Rehashing a hashtag – the gagging of The Guardian

Last night at about 20:30, The Guardian brought us the breaking news that it has – for the first time – been legally prevented from reporting proceedings in parliament, in the form of a question that is to be asked later this week.  The whole article read like a cryptic crossword post: they could tell us that this question would be asked, but not what it was, or who would ask it, or who it would be asked of.  Not only that but

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

 All The Guardian were permitted to tell us was that the injunction against them involved Carter-Ruck: solicitors specialising in suing the media for global clients. 

The internet was agog.  Someone had gagged The Guardian. 

Whoever it was (and we think we know), I don’t think they thought it through.  To quote John Gilmore: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.  The Guardian piece was rapidly disseminated across the internet (I followed the story on twitter, though I imagine the same was happening through other avenues) and immediately bloggers, tweeters and the like leapt on it.  It seems whoever filed the injunction failed to realise the obvious about human nature: that the best way to get people to talk about something is to ban them from talking about it.

Two blogging ‘sceptics’ - @dontgetfooled and lawyer @jackofkent seem to have got there first, digging up the following from Parliament.uk, “Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009″

61 N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

You may also be interested to read about how, back in September, The Guardian collaborated with BBC’s Newsnight in investigating the possibility of Trafigura (the world’s third largest oil company) dumping toxic waste and covering it up.  The company coincidentally seemed to employ similar tactics then to what’s happening right now:

Most concerned had received legal threats from Trafigura, which had reduced mainstream media coverage elsewhere to little more than a whisper.

From which you may draw your own conclusions.  This Thursday, a flashmob is planned outside Carter-Ruck in protest.

I’m posting this in support of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. They may be able to stop The Guardian talking, but they can’t stop everyone. You can follow the backlash on twitter using the hashtags #Carterruck and #Trafigura.

Do re-blog this, re-hash this, re-post this, re-tweet this.

UPDATE: Breaking news (14:55) . Alan Rusbridger (Ed. Guardian) confirms that Carter-Ruck have caved under pressure and lifted the injunction:

Thx to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. 

Hurrah!

Night Terrors: Sleep Paralysis, Old Hags & Sitting Ghosts

“It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed airlessly, pressing her, sapping her. ‘Oh, no. A Sitting Ghost.’”
–Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

I was once attacked by a lion in my own bed.

At least, I thought it was a lion. All auditory and sensory input was pointing to it being a lion; the rasping, growling in my ear; its hot breath in my face; the enormous shaggy weight of it on top of me and the razor sharp teeth and claws mauling at my neck.

But not quite all input. Because how ever hard I tried, I could not open my eyes, and I could not move any part of my body. I could feel my bed beneath me, and I could feel the sheets around me. I could feel what position I was lying in. I simply could not move. I, like somewhere between 25-40% of the population (depending on which study you go by), was suffering from an episode of sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon which can occur in the state between REM sleep, where dreaming occurs, and waking up. During REM sleep, the brain paralyses the body to avoid us carrying out our dream-actions and harming ourselves somehow. Sometimes, on waking, the brain does not quite turn off these dreams – or the paralysis accompanying them – resulting in a potentially intensely frightening experience. I have always regarded sleep paralysis as lucid dreaming’s ugly sister, in that both occur when there is some discrepancy between different parts of the brain, some parts of which still believe you are asleep and continue to dream away happily, whilst other parts are lucid and know full well that you are actually awake.

When the paralysis is accompanied by a feeling of a weight or malevolent presence crushing you, as mine was, it is known as ‘old hag’ syndrome. This ‘heaviness’ on your chest may be accompanied by other hallucinations, auditory, visual or tactile, and a feeling of terror and mounting panic. These hallucinations are known as hynagogic (if occurring at the onset of sleep) or hypnopompic (if occurring just before waking). The phenomenon of sleep paralysis is little-heard of by most, although its influence is far-reaching; echoes of it run throughout human mythology and folklore, amid superstitions that it was caused by witches (the ‘old hag’), demons and other evil spirits sitting on your chest. Indeed, the ‘-mare’ of ‘nightmare’ actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘merren’, meaning ‘to crush’, because of exactly these associations. Though this type of explanation may seem outdated now, it has by no means disappeared. A colleague of mine once recounted to me the story of how, waking in the middle of the night, her husband had felt a presence sitting on his chest and attempting to strangle him. Understandably scared, and having heard stories from neighbours about his house being haunted, her husband attributed the strangling to a malevolent spirit and had been living in fear ever since.

Another common manifestation of sleep paralysis is ‘the visitor’, where the sleeper will wake, helpless and unable to move (their eyes may be open or closed), and have a strong feeling that there is a something watching them from a corner of the room. It has been theorised that it is precisely this type of ‘visitation’ which leads to accounts of extra-terrestrial visits.

Though both of these hallucinatory types of experience can be terrifying, there are methods that can be employed to end the paralysis. Some people swear by concentrating on moving just one finger or toe, and say that once you have managed to move a tiny part of you, the spell will be broken. Some people try to scream or make a noise to in order wake themselves up. These techniques can be effective, but there is something to be said for simple awareness of the scientific explanation. On hearing of my colleague’s husband’s plight, I immediately printed of reams of information on the subject for him. She reported back that he was relieved to discover that what he had experienced was in fact something perfectly rational, and indeed relatively common.

After jolting fully awake from my own episode of paralysis to find that there was no lion or similar in my bedroom, it didn’t take long for me to realise what had actually happened; at which point it ceased immediately to be something horrific and monstrous and instead just led to a feeling of excitement. Though my experience of the event had not changed, the way I viewed it had. “Oh, well that was quite interesting”, I thought, “Can I do it again?”. This, perhaps, is the better way to view the darker, more mysterious workings of the mind: not with fear, but with curiosity.

This is a piece written for The Skeptic Magazine & can also be found on their website.  You can also follow them on twitter.  Prof. Chris French will be appearing on The One Show tonight (05/10/09) to talk about the phenomenon.