catarsis, el blog de'n Francesc Roma i Frigole

Yesterday I posted wrong information about Aljazeera. The articles I posted where not from the real Aljazeera.net , they were from the scammers who run aljazeera.com. They abuse Alzajeera's good name to spread lies. I apologize for the mistake.

UPDATE The articles I posted below are not from the real Aljazeera.net I was a victim of the scammers who run the aljazeera.com. Sorry for posting wrong information

Often the western left portrays independent Arab media as an oasis of freedom and enlightenment in a world where corporate and political interests set the discourse in all the western media. After seeing two articles promoted at Aljazeera's English home page I won't be able to give any credit anymore to anything published by them.

The article Mousavi's big blunders by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi and another one called A realist's view of the protests in Iran by Muhammad al-Arabi have destroyed all Ajazeera's credibility.

Two quotes from the articles illustrate their style. From the first:

Initially, the ruling elite had no intention of any "election engineering" and, in fact, lowered its guards by allowing a fiercely competitive race that galvanized the public attention through the TV debates, unfettered campaigns, etc. but then as we got closer and closer to the June 12 appointed hour, it became patently obvious that the reformist camp was pushing the envelope to new, and from the vantage point of system coherence, intolerable heights that, in turn, required a stern reaction.

and from the second

there is a lot of pent-up frustration in Iranian society. About half the country's population of 71 million people are under 25, and nearly two-thirds are under 30. Many of these youths yearn for what they don't have or don’t have in abundance: a Western life style, the freedom to wear what they like, to drink alcohol freely,to go to discotheques, etc. Also, as with many other peoples in the Third World, they believe in what they see in Western, especially Hollywood movies, and they want to be part of it – the big houses, the flash cars, the huge incomes, the cloud cuckoo land.

So this guys believe, like I do, as well as the western progressives silenced at the polls both in Europe and North America, that Hollywood is and imperialist propaganda instrument that brainwashes the masses with the lies of unlimited growth and the dangerous ethics of consumerism. Fine. However, they also believe that democracy means that when the majority of the people are wrong it is necessary to steal the elections. This is the same message that the Imperialist USA has been spreading around the world since WW2 and it has clearly found an audience. Bravo!

Since these guy's "logic" is that "Ahmadinejad won the elections because the majority of voters who support the other candidates are wrong and immoral", I won't waste my time listing the factual errors on their articles. Guys like that who are on the good side don't let facts spoil a good article.

Today I start a new section in my blog at blog.cesc.cat called "Also not found in wolfram alpha". Now that the new search engine has finally opened for business I'm going to challenge it's claim that it democratizes data analysis. My first search attempt has been information on Death Penalty. How many inmates are awaiting in death rows in different regions of the globe? Well, I couldn't get any information on capital punishment from wolfram alpha.