Presspaganda

There was this point in which I got fed up of getting bits, whether it was the Fox videos or the CNN or the MSNBC or all those that, whether I agreed with them or not, were pre-filtering the information for me, including the tweets of the actor.

And I'm trying to be understanding because some people very dear to me defend him. So I played the press conference that some media were presenting as propaganda, a personal rally, rather than an informative press conference on COVID-19. And, yes, it was propaganda. In all fairness, some reporters were asking questions that were not related to the current progress of the fight against COVID-19—but also in all fairness, it was the speakers who started talking about other issues. It is true that some reporters were not the most polite and interrupted the speaker. But, mind, the one that interrupted most, and first, was the main speaker. Some reporters indeed spoke as if taking things personally; but hey, the conference started with a video attacking the media and the reporters, and polite or not, taking it personally or not, the worst behaviour I saw was either by the speaker or following his lead. He is their leader, after all, so he, in my eyes, is the only one to blame for his subjects' misled behaviour. And the only insults I heard were from the main speaker.

Now, there were some good moments in which I thought the answers given were reasonable for the circumstances. There was enough of them to think that, if the speaker wanted and had the data in his favour, he really could give a reasonable press conference. Even with all the mistakes and flaws in the actions taken (or not taken), he has the possibility of behaving reasonably. Probably he chooses not to. I prefer to think he chooses that than thinking he feels like a trapped rat.

However, there were too many misleading and manipulative statements. When he said, "When you look at Europe as a whole, they are doing much worse than we do"... Come on: when you look at any single administration, no one has as many cases and as fast growth. If you look at the number of cases in Europe, and you want to put it as a whole, then don't forget to see Europe as a whole when it comes to other facts. You said you have done more tests than any other country in the world? Let's see Europe as a whole, then: Europe has more tests than the USA (see the table below). With 616,168, the US has more cases than the next four countries combined (Spain, Italy, France and Germany, adding up to 616,016 cases—we would need to add Brunei, with 136, and Nepal, with 16, to reach the number of the US). The four mentioned European countries alone combine 3,325,383 tests—by contrast, the US has had 3,128,088 (impressive, yes, but not more than Europe as a whole). So to sum up, it may be that Europe as a whole is doing worse than you are, but the fact is that Europe as a whole is doing more tests than you do.

(source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries)

There are incompetent politicians everywhere, but if we use your criteria to judge reality, it comes out no single leader of any country is doing as bad as you. By far. No fake news: just using your methods of manipulation and falsehood.

Let's not compare with Europe, let's see it globally. We've said the USA has the largest number of cases of any single Government in the world. We could say it is simply more detected since they have more tests than anybody else in the world. But can we? The US has 30.39% of the world's cases (as of April 15th 2020). Counting only the countries with 70,000 tests or above, the US has less than 26% of the world's tests (this is a very conservative figure and it is probably much less than 26% since I couldn't find the number of tests that China has taken and I was counting as such just the confirmed cases, plus I left out many other countries):

In terms of cases per capita, or per million people, the US is way behind. Mind—there are 23 European countries (in the EU or not) and at least 6 European territories that are ahead of the US (feel free to check & count, but give or take a couple, I'm still safe). Oh, yes, it felt glorious to see Greenland in the list: now they must feel relieved that they were not purchased by the US:

I am going to show the first table again. Let's have a look at the total recovered. True, the pandemic was uncovered later in the US, so we need to give them time to recover. Considering the high figure of total cases, I really hope that the US gets also the highest number of total recovered. I sincerely do. Otherwise, they are going to have the largest number of deaths, and the American people deserve better. Please, everybody, stay safe.

BTW this is only one example of little research anybody can do to find all the manipulation that happened yesterday. Things like the previous administration destroying the COVID testing (or breaking them, or whatever he said)... He has been in Office for more than three years now, there was no COVID-19 one year ago so such testing did not exist under the previous administration—that is, no COVID-19 test could be broken or destroyed by anybody. Maybe he wanted to say something different and said it wrong, but, if they can't prepare his speech properly, why should anybody attend or watch these things? Why should we believe anything we hear?

There were many more traceable lies and misinformation, but enough for now. It was painful to watch (actually, I didn't watch most of it, I just listened to it while looking in a different direction). But you know what? Afterwards, I felt a huge peace of mind. Also, I was able to see positive things in both the incompetent speakers (there was more than one), in the competent ones (Steve something and Dr Fauci) and in the reporters. I was able to see negative things on both sides. I managed to read between some lines that I doubt the main speaker could identify when some of his people spoke—and I won't betray them here.

All in all, I got the impression there are quite a few reasons the US Government is seen as less and less reliable in other countries. While I still believe many among the media are manipulating the info for their interest, they are just a shadow of the manipulation displayed by the speakers. Not to talk about the lies and the lack of respect of those presenting this Press Propaganda briefing. After watching it, really, more than ever, I have reasons to believe what certain media show us on a daily basis. They may be manipulating a bit, but mainly, they are doing the dirty work of filtering the BS for us. They are saving our time from Presspaganda.

(P.S: if you want to give it a try, go ahead—just be warned, your feelings will be inclined in favour of the speaker due to the angle of recording. You may check how your feelings change by not looking at the video, just listen. However, it would be even more effective if you compare with your feelings when, instead of the speakers, one of the reporters is in the center of the screen: I feel it then stops being bad to become outrageous. Have fun).

An opportunity running away

I do not feel like translating my own blog another time, this time into English. Probably what I wrote in Spanish or Czech has been said by tens of thousands of people in the last days. Let's go straight to the statistics. I have found two tables on the internet. The first one shows the GDP of countries from the largest figure to the smallest, according to four different sources. In the second one, we can see the gross number of immigrants per country, again from the most to the least. I have found there seem to be a correlation between these two in the first 14 positions:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant_population

So it seems that many flags are repeated. The economically more advantaged countries seem to be those which got the largest amount of immigrants in recent history. In fact, among the first ten, half are repeated: USA, Russia, Germany, UK and France. If we add another four positions from the ranking, a total of 10 coincidences are found, with Canada, Australia, Spain, Italy and India being added to the list. That makes 10 out of 14, which is slightly over 70%. Afterwards, the correlation is much less clear, just to appear clearly again in the bottom positions.


I can think of an opposite situation of what we are living now: when Spain decided to kick whole cultures off its borders, some centuries ago, which was the beginning of the end for its Empire. On a smaller scale, similar examples can be found in Modern History too - but that is still a very sensitive topic in some cultures, so let us leave it that way for the time being. Feel free to do your own research or reach your own conclusions.

It would certainly be more than welcome if we could have some stronger support, control, and clear laws from a United Europe, as well as infrastructures and a proper guidance for a satisfactory integration of the new comers. But even so, this process is, most probably, going to be enriching, and not only culturally. We only need to protect the values that all of us, old residents and new residents, want from Europe: solidarity, respect, tolerance, protection, culture...

Hopefully, we will not be making slaves out of the new comers, those slaves that certain countries have made out of their own citizens to be near the top of the GDP list. Hopefully they will be citizens in equal conditions, happy to be in Europe, maybe feeling proud Europeans. Or is this a Utopy?

We have a unique opportunity to show who we really are, on which side we are, what are our values; to learn and become better; to be more than mere witnesses; to become part of the history book we once were studying. Yes, it may all as well end up with Europe being ruined or bombed or sunk or painted in pink. In between, we can choose whether to fear the future or to live the dream.

What do you prefer?

Confusion on the net

Okay, it's been a while since I last wrote a post in English. Allow me to do an exception. Today I found this on a status on the net:

"[...] religious people vs. Atheist in US prisons (in 1997) from the Federal Bureau of Prisons is : Religious 99.791%, Atheist 00.209%. [...] That's a very disproportionately low total of Atheist in prison. In 2013 nearly 20% of US Citizens are currently non-religious. That's up from around 10% in the mid 90's. In 2013 %32 of people under 30 years old are non-religious. The non-religious US population has increased by 10% in the past 20 years. That's an average of .5% per year and it looks to be "snowballing". These figures indicate that as religion drops so does crime. Percentage of religious people in US prisons: http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm Non-religious population in the US at 20% in 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States".

Sorry to contradict you, but these figures alone indicate nothing, unless you are totally biased. Let's look at the second link, where we have a table indicating that, in the US, irreligious people make up to 20% among whites, 16% among lations and 15% among africans. Considering the majority of the population in the US is still the whites, or the fact that:

"On June 30, 2006, an estimated 4.8% of black non-Hispanic men were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9% of Hispanic men of any race and 0.7% of white non-Hispanic men. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics"

it is not so easy to see a correlation. A graph may be more self-explicit:

Why are not black, or african, more than doubling the percentage of hispanics/latinos, when there's only 1% more of believers among blacks? If a 1% makes such a difference, why is not such a difference with the 4% between the Hispanich population and the White one? Just wondering.





Something else that I couldn't help doing was comparing the following maps:

(percentage of religious people in European coutries)

 (World prison population per 100 000 people, per country)

According to these wiki sources, the US lead the prison population per 100 000 people (more than 700) with the 20% of irreligious people mentioned above. The same wiki sources atribute to Spain a 7.6% atheists (24.1% if you count them together with the 16.5% of non-believers) - yet Spain has a prison population in the 100-150 frame. Then you have the Czech Republic, one of the least religious democratic countries in the world (if not the absolute first), with a 37% of "believers in nothing at all", whose prison population ranks in the 150-200 frame. Can someone explain this lack of correlation to me?

Another comparison worth making would be between the highly religious Turkey and the relatively mid- or low religious Baltic Republics. According to the original inference, Turkey should have a higher prison population than any of the three Baltic Republics. However, it is the other way round. Further more, out of the Three, Estonia has the lowest percentage of believers (10-20% - which is, again, one of the lowest worldwide), but has the highest prison population in the European Union. What can one easily infer there, if one would not mind the possibility of maybe having incomplete information? And remember - now we have more data than we had at the beginning. Still, I refuse to accept the easy option that the less believers, the higher the jail population. Things are not that easy.

A last example: if we move to other places in the world than just the EU, let's compare India, with a 19% of the population describing themselves as atheist, not religious or not sure (click here for the source - again, wiki). It's jail population is less than 50 per 100 000 people, one of the lowest in the world. The US, with a similar percentage of non-believers, is on the other end, with the highest jail population in the world, as it was mentioned before.

It seems to be a correlation between prison population and belief in the US as a whole. However, our sources, which come from the same source as the ones provided in the original status, prove this correlation is not universal - not even in the US. We could just as simply infer that religious people don't mind paying with freedom for their crimes, while non-religious pay with money and remain free. But seriously, provided the given sources by either of us are reliable in their "wikiness", the only thing that we can infer deduce is that believing in something or belonging to a religion is not going to make a criminal out of anybody.

Live and let live. Give respect and you'll get respect back. If you connect religion with those that abuse religion, don't be surprised the day someone connects atheism with those that abuse atheism - hell, they exist too!! Surf the net and find them. Be serious.

My sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

And for an extra map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion