Whilst watching TV you wait for the adverts despite the fact your bladder is bursting. When the adverts come on, you rush out, visit the loo, make a coffee, get a sandwich, and get back to find the programme has started whilst you were absent and you’ve missed a bit.
The you realise that with a PVR this was so unnecessary :-
One of the things that irritates me whenever there is any kind of programme on TV about healthy eating is re-learning just how bad pre-packaged meals are. And even more, every time I get lectured to by some pompous food guru who tells me I just need to spend the time to cook my own food to eat healthily.
But I don’t want to use my spare time to cook. I don’t really enjoy it, and I’m often in need of food when I arrive back tired from doing something I prefer. Convenience food is ideal for me, except for the health aspect. I’m quite happy to eat healthily and do try, but convenience food is too convenient to give up.
So why is convenience food bad ? The traditional trend has been for manufacturers to add salt and sugar to cheap ingredients to make them taste ‘better’, and to reduce the price. I would be quite happy to spend a little bit more for a healthier product and I dare say many others would be too.
Rather than be told that we need to cook our food from scratch, it would be better if the TV pundits told us that but also tried to persuade the manufacturers to produce healthier convenience food … perhaps by highlighting products that are good. No matter how hard people campaign, many people will not switch from convenience foods, so improving convenience foods will probably have a greater effect on the health of the nation than just telling us we need to behave better and not be so lazy.
Firstly I’ll point out that I don’t really believe that the types mentioned in the headline really exist … all people have artistic sides and scientific sides even if they deny them. I know! I thought I was purely scientific without an artistic bone in my body, but couldn’t stop writing (incompetently) and now I’m obsessed with creating pleasing images (unsuccessfully). However many people do believe that they exist.
I have just finished a book where a literary woman insists that her father is ignorant because he doesn’t read despite the fact that he is a neurosurgeon (which does involve lots of reading) and is a serious music listener. There is enough clues in there for some to guess the book and the author, but I won’t name either because it is a relatively common tendency to run down the knowledge of “scientific types”.
Why? I mean any kind of knowledge is valuable and deciding what knowledge is more valuable than the rest is the kind of game that only the foolish indulge in. Of course “scientific types” have been known to think the opposite … that “artistic types” are the ignorant ones, although for some mysterious reason we don’t get to hear this point of view in the media or great literature.
It is too easy to think of someone who does not spend time learning your knowledge is lazy and ignorant without considering that they may spend a great deal of time learning other stuff that is valuable to them. I don’t as a rule read great works of literature because I either don’t have the time or I am too tired to do the work justice. That doesn’t mean I don’t read.
Today (or to be more precise just an hour or two ago) Iran released a video containing images of the British navy prisoners they took in dubious circumstances. The contents of the video seem to show the prisoners being relatively well treated, and it is possible (I’m being very charitable here) that the Iranian government intended to use it to demonstrate that the prisoners are being well treated.
So why is there so much condemnation of the video ? Well ignoring any other issues, it is against international law in respect to prisoners.
So the Iranians need to understand that whatever their motives, the release of this video is a public-relations disaster for them. They have come across as a government that has no respect for international law. It does not matter if the Iranians believe this bit of law is wrong, or if they do not have respect for international law, breaching the law it in this way will come across very badly.
The Americans and the British have been accused of the same thing themselves, and there is some grounds for complaint here … although our system makes it difficult to do anything with a media industry that is effectively out of control. But two wrongs don’t make a right. The Iranians will not look good whatever they do with regard to the prisoners they hold, but releasing the video makes them look considerably worse.
It would have been better by far if they really thought such a video was needed, to release it privately into the hands of the British government and allow them to decide what to do with it.
I have written on slavery before in a more general sense, but this time it is more about how media represents slavery at a time when slavery is in the news because Sunday is the 200th anniversary of the British attempting to abolish the slave trade as the first step in abolishing slavery which is something that is still not finished.
Well, actually the campaign for the abolition of slavery in Britain/England is actually quite a bit older than that act in 1807; the first step was allegedly the abolition of serfdom in 1102. There were many steps forward and many shameful steps backwards (such as the start of the transatlantic slave trade). But I’ll stop there before I get carried away and just point you to the Wikipedia article on the history of slavery … [w:History of Slavery]
What this little rant is about, is how the media portray slavery as an institution where only blacks were slaves and only whites were slave owners and traders. Wrong!
Even ignoring the earlier history of slavery, it is clear from various statistics that slaves could be white or black :-
| Group | Number |
|---|---|
| Africans in the transatlantic slave trade | 11.6 million |
| Africans in the Eastern slave trade | 11-16 million |
| Europeans in the Eastern slave trade | 1-1.5 million |
These figures are hardly likely to be accurate … slave traders do not appear to be good record keepers for some reason, but it would appear that from these figures approximately 6% of the slaves in early modern history were European. That seems like a relatively small quantity in comparison to the number of African slaves taken from their homes, but each individual forced into slavery is a crime against humanity, and a tragedy for the individual whether the individual was black, white or any other colour.
These figures probably vastly underestimate the number of slaves throughout history even if we exclude serfs (a serf is a slave owned by the land and not a person … a distinction likely to make a difference to a lawyer but not the serf). The colour of a slave is irrelevant; it is the fact that he is a slave that is important (and important to free him). The colour of a slave owner is irrelevant; it is the fact that she owns slaves and abuses them that is important (no matter how kind a slavemaster is, she is still abusing other humans).
It is easy to overlook the African involvement in the slave trade … we are given the impression that it was solely white Europeans who threw black Africans into chains. There was certainly plenty of that going on, but in the early days at least many black Africans were involved in the slave trade.
The media needs to stop getting carried away with the easy job of portraying the transatlantic slave trade where images are relatively easy to come by, and make it plain that all slavery is wrong and that it was not just black Africans abused in this way. Given how widespread slavery has been in the past, it is almost certain that everyone alive today is descended from someone who was a slave and probable that they are descended from slave owner.
There are those who say we should compensate the descendants of slaves for the crime against their ancestors. If everyone is a descendent of a slave, this could be somewhat expensive to do! However there is some that we must do and that is to do everything we can to stop present day slavery … yes it still goes on. I am sure that many if not all of history’s dead slaves would cry out that any money that could be put into compensation should be first spent on stopping anyone else being subject to slavery in any form … that is the first priority.