Made with Figure for iOS. Don't have Figure yet? It's a fun, easy and bargain-priced music making app that anyone can use! Read about it here: http://itunes.com/app/figure

Juvenerevo

Vykohi

Didi Samoly

On 28 October 2015, Mills Baker, a product designer at Facebook, came to Bournemouth University to talk to students and staff in the Faculty of Media & Communication. Over the course of an hour and forty minutes, Mills and the audience discussed social systems design, privacy, filter bubbles and much, much more. 

In a few moments you’ll hear Mills ask the audience to raise their hands in response to a series of questions about their use of Facebook and Snapchat. In each case, most of the audience raised their hands.

Mills Baker was speaking in a personal capacity, and his views do not represent Facebook, Inc.

Inside Facebook, Inc.

In the teeth of the financial collapse of 2008, David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, made a statement about the economy at the Conservative Party conference on 30 September. It makes for interesting reading now. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7644056.stm

I just set some of it to music.

Protecting the System

Test at Lymington

Beach at Milford-on-Sea, Hampshire

Scirocco  at Irsina

David Wearing of New Left Project interviewed Maryam al-Khawaja, acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, during her recent visit to London.

"Since an Islamophobic film sparked protests across the Muslim world two weeks ago, we seem to have found ourselves drawn back towards the old “Clash of Civilisations” narative that framed a lot of mainstream discourse during the Bush-Blair era. The narrative presents a liberal, progressive, democratic West in opposition to a backward, religious and intolerent East. But this time around, thanks to the Arab uprisings, it’s a bit easier to see that narrative for what it is: a caricature and a false dichotomy that is, at the same time, both conceited and racist. 

In reality, one of the key aspects of Western power as it manifests itself in the Middle East and North Africa, is the support that states like Britain and the US have given to autocratic regimes across the region, over the past hundred years or so, up to and including the present day. It seems that under the “Clash of Civilisations” narrative, the West’s character is defined by the freedoms that it enjoys for itself, and not by the fact that its governments collude in the denial of those same freedoms to other people. In any event, it cannot escape our attention that many of the recent Arab uprisings have involved people taking significant personal risks to wrest their democratic and human rights from autocracies supported and armed by our own governments.

One such case is Bahrain, where last year the regime set about violently crushing a peaceful and broad-based pro-democracy movement. People whose crime was simply to demand their rights were killed, beaten, locked-up and tortured by a state whose military has been armed and trained by the UK since it was a British imperial protectorate. London’s long-standing commitment to maintain an order of conservative allied states at the heart of the world’s key energy producing region has placed the UK squarely on the wrong side of history.

A fortnight ago I had the privilege of meeting Maryam Al-Khawaja, Acting President of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, while she was here in London. We talked about the role that her and her family have played in the democratic opposition, the challenges they face, and the importance of the links between Western governments and the Bahraini regime. Maryam gave a fascinating interview, which really enriched my understanding of how the system of oppression works in her country. I left with a strong sense of the need to campaign against the supportive relationship that Britain has with the regime.  Sara Yasin, Bahrain Programme Manager at the Index on Censorship, put it like this:

"A year after the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry  delivered its report, the government’s promises of reform have turned out to be empty. The British government has a lot of influence in Bahrain, but unfortunately a blind eye has been turned to human rights violations due to business interests, this must stop." 

Here then is my interview with Maryam al-Khawaja. You can learn more about the struggle for democracy in Bahrain by visiting bahrainrights.org. "

David Wearing is a post-graduate researcher on British foreign policy in the Middle East at the University of London. He writes regularly for the Guardian, and has also been published by the New Statesman, openDemocracy and Le Monde Diplomatique. He is a co-editor of New Left Project.


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