Month: April 2008

Chinese Ultra-Nationalism Showing Itself Online

Lhasa Rising at Tibet Will Be Free runs through a spoof copy of The People’s Daily that is circulating widely in China now that includes jokes about the murder of the Dalai Lama, an earthquake killing everyone in Japan, China testing a nuclear weapon in San Francisco, China accidentally bombing the Pentagon, and China re-absorbing Taiwan. LR writes:

Ultra-nationalism doesn’t spring about in a vacuum (Rwanda, Bosnia, etc. – they were all state-incited).  The Chinese government needs to start acting as a responsible member of the world community, not like a genocidal and thuggish clique.  Unfortunately when it comes to Tibet, it seems that Beijing reverts to barbarism.

Go read the full post – there’s nothing funny about this “spoof” and given Beijing’s intense internet censorship, this “spoof” seems to at least be tacitly approved of by the Chinese government.

A Limited World of Ideas

I can’t decide if this quote, from a piece on Obama’s rhetoric, is monumentally depressing or incredibly patronizing.

“If you’re an unemployed steelworker, a former coal miner, you want to know about job training, who pays your health care,” Dr. Madonna said. “Obama’s speeches are uplifting but without much specificity, and that’s a tough sell for working people who don’t live in a world of ideas.”

I suppose it can be both.

Don’t Back Down

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a piece by Siobhan Gorman that reports that Bush is pushing Congressional Dems to come to the negotiating table on FISA and that he’s willing to make some concessions from his previous hard-line of retroactive immunity and expanded executive powers.

Over the two-week spring recess, administration officials contacted Democratic leaders to suggest they were open to compromise on updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “We definitely want to get it done,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “We’ve had some initial conversations with Congress about the need to get FISA reform done quickly.” He added that Mr. Bush still prefers the Senate measure, which the White House negotiated with Senate Democrats.

In addition to rejecting immunity for companies, House Democrats want tougher judicial oversight of any eavesdropping effort. People familiar with the matter said the White House has floated ideas to find common ground but hasn’t offered a formal compromise proposal. Officials in both parties said judicial oversight might be an easier area for the administration to make concessions.

The White House’s more conciliatory posture reflects a recognition that the Bush administration’s leverage on national-security matters has slipped since this past summer, a top Republican congressional aide said. “There’s a recognition that if they’re actually going to get a product they can support, there’s going to have to be some new level of engagement,” the aide said.

It would be a profound mistake with repercussions lasting long, long past the expiration of President Bush’s term in office if congressional Democrats took this olive branch and negotiated FISA legislation that was acceptable to the Bush administration. The Bush administration want to negotiate now because they know that unless they get Democrats to deal with them now, they won’t get anything from Congress. This is a recognition that Democrats have been able to stall their push for retroactive immunity since last October and there is no resolution satisfactory to the Bush administration in sight.

For once, Democrats have power. Negotiating a “compromise” with Bush now would undercut the little power we have accrued in our efforts to defend the rule of law. There can be no compromise when it comes to expanding executive powers under this President, nor can their be a compromise when it comes to actions that strike against the rule of law.

Democrats must sit on their hands now and not extend them to President Bush. They should wait out the end of his term, then flex muscle in January 2009 under a Democratic president. If McCain is elected, that’s when we should be forced to consider negotiations. But to do it now just because Bush is asking nicely would be pure folly.

Dassin

rififi

Jules Dassin, one of the great directors of film noir, has died. He was blacklisted during the HUAC for associations with the Communist Party and had lived in exile since 1953. Rififi is one of my favorite movies – I actually thought about watching it this weekend, coincidentally. If you’re a fan of Quintin Tarantino, you’d love Dassin, who is one of Tarantino’s biggest influences. Seriously, just watch Rififi and you’ll find about a third of Tarantino’s themes. Plus Rififi has probably the most incredible scene in the crime/heist genre, as Dassin depicts a break-in at a jewelry store in real-time. The scene is over half an hour long, contains no dialogue, and gave such accurate detail of what it takes to avoid alarms and break into safes that the film was banned in some countries. Dassin was a great artist and I highly recommend his work.

Silent Killers

Humorous Pictures

Athenae has a recap of some of her presentation at EschaCon on the media and how the dynamics of a failing business model, laziness, stupidity, and sensationalism are all contributing to the decline of journalism in America.

My remarks at the panel on journalism can basically be boiled down to “never ascribe to bias what laziness and stupidity will adequately explain.” What I meant by laziness and stupidity is the tendency, all across the board, to embrace the easy narrative.

The easy narrative in the form of cheap sentimentality, as in stories about how to explain school shootings to your children, or stories about how 9/11 made you love your family and go back to church.

The easy narrative in the form of exploitation of fear. Matt and I spent some time talking about all the various things which were called “the silent killer” by newscasts, but it’s the false sense of urgency, and it’s a very short step from “YOUR MASCARA COULD KILL YOU” to “TERRORISTS COULD KILL YOU” and getting people caught up in the outrage of the moment such that everything is always at a fever pitch, making you ripe for whoever can best pretend to solve the crisis you’re not really facing.

While working on the Dodd campaign, the internet team pretty much always had either MSNBC or CNN on in the background – from the time we got into the office, until the time we went home at night, the news was on. Doing that day in and day out for an extended period of time, you’ll really be surprised to find out how many things cable news outlets will label as silent killers. I mean, it’s actually pretty hard to parody (though the LOL cat above does it well) because it’s so absurd. I recall one week this fall where, within a matter of days of each other, separate reports came out on the same network about the hidden killers heat and cold.

I think Athenae is spot-on to connect the cheapening of fear through stories conveying urgent danger from mundane things to the use of fear of terrorists living in caves in the mountains of Afghanistand and Pakistan. If your mascara can kill you, you better be scared shitless of some guy with a different sounding name and different looking clothes who carries with him the most ubiquitous rifle in the world. Right? Except, somewhere along the way, a lot of Americans stopped being scared of the GOP’s and the complicit media’s drum beat of fear of terror attacks. The Bush administration has certainly played it’s “Boy Who Cried Wolf” trick enough times that I don’t know many people who take it too seriously when a Bush administration official sounds the klaxon on behalf of, say, getting telecom immunity passed or facilitating a hasty war with Iran.

I wonder if the same goes for people watching the news. When I see reports about how mascara or soccer goals or the common cold can kill Americans, I usually laugh. Most people I’m watching with usually do the same. We question how these reporters can take themselves seriously, as we surely cannot. I don’t doubt that there is a segment of hyper-frightened parents and germaphobes that views these reports and embraces the fear contained within, but I certainly hope we’re a more courageous nation than this sort of reporting suggests. I think Athenae is right, though: while this sort of reporting is a product of lazy and stupid reporting, there is still great journalism out there and there will be more great journalism if more readers demand it of their reporters.

Smell the Totalitarianism

The AP reports:

A human rights activist says at least 60 people are still jailed in China for protests by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989 at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. John Kamm said in a speech in Hong Kong today that between 60 and 100 such protesters remain jailed and he urged China to release them before the Beijing Olympics.

Kamm also says he’s concerned that China has released fewer names of political prisoners since 1989.

There are actually major similarities between the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the Tiananmen Square protests. At first, the Chinese government denied that there had been any violence against the protesters, suggesting instead that the only injuries were suffered by the police. Then news and images began to filter out about the extent and violence of China’s crackdown. Even today, the official accounts of Tiananmen are vastly difference from the account given by the victims.

We’re seeing a similar scenario play out in Tibet. China continues to grossly understate the number of people confirmed killed. Only a fraction of the number that have been arrested or detained around Tibet is being reported by the Chinese government. It’s frightening to think that China continues to hold over 60 political prisoners from the 1989 protests, given that these protests happened with the world watching and those detained are presumably Han Chinese. Imagine what license the CCP may take when it comes to Tibetan monks, nuns, and lay people taken in the dead of night by military forces?

One of the clearest demands of China with regard to their crackdown in Tibet is that they must allow international observers into Tibet to meet with detainees, to monitor their treatment, and to get a full account of how many Tibetan political prisoners are currently being held. Will this happen? Almost certainly not, for what totalitarian government is interested in voluntarily submitting themselves to accountability on the global stage?