Chop-chop Video

You may remember a previous blog post a few years back where I interviewed my friend Trung who was, at the time, enrolled in the master's program at University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). Trung is also a blogger who shares my contempt for the tea party. Well, apparently the ignorant teabaggers have contempt -- actually, violent hatred -- towards Trung's alma mater.

Trung explains the ongoing situation in his blog. It involves Andrew Breitbart (need I say more?) and secretly (actually, not so secretly) video taped lectures of UMKC econ professors. Of course, Breitbart and his minions are up to old tricks. They gave the splice job to these videos in the same way they distorted and minced Shirley Sherrod's words last July.

Breitbart and his BigGovernment web site are using the obviously edited videos to accuse two labor-studies professors of indoctrinating innocent, malleable minds to the violent ways of union thugs. The complete unadulterated videos, however, reveal the exact opposite. One professor tells students to resist violence because it "gives credence" to the argument that "these people need to be controlled."

But facts be damned. In a twist that's not really a twist because it's totally predictable, the teabaggers are actually the violent thugs. Incited by the erroneous videos, they started with phoning in threats to the university but quickly escalated the situation by trespassing on the UMSL (University of Missouri-St. Louis) campus and threatening students with violence:

In order to distract people from the fact that they were busted lying, St. Louis tea party provocateur Adam Sharp, who's blogged on Breitbart's sites before, apparently trespassed on the UMSL campus on Saturday to harass students and instructor Don Giljum. Sharp attempted to film students in their classroom, pestered them as they walked out of class with questions like "do you condone violence," and was arrested and charged with trespassing. Don Giljum was also taken to the police station because there was an altercation, and as students waited outside of the police station, another tea partier approached them and began taunting them and daring them to "take a swing" at him. This is after a week where the tea party violated students' privacy by putting videos on YouTube showing comments made for the purpose of classroom discussion.

Breitbart, in an April 18 interview with Sean Hannity, said he planned to "go after" educators. And there you have it. We've seen ethnic intolerance, religious intolerance, and every other shade of bigotry from these nuts, but now... academic intolerance.

Freedom of inquiry by students and faculty is the foundation of education and our university system. It's all too fitting that the teabaggers go after this.

A Book Burner By Any Other Name

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war." — Fahrenheit 451.

They call themselves the "Digg Patriots," but they're a conservative wingnut community conspiring to bury liberal posts on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook. Of course, it's not difficult to up-vote/down-vote articles on social media sites. It never was difficult to burn books either. Censorship has always been the inarticulate grunt of asses and fools.

He'll Realize the Irony Soon

I happen to be a big fan of the Hitler Downfall parodies on YouTube -- much to the confusion of my Facebook friends who became awkwardly silent when I posted Hitler's Reaction to the Oasis Split. Maybe they don't like Oasis.

But you can't watch that particular parody video now. It's been DMCA'd -- taken down, along with many other Downfall parodies, by a copyright claim from Constantin Film. This is a real shame. There's something fun about watching the crazy-eyed murderous loon having a nervous collapse over modern trifles like balloon boy, Michael Jackson, and MySpace.

But all these parodies are clearly fair use and never should have been removed by YouTube. Luckily, Rocketboom has put together a video explaining how to dispute a YouTube content take down in six easy steps. Hitler will be relieved.


(YouTube video.)

How to Wuss Out

Angry celebrities, violent ginger kids, and Mecha Streisand are about to destroy South Park and all anyone wants to know is, "Who is Eric Cartman's father?" That's how Comedy Central hyped South Park's two-part 200th show celebration.

But when I tuned in last night to watch the conclusion of this monumental event, all I saw was a repeat of "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs."

Well, let's backup to last week's part one, which aired uncensored. The plot was truly aimed at the die-hard fans. Every celebrity who the people of South Park ever ridiculed over the last 14 seasons were coming together for a class action lawsuit (led by fudge-packer Tom Cruise).

Of course, any South Park retrospective has to incorporate The Super Best Friends, an episode which featured major religious figures including Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Joseph Smith, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Muhammad and Sea Man defending the world against evil. This cartoon alliance didn't cause a stir back when it originally aired in July 2001.

But sometime after the attacks on September 11, 2001, an era of media self-censorship began, and the myth of the prohibition on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Mohammad became an extremist rallying point:

Even a tradition as seemingly deeply set and unyielding as the one at the heart of the controversy over the Danish cartoons – the prohibition on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Mohammed – is in truth neither deeply set nor unyielding. Far from Islam having always forbidden representations of the Prophet, it was common to portray him until comparatively recently. The prohibition against such depictions only emerged in the 17th century. Even over the past 400 years, a number of Islamic, especially Shiite, traditions have accepted the pictorial representation of Muhammed. The Edinburgh University Library in Scotland, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, all contain dozens of Persian, Ottoman and Afghan manuscripts depicting the Prophet. His face can be seen in many mosques too – even in Iran. A seventeenth-century mural on the Iman Zahdah Chah Zaid Mosque in the Iranian town of Isfahan, for instance, shows a Mohammed whose facial features are clearly visible.

Even today, few Muslims have a problem in seeing the Prophet's face. Shortly after Jyllands Posten published the cartoons, the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr reprinted them. They were accompanied by a critical commentary, but Al Fagr did not think it necessary to blank out Mohammad's face, and faced no opprobrium for not doing so. Egypt's religious and political authorities, even as they were demanding an apology from the Danish Prime Minister, raised no objections to Al Fagr's full frontal photos.

The Danish cartoons they're referring to are the 12 editorial cartoons, most depicting Mohammad, which resulted in widespread demonstrations, arson, and death threats in 2005.

So, rather predictably, a radical Islamic site issued threats (and denied they were threats) before last night's episode of South Park could air:

We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.

Theo Van Gogh was the Dutch film director who was murdered by an Islamic extremist for making a documentary critical of the treatment of women in Islam.

Now, Matt and Trey, the producers of South Park, are smart people, and clearly they planned for a bit more controversy than usual. They knew they could get away with showing Buddha snorting coke and Jesus viewing porn, but simply showing Mohammad would be the touchy issue. So part of episode 200 dealt with the South Park kids figuring out how to disguise Mohammad. One hilarious ruse involved Mohammad wearing a bear suit.

Keep in mind, they never even utilized the original cartoon version of Mohammad from 2001. Comedy Central and Viacom were probably too wussy for that, but Matt and Trey were making a larger point -- a point about fear and intimidation.

So what did Comedy Central and Viacom do? They succumbed to fear and intimidation. They bleeped out every mention of the prophet -- and then refused to repeat the episode anyway. That's the way to totally wuss out.

It's easy to think it was all some kind of meta-joke, but Matt and Trey issued a statement regarding this ridiculous censorship:

In the 14 years we've been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn't stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn't some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle's customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn't mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We'll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we'll see what happens to it.

Comedy Central airs some of my favorite shows, but I don't respect this bowing to Islamic extremists. Nobody wants a repeat of the 2005 violence, but this paranoia puts our art, our entertainment, and our culture in the hands of a few religious nuts. There's nothing funny about that.

If the media keeps wussing out like this, then (I hate to drag out this old line) "the terrorists have already won."

Moment of Surrender

I watched the season premiere of Saturday Night Live tonight. Being on the west coast, I don't actually see the show live, and I assume they had time to clean up the F-bomb in that one skit (or maybe I just didn't notice it). Anyway, the high point tonight was this U2 performance:


(YouTube video)

The rest of the show was kind of --- eh.

Bad Parent Blames YouTube

Apparently there is stuff on the Internet that slow children shouldn't see:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

So does this mean the Internet will be closed tomorrow? But really, while little Russell Gortzig is propped up in front of the television for the next few months -- Internet privileges taken away I presume -- his ever watchful mother and sister better keep him away from Jackass, Beavis and Butthead, and The Roadrunner. "Monkey see, monkey do," as my mother would say.

The funniest part of this story isn't even mentioned. Through an interview with Marco (the buddy who poured the gasoline) "deputies learned that Gortzig had set his pants on fire on three previous occasions without any accelerant."

Hey, I have a good idea. In addition to watching your children carefully, how about keeping gasoline, cigarette lighters and accelerant out of their reach? I'm hoping that's what Ann Curry really wanted to say to these clueless dimwits.

Filtering the Revolution

In the aftermath of the election in Iran, Twitter emerged as the most powerful way for Iranians to disseminate information and organize protests. The Iranian government has been censoring the Internet for years, but of course -- as the Cute Cat Theory explains -- firewalls don't stop anybody for long.

But don't expect our own government to understand technology, firewalls, or cute cats. Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts.

My first thought -- have these senators heard of China? China's net censorship is well documented. American companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all been complicit in China's human rights abuses. Heck, you might even say they were enthusiastic.

But why do these companies make technologies with wiretapping features built in anyway? Our lawmakers should know the answer to this simple question. In the EU and the US, telecommunications networks are legally required to have those capabilities for Lawful Intercept. Unfortunately, the exact same network hardware that is sold over here is also sold over there.

This fact shouldn't give the above mentioned companies a free pass for supporting oppressive regimes. However, our own government has to see the bigger picture. We want our law enforcement agencies to be able to wiretap (with a court order -- wink wink), but these Lawful Intercept requirements have consequences far outside our own borders.

Oh, and this leads me to my second thought -- why the hell aren't we punishing the companies who enabled warrantless wiretapping within the US? Schumer and Graham ought to work on that one for a while.

Cute Cat Theory

Activism, the internet, and cute cats -- there's a relationship here that I never would have dreamed of. The theory is that when oppressive governments try to censor the internet, they inevitably make activists out of everybody, because people who previously had no interest in subversion are suddenly determined to get their rightful dose of cute cats:

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.
...
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.

Okay, the point isn't really about cute cats. "Cute cats" are symbolic of everything banal on the internet. When everybody is using a tool, it makes it harder for the government to sweep it away -- even behind the great firewall of China.

Still, some countries, China especially, have become quite adept at creating their own Web 2.0 clones with censorship built right in. While one study has concluded that it is difficult to carry out web censorship consistently and effectively, we know U.S. corporations will always be up to the lucrative challenge.

Subversion is a Crime Against The State

Isn't that one cute and non-threatening avatar? In China, he pops up every thirty minutes on web surfers' screens to cheerfully remind them that subversion is a crime against the state.

Beijing has declared war on cybercafes, the Internet, and bloggers. The government has frequently raided cybercafes claiming that pornography and violent, addictive video games are cultural pollution and threaten their youth and their future.

But the control-freak government doesn't stop there (they never do). Project "Golden Shield" is the name of the Chinese high-tech surveillance and censorship program. The program involves some 300,000 surveillance cameras, often disguised as lampposts, connected to a single, nationwide network. This network involves a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history, credit records, Internet usage and biometric data.

When I read about these tools of oppression, somehow I don't shout "wow, great opportunity to make money!" Maybe that's why I'm not rich like those people at Cisco who are helping to build the Great Firewall of China (while possibly violating U.S. sanctions). Western companies -- even those that proudly attach themselves to the Internet’s reputation for anarchy -- peddle their wares to China’s Ministry of Public Security. Shanghai Business Magazine recently estimated that the Chinese security industry is enjoying 15% annual growth.

Undermining privacy is a profitable business. And privacy is the rock that dignity, freedom of association and freedom of speech are built on.

China, hosting the summer Olympics, is trying to awe us with their technology, planning, efficiency and social order, but this is not progress.

Naomi Klein describes the new police state:

The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China's governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald's happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery -- to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex.

I used to believe that free people and free markets were a package deal. It's not true, unless you only value your freedom to buy stuff.

BBC News has an online video exploring China's cyberspace. I had to pause at the point where Sherang Chen, editor for BBC China, says that the Chinese "do feel they are enjoying quite a degree of freedom..." When Police State 2.0 arrives in the U.S., "quite a degree of freedom" won't be enough for me.