Category Archives: democracy
STORY OF OUR TIMES
I am releasing my latest novel fiction Turkeys not Bees.
The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control.
Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.
The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist.
At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Reviewed by
David P Jones
August 12th 2022
MEDIA MAKE MONEY
I disagree with Puttnam’s analysis: that it does.
Freedom of speech hurts some people but we already have laws of negligence, defamation and slander.
It is not possible to regulate media with reference to ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ because we are in a post-truth age where these have disappeared. All opinions must be considered now. This is better than the narrow moralities of the past e.g. condemnation of witchcraft and homosexuality.
Debating of binary issues is defunct because post-truth content is not binary. Debating is being replaced by politicking. The media aim is profit, within Debord’s spectacle, with a news churn having self-serving morality. Reform of the spectacle could be to reduce employee alienation, with job improvement by workers’ councils. Also by reducing consumer alienation, by limitation of product resource use, energy demand and packaging. Investment regulation could reduce media concentration and foster competition. Duty of Care censorship could consider harmful effects on minorities of advertising. The media industry can be made more responsible by cutting off the flow of money they lure.
My novels have current issues reviewed on my blog: martinknox.com
Information didn’t reach anyone
Today my post on the WordPress platform has not brought any hits on my website nor interest in my novel Presumed Dead, a political crime fiction thriller. The book is set in a hung parliament. The title of my post was Must Parliament be Hung? It was inoffensive, apolitical and informative. I have received no complaint about the content of my post. I am disappointed that my information didn’t reach anyone..
I assume reach to my 130 followers was suppressed by a WordPress algorithm sensitive to political issues. I am alarmed that my post offering analysis and alternatives for Australia’s democracy has been taken out at a time when discussion is wanted. In the opinion of most people, a healthy democracy allows its political processes to be discussed respectfully.
Guy Debord, a French philosopher, wrote in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) that the people are exploited by the leaders for profit, with images created by the media and others. The spectacle is totalitarian. This theory would explain the suppression of my post, because discussion of a hung parliament could increase or decrease profits and leader interests.
If the algorithms would stop my post earlier today reaching anyone, then the spectacle could stop this one, because it exposes the monetisation intent of WordPress in allowing reach. Our future could be bleak.
martinknox.com
MUST PARLIAMENT BE HUNG?
If the Australian Parliament is hung, it could be an artificial impasse created by representatives who are prevented by self-serving parties from separating and compromising on issues because they want to force a change of government. Could the incumbent government better organise the parliament’s business to operate a minority government and avoid deadlock?
Presumed Dead is a crime fiction story with a hung parliament, resolved by an independent woman politician who opposes and ends partisan politics.
Reviews: martinknox.com
