2019/2020 LE blogs

      Today we learned about the Ukraine-Russia conflict that's happening right now from a different perspective. Since we are living in Japan and normally we only access to Japanese or perhaps American media, we only see the Ukraine-Russia conflict from one side. Only judging from the footage and the news reports by the Japanese media, I have an impression that Russia was one-sidedly attacking Ukraine because of its own selfish reason. Today, Mr Paterson told us that to understand wars or any incidents, we need to look at history. He told us that NATO was originally formed to balance out military power between western Europe and eastern Europe. However, now that the USSR has collapsed, there is no need for NATO. If Ukraine joins NATO, Russia's safety would be threatened by the high-tech NATO weapons on their doorstep. The US criticised Russia for invading Ukraine for such selfish reasons, however, the US also attacked Cuba during the Cuban crisis, so there is a double st...

      This year I have learned numerous important things, but I think these three topics were especially important and surprising for me: the five filters of media, cancerous corporations and American hegemony. Firstly, the fact that media deliberately don't report the truth has completely changed  my view of the world. I thought that I was able to read the news critically enough but I realised how ignorant I was. I thought this topic was very important nowadays because there is too much both true and false information in the world, so media literacy skills are in demand for every citizen. However learning that every news we get from the mass media is filtered, carefully selected and manipulated, made me think that we would never be able to make the right decisions or do decent discussions. Throughout the year, we learned various examples of media distorting reality, and since each example fitted within Noam Chomsky's five filter model, I realised how accurate his mo...