Category Archives: Censorship

doublespeak and TWAT

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from Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute, who actually called it “Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism.”

The abstract:

Five years have passed since the catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks ushered in the war on terror. Since some high-ranking government officials and pundits are now referring to the war on terror as the “Long War” or “World War III,” because its duration is not clear, now is an appropriate time to take a few steps back and examine the disturbing new vocabulary that has emerged from this conflict.

One of the central insights of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four concerned the manipulative use of language, which he called “newspeak” and “doublethink,” and which we now call “doublespeak” and “Orwellian.” Orwell was alarmed by government propaganda and the seemingly rampant use of euphemisms and halftruths— and he conveyed his discomfort with such tactics to generations of readers by using vivid examples in his novel. Despite our general awareness of the tactic, government officials routinely use doublespeak to expand, or at least maintain, their power.

The purpose of this paper is not to criticize any particular policy initiative. Reasonable people can honestly disagree about what needs to be done to combat the terrorists who are bent on killing Americans. However, a conscientious discussion of our policy options must begin with a clear understanding of what our government is actually doing and what it is really proposing to do next. The aim here is to enhance the understanding of both policymakers and the interested lay public by exposing doublespeak.

and the full report as PDF here.

Clayton Bigsby, black white supremacist

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Warning: N-word!!! Dave Chappelle may, in fact, be insane, but he’s also hilarious.

the ultimate blog posts

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TIAThis is a clever strategy to promote your blog: tell anyone who will listen that you were a guest blogger on one of the most popular blogs, and given how pathetic the search boxes are on most of them, corroboration, if it existed, would be impossible to find anyway.

So Wired has done a handy-dandy list of the ultimate blog posts for each of the top blogs, sorta like that time I pitched the Province on the “single welfare foster mom of Aboriginal, dyslexic pit bull orphans wins lottery, gets impregnated by Brad Pitt, steals car from Surrey mall” story, and it shouldn’t be long now until she finally manifests and I can write the damn thing.

Ultimate blog post for raincoaster: Cthulhu rises from Rl’yeh, exposes Stephen Harper as an inhuman Fungi from Yuggoth and destroys him, all slavering right-wingers awake from their mind controlled walking comas, surviving Watergate Plumbers drop dead from the shock, worldwide communal anarchy is declared; the YouTube video (soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, bonus appearance by the Monkees)

While blogging has only reached prominence in the last few years, it was actually invented by the ancient Romans who built a majestic blog in 200 BC from marble, granite and links they stole from the Greeks.

“Blog” itself is short for “weblog,” which is short for “we blog because we weren’t very popular in high school and we’re trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people.”

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it…

blogdogs

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

Kottke: Elwin Festerator is the unsung inventor of the curly telephone cord. “I looked at a straight telephone cord, and I asked myself, Elwin, why can’t that be curly? So I went out and got my brand-new curling gun, and I curled the hell out of it.” Related link: New Yorker article on the Olympic curling team.

Daily Kos: Bush caught in three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Little Green Footballs: Bush enjoys triumphant three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Gawker: Paris Hilton does pretty much anything.

Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.

Fleshbot: Same as Cute Overload, only with coeds.

MAKE blog: How to create a nuclear accelerator using a Flash drive, a Commodore 64 and a guy named Roger.

Metafilter: Unhelpful link text. Extra links added for padding that have little to do with the main topic of the entry. Are extremely loaded rhetorical questions the only thing that can save us now?

It’s a blog, Metafilterites. What do you think?

all your newspapers are belong to us

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Google rulez okay?

The Wall Street Journal interviews one FOI advocate who opposes Google‘s quest to put all newspapers going back to 1888 online. He’s doing that himself, as part of a project sponsored by Yahoo and Microsoft. Coincidence?

Google Inc. made news last week when it said it was launching a service that would allow users to search newspaper archives going back as far as the 18th century. Announcements like that are usually applauded as an advance for the spread of knowledge. But Brewster Kahle, a long-time Internet activist and founder of Internet Archive, had some reservations. We asked him why.

* * *

What’s not to like about Google making so much information freely available?

The opportunity for universal access to all public knowledge is one of the great opportunities of our times. And to the extent that companies are helping us get there, that’s terrific. Google is making great strides in this direction; the basic goal is terrific and their service is actually quite good.

The issue we have with what’s being built is that we are creating what is in effect a private library system. What we want, however, is a public library system, one where we can have many different points of view on the published literature of humankind. What we are actually building might end up being controlled by a single corporation. If this were some other industry — plastic or software — I wouldn’t be as worried about it. But we are taking about the cultural heritage, the intellectual heritage, of humans. And that’s too important to be left to one company.

In this we are in complete agreement. When companies have vested interests in controlling key components of the culture, that’s when a government solution is appropriate. Because a government, however venal and Machiavellian it may be, has a vested interest in the culture itself, and is responsive to the culture as a whole, whereas corporations are sensitive to (and vulnerable to) only the market, one tiny segment of the culture.

If only one such archive is to be built, why let it be in private hands? he asks. My response to that is another question: why not do this as a public project as well. Go ahead, duplicate the effort. Because as we learn on the Internet to our peril, things fall apart. And if the servers themselves don’t belong to you, there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it.

Wasteful? Not really; all those grad students are gonna hafta find co-ops or internships somewhere on the federal dime anyway. Any system administrator will tell you that redundancy can be a source of strength, and any savvy investor will tell you that competition improves quality.

Besides, what are you gonna do when China buys Google?

Choogle

TWAT 9/11 roundup of Bush administration lies

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A 9/11 reminder 

Thanks to Desert Beacon, whom I found because s/he linked to me in this very post.

Does that make me a self-abusing wanker?

Not as much as Bush is.

Bush: A totally political 9/11 mission creep address to the nation

I’ve lost count of the number of reasons the Bush Administration’s set forth for why it is we’re bogged down in Iraq. Whatever the number, tonight’s address emphasized another one: “The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said. [NYT] So, now we have yet another reason to be bogged down in Iraq? What happened to the previous ones?

There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in 2001. [Reuters]
Hussein considered AQ followers in Iraq to be outlaws. [WT]
There were no weapons of mass destruction. [BBC]
There was no viable nuclear weapons program. [ST]
There was no “45 minute” attack possible. [GPF]
There was no connection between Baghdad and yellowcake from Nigeria. [WFE]
There was no Atta/Iraqi meeting in Prague. [T-UK]

“If we do not defeat these enemies now,” Mr. Bush said, “we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” [NYT] Nothing like a little fear-mongering reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice’s comment about seeing Mushroom Shaped Clouds? Same old Bush White House election year song — “Vote Republican or Die?” Support my occupation of Iraq or bin Laden’s boyz will strike you in suburbia? For someone who said he wanted to take “politics” out of 9/11 he certainly did a good job of inserting it front and center.

Who, Mr. President, are these “enemies?” First, wasn’t this chaos just what advisers from the GHW Bush Administration said would happen if we foolishly decided to invade Iraq in 1991? [RCstr]

Secondly, if we were going to defeat “these enemies,” wouldn’t it have been a good thing to have put enough troops on the ground in the first place? [WaPo] To have developed a solid plan for the occupation? [KCS] To have clearly understood the complex dynamic between the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shi’a? [Dossier UK]

So, now Mr. President, you are telling me it’s my patriotic duty to buckle down and bail your administration out of this global blunder lest our children have to bear the brunt of your imperious foolishness? In our family, when we got into trouble of our own creation, and then had the temerity to ask for someone to clean up the mess, the adult answer was simplicity itself: “You got yourself into it, so now you can get yourself out of it.”

And much more, equally richly sourced.