I am collecting “censored!” screens from different countries. Thanks to the sleuthing of Jacob Appelbaum, I’ve got two more for you. When you’re not allowed to see something online in Qatar, you get redirected to this site:
(Click for larger.) As opposed to most of the other “blocked site” screens, you don’t actually have to be in country to see this, just go to http://www.censor.qa/.
Next up, Bahrain:
Lest the Westerners in the audience get the impression that blocking internet access is all about silly little theocracies in the desert, note that Australia just passed an internet censorship law. The blacklist is secret. Stay tuned for “What Internet Censorship Looks Like in Australia”!
In America, the enemy is Terrorism. It used to be the Russians, or more generically Communists. We discussed the history of this concept in class today. And then I asked: In the state-controlled Chinese media, who is the enemy today?
Representative Joe Wilson yelled “you lie!” at the president, and the papers loved it. Unfortunately, by a count of more than three to one, the major media articles covering the event did not bother to comment on the substance of issue of that provoked Wilson’s outburst: whether or not illegal immigrants would be provided health care under proposed reforms. There is no health care debate in the mainstream American press. There is only political drama.
The president did not lie. All of the proposed health care reform bills contain language excluding those residing illegally in the US from government-subsidized coverage. This single-sentence fact check was entirely absent from 50 of the 70 articles mentioning “wilson” and “lie” on the New York Times and Washington Post websites as of Monday night. Of the 20 which discussed actual policy, only nine articles mentioned it in the first two paragraphs. (Spreadsheet here.)
Wilson’s outburst will be forgotten long after millions of Americans are insured — or not — under Obama’s plan. It’s just noise and heat. Yet some of the most reputable newspapers in the world have lead with it for the last five days. In fact, the press has in some cases actively dodged the underlying issue. Consider this exchange from an online Q&A session with Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:
Cincinnati: Are you saying the President wasn’t lying when he said illegal immigrants won’t be covered? Why not look at the House bill and tell us whether or not it allows illegals to be covered? The Congressional Research service issued a report last week saying there was NOTHING in the House bill that excludes illegals from receiving government-run health care. In other words, be a REPORTER instead of a hack for Barack.
Dana Milbank: Actually I wasn’t addressing the factual nature of Obama’s speech. The issue wasn’t that Wilson thought the president wasn’t telling the truth; part of the presidential job description calls for expertise in truth shading. The issue was shouting “you lie!” at the president on the House floor during an address to a joint session of Congress.
(For the record, the CRS report in question notes that HR 3200 says “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.” Which has, oddly, been spun as meaning that illegals would be subsidized!)
It should be no surprise that there is actually substance to the question of coverage for illegal immigrants. Only nine of the 70 pieces get into it: yes, a few undocumented workers could end up getting subsidized health care. No, it’s not worth taxpayer money to add an enforcement mechanism.
But even this is one level removed, and only one article grappled with the fundamental question: would it really be so bad if the poorest workers in America got a break? In fact we might even owe it to them. On average, migrant labor is thought to be a small net gain to the American economy.
I get that Wilson’s little moment is a great story, right up there with the guy who threw a shoe at Bush (who was imprisoned for his prank, with far less coverage.) And I do understand the logic of a populist press as the paper ship sinks. What cannot be excused is the omission of any mention of the substantive content of the debate from the majority of coverage — 50 out of 70 articles said nothing at all about anything that will last.
We are reporting on court theatrics while the citizens starve.
Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy writes a classic post about rapper The Game’s recent attacks on reigning power Jay-Z, and uses the spat as an allegory for international relations and the options open for an American hegemonic power.
Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. The changes in Jay-Z’s approach over the years suggest that he recognizes the realist and liberal logic… but is sorely tempted by the neo-conservative impulse. Back when he was younger, Jay-Z was a merciless, ruthless killer in the “beefs” which define hip hop politics. He never would have gotten to the top without that. But since then he’s changed his style and has instead largely chosen to stand above the fray. As Jay-Z got older and more powerful, the marginal benefits of such battles declined and the costs increased even as the number of would-be rivals escalated. Just as the U.S. attracts resentment and rhetorical anti-Americanism simply by virtue of being on top, so did Jay-Z attract a disproportionate number of attackers. “I got beefs with like a hundred children” he bragged/complained on one track.
Some of the responses in the comment thread are even better:
If perhaps Switzerland had once been a British colony which rebuilt itself after World War II as the Japan-like embodiment of a modern technocracy…then maybe Jay-Z could be thought of as that nation-state. And if the U.S. were a rapper, I’m sad to say…we’d probably be 50 Cent. Clumsy commercialism passed off as art, unmerited bellicosity, unmatched market penetration, and the diminishment of formerly venerated (and historically better pedigreed) entities, with a commercially viable pile of sex-sex-sex on the side.
We WISH this country was like Jay-Z….
As far as I’m concerned, Marc just made his career with this track. If this doesn’t get hip-hop into Ivy League faculty parties and ghetto kids spitting geopolitics, I don’t know what will. (Via Abu Muqawama.)
Guatemalans took to the streets in protest over the alleged murder of a prominent attorney by the country’s president, and an unrelated man was arrested for tweeting about it. The protests were reportedly organized on Facebook and other social networking sites, and streamed live to the world by laptop. Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing has been reporting from Guatemala directly for the past two weeks, and in an essay two days ago she calls this the “Twitter Revolution“. I love the story of new technology enabling mass social dissent and change, but I’m not at all sure it’s true.
The background: Attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg was shot while riding his bicycle on May 10th, just a few days after recording a video message which begins,
If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom.
The video implicates not only the president but the major state-owned bank, and indeed much of the current government, and there were mass protests in the capital city. Xeni has been covering the story from Guatemala since the 20th, and I can only commend her for actually being there. However, her coverage has focussed on the role of the internet in these protests.
Google is not reality and Twitter is not reality in exactly the same way that television is not reality. Part of the reason that Middle-Eastern peasants have such a warped view of America is that they too watch Desperate Housewives (via satellite or bootleg VCD), but never get the chance to actually meet some Americans. To them, all American women are blonde and slutty. There’s no reason to believe that we’re not getting a similarly warped view of other cultures when we watch their internet.
In other words, Twitter and Facebook aren’t the point, and we can’t yet interpret what they might be telling us. I fear that all of us who have seen the social potential of new media are just making up stories of our own; there are pointed questions that I haven’t yet seen asked in the coverage of the Revolution.
Despite spending the last several days reading up on Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to buy bad bank assests, I now feel only marginally better prepared to judge whether this is a good idea or not. Of course, no one is asking me, but I still think it’s a big problem that I can’t evaluate this plan, because the fact that we live in a democracy means that citizens need to be able to understand what their government is doing.
Now, I am no economist and I have no idea how to run a bank — much less all the banks. However, I am smart, interested, and I’ve done my homework, including previously reading a first year economics textbook (covering both micro- and macro-economics) and several other interesting books (1,2,3) on how markets work or don’t. In short I have been the model of a concerned citizen, and I still have no idea what is going on. This is partially because the situation is very complex, but it is also because there is no way a private citizen can get access to the data that would clarify matters — large banks will barely share their balance sheets with the government, much less me.
This is a problem. It means that the government, financial, and academic communities have not paid nearly enough attention both to basic economics education, and to transparency in real-world business. It is therefore impossible for anyone else to check their assumptions and restrain their huge power. Lest this sounds like unhelpful complaining, I promise to make a concrete suggestion for improvement by the end of this post.
Bush sits just behind Obama as he swears in, clapping politely, an inscrutable look on his face. Does he worry that pulling out of Iraq will damage American superiority? Does he feel sad for the loss of oil company-tax credits? Maybe he’s shaking his head because he knows he was doing God’s work.
What was Bush thinking during eight years of presidency?
Why did he start two wars that could not be won? Why did he cut of all funding for stem cell research, sex education, and environmental research? To me, he always seemed out of touch with reality, blatantly ignoring signals that things were badly wrong: impending environmental catastrophe, declining educational standards at home and the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and over one million casualties in Iraq. But everyone is sane in their own head. What was the utopia he thought to create?
A leaked FBI report states that a man named James G. Cummings was trying to build a dirty bomb when he was shot and and killed by his wife last December 9th in Belfast, Maine. He had plans, parts, explosive ingredients, and small quantities of radioactive material, though nothing that could not be purchased legally within the US. Cummings was a white supremacist who was reportedly very upset about Obama’s election.
The leaked document has been posted on Wikileaks since January 16th. While the material concerning Cummins was first noticed by the rumor site Unattributable.com on January 19th, only yesterday was there any sort of story about it in the mainstream media, in this case the local Bangor Daily News.
Although this dastardly plot was probably not much more dangerous to the public than a garden-variety bomb, this man would certainly qualify as a bona fide “terrorist” under Bush-regime logic. Or at least he would if he was Arab. In point of fact, he actually is a threat to the public, or was. So why haven’t we heard about it? Are crazy white supremacists somehow less of a threat than crazy fundamentalist muslims?
Who is writing the major policies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what is the Obama administration likely to do? There have been many analyses and news reports of individual policies and events, but it’s hard to wade into this flood of information, and besides, how would I know who to listen to? In an effort to get some perspective on at least one major aspect of American military strategy, I decided to plot out all the authors of (public) counterinsurgency policy over the last decade, and the relationships between them, as evidenced by co-authorship of articles and papers.
Liu Xiaobo is now imprisoned at an uknown location for his involvement in the Charter ‘08 document
On December 10, 2008, a group of 300 Chinese dissidents published an open letter (english translation) to the Chinese government calling for wide political freedoms and basic human rights in their country. Although this document has become the vegetarian dinner party topic du jour among Western activists, it’s not at all clear whether it will have any impact in China. For one thing, the Chinese government has censored it, removing it from Baidu and Google and even individual blogs. The internet being the internet, people are reading and talking about it anyway, but this only matters if the Chinese populace in general is sympathetic to the notion of government reform and greater personal rights. They may not be.
