So I went to a feminist rally last night called "Find Your Power" but it wasn't the Soros funded coven you'd imagine, there were no goat sacrifices, no candle light homages to their godesss Taylor Swift, and only one minor plot to overthrow Ben Affleck as the current godfather of the patriarchy. 

Instead the feminists sat down drinking wine and beer like normal people, talked about politics, shared a few jokes, listened to some poetry readings, occasionally sang some songs, and then they even invented an impromptu dating game called "The Three Michaels". 

In what has to be the highlight of the podcast festival Deborah Frances White, the most famous Deborah in the world, brought her sold out show "The Guilty Feminist" to Dublin for one night only. Co-hosted by comedian Alison Spittle the audience were brought to their knees with laughter and to their feet by poet Sarah Cahill performing “Ar An Imeall”.

Later in the night Tara Flynn and Senator Lynn Ruane joined the hosts to share stories with the audience on how they found their power. In what was a thoroughly enjoyable and inspirational event that not only lived up to expectations but created fond memories and hope for the future, I would encourage everyone to check out their live and unfiltered show. Hopefully they make their way back to Dublin (or Limerick) soon. 

Luckily for anyone not present to witness the event, or the interval feminist occupation of the male bathrooms, the podcast is available online at:
www.guiltyfeminist.com/episodes/ The Dublin show is episode 119. 

 "Ar An Imeall" is available to hear and view on Sarah Cahill's website:
https://ragairetheatre.wixsite.com/sarahcahill

Sarah is an Irish playwright, spoken word artist, actor & activist with the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign. She founded Ragaire Theatre Company in 2016. Her most recent play Welcome Home ran at the Old Red Lion Theatre to a four star review by London Pub Theatres who called it "... consistently funny, with a sharp wit that is as smart as it is cruel." ​

Radical political action is required to force the Government to roll out a major, public building programme to deal with the urgent need for social and affordable housing, according to SIPTU General Secretary Joe O’Flynn.
 
He has called on SIPTU members, their families and friends to join the ‘Raise the Roof’ rally to be held outside Leinster House on Wednesday, 3rd October. The rally organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the National Homeless and Housing Coalition, the National Womens’ Council and the Union of Students in Ireland is timed to coincide with a Dáil motion on the housing crisis.
 
The motion calls for the immediate construction of quality, affordable public housing, an end to evictions and the inclusion of the right to housing in the Irish Constitution. It is supported by opposition parties including Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, People Before Profit/Solidarity, the Social Democrats, the Green Party and Independents4Change.
 
Trade union members and other campaigners have been lobbying Fianna Fáil deputies and senators over recent months to support the call for a massive, publicly led, social and affordable housing programme. They will seek to have the party support the motion to be tabled by the other opposition parties.
 
“It is no exaggeration to say that the housing crisis is damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and their families. As with any crisis it is working people, those on low and average incomes, who suffer the most,” Joe O’Flynn said.
 
“Buying your own home is now beyond reach for a generation of young people. The shortage of public, social and affordable housing means that tens of thousands are forced into the rental sector”
 
“Rents are increasing, as landlords take advantage of the shortfall in supply. Young workers and students find it almost impossible to find decent accommodation at affordable prices, particularly when they work in low paid, precarious employment,” the SIPTU General Secretary told Liberty.
 
“More and more families are forced into homelessness because rents are too high or because they cannot meet their mortgage repayments due to financial difficulty. They are then forced into unsuitable accommodation in hotels or emergency hubs. A generation of children will grow up without knowing what a normal home is like.”
 
“It is important that we come out in large numbers to support this call for immediate action that puts the public interest ahead of those who are profiting from the lack of social and affordable housing which makes life a misery for so many families across the country,” he said.
 
The SIPTU Dublin District Council is co-ordinating the union’s participation in the
rally. It is calling on all members to stand together on the 3rd of October.
 
This article is from the front cover of SIPTU’s free online paper “Liberty”, also available in print, written by SIPTU Head of Communications Frank Connolly. 

Born in 1982, Ed Atkins lives and works in London. The artist is well known for his immersive environments and association of high definition digital images and syncopated sound montages. A literature connoisseur, he writes his own scenarios, creating a world of digital illusions and fantasy sometimes verging on the grotesque.

Atkins subverts and exploits the conventions of high-definition moving image and text. Referred to as “part musical, part horror, and part melodrama,”. For Atkins, virtual space is liberating; “you can treat it as a surrogate world – a fantasy, or a hell, or more likely a purgatory”.​

The protagonist in his film Ribbons is a white male avatar called Dave, who moans, monologues, sings, smokes and drinks profusely. Dave is often referred to as an avatar, Atkins calls him a surrogate. In contradiction with his hyperreal resemblance, he sits there in place of a human body. His digital self reflects how with online communication we can be present remotely; the body is no longer the bastion of authenticity, our identities now constructed from information.

Both compelling and repulsive, with all the compulsion of a sweet love song, Dave does not so much tell us how he feels but rather goes through the motions, hopelessly performing the act of emotional outpouring on repeat.

Even Pricks (2013) comprises a series of hyperpolished digitally rendered vignettes that relate the idea of depression—both physical and psychological—to the immaterial surfaces of images.

“Ed combines a good, dexterous grasp of new technology and an ability to infuse it with profound feeling, and that’s rare,” Polly Staples, director of the Chisenhale Gallery

Anzac day, another reminder of the horrors of war, a day to respect the fallen, or blind pride for state and glorification of bloody conquest.

Anzac Day is observed on 25 April every year and honours members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) who lost their lives in foreign conflicts. Originally inaugurated to mark the anniversary of Anzac troops entering the fray against the Ottomon Empire at Gallipoli in the First World War, the scope of this national day of remembrance has since been broadened out of respect for those killed during the Second World War and on subsequent peacekeeping missions around the globe.  @JoeSommerlad

“I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

Recently Anzac Day has rebranded itself to commemorate all soldiers in all wars which has caused a bit of controversy in Australia as there has been a growing movement to recognise Aboriginal people who died in the so-called ‘frontier wars’ of colonisation, but Australia doesn’t like to talk about that.

So for this Anzac Day make sure you share a story about the indigenous people of Australia and their fight against colonisation.

More than 200 years after the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove, white Australians are still struggling to come to terms with their colonial past. Long erased from official accounts, the clashes and massacres that took place on the frontier remain a contested area of history, often replaced by more palatable stories of rugged pioneers conquering an inhospitable land. @kathymarksoz

Certainly the stories of massacres of Indigenous Australians are everywhere in the archives of the major cultural institutions of Australia and Great Britain. The diaries, letters, journals and memoirs of colonial and postcolonial officials, troops, police, farmers, frontiersmen and women are replete with accounts of fights against – and massacres of – the “marauding blacks”. Early newspapers also offer remarkably detailed concurrent and retrospective accounts of frontier violence. Such stories are so often defined by a chilling, deeply disturbing candour, so detached are the killers from the humanity of their victims. Paul Daley The Guardian
​
A group of settlers on the Hawkesbury river, reportedly in reprisal for an attack on a settler and his servant and the theft of their clothes some days prior, armed themselves and killed seven or eight members of the Bediagal clan. The massacre occurred on a bend in the river at Cornwallis, about 4km from what is now Richmond. According to a 2011 book by the historian Peter Turbet, one of the sources cited by the University of Newcastle researchers, it was the largest massacre committed by settlers to date.  Another seven or eight Bediagal were killed nine months later, just over 6km away on what is now a thoroughbred stud. Their murderers were two officers and 66 soldiers of the New South Wales Corps, dispatched by Captain William Paterson, who would later be promoted to colonel, serve as the lieutenant governor of NSW, be celebrated by history as an explorer, and have a river in the Hunter Valley named after him. According to a temporary account, Paterson ordered his men to “drive the natives to a distance; and, in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung”. @callapilla 

It’s often the case that when Sinn Fein come on TV no matter what they say they get dragged into some debate by ivory tower politicians trying to win some moral high ground in the perpetual battle on whether screwing the country financially was better than being involved in an armed conflict with a known oppressor.

So you might not get to hear from bright young people like Eoin O’Broin (@EOBroin ‏) unless you go to a Mary Lou tea party or listen to his outstanding presentation on the Echo Chamber Podcast
As it turns out not only is Eoin O’Broin well versed in the Housing Crisis but he has some very sensible solutions that can work. The following was taken from a post on the SF party site and well worth digesting:

Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin TD has described Minister Eoghan Murphy’s affordable housing package as “deeply disappointing”.

The Dublin Mid-West TD was responding to the announcement by Minister Murphy of a revised Council loan scheme, an affordable home scheme and an affordable rental scheme.

Deputy Ó Broin said: “The affordable housing measures announced by Minister Murphy today are deeply disappointing. They will have little impact on the affordability crisis and have the potential to cause real problems in the future."

“The revised council loan scheme for first time buyers is a rehash of the existing scheme. While the 2% fixed interest rate will be of benefit to some people, the scheme itself is badly designed. The scheme allows first time buyers to breach the central bank lending rules in order to buy overpriced homes. The existing council loan scheme has had a very poor take-up and a large level of significant mortgage arrears. I am genuinely concerned that the revised scheme will lead to the same results."

“The new affordable housing scheme is very unclear. Granting the Local Authority an equity stake in the home is cumbersome. The basis of the stake and the reasons for it have not been explained. It is also not clear what the relationship to the Local Infrastructure Fund and the €25m affordable housing fund is. Again, the concern is that public funds will be used to facilitate the purchase of overpriced homes."

“Most disappointing of all is the absence of any real affordable rental scheme. There has been a government commitment since 2014 to introduce such a scheme, yet all the Minister has said today is that there will be a pilot at some undefined point in the future. Struggling renters will be asking themselves why it is taking so long to get this off the ground."

“The Governments focus should be on providing a stream of genuinely affordable homes ranging from €170,000 to €260,000 for those earning between €45,000 and €75,000. This would be best achieved by Councils developing affordable homes on public land accessing finance from the Housing Finance Agency or the Strategic Investment Fund."
​
“While a small number of families may benefit from today’s announcement, it will do little to address the growing affordability crisis for tens of thousands of struggling working people desperate to buy or rent at genuinely affordable prices.” 

Something that really bothered me this week was fast fashion giant H&M limply apologising for using a black child to advertise an eight pound hoodie with the slogan “coolest monkey in the jungle”.

Here is a list of people who didn’t consider this racist:
The Model’s Agent
The Photographer
Senior Designer
Graphic Design Department
Art Director
Creative Director
Web Department
Pricing Specialist
Department Manager
H&M Staff

One can also draw the conclusion that the boy’s parents were not involved in the decision making process which raises further ethical questions.  

To anyone who dismisses H&M’s roll out of the shot please consider the following:

Monkey chanting has been used by football hooligans for over thirty years to discourage black players from both performing and playing the game.

Carl-Gustaf Scott writes about racism in Swedish football in the 80’s and 90’s in his book - African Footballers in Sweden: Race, Immigration, and Integration in the Age of Globalization

He writes; “Djurgarden’s  supporters for instance chanted ‘Samir Bakaou belongs in a zoo’, whereas IFK Goteborg’s fans made monkey noises shouting ‘ugh, ugh, ugh’ every time AIK’s Pascal Simpson touched the ball. In news footage taken from a match in the summer of 1988 AIK followers can be seen yelling ‘Kunta Kinte’ at Djurgarden’s Glen Myrthil”
 
The Guardian 19/11/2004
Tony Blair and the Spanish prime minister yesterday condemned the racist abuse of black England footballers by thousands of Spanish fans as the disgraceful scenes on Wednesday night prompted outrage in Britain and threatened to escalate into a diplomatic row. Several black England players were taunted with monkey chants and chants by large sections of the crowd at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium during England's 1-0 defeat.

BBC News 07/05/2014
Villarreal have been fined €12,000 (£9,850) by the Spanish Football Federation after a fan threw a banana at Barcelona defender Dani Alves. The Brazilian, 30, picked up the banana and took a bite as he prepared to take a corner in the La Liga match between the sides last month.

The Guardian 29/09/2016
Russia’s FC Rostov face sanction for banana-throwing in Champions League

The Mirror 21/02/2017
Everton Luiz has vowed to continue playing in Serbian football despite racist abuse bringing him to tears whilst playing for Partizan Belgrade last weekend. The Brazilian was abused during the fiery encounter with fierce rivals Rad Beograd last Sunday with what the player describes as monkey chants.

Wikipedia
Shock advertising or Shockvertising is a type of advertising that "deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals". It is the employment in advertising or public relations of "graphic imagery and blunt slogans to highlight" a public policy issue, goods, or services. Shock advertising is designed principally to break through the advertising “clutter” to capture attention and create buzz.

Conclusion
The racial slur ‘monkey’ is an ugly feature in football hooliganism across Europe including Sweden and the UK. Too many people involved in the production and publication of this photograph not to notice the reference and one can only conclude there was intent to create ‘buzz’ by dressing an innocent child with racist slogans.

This post is cut together from various sources. Serious question at the end, please consider.

Wikipedia:
The Kingsmill massacre took place on 5 January 1976 near the village of Kingsmill in south County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Gunmen stopped a minibus carrying eleven Protestant workmen, lined them up alongside it and shot them. Only one victim survived, despite having been shot 18 times. One catholic man, also on the minibus, was allowed to go free. A group calling itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force claimed responsibility. It said the shooting was retaliation for a string of attacks on Catholic civilians in the area by Loyalists, particularly the killing of six Catholics the night before. The Kingsmill massacre was the climax of a string of tit-for-tat killings in the area during the mid-1970s, and was one of the deadliest mass shootings of the Troubles.

Belfast Telegraph 02/01/2016:
“For years, I didn’t tell the truth to protect the bereaved,” says Alan. “I said it was over quickly with one round of shooting and nobody suffering.
“But it wasn’t like that. The men didn’t die in the first round of fire. I can still hear them screaming in fear and agony. The gunmen shot everyone again in the head  to finish them off as we lay on the ground. After that, there was no screaming, only silence. I knew I was the only one still alive.”
A total of 136 shots were fired. Despite being hit 18 times, Alan survived. “The bullet to the head didn’t penetrate my skull,” he says. “I remember being in awful pain and the rain trickling down my cheeks. 
“I was so grateful for the rain because my body felt on fire. I must have been lying on the roadside 30 minutes before the ambulance came. It felt like eternity.”

Irish Independent 06/01/2018:
A SINN Fein MP has been accused of “poking fun” at the victims of the Kingsmill massacre after he posed with a loaf of bread on his head.
In a video posted on Twitter last night, Barry McElduff is seen walking around a service station with a batch of Kingsmill bread resting on his head. Friday, January 5 was also the  41st anniversary of the massacre which saw 10 innocent workers gunned down in cold blood by the Provisional IRA.
​
Question:
Was a three month suspension with pay a suitable punishment for the loafer or does paid leave equate to a 12 week holiday? 

For a few years I ran various blogs on different topics but I soon grew tired of sites continuously barraging people with ads and click bait. In 2014 I decided to set up my own site and committed to making it an ad free space so I could write in peace. The result was all my random thoughts, opinions and interests coming to the one place, thechampsvoice.com

Social media presents its own problems with sharing content and the modern day blogger has become a slave to algorithms. For example Facebook prevent you from reaching your own audience unless you’re willing to boost posts, which in effect is paying to advertise posts to reach people you’ve already connected with.

With the start of a new year what I’m looking to do is to set up a mailing list, so if you’d like to receive a monthly letter from the site feel free to drop me a mail at thechampsvoice@gmail.com or hit the subscribe button.

This is a shortened version of a very interesting article taken from washingtonmonthly, written by Roger McNamee (@Moonalice) originally titled How to Fix Facebook – Before it Fixes Us

In my thirty-five-year career in technology investing, I have never made a bigger contribution to a company’s success than I made at Facebook. It was my proudest accomplishment. Not surprisingly, Facebook became my favorite app. I checked it constantly, and I became an expert in using the platform by marketing my rock band, Moonalice, through a Facebook page.

Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms make their money from advertising. As with all ad-supported businesses, that means advertisers are the true customers, while audience members are the product. Until the past decade, media platforms were locked into a one-size-fits-all broadcast model. Success with advertisers depended on producing content that would appeal to the largest possible audience.

Whenever you log into Facebook, there are millions of posts the platform could show you. The key to its business model is the use of algorithms, driven by individual user data, to show you stuff you’re more likely to react to.

Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.

It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t.

The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.

Meanwhile, the Remain campaign was making an appeal to reason. Leave’s crude, emotional message would have been turbocharged by sharing far more than Remain’s.

I did not see it at the time, but the users most likely to respond to Leave’s messages were probably less wealthy and therefore cheaper for the advertiser to target: the price of Facebook (and Google) ads is determined by auction, and the cost of targeting more upscale consumers gets bid up higher by actual businesses trying to sell them things.

As a consequence, Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.

The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs.

We now know, for instance, that the Russians indeed exploited topics like Black Lives Matter and white nativism to promote fear and distrust, and that this had the benefit of laying the groundwork for the most divisive presidential candidate in history, Donald Trump. The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.

Once the nominations were set, the Russians continued to undermine Clinton with social media targeted at likely Democratic voters. We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote. A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.

We hypothesize that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.

In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.

Thanks to government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions. No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil. No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.

Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective. The European Union challenged Google’s shopping price comparison engine on antitrust grounds, citing unfair use of Google’s search and AdWords data. The harm was clear: most of Google’s European competitors in the category suffered crippling losses. The most successful survivor lost 80 percent of its market share in one year. The EU won a record $2.7 billion judgment—which Google is appealing.

Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

First, we must address the resistance to facts created by filter bubbles. Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.

This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.

Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.

We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.

First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans.

Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.

Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication. The Honest Ads Act is a good start

Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.

Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs). If there are terms you choose not to accept, your only alternative is to abandon use of the product. For Facebook, where users have contributed 100 percent of the content, this non-option is particularly problematic. All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.

Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.

Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.

The Full article is a much longer read but enjoyable:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/how-to-fix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us/