conspiracy movies

Conspiracy theories are everywhere:

Jay Doubleyou: coronavirus and populism

Jay Doubleyou: conspiracy theories

Jay Doubleyou: fake news

Jay Doubleyou: there are several questions around Shakespeare

Jay Doubleyou: conspiracy!

Conspiracy makes a good theme for movies

The 15 Best Conspiracy Theory Movies and Paranoid Thrillers

List of conspiracy-thriller films and television series - Wikipedia

All made up? Conspiracy theories in movies | All media content | DW | 19.05.2020

12 Great Government Conspiracies on Film | Fandango

With the granddaddy of them all:

When it comes to nourishing paranoiac beliefs through pop culture, one of the most iconic works is the 1999 sci-fi political parable The Matrix. A computer hacker, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, journeys into a reality he didn’t know existed and must battle the system of machines controlling all of humanity. The plot of the movie hinges around a choice Neo makes to take a red pill and to wake up from his blissful ignorance. 

How The Matrix Fed Our Conspiracy-Laden World | On the Media | WNYC Studios

And this has fed directly into today's politics:

How Did Conspiracy Theories Come to Dominate American Culture? | Literary Hub

CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN THEPATRIOT/MILITIA MOVEMENT | extremism.gwu.edu

Red pills and dog whistles: It is more than ‘just the internet’ | US & Canada | Al Jazeera

Urban Dictionary: Red Pilled

The New European takes a closer look:

The movies that turned everything tin foil

James Oliver

Published: 9:51 AM November 12, 2020   

The two films - and a TV show - that helped make conspiracy theories mainstream.

So let’s recap. This virus that you’re all so scared of isn’t actually real, just a flammed-up cold that’s been exaggerated to enslave the easily-led. But if it is real, then it was cooked up in a government laboratory either in China or the US, and unleashed to destroy the economy of the other.

And any ‘cure’ will be worse still. You think vaccination will save you? Pah! Don’t you realise that’s just a way for the puppet-masters of Davos to steal your precious bodily fluids? It’s all Bill Gates’ doing!
Ahem.

It is very easy to mock conspiracy theories. In fact, it’s near-enough impossible not to; the above might not be the fairest representation of some of the notions currently swilling around online and in people’s actual brains, but who wants to be fair to stuff that contradicts medical science, common sense and the evidence of your own eyes?

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, of course, from Blood Libels to Popish Plots but are flourishing now, in 2020, as never before. The pandemic has certainly stirred it up but the taste for conspiratorial thinking predates the arrival of Sars-COV-2.

Witness QAnon, bubbling away these past couple of years. It’s hard to summarise because it sounds so loopy but broadly speaking, QAnon (which started with an anonymous internet poster calling him/ herself ‘Q’) posits that the only thing standing between a cellar-full of terrified, trafficked children and the rapacious pederasts of the global elite is Donald Trump.

The reasons for this triumph of unreason are many and varied. Before Covid-19, there’s been a steady erosion of trust in the political class (that didn’t start with the Iraq War but was certainly exacerbated by it).

The lack of accountability at the top doesn’t help either (take the 2008 crash, for which no one so much as got their wrists slapped). All of this is poured into the internet and patiently stirred by people otherwise excluded from mainstream discourse.

Something else should be added, however. The role of culture, film and television, has sometimes been overlooked but it has been one of the most powerful drivers in all this, most especially things produced in America...

The movies that turned everything tin foil | The New European

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how to get free office software

 

From the Money Saving Expert website:

Free Office Software

Word, PowerPoint, Excel & others

Nick Durrant | Edited by Steve Nowottny

Updated 11 October 2019

The open source movement means there's more top quality, legit free software than ever floating around the web to kit out your computer with.
 

We explain how to get Microsoft Office free if you're eligible, and – for those who aren't – have cherry-picked some of the best free alternatives, along with plenty of other software for PCs and Macs (and a few for Linux). To make sure your computer's well protected online, see our Free Antivirus Software guide.

Always check any software you put on your computer's suitable and compatible with your existing set-up. No liability can be accepted for any problems caused from acting upon the info given.

How can it be free?

Free software falls into two categories: promotional freebies, usually hoped to serve form of commercial again, and software developed to help people fight back against big software providers.

The latter has grown hugely as more people have embraced open source projects, where the building blocks – big chunks of code – are free for everybody to adapt and improve.

Click the categories below to read more about the types of free software available.

• Free software as a commercial giveaway

• Open source software

• Freeware and shareware

Free Microsoft Office for students and teachers

If you're a student or working in education and have an academic email address that can receive external email, you may be able to get a couple of decent freebies from Microsoft.

• 1.Free Microsoft Office

• 2.1TB free online storage

Quick questions:

• How long can I get these for?

• What if I'm not eligible?

Free Microsoft Office alternatives

For those who aren't able to get Microsoft's Office suite for free, the package is a costly proposition with the single-user subscription costing £59.99/year (or £48ish on Amazon* at the time of writing).

Yet you can furnish your machine with equivalents to most of its applications for nothing, thanks to open source alternatives...

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Free Office Software: Word, PowerPoint, Excel & others - MSE

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the african origins of 'ok'

We know that non-European languages have had an impact on the English language:

How the Native American's influenced the English language | The New European

And perhaps the most frequent word in English, now used in most other languages, had its origin in West African languages:

Peter Trudgill: How everything became okey dokey | The New European

This is the original piece of research from the 1970s:

O.K., A.O.K. and O KE

By David Dalby
Jan. 8, 1971

Further investigation has revealed forms similar to O.K. not only in the 19th century black English of Jamaica and Surinam, and in the black Gullah speech of South Carolina, but in numerous West African languages: Two examples are Mandingo o ke “that's it” or “certainly” (also “do it”) and Wolof waw kay “yes indeed.”

The fact that indigenous forms resembling O.K. occur widely in West Africa, in areas from which forced immigration to America took place until the Civil War, made it easier for them to become established in the New World. It is also significant that the popularization of O.K. in New England should have taken place in the period when an increasing number of refugees from Southern slavery were arriving in the North.

An Afro‐American origin for O.K. accounts for its arrival in American English in a more straightforward way than any previous explanation, and also explains why its derivation has for so long been obscured. The ridicule with which black English has been unjustly treated for over 300 years, and the resulting failure to recognize its important place in the history of the language, has led schol ars to underestimate its influence on the development of American English.

Thus it was that investigators could be led as far away as Greece and Finland in their search for the derivation of O.K., without even considering the possibility of an origin in Black America.

Although the most notable, O.K. is only one of over eighty American isms with a probable African origin. A remarkable fact is that a large number of these items should be traceable to the same two West African languages, Mandingo and Wolof. Standard etymological dictionaries have so far recognized only a few of these Americanisms as ultimate African isms, but it is significant that a high proportion of them, like O.K., should have been of hitherto disputed or unknown origin.

O.K., A.O.K. and O KE - The New York Times

OK. Is It African? on JSTOR

See also:

Wolof language - Wikipedia

Mandinka language - Wikipedia

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how to blog in esl/efl

Blogs can be a very handy tool for both teaching and learning.

Here are a couple of them which show us how to set them up and how to make use of them:

Use Blogs in Your ESL Class and Join the Blogosphere!
Blogs are actually a great resource for teachers and students alike—if you know how to use them effectively.
Whether you’re a blog newbie, an avid blogger yourself or anything in between, you’ll find that the following blogs are great tools to have on hand both inside and outside the ESL classroom.
In this post we’ll go through six different ways to use blogs with your ESL class, and I’ll give some examples of specific blogs you can use in each way. So take a deep breath as we dive into the blogosphere...

Everything ESL Teachers Should Know About Using Blogs in Class | FluentU English Educator Blog

The British Council gives a few tips:

Blogging for ELT
This article takes a look at blogging, which is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool.

It gives an overview of blogging websites, suggests why you might want to use them, and gives some practical advice on setting up blogs for use with your own classes.

Blogging for ELT | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

Plus some research:

Using Blogs in ESL/EFL Teaching and Teacher-Training | Request PDF

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the best esl/efl blogs

There are some excellent blogs out there to help teachers in English as a second or foreign language.

Here are a few lists to look at:

You might also be interested in my British Council post, The Top Blogs and Resource Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners. Here they are (in order to make this list, the blogs need to have at least one post each month), not in any order of preference: Speaking of the British Council, they have greatly expanded the number of bloggers who are writing monthly posts on different topics.

Updated & Revised: The Best ESL/EFL Blogs – Share Your Favorites! | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

We need to share thoughts, ideas and classroom activities that can inject a bit of oomph back into our lessons. Here are our top 8 ESL teacher blogs to follow (in no particular order) when we need some motivation.

ESL Teacher Blogs, Our Top 8 - The TEFL Academy Blog

Blogs by ESL/EFL teachers, blogs about English learning and teaching

TESL/TEFL/TESOL/ESL/EFL/ESOL Links - TESL : Weblogs

One of the best things about English Language Teaching is the sense of community.

5 Fantastic EFL Blogs for Teaching Tips and Advice - LoveTEFL

And a very long list, but there are some interesting places:

Top 100 ESL Teacher Blogs & Websites To Follow in 2020 (ELT blogs)

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what is an 'illiberal democracy'?

The US election is too close to call - but whatever the result, can America's political system be compared to any other country?

Some would say that the USA is looking more and more like other countries:

Trump’s bid to stop the count risks turning America into an ‘illiberal democracy’ like Turkey | The Independent

Including European countries:

Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not.
In both countries, conservative parties have pursued power at all cost in recent years, including by abandoning any pretext of adherence to a previously agreed-upon set of norms for governance. The result has been a resounding, if slow-motion, decline in democratic health.
Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.

Opinion | Where would U.S. democracy head in a second Trump term? Hungary and Poland show the answer. - The Washington Post

Democracy did not die in Hungary in 2015 when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán decided he needed an expensive border wall to see off a nonexistent "invasion" of asylum seekers.
When Poland's government that same year started stripping power from the country's courts by filling large swaths of the judiciary with apparatchiks loyal above all else to the right-wing populist party, the rule of law still applied.
Turkey's leader was once seen as a potential model democrat in the Islamic world. Today, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the world's biggest jailer of journalists.
Experts agree that democracy is fragile, and that a country's descent into the type of illiberal politics that has emerged in recent years in parts of Europe, in Brazil, in India and elsewhere, has been nothing if not gradual. It creeps up on you.

What authoritarian countries can tell us about democracy and Trump

Let's look at Hungary, from inside and outside the country:

Are Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America one and the same? – Daily News Hungary

Trump’s twinship with Orbán shows ‘illiberal democracy’ has a home in the US | Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Opinion | The Guardian

American Orbánism - The Atlantic

Is the U.S. at Risk of Mirroring Hungary’s Democratic Backsliding?

The US Ambassador to Hungary has had two good years, however:

Relations between Hungary and the United States could not be better, outgoing US Ambassador David B. Cornstein said in an interview published in daily Magyar Nemzet’s Wednesday issue. The ambassador told the paper that US-Hungary relations had been “rather poor” when he came to serve in Hungary in June 2018.

US Ambassador: 'Orbán Gov't Not Totalitarian, Hungary Democracy'

But things are divided in Poland too:

Duda's Polish Election Victory Is a Warning For Trump's America - Bloomberg

Poles in America demand Biden correct himself after calling Poland and Hungary 'totalitarian regimes'

U.S. ambassador says EU criticism of Poland 'overblown' | Reuters

What Poland’s presidential politics tells us about Trump’s re-election bid

Here's a very interesting book from a Brit living in Poland:

Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | Books | The Guardian

Here's another look from the centre:

US Election Splits Central Europe | Balkan Insight

To finish, some general concerns:

Democracies around the world are under threat. Ours is no exception - Los Angeles Times

Republicans’ Authoritarian Ambitions Will Live on Past Trump

How Do We Fix American Democracy? 

There was the contested 2000 presidential election, when the popular-vote winner did not win the Electoral College and five unelected Supreme Court justices settled the outcome. The series of court decisions, culminating with the disastrous Citizens United v. FEC, that unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money into our elections and diminished the power and influence of individual voters. There was also the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and opened the door yet again to widespread disenfranchisement of black and brown voters, including the hours-long wait times to cast a ballot that we’re seeing right now.

Biden: Should He End Electoral College, Pack Courts to Fix Democracy? - Rolling Stone

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ivan illich: schooling, technology, and culture

The educationalist Ivan Illich had a lot to say:

Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling and deschooling

Jay Doubleyou: networked learning

Jay Doubleyou: schools as 'total institutions'

Jay Doubleyou: "The use of technology – for children above all – needs to be interrogated: Is it convivial?"

Jay Doubleyou: "As the market develops … education will become organically linked again into … family homes, workplaces, sports centres, town halls, reading rooms in pubs, debating chambers, book stores … but you won't see the youth ghettos we call schools and colleges"

Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society

Later this month, there'll be a webinar showing how very relevant he is today:

Ivan Illich: Technology, Education & Culture

Webinar

17

November

2020

Time

3pm to 5:30pm

Industrial society has created a new kind of helplessness: human beings who have lost the ability to meet their own needs and the needs of their community. This was the argument Ivan Illich made in a series of influential books about schooling, technology, and culture. 

In this workshop, Dougald Hine (co-founder of Dark Mountain and a school called HOME) will tell the story of his journey into the world of Illich’s friends and co-conspirators, how their work contributed to movements from Asset-Based Community Development to the Zapatistas, and how it can nourish the work of regenerative culture today.

Select PriceLow Income £20Standard £40Organisation £60

Prices inclusive of VAT

Quantity

What to expect

What I'll leave with

Who it's for

The facilitator

• An encounter with the ideas of one of the most radical thinkers of the late 20th century
• A mixture of storytelling, teaching, and discussion
• Breakout sessions where we bring a couple of simple concepts from Illich’s work together with our own experiences

Joining Instructions

Terms and Conditions

Stir to Action

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