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The Cuban Memory Stick Underground
circletimessquare writes "The NyTimes has an aticle describing how students and others in Cuba have taken to passing around media on memory sticks, as this is the only way they can get around state-controlled media. Also driving this phenomenon is the fact that there are so few places to get on the Internet. In Old Havana there is only one Internet cafe; getting online there for an hour costs 1/3 of the average Cuban's monthly wages. Local entrepreneurs get the memory sticks from European friends, since they are scarce to find in Cuba through normal channels, and expensive."
Sounds like an opportunity for propagandizing. Take a few thousand cheap USB keys, fill them with american media, put them in a water tight enclosure and drop them off outside cuban waters.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society with perfect free healthcare that the rest of the world should aspire to emulate!? ( see movies by fat slobs who don't know what they're talking about )
Because there are no capitalist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba of course.
What always amuses me is that people decry the reactionary left-wing government of Cuba without seeing it in the wider context of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century, during which the US made a point of launching vicious attacks on every progressive left-wing government in the hemisphere by organising strikes, spreading propaganda, sponsoring coups and terrorists, and occasionally direct military force. The repression of the Cuban regime is a result of a Darwinian process that has weeded out every left-wing government in the region that didn't shoot or imprison anyone and everyone who even might be on the CIA payroll.
Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them - but thanks to the actions of America there is literally no way their social programmes could've been implemented if they were not prepared to run the country as a dictatorship. Western democracies such as Britain have reacted in a similar way when faced with extreme outside threats.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
We should donate our old memory sticks to them, I've got a 128mb mp3 player which is worthless to westerners but could be of use to people in the third world to dissemenate information.
And a choice of presidential candidates just one behind the US as well.
About 16 years ago, in a time of floppy disks, 486s and joysticks, I also was a part of such a network. Media such as the anarchist cookbook and all kinds of software were passed around by hand through packs of floppy disks from one person to another, spreading through everyone.
Mind you, that took place in a western european country, a free country with freedom of expression as best as the world could muster. Yet, that network, which TFA tries to label as a sign of subversive actions against a government went ahead anyway. How could that be?
The thing is, that has absolutely nothing to do with dissent or trying to overthrow any government. People form data sharing networks because they want to share data. With the internet we belong to multiple P2P networks. Before that we had FTPs. Before that we had BBS. If there is no electronic network available then that doesn't stop anyone. Instead of a computer network, people networks are formed. Nowadays, instead of floppy disks or even CD-RWs we have USB mass storage devices such as flash drives.
So quite simply the article is nothing more than yet another piece of anti-Cuba propaganda. Just because there are people in Cuba sharing media around does that mean that they do it with subversive intentions in mind? If you fire up your FTP client does it mean that you are also trying to overthrow your country's government? What about your USB drive? And what about SD cards? What a rebellion.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
This bullshit urban legend about the "low" infant mortality rate in the US has got to stop.
The reason the infant "mortality" rate in the US is low is because the US is one of the very few countries that tries to save the life of severely premature babies and babies with severe birth defects. Not surprisingly, quite a lot of these sad cases die, up to 80% in the case of severely premature babies. By contrast, most other countries don't even try to save those infants, and simply record them as late miscarriages or stillbirths. Since they're never "born" they can't "die," so they don't count in infant mortality statistics. Hey presto! A lower infant mortality rate than the US! Congratulatory headlines in any random self-hating US media outlet...
Here's a related fun fact: university hospitals often have higher death rates than community hospitals for grave disease, e.g. heart attacks, strokes. Is this because they're less competent? Some strange corruption where the richer and more prestigious hospital is screwing up because of its callous disregard for humanity, i.e. the kind of "logic" used to criticize the US infant mortality rate? Nope. It's just because the most serious cases prefer to go to university hospitals, or get transferred there from community hospitals, and because university hospitals often admit people for experimental therapies that usually don't work, whereas less sophisticated hospitals just send folks to hospice or home to die.
Whenever you compare statistics, it really needs to be apples to apples, and when the statistic is so politically-charged as a quality of life versus type of government measurement, you really need to ask some hard and detailed questions about the methodology. It's amazingly easy to lie with statistics.
Or just hand them to a citizen of any other country in the world, who can put them in a suitcase and bring them over on the plane.... 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.