human societies. Only very few single individuals attempt to live without it. Some have theorized that this radical behaviour formed a major factor in our rise to stardom. Dr Wrangham investigated the effect it has on food, and finds that it hugely improves the efficiency of the energy gain from the food cycle. Commentary was published in The Economist:

“Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it. [...] Cooking increases the share of good digested in the stomach and small intestine [...] from 50% to 95%.”
The Economist (2009)

The full page contains much more!

The UFO Craze: Media exaggeration and hoaxes!

Although it is common sense that the popular press play up and exaggerate stories, it wasn't until I read the research of Martin Gardner that I realized just how much of a role imaginative newspaper editors had played in the creation of the UFO craze. It started in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold saw 9 small weather balloons that were strung together, 'flying' in formation in the sky. The papers came up with the idea of 'flying saucers' on their own, and henceforth, enthusiastically published hyped-up articles attributing all unidentified flying objects to mysterious advanced technology and aliens. It was a science-fiction decade, with a popular press to match.

The contents of "Alien Life and Planet Earth" by Vexen Crabtree (1999) is now:

1. The Chances of Life in the Universe
2. UFOs Are Probably Not Aliens
   1. Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?
   2. The UFO Craze Was Created by Sensationalist Media and Hoaxes
   3. What We Learn From Skyhook Balloons
3. Communication With Aliens
   1. A Very Slow Affair
   2. Our Transmissions into Space Already Span 100 Light Years

The Benefits of Consolidating Power in the European Union

I've added this text to "The European Union: Democratic Values, The Euro, Crises and Migration: 7.1. The Power of Solidarity" by Vexen Crabtree (2007):

The benefits of EU consolidarity means that multinationalism should often trump national interests. This means that when the EU acts together as a whole, the advantage to all of its members is greater than if countries maintained their own unilaterial national policies. If a nation combined its efforts in (say) ten endeavours within consolidated EU plans, it would benefit enormously even if in a few of those areas this means that the norm which emerges is not one that is beneficial. It is like any collection of humans: If you group together, the whole group has more capability, even though sometimes all individuals will feel that peer pressure has stopped them doing something they wanted. Anyway, needless to say that at present the EU is only united on a few, mostly economic, points. Great rewards can be gained in the future if further chioces are made at a EU level rather than a national one, and of those those is energy foreign policy especially. The Economist ran an article on this in 2008 with regards to Russian antagonism:

“The European Union will be heeded by Russia only when it speaks with one voice. That was the universal battle cry in Brussels as EU officials and diplomats hurried back from their summer holidays to prepare for an emergency EU summit on the Georgian crises, called by the current French presidency for September 1st. And faced with the sobering sight of tanks trundling around Europe's backyard, there was equally loud agreement among national politicians that their usual squabbling over the right attitude towards Russia harms the common interests of the 27-member union. [...]

A November 'power audit' by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think-tank, argued that Europe was throwing away what should be its considerable leverage over Russia. After all, the EU's population is more than three times that of Russia, and its wealth more than a dozen times greater. The EU depends heavily on Russian energy, but the flip-side is that it is Russia's biggest market for gas (indeed, for all Russian exports). If the 27 EU countries dealt with Russia as one, they would surely have less to fear from Moscow hawks.”

The Economist (2008)

God's Will Versus Genetics

I've added a large new section to my page on evolution: "Evolution and Unintelligent Design: Religion: God's Will Versus Genetics" by Vexen Crabtree. The online version is formatted better and is footnoted:

Many religionists, especially conservative Christians in the USA and fundamentalists around the world, oppose Humankind's intervention in genetics. "Some, like Leon Kass, the former head of President Bush's bioethics council, regard genetic interventions as humankind's contemporary replay of the Tower of Babel episode". They say we 'shouldn't play God', that genetic engineering is a Promethean seizure of God's power. A poll in 1997 revealed that 70% of Americans said only God should have the power to interfere with inherited traits, following on from polls in the 1980s that saw two-thirds of Americans declare that the altering of human genes was against God's will.

I will now offer four arguments that genetic engineering is in accordance with God's will - and also offer one cheeky argument that at the very least, genetic engineering foils the Devil's plans! So for those of us who don't believe in such dualisms, take the following with a philosophical pinch of salt:

1. Firstly, God doesn't have control over inherited traits. If there is a God, and it designed the way nature works, then it relinquished its control of inheritability when it chose to create genes. Genes are subject solely to the deterministic laws of physics and chemistry. These laws run without God's interference; the genes that we inherit result from natural cause and effect in accordance with fixed physical laws, not from God's will. There is only one reason why God would create such roundabout way of facilitating the inheritance of traits: because it wanted to place genetics within the grasp of human biological sciences. If it did not want us to consciously examine and improve our genes, then God would not have made them accessible. Traits would be picked by god and bestowed upon individuals by magic, without a physical intermediary (DNA) doing the job. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then DNA exists in the physical world (rather than the spiritual one) for a reason: God has placed DNA within our reach to see what we will do.
   
   
2. The desire to eradicate disease is the desire to help others; it is a moral impulse derived from our best social instincts. The expression of this desire through advanced science provides us with new methods of preventing disease. If God's test is to see if we will do the right thing, then, my bets are with the geneticists. Those who wish to let disease run its course, and let mutant genes continue to cause disease, are the ones who are interfering with God's will. It is God's place to punish humankind for transgressions, not our place to punish ourselves (and those around us) by failing to fight disease and biological dysfunction.
   
   
3. Thirdly, exegesis: Christians will remember that in their 'Old Testament' it implores humankind to govern nature. God has placed DNA within the realm of nature, the same as it placed seeds and plants within our grasp. We took those seeds and plants and selectively bred them to create many crops that over thousands of years, have become intensely genetically modified by us. Consider that the Bible grants us "animal husbandry". There was no phrase in the Hebrew vocabulary for genes or evolution, but husbandry is a sexual term that implies the act of mixing male chromosomes with those of a female egg, to produce life. This is genetic in nature. The next section on this page details advances we have already made with crops and with our creation of domesticated species such as cows, pigs and cats. These animals did not originate in nature - we created them without causing the heaven's to rain fire on the Egyptians or Indians.
   

   "The same Genesis narratives that many read as a source of the prohibition confer on human beings the task of governing and tending to nature. Throughout the Bible, agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, and many other technological interventions in nature are permitted and even approved."
   

   "Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice"
   Ronald M. Green (2007)

   
   

   
   

   Human achievements with crops and domesticated animals are much more extreme that the simple genetic engineering changes we would implement now, such as removing genes mutations that cause certain diseases, and adding vitamin-producing genes to common crops. This is small fry to what we have already achieved. It's not that the religionists are opposed to the results, its just that they perceive continued scientific achievements to be a threat to their general religious worldview.

   
   
4. Finally, genetic engineering may aid in the fight against the Devil! Genetic engineering will eventually absolve us of the need to kill livestock to feed ourselves. Researchers have already grown meat in laboratories, from germlines extracted from animals. Such meat is the real thing, but is grown without the need for a living organism surrounding it. It is maintained by the laboratory as fresh, non-living meat. Manufacturing on reasonable scales in so far impossible, but in the future it will be possible, and the barbaric era of animal slaughter will start to enter history for good. This underlines our final argument. The food chain is designed so that in order to survive, living beings have to kill and destroy each other. The whole food chain is based on blood and death. This is the design of an evil genius, not of a good god. Likewise for gene mutations (which cause the suffering of many innocent and unborn children) and other biological dysfunctions. No good God would have created such a flawed biological world. If it genetics is a chance at dashing the devil's (apparent) designs, then, we should give no hesitation!
   
   

Fashion Tastes Amongst Satanists

I've complete rewritten and relaunched "Fashion Tastes Amongst Satanists" by Vexen Crabtree (2007, was 1999).

Airport Internet Access

Airports are ok for internet access; whereas previous experiences have included myself paying £1 coins per minute (or fifteen) for access at a poor, difficult-to-use, clunky internet dumb terminal, nowadays there are WiFi access zones, and power points, where I can use my laptop & T-Mobile account.

You'd expect this from airports, as they are a fundamental building-block of modern globalisation, and along with coffee shops are a beacon of modernity.

But on the other extreme, why, in a world where technology and the Internet have driven people closer together and made business worldwide, are people travelling more and not less? It is not the technology at fault, but Human nature. Our instincts and drives are out-of-date. We are evolved for face-to-face contact when it is now more rational to stick to abstrac contact. Unfortunately, there are no readily available cures for Human nature.

The Fear of Death is a Cause of Irrational Beliefs

“It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death.”
"Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell, p74

Child psychologists say that 'there is no death' in the world of most childen. Others in history, such as Freud, have explained that "dealing" with the learned idea of death is one of the greatest challenges of adulthood. Many, of course, "deal" with it by imagining that death is not real. That, in fact, we somehow survive death, despite that the self is the brain, and the brain dies.

The fear of death has got to be one of the biggest causes, in history, of religious beliefs. The difficulty in imagining the discontinuance of thought and the loss of all motivations, memories, life, to some seeming void, has lent itself in history to the idea that somehow we don't actually die. These "spiritual pipe dreams" (in the words of Anton LaVey) fuel irrational religious beliefs.

I've added the quote by Bertrand Russell to my page, "The Causes of Religion" by Vexen Crabtree (2007).

Vexen Crabtree's New Pages in 2005

2005 Dec 28	"Christian Prayer" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 24	"Satanism: The Natural Religion (Forget the New Age!)" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 18	"Blasphemy Laws in the UK" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 11	"Christmas: The Multicultural Celebration" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Aug 29	"The Goodguy Badge": Vexen's page on LaVey's term describing the shallow things people do to look and feel 'good'
2005 Aug 16	The International Date Format (ISO-8601): Vexen's appraisal of the YYYY MMM DD date format
2005 Aug 15	Doubled size of ""If there is a God, it Must be an Evil God" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Aug 14	"Satanism as the Worship of Truth and Reality", according to Vexen
2005 Aug 13	How does Acupuncture Work? Scientific studies included. Summary by Vexen
2005 Aug 07	"Military Drill: Its Theory & Purpose" by Vexen Crabtree Vexen Sociology: The Importance of Current Events is Amplified by our Egos
2005 Jul 20	Pornography: Vexen on the porn industry
2005 Jul 20	Hellraiser films; Reviews and Commentary on Hellraiser, the Cenobites, Pinhead. By Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jun 04	If Vexen Crabtree was God, what would he do? And why doesn't God do these things?
2005 May 28	"Cultural Religion and Scholarly Religion" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 May 03	Vexen shows that Biblical Christianity Completely And Specifically Denies All Free Will
2005 May 01	"Satanism is a Different Religion to Christianity!" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Apr 24	New website on politics and countries, including new essay "Which Country Sets the Best Examples in the World?" by Vexen
2005 Apr 10	God never needs to "test" us, it already knows what we'll do
2005 Mar 22	"Prayer is useless and satanic, not godly" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Mar 20	New dream pages: Dream Interpretation, The Biology of Dreams and Nightmares and Night Terrors
2005 Mar 19	New page on "Homosexuality" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 31	"Fascism and Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 27	"Equality, Egalitarianism and Social Stratification in Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 25	Friedrich Nietzsche on Vexen's A to Z of Satanism page
2005 Jan 06	List of pages on Buddhism by Vexen

Archive of Vexen Crabtree's Live Journal entries in 2005

The Taboo of Death

I have added the following text to "Death and Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree:

“We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.”

"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James, p103

The psychologist William James, above, spoke 100 years ago that normal Human beings hide death away. We clinicalize death, so that only trained professionals have anything to do with the practical side of slaughter, bodies, funerals and burials [Clark, 1993]. This denial of reality extends far and wide amongst the masses. Dead bodies do not litter the floor of battlefields in films, in computer games also corpses fade away majestically, and one's future death is hardly featured in public angst, except where the subconscious, desperate, finds expression in dreams.

The invisibility of death, the taboo of it, and the strong (largely) subconscious desire to avoid it during our reproductive years, fuels popular religion. The major religions of the world do, and always have, denied death and comforted people with the lie that we survive death. Hades, Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana are all names for the afterlife, despite the theological and philosophical impossibilities that arise.

Don't want to die: Why isn't the world more futuristic?

The thought of dying is impossibly tragic, I just can't imagine being nothing and not caring about anything. In the thousands of years to come, we will be able to scan a persons' neurones in their heads and build a copy of their life thoughts... basically, to digitize our thoughts and therefore live forever, by dispensing with our biological bodies.

But... why am I alive NOW, and not hundreds of years in the future when such technology is possible?

Why do I have to *die* without seeing us explore the stars and planets, without seeing where Computers will lead us, and without seeing how far technology can go?

I mean... if I didn't have commitments here, and it was safe... I would freeze myself and tell them to wake me up in 100 years. But what if war, religious fundamentalism (Christians in the USA, & Muslims in the East) disrupt the cryogenic system? What a complete waste, to die without even knowing.

When I die... I want to it to be slow, predictable, visible... not sudden, not heroic, not unforseen. I want every last thought out of life!

So... I keep fit, eat well, keep my brain busy, drink lots of water... anything, to prolong life expectancy and mental health.

These pages were published by Vexen in 2004

Vexen Crabtree

2 new Vexen photos, the first new ones for over a year
Dream: Vexen dream he had a Delusional Fear of Zombies
New website: United Kingdom: Successes and Failures including pages:

Why dislike the UK?

UK Trash Culture

UK Positive Successes

Ontological Argument (Descartes & Anselm) is Flawed, by Vexen
Criticism of Buddhism by Vexen
"Evil is the absence of good" does not explain why God created evil
Religion and Morals
Religion and Charity
Vexen reminds people that a God wouldn't need prayer, prophets, souls, evangelists or religious buildings
Souls do not exist, by Vexen
Anti-Semitism was created by Christianity and Pages on Judaism
Historical Satanism and The Knights Templar. Deleted the Ambient Halls site
The Untermensch
Marriage and Engagement. Deleted some older pages and both games
Special religious rights should be abolished, says Vexen
Vexen on the New Age and Satanism
List of Vexen's Pages on Universalism

View an archive of Vexen's Online Diary LiveJournal posts made in 2004