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Torrentspy Disables Searching For US IPs
dr_strang writes "Torrent indexing site Torrentspy.com appears to have disabled torrent searches for IPs that originate in the United States. Instead of a results page, users are directed to this page, which states: 'Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy. Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website. Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws."
Regarding your sig*, many are under the false impression that Michael Moore is a documentarian. I assure you he is not. He makes a sort of intellectual pornography for the shrill faction of the American political left.
Learning about America from his films would be very much like learning about sex from pornography. Everything is basically correct, but you're left with entirely the wrong impression.
Don't be embarrassed about your misunderstanding. It's quite common here in the States as well.
-Peter
* For the record, at the time of this post his sig is, "After watching Sycko[sic] now I am very afraid to live in the USA. How can you live there?"
And the right has an entire channel of the same thing. What's your point?
Active misrepresentation in order to support your conclusions makes you a propagandist, not a documentarian.
One concrete example. A friend of mine told me that when a person opens a bank account in Texas the government gives that person a gun. Beyond the fact that this obviously fails the sniff test, I had lived in Texas fairly recently, had opened several bank accounts, and had to buy all my guns.
So I saw Fahrenheit 9/11. Okay, so she misunderstood the facts, even as Moore represented them. In fact I recognized the program, which isn't limited to Texas, immediately. He did make it seem like something insidious.
Then I saw a film called Fahrenhype 9/11, which purports to debunk Fahrenheit 9/11. Say what you will about the makers of that film, it contained a bunch of footage of the people at the bank in Fahrenheit 9/11 complaining that Moore misrepresented what happened.
Here's the key bit. He asked them to bring the gun in from there warehouse and put it in the vault. They cooperated in good faith. He coached them to sort of play along with his questions. Again, they cooperated. He then asked leading questions on tape, creating the impression that the guns are stored on the premises.
Do you contend that that sort of practice is normal and/or acceptable in documentary film making?
Another good example from those two films. In the bit where Bush quips about the "Haves and the Have Mores" Moore paints him as an elitist. Turns out that Al Gore was a few chairs away, and Moore cropped him out. Is one of us confused about what "document" means?
-Peter