A Place to Stand

  The first 10 minutes of Friday's Channel 4 news was given over to the Russians imprisoning Pussy Riot for singing offensive and obscene comments in the middle of Moscow's cathedral. It has been all over the news with everybody from Madonna down, or up, getting airtime to say how dreadful it is. 4,900,000 items on Google news including this from the BBC's newspaper arm, the Guardian on Sunday. 

Pussy Riot: It took a bunch of bright, sassy women in colourful balaclavas to blow the lid off Putin's RussiaWhat Pussy Riot have done is show up the machinery of the state for what it is: scary, violent, punitive and male....

Pussy Riot blew apart the myth of modern Russia with little more than song and colourful outfits.

Three weeks ago, I met three (unimprisoned) members of the group on the eve of the trial opening. While they talked interestingly about all sorts of things – the church, the state, feminism, art – what struck me above and beyond anything else was simply how funny they were, how charming, how – I can't think of any other way of saying this – how nice they were.

  Obviously, the western media, not being simply corrupt totalitarian fascist parasites who care not in the smallest degree about freedom of speech and only use "human rights" as propaganda against countries they would really like to bomb, would give far more coverage if somebody were imprisoned, in our own country, for saying something somewhat less offensive to most people, in their own home.

   Or possibly I am wrong about our media not being simply corrupt totalitarian fascist parasites who care not in the smallest degree about freedom of speech.

   Google News hits turn out to be somewhat less than 4,900,000.  Not the considerably more they should be, bearing in mind that people are more interested in news about their home country. Not 250,000 as it would be if our media approched 50% honest; not the 100,000 if it were 10% honest or even the 5,000 if it were under 0.5% (ie zero to the nearest whole number) honest. Stephen Birrell  is mentioned in 0.0 news items.

Internet bigot Stephen Birrell jailed for eight months

A man who posted sectarian comments on a Facebook page called "Neil Lennon Should be Banned" has been jailed for eight months.
Stephen Birrell, 28, from Glasgow, admitted posting the religiously prejudiced abuse earlier this year.

Sheriff Bill Totten said what Birrell had done was a hate crime which would not be tolerated by "the right thinking people of Glasgow and Scotland".

He said he wanted to send out "a clear message to deter others".

  As reported by our state fascist broadcasting monopoly the BBC. This appears to have been written without the Beeboid author going to the trouble of going all the way to Glasgow to meet him.