The Daily Blog Open Mic – Wednesday – 3rd November 2021

1. Great news.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/454822/missing-girl-cleo-smith-found-alive-by-australian-police

   A 36 year old man is helping police who entered a house about 1 am and found her in one of the rooms. She seems okay, knows who she is. Only four years, she may never feel safe any more, and keep having flashbacks.
   The problem is that our society talks about neighbourliness which is being sold to us commercially in the Media.
   But we don’t love and respect humanity and that starts with our attitudes to the tiny and to parenting and childcaare. Why is that single mothers and low income families mothers’ are driven out to work and have less time for their parenting and role modelling than they should?

   And the wee girl is affected, and the attitudes of deadened maleness self-absorption without fulfilment have led to this man needing somebody small and innocent and more helpless than he is inside his head.
   How to regard people so they don’t become damaged, and when they are what then.
   A good interview with a trick cyclist from UK who is onto it I think. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018818805/the-devil-you-know-inside-the-minds-of-the-most-violent-criminals

2. .How much of art is being cancelled by new censorship? In the UK:
   https://www.bbc.com/news/59127144
   A new production of Into The Woods, set to be co-directed by Monty Python star Terry Gilliam, will no longer be staged at the Old Vic..after the show was announced, it is understood some staff expressed concern about Gilliam’s views on issues such as the MeToo movement, diversity and trans rights.

   Gilliam has previously described the MeToo movement as a “witch hunt”, adding there were many “decent people” who were “getting hammered” as the industry grappled with sexual abuse.
   Several allegations were made against the Old Vic’s former artistic director Kevin Spacey. as part of the MeToo movement, which began in late 2017.
   Last year, Gilliam told The Independent he was “tired of white men being blamed for everything wrong with the world”. In the same interview he said: “When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?”https://www.bbc.com/news/59127144

   It seems another facet of a regular movement in society each generation. Who amongst the older out there remember UK’s Mary Whitehouse, cleaning up unsatisfactory attitudes of her time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
   Constance Mary Whitehouse CBE (née Hutcheson; 13 June 1910 – 23 November 2001) was a British teacher and conservative activist. … She campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society.//
   She became a public figure via the Clean-Up TV pressure group, established in 1964, in which she was the most prominent figure. The following year she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for what she perceived as a lack of accountability and excessive use of bad language and portrayals of sex and violence in its programmes

   NZ had campaigner Patricia Bartlett. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Bartlett
   Over the years, she campaigned for theatre censorship, against the stage show Hair in Wellington, (1972) and prohibition of adolescent-oriented sex education books like Down Under the Plum Trees (1972). SPCS tried to have Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris (1972) prohibited, which led to New Zealand Film Society activism against SPCS attempts to stifle freedom of artistic expression throughout the late seventies and early eighties.

   (I don’t know whether this is okay, but I put down my feelings of controllers about many things, echoing Mary Whitehouse and Patricia Bartlett’s approach. Which is a surprise.)

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