Has anyone else noticed the jarring disconnect between New Vision stories and New Vision story headlines? Is it just me or does it sometimes seem as if the two are in different realms, the story in one parallel universe where one thing is meant and said, and the headline in another, where another completely different meaning is uttered?
Take for example the recent story headlined “Barack Obama Survives Assasination”. Now, I may be a fastidious pissant with tighty-whiteys that hunch up into knots of disconcertment whenever I see the word “everyday” used instead of “every day”, and I understand that in this situation one needs not to attack the grammatical windmill full tilt, but rather, and rather obviously, one needs to loosen up. Loosening up is the wiser option when one’s underwear is in knots.
But when I read “Obama Survives Assasination”, I am sorry, but I begin to think Obama was assassinated and then survived.
I will assume, though, that what they meant was that the fellow survived an assassination attempt, not an actual assassination—because people don’t survive those, not even Obama, though the whole world thinks he is Superman.
From the story, however, (here http://newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/677333 ) it sounds more like there was no actual attempt, either. At most there was a plan to lay a plot to lead to an attempt that may, if successful, have resulted in an assassination. An assassination which would only be successful if the victim did not survive.
Well, any frowns that were inspired by the death and resurrection of Obama were reversed by another later front page story: “Catholic Church to Probe Gay Priests” it said.
No, that one is not on the internet. You have to take my word for it.
The best lack all conviction, Yeats said, in one of the more underquoted parts of that immortal poem, while the worst, regrettably, are full of passionate intensity. All it takes for evil to succeed, another man, in a convenient bid to contribute to this paragraph, added, is for good men to do nothing.
Perhaps I shouldn’t go so far as to call those who hold different viewpoints from mine as “the worst” or “evil men”, even though they have implied far worse things about us, but I think it is time for Uganda to develop a tradition of liberal activism. Because blogs and commentary pages and radio shows are overrun by reactionaries and bigots and people who spew with force and passion, but spew in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile, those of us who understand that things are not always black and white, those of us with a sense of nuance, those who see the value of asking questions as greater than the act of proclaiming guesses as certain answers just shrug and tut and go away.
Certainly without starting our own blogs.
So anyone stumbling into our sphere of discussion would think that there is a consensus on these issues—gays should be hanged, Obama is a babykiller, porno causes rape and others.
Did you read that article in the Vision last Saturday, by the way? It was an appaling piece of bullshittery that skated so close to the edge that by the end I could no longer be sure that the writer wasn’t deliberately trying to lie.
Full disclosure first: I find pornography distasteful and vulgar and think it debases everyone involved in making and using it, and even though if you gave me a VCD of Beyonce stripping out of a French Maid’s outfit I will not fling it back at you, at least not until after I have watched it, I still don’t think that is anything to be proud of. Porn is cheap thrills and is bad manners. But let’s not get carried away. Porning doesn’t make you want to rape people.
This article’s headline said that porn causes crime according to research, but blithely neglected to actually state so in the story. The writer, Ganzi Muhanguzi, observed that there is a lot of porn around Uganda these days and that also, over the past few years, there has been a rise in the number of rape convictions.
The implication here, of course is clear.
However, what Ganzi doesn’t know, or doesn’t tell us, or just didn’t bother to find out is, beyond implications, what do actual researchers say?
How about nothing? In over sixty years of looking no valid scientific evidence has been found that proves that porn causes an increase in sexual crime, and when Ganzi cites a rise in rape convictions in Uganda, he doesn’t look at places where this research is a virtual industry.
In the US home of Judith Reisman (more on her later if you are still reading by then) A presidential commission estimated in 1970 that the total retail value of all the hard-core porn in the US was no more than $10 million.
In 2003, Forbes.com put an estimate of the industry’s revenue at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion.
Meanwhile, during the time when magazines and videos and websites were burgeoning, did the US record the expected spike in sexual crime?
Uh-uh. The US department of Justice said in January that there has been an eighty-five percent reduction in sexual violence over the past 25 years.
The numbers won’t prove it and neither will common sense. Ganzi mentions Ted Bundy, the serial killer who famously claimed that porno made him do it before he was excecuted for the murders of thirty women.
But Ganzi forgets the hundreds of thousands, the millions of guys out there who have consumed pornography in their life but have not raped or killed anybody for it. Every dude I know who has no religious compunctions about it doesn’t mind a glance or two at a dirty picture, but I don’t know any serial rapists at all. The logic is telling me that porn doesn’t cause rape and if a porn user rapes someone, there was another factor in the equation.
The article gets really ridiculous here, when Ganzi brings in his quoted authority. He refers to Dr Judith Reisman who he introduces as a “renowned psychiatrist.”
Reisman is not a psychiatrist. She is a “doctor” yes, she has a Masters degree and Ph.D in Communications from a Cleveland university, but she has no training in medicine, psychology or psychiatry.
Perhaps that ignorance is what enables her to craft such risible theories as the one that I found when I read up on her. She claims that a cocktail of hormones, which she calls “erototoxins”, are produced when you look at a porny picture and that these cause actual physical damage to the brain. Erototoxins, she says are, testosterone, dopamine, adrenalin, serotonin. Actual real doctors who have seen neurotransmitters and hormones at work disagree when told that sexual arousal damages the brain.
I am about to hit my word limit.
This post was not in defense of porno. Like I said, it is bad manners and none of us want our children involved in it, but there are worse things to find in magazines and newspapers and on the net. Like falsehood and deceit which, even if it is only by neglecting to do his job thoroughly, is what this story amounts to: a lie.
But in the week since it was published, no one has taken it upon themselves to retort, because that is how we be. The Ganzis of the world write their stuff uncontested. Rev wrote a bilious tirade based on a very slight grasp on the issue of overpopulation vs large population. I know there is nothing to be gained by offering facts and logic and figures to 27th, but it worries me that he writes long-ass blogs about American conspiracies to exterminate Africans, and SAGE writes about how we should be ruled by priests but no one writes the opposite. Those of us who know why separation of church and state is good for the Church don’t say so. Those of us who know why gay rights are not about the right to be a homosexual, they are about basic human decency, don’t say so. Those of us with insights on family planning and reproductive rights issues just shrug and let the crackpots rage uncontested.
Well, at least we have Tumwi.
Man, I am as tired of writing as you are of reading, so let me leave you with an amusing gif.
If you saw a copy of the New Vision today, Friday, you may have been impressed to see that the newspaper went all out in expressing support for the cause of Breast Cancer Awareness.
You may not have been as impressed by the means by which we expressed that support. Said means being yet another example of an idea that sounds good in the boardroom but gets lost along the way and ends up making the word “vomitacious” suddenly spring to hundreds of minds.
We meant to come out printed on pink coloured paper. But instead we looked like beans and eggs and bad milk on the way back out.
A friend described it as “pukish.”
But it is still Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I am glad that the company, and others around us have taken it upon themselves to try and do, say, or wear something that shows some concern about the matter. But that, you know, is only as commendable as it is useful.
And it has to be useful. Now the month is still ongoing, so you have until the last day to learn and know, for example, what the incidence of Breast Cancer in Uganda is, what facilities we have in the country to treat it, what the survival rate is, and what you can do about it. That sort of thing.
In other news, Morris is a Moron. Sheila said so, and she should know. She lived with the idiot for a month.
I found him boring. Morris is no Gaetano. He lacks charisma.
She stopped short of saying (or the Monitor reporter just didn’t transcribe that part) that he was the kind of challenged that can’t shit and think at the same time and that is why he spent so long in the can.
Going face: today was International Eradication Poverty day. There is a day for everything, it seems. Earlier this week, I recall hearing that it was international hand washing day. Hand washing day. There is a guy at work who smells like he hasn’t even have a body washing day all week but let us not digress further.
And here, In honour of IEPDay, some thoughts on poverty eradication:
The most effective weapon against poverty has always been wealth. So to eradicate poverty, make money, or enable the making of money. Buy Ugandan wherever possible, guys. Support local industries and companies and services as much as you can.
But don’t buy the shit stuff—let the guys who make shit products go out of business. I mean the good stuff that is made in Uganda.
It’s the weekend and I need to skate. Before I go there are two things: One is an apology for a grevious wrong wrought, that isn’t even my fault.
There was a day a couple of weeks ago when I wrote a thesis about development, and urged that we should emulate Icleand if we wish to develop. Well, Iceland is broke.
As in last week they were looking at the possibility of declaring bankruptcy AS A NATION.
Mr E. Bazanye 