Slashdot Mirror
US Plummets On World Press Freedom Ranking
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Reporters Without Borders released its 2011-2012 global Press Freedom Index. The indicators for press freedom in the U.S. are dramatic, with a downward movement from 27th to 47th in the global ranking, from the previous year. Much of this is correlated directly to the arrest and incarceration of American journalists covering the 'Occupy' protest movements in New York and across the country. 'This is especially troubling as we head into an election year which is sure to spark new conflicts between police and press covering rallies, protests and political events.' Only Chile, who dropped from 33 to 80, joined the U.S. in falling over 100% of their previous ranking. Similarly, Chile was downgraded for 'freedom of information violations committed by the security forces during student protests.'"
The American government should shut down this website before the news gets out.
I'm surprised the US isn't lower.
I don't think they'd rate a Brave New World-esque media as "free".
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power. "
"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
-- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, CIA Director
...that the US would plummet on World Press Freedom rankings given that Fox News literally won the right in court to lie to its viewers.
Thank the drug war and the war on terror for the militarization of the police.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/164695/former-seattle-police-chief-ows-reveals-militarization-our-police-forces
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
comment removed
Seven of the nations that rank "more free" than the United States are former Soviet bloc states.
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
So if journalists are not allowed to be at events to cover them, but can then write all they want (about what they missed?), then that is full freedom? It seems like that is what you're saying
. Not only are you wrong, but I have to wonder what kind of personal bias you have to even go down that line of logic.
You never specified "what happened to the journalists trying to cover OWS", purposely leaving your own argument vague. Probably because if you look at the details, you'll find they were in public space covering the public doing public things.
And yes, being prevented from doing that IS freedom of press, despite your Orwellianesque attempt to redefine the word.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Does falling from 27 to 47 in ranking qualify for your test of significant metrics?
Either way, it's Springtime for Hitler!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When you start trying to execute journalists and their sources.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Meaningless metric
...and incorrectly applied in any case; 47 is less than twice 27.
What matters is how many places up or down you move.
...of how many total places there are - it's not the same to move down 20 positions out of 200 than 20 out of 21. Or equivalently, what % of the table you move (provided the table has not changed size due to countries being added/removed).
But this is a very subjective topic and even these more appropriate metrics conform a rather incomplete picture of the situation.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
In other news, US dropped 110% in world math rankings...
Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants.
It was my understanding that the "occupy" protests, in general, have been occurring in public spaces (this is certainly the case in my city). I don't understand why it would be illegal to go to a public space in order to report on a protest happening there.
If you're talking about cases where journalists have committed illegal trespass, then perhaps I could see your point. But I assume that the press freedom rankings are based on arrests of journalists not committing trespass. I'm thinking about people such as Kristyna Wentz-Graff; since she was released without charge, it would appear that she was not committing a crime when she was arrested.
So what you are saying is that arresting the press at a gathering on public land is not a freedom of the press issue? What you mean is that we can say what we want, but are not permitted to observe what is happening on our land?
Either way, it's Springtime for Hitler!
Godwin in 13 minutes. Not bad for a Thursday evening.
Given the simply *massive* amount of coverage that the "Occupy" protests got and the sheer amount of "journalists" covering all of the various camp-ins, sit-ins, poop-on-cop-car-ins, etc... that happened, I don't remember seeing/hearing much about any journalists being arrested.
That could be because maybe their freedom of speech was being restricted, although I remember all the countless hours of "our freedom of speech is being violated" interviews, articles, and counter-counter-protests, and docu-dramas -- but not that. /snark
I would like to know the following:
1). The exact *TOTAL* number of reporters that were arrested covering "Occupy" in the US. So far I see one.
1). Percentage, as a whole, of reporters that were arrested or detained directly covering the "Occupy" movement. Raw numbers would be nice as well.
2). Percentage of reporters arrested that were violating a federal, state, or municipal law at the time.
3). Percentage of reporters arrested that were accredited journalists with professional news organizations rather than blogs/activist newspapers/facebook posters.
I didn't see a whole lot of journalistic "repression" going on while I did see a lot of very mixed-up people talk endlessly about how they're being repressed to the nearest video camera or recording device while violating laws. I got nearly two months of media coverage in video, press, and web forms. I couldn't turn on the news without hearing about "Occupy".
Holland keeps its third place but loses a whole 9 points (US lost 14), the only reason we are still 3rd is because everyone started from a worse positin but it is hardly good. Wonder if anyone dares to call out Rukker on this (Previous Prime Minsters was Bakellende, the cambion offspring off Bush and Blair, Rukker is that guys pet rock, an object with absolutely no ideas, opinions or passion)... doubt it, probably everyone pats themselves on the back for still being 3rd no matter how steep the downwards slope is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Godwin does NOT apply to Mel Brooks references!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I hope this indicates that Reporters Without Borders is moving towards some independence and partisan neutrality, unlike their past performance.
You can either take money from Otto Reich, or you can be an impartial, credible advocate of press freedom. You can't do both.
Reporters Without Borders has chosen to take money from Otto Reich.
As this Wikipedia article explains, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Controversies Reich was engaging in propaganda to support military campaigns against left-wing governments governments in Latin America, and he was on the board of the School of the Americas, which trained people in torture and executions.
They accused the Aristide government in Haiti of attacks on the opposition press, but they ignored attacks on journalists under the Latortue government.
no, see... it wasn't a freedom of the press issue, it was a freedom of the reporters issue. Two completely different things! The press is still free to report whatever they want, but the reporters can be imprisoned all the government wants without infringing on that!
^.~
And if it's inconvenient, you call the editor and get the first paragraph changed.
http://i51.tinypic.com/296i2iq.jpg
Next time around, there may be protests up the wazoo, but there may not be any coverage, or it soft power will be deployed to make sure the coverage goes a certain way, as we can see in the example above.
More to the point, why would anyone care what % they drop in a ranking? A ranking is just an ordered list. It says nothing about the criteria used to put the elements in that order.
It's like finishing times for a marathon. If the leading pack crosses together, there could be only a 30 second difference between 1st place and 25th place. Meanwhile there could be a 5 minute difference between 25th place and 26st place. But if you look at just the ranking, you'd think that the 25th place finisher was nearly as bad as the 26th place finisher, when in reality he was actually very close to finishing 1st.
If you want to make relative comparisons like %, you have to look at the finishing times. In particular, the rank order is meaningless for gauging year-to-year changes. What if everyone improved? Then you could drop in rank despite doing better than the previous year.
I am the tool of the government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think Im delicious
With the stuff that I say
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin out
From your tv set
-- Frank Zappa "The Slime"
The arrest of journalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff was not part of some systematic crack down on reporters/journalists. At best it was a swamped cop dealing with a large group and not noticing her credentials, at worst it was an idiot cop, maybe both. To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
To quote Brother George Carlin:
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
This country is finished.
~X~
A decision to not prosecute does not necessarily mean that a crime was not occurring. It may mean that the evidence is not strong enough to get a conviction worthy of the resources spent on it or that the potential downside of continuing the prosecution (as of a journalist) outweighs the punitive measure against the accused.
I do believe that journalists should largely be left alone except in cases of safety problems (and even then sometimes it's their call), but it's getting tougher to nail down who is a journalist these days. Anyone with a webpage can claim to be a journalist. Anyone caught being part of the events should lose their journalist protections, but sometimes it's hard to tell when someone is part of the events or just in the crowd getting reactions.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If they consider direct media ownership by government officials as impinging on freedom of information. For example, Italy's Berlusconi owned controlling interest in much of Italy's media. He received quite a bit more consideration than any other politician would in the modern era. For any other politician a sex scandal would have been a blow to their career, while Berlusconi was only sank by Italy's near bankruptcy. As another example, on the same note, there is very little negative coverage of mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg. While he does not technically run the company, he does own Bloomberg LP which owns Bloomberg TV and US News. He is an unmarried man and most people don't even know the name of his girlfriend(girlfriends?). This is quite a fit for a politician of such high visibility. Clearly, the more media a politician owns, the less negative or controversial coverage they get.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This is just another in a succession of stories on ./ today that has deeply shaken my faith in democracy and liberty in the civilized world. Earlier today (or maybe last night) there was a story posted about proposed legislation that would require ISPs to log all internet activity of customers in HI for 2 years, which would be accessible to law enforcement (or just about anyone) without a warrant or court order. Add to this the articles about DMCA exemptions for jailbreaking of devices, which are about to expire, and ACTA being signed by 22 European countries. Today, ./ also brought news of the demise of the market for used console games (thanks to Microsoft), the NASDAQ delisting a broadcasting company under pressure from the Chinese government, and a new law that would provide for indefinite logging and retention of online activity of Australian citizens.
SOPA may be on hold, but I fear that we might be losing the war against big content providers and others who want to restrict our rights for financial or political gain. While I appreciate being made aware of these troubling developments, I find today's news to be incredibly distressing and depressing. While the war isn't over, I feel the balance is beginning to shift against us. What else can we do to tip the scales?
Facts have a liberal bias.
...of how many total places there are
Still wrong. What matters is how much you change in the objective measure that is then sorted into a ranking. Someone else used a marathon as an example, go find and read it.
A decision to not prosecute does not necessarily mean that a crime was not occurring. It may mean that the evidence is not strong enough to get a conviction worthy of the resources spent on it or that the potential downside of continuing the prosecution (as of a journalist) outweighs the punitive measure against the accused.
It's a fair point -- but in the Wentz-Graff case, the police never stated to her or anyone else what crime she was suspected of. The police seem to be running with "oops, we didn't know she was a journalist", which seems implausible given the clearly visible press card in the photographs of her arrest.
Of course, any one case can be put down to incompetence, but this isn't just one case. The SJS editorial linked from the TFA gives other examples, as well as a fairly measured commentary which takes into account the difficulties faced by police.
I agree with you that the explosion of "citizen journalists" creates a bit of a grey area here, but most of the cases under discussion seem to involve salaried, credentialled, professional journalists and reporters taking pains to advertise their status.
Maybe it is just incompetence all round, but the effect is the same whether or not this is a planned policy: journalists are discouraged from reporting on protests by fear that they will be arrested.
Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment.
But I enjoy watching TV shows (not all of them, the ones I chose to wach). I would not enjoy sitting in prison. I would much prefer to do things that I enjoy than things I don't enjoy. Why is it shocking then that I should spend a lot of time doing something I enjoy -- without coercion naturally -- instead of something I don't?
It's not particularly democratic (or respectful of other individuals) to disregard individual preferences even when you might have different ones. This sort of haughty attitude doesn't further your cause either -- it makes it seem like you don't respect other's choices and want to substitute your own.
Personally, if they gave me my own spacious cave/cell like Hannibal Lecter with free WIFI for reading slashdot and visiting FBI trainees asking about C++ rules for sequence points, I'd consider it.
I did an analysis and found out that the 192 countries average rank was 96.5 the same as last year. We can rest easy knowing that we held steady this year.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...and incorrectly applied in any case; 47 is less than twice 27.
Actually, the incorrect part is the summary.. the US fell 27 places... from #20 to #47.
And while I will admit there is still a long way we can still fall, perhaps some of us should reflect for a moment about the countries ranked higher than we are, and how they got there, considering where they were (in general, not absolutely speaking in terms of this particular metric) not too long ago... Some of these places were the places I I heard about in school when they talked about repression and how "those commies" were trying to take over the world... Phrases like "Papers, please.... Your papers..." were practically ingrained into our social consciousness, asked of poor innocents in every movie with a scene set in one of these places... I'm extremely glad to hear they are doing so well (and that the stereotypes "may" have been exaggerated ;-) ) But I still have to ask; What the hell is happening to us? Aren't we supposed to be the shining light? Aren't we supposed to be the beacon of hope, the pinnacle of freedom? More importantly, why do so few people seem to care?
This thing reminds me of the doomsday clock.
It's just the opinion of a group of people... the validity of the claim is entirely dependent on their judgment.
Here's a question... what is their judgement rating? Anyone bother to rank them? Is there ever an audit of their reliability?
If not... then how do we know that the broken thermometer isn't telling us it's getting colder or warmer? Have to test the instruments.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...and incorrectly applied in any case; 47 is less than twice 27.
The summary is wrong. TFA says "U.S. has dropped 27 places to 47th in the world", or from 20th to 47th. So meaningless or not, over 100% is right.
Godwin's law does not apply to discussions of fascist or otherwise totalitarian regimes. Absolute statists hide behind that dodge all too often.
"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" -- Matthew 22:21
The "God" of your understanding has no place in politics, and if you're really worried about "gays" corrupting society, I think you're pretty misguided. Do you follow all of the commandments of the old testament? Do you still eat shellfish? "But all in the seas or in the rivers that do not have fins and scales, all that move in the water or any living thing which is in the water, they are an abomination to you." -- Leviticus 11:10
NB -- I'm not religious, but grew up in a very religious family, and I can cite scripture chapter and verse all night long -- I guess I can thank my crazy parents for something!
Facts have a liberal bias.
Get rid of scheduled lunches and other breaks, and you could call it work without a hint of sarcasm.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yeah, only a Nazi like Hitler would do something like tha-
Whoops!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
You know, this is like the fifth time that I've seen this on Slashdot in the last week. Even so, this is copypasta I can get behind.
At least it doesn't start "Fear, control, etc." and then start ranting about the Zionist conspiracy towards a one world government or something like that...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Bummer. And I was all set to take a cheap shot at public school math education in the U.S....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm going to have do disagree with George Carlin on the last part of that. What they want is more than enough for themselves, and less than enough for everybody else. That way the can live high on the hog while being securely in charge of everything because everyone else is scrambling to get by. For our parents generation, this meant making people believe they needed more stuff, because there was just way to much of it. But it will not be the same for us. We will all be working our fingers to be bone while our parents retire in relative comfort. Retirement funds and social security will be protected, but younger people will work themselves to death for it. The last round of economic bailouts proved that strategy would work, so we'll probably seeing more of it over the next couple decades.
I appreciate you having the courage to reply -- it would be nice if you didn't do it as an AC, but I can't really fault you for that.
I think that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament offers pretty good guidance on a lot of thorny moral and philosophical issues (though I reserve the right to disagree at times). I picked up on your assault on "gays" because homosexuality and shellfish are given essentially the same treatment in Leviticus -- both are an "abomination". You could interpret that to mean that homosexuality is bad, or you could interpret it as meaning that homosexuality is no worse than eating shellfish, which most anti-gay advocates do.
The old testament says a bunch of contradictory things as well, which I won't go into here, but I would be happy to discuss at length if you're interested. What I'm more interested in addressing is the new testament and the core values it promotes: that we love our neighbor (broadly interpreted to mean every human being) as ourselves, and that we see spirituality as something that is personal and not political. Nowhere in the new testament did Jesus try to impose his belief system on others. He had followers, but they were free to come and go as they pleased, and governed themselves as they saw fit. Jesus was a revolutionary figure; if he were alive today he would likely oppose all armed conflict and would spend most of his time deriding the rich (as he did during his lifetime). You may think that being homosexual is bad, but the only qualities that Jesus consistently spoke out against were greed, selfishness and inordinate wealth. And if you believe that all the old testament stuff was "washed away", I don't see how you justify being against homosexuality at all, at least scripturally. The new testament is good news for believers. It says, among other things, that you can eat shrimp and be faithful in private. It also means that you should probably take the "beam" out of your own eye before attempting to fix someone else (see Matthew 7:5).
Again, I'm not religious at all, I just know scripture pretty well.
Facts have a liberal bias.
There have been for a long time. They're called press credentials, and they're supposed to mean that the journalists are there to observe and report on the events, not take part in them. They're not generally required, but are considered to be useful for authorities to know who is probably not partaking in the activities and to grant them leeway. Press credentials may also get a person into limited-access events such as certain press conferences where allowing the general public would create too much of a crowd management problem.
Journalists do get special protections which vary but which the courts have often (though not always) recognized as essential to freedom of the press including the right to withhold the identities of sources. If you're not a journalist and someone tells you something that is critical to a case, you may be compelled by the courts to do so. Journalists generally are free of this to protect sources from reprisal, though in many cases it's not codified into law and journalists in the US have served time for contempt of court for refusing to reveal the sources. Some states have passed laws specifically addressing this, but to date there is no federal law providing such protection.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Icelandic journalists complain of losing libel cases when all they've done is to publish court records, of fear of retaliation, and of a climate of self-censorship.
One broadcaster was hit with an injunction to prevent them from publishing details about banking misconduct.
Iceland was one of the top-rated countries in that report.
When he says Militarization, he means tanks, heavy automatic weapons and other military grade equipment & tactics. Also, he means the laws to back it up. The patriot act was used against American citizens on US Soil (e.g. provisions of it were employed to allow coordination against protestors). The level of organization, manpower and resources that went into crushing the Occupy Wall Street movement makes the 60s era anti-civil rights movement look like a bunch of hillbillies doing a civil war re-enactment.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Things don't rise, they skyrocket, they don't drop, they plummet. Cuts are always draconian, oil spews, smoke belches. Now, make sure you keep your notes for the next semester Political Science 101. Class dismissed
"...and yet, I blame society" Duke - Repo Man
I'll get hate for saying it but in this case its probably an insult to the Nazis. During "Springtime for Hitler" in the mid 30s the Nazis were actually quite popular because as Hitler's bodyguard put it in the excellent BBC series "World At War" "At the time we were in a bad way, yes a very bad way. they promised us bread and jobs which seems like such a trivial thing now but then that meant a lot when you couldn't feed your family" so while the Nazis gave the boot to anybody that wasn't like them they also put the country back to work modernizing their systems whereas in America they just ship the jobs overseas or hire illegals and give you the boot. I doubt VERY seriously you'd find the US government popular with anybody but multigenerational superelite who have been making out like robber barons of old.
I'd urge everyone to read this article that drives a stake in the "job creators and lower taxes' lie, followed by this one on corporate taxes and finally some numbers that will make you sick. They are quite a good read and will help to show why we have gotten where we are. Personally i think the elite at the top are trying to condition the public to a mindset of fear so they won't have an uprising spread if they should roll the tanks. they have already seen what the Arab Springs have done to systems that had been there for years and they know they can only juggle the numbers, lie about the true unemployment figures, and print money like there is no tomorrow for so long before the thing falls down and we become another failed country like Greece. I don't know which is worse, the thought they might actually turn the tanks on us or decide that its our turn to be the bad guys and do what Germany did to Poland in South America. But I doubt the rulers at the top of the food chain will just go without a fight, nor do i think after buying the entire congress for years they will just sit by and let the people bring fairness back into the system no matter how badly we as a nation are suffering. i think its gonna get ugly folks, really ugly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you haven't, read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings. It's shameful how far we've turned from our original ideal, embodied in the Constitution - I know, "just a god damned piece of paper!" - but he warned about just such a possibility. 200+ years can dull the senses and purpose of a country. Seems like it might be time to learn our lesson all over again.
perhaps some of us should reflect for a moment about the countries ranked higher than we are, and how they got there, considering where they were (in general, not absolutely speaking in terms of this particular metric) not too long ago... Some of these places were the places I I heard about in school when they talked about repression and how "those commies" were trying to take over the world... Phrases like "Papers, please.... Your papers..." were practically ingrained into our social consciousness, asked of poor innocents in every movie with a scene set in one of these places...
Curiously, Finland remains one of those countries where there's no general legal requirement to carry identification papers or indeed even to have any - and some people actually don't. (There's presidential election going on here right now, and every now and then people come to vote without papers, and there are a number of ways they can, including bringing along someone who can testify they're who they say they are.)
The ranking is somewhat "arbitrary", for example it puts Equatorial Guinea way over Iran and China, in terms of "press freedom".
Well, it is more or less impossible for any journalist to go to EG, and there is no written press at all (only one "free publicity mag", and one randomly published government "daily" that comes out about 5 to 10 times a year, and no library, bookshop, ...)
So of course there is little "oppression", once you suppressed all the press...
In contrast the press in Iran and China is regularly oppressed but at least exist.
Hungary abolished all independent news outlets and moved all public ones under close control of the government while the threat of nationalist-extremists towards any dissenters increases. How the hell are they still at only +10?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The press freedom index is little more than a compilation of the opinions and beliefs of journalists across the world, based on questionnaires. There is no calibration for cultural differences, no verification or validation, no guarantee of unbiased sampling, little to ensure objectivity. Look at the questionnaire yourself:
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/quest_en.pdf
The very first question is "During [the last year], were there any cases of journalists 1. Being illegally detained (without an arrest warrant, for longer than the maximum period of police custody, without a court appearance etc)?" Now think about that. In what way are random journalists qualified to answer this question? How can they even answer that question? In most cases, legality hasn't even been determined in the courts by then. In countries in which the media are fully or partially controlled or operated by the government, "journalists" would have a strong bias in favor of the government and they would be unlikely to be detained, because anybody critical of the government wouldn't even get hired; yes, to some degree this is true even in Western Europe. And in countries with few legal protections for journalists, detentions of journalists would be much more likely to be legal.
Mostly, what this attests to is utter incompetence on the part of RSF and the journalists who sign responsible for it.
>What the hell is happening to us? Aren't we supposed to be the shining light? Aren't we supposed to be the beacon of hope, the pinnacle of freedom? More importantly, why do so few people seem to care?
Only two people types of people have ever said that: American politicians and American schoolteachers. Nobody else in the world has EVER thought of you that way, and frankly when us people in the rest of the world think of nations that are the epitomy of civil liberty and freedom - America hasn't even been in the top 10 in decades. The most liberal constitution in the world belongs to an African country for crying out loud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You work for Foxconn too?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Nope. Finnish citizens in Finland are not required to possess any kind of identity card, and I know for a fact that many indeed do not have one at all. The text you quoted does not say a country must require or issue IDs to all its citizens, only that such a card is sufficient to travel abroad (with limitations), and while Finland does have national identity cards in the sense used in that directive, they're not issued to everybody automatically, you must explicitly request one, and it's not free (EUR 53 last I checked). Indeed most people don't have one but rather use a passport or driver's license as ID when needed - but as noted, some people don't have those either. If you don't travel abroad or drive or need to open a new bank account, you can do without.
Absolutely. Anzya is paranoid. There is no EU requirement to carry papers in any member country, it's just that member countries are required to accept other countries national ID where they used to require passports.
I'm a non-French EU resident in France and I do not need to carry any ID papers at all.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
But since Leviticus is from the Old Testament, the command to not practice homosexuality would have been washed away no?
And no, for the record, when Jesus died on the cross and was raised. All the old testament stuff was "washed away". Or so I believe. I'm free in Christ and have a responsibility to speak up. "Do not practice homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman. It is a detestable sin" Leviticus 18:22 Not my words, those are God's.
Who promise wam fuzzies of one type or another.
It isn't left vs right. It's authoritarian vs autarchic.
There are a couple of ironies which are missed in American politics. It's rather bewildering to watch from the outside.
1. On the liberal side: How can liberal ideals, which are literally those which pertain to being free, possibly be accomplished by handing more authority to a centralised bureaucracy?
2. On the conservative side: How can conservative ideals, such as lower taxation possibly be accomplished by increasing legislation, rules, regulations on social issues like abortion, drugs or increasing spending on military or law enforcement?
Both points of view, liberal and conservative are logically inconsistent with the methods being used to achieve them.
It seems to me that you are voting along the wrong axes. The true axis is authoritarian vs autarchic (I won't use the word "liberal" because the meaning has been perverted) and both sides; republican and democrat are authoritarian.
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Mod parent up. I don't know where Americans get this idea that everyone thinks they are the posterchild for civilization. "The American" in my mind as a child was a gun-toting redneck who liked war and killing.
I... Um, I think that was what he was saying. What matters is the objective measure of press freedom, and how you performed on that; the US might not have changed at all, just 20 other countries got a whole lot better in the year. Or, as you so perspicaciously point out, if you are in "a cluster of excellent freedom rated countries at the top," that is the objective measure of freedom is good, then it doesn't matter where exactly you sit and how you move within that group.
Still, we all do things we regret when we're drunk. Not an excuse my wife accepts, but maybe /. will be more forgiving.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Or James Madison
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations"
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."
The Founders lived in a time of royalism and absolutism. Large-scale autocracies were the rule. We like to believe the age of absolute monarchs is over because they've been replaced by throne-less entities like the EU, the IMF, World Bank, and the US Federal war/welfare state. Afraid not.
I'd urge everyone to read this article that drives a stake in the "job creators and lower taxes' lie
For a guy with "a double major in math and physics", he doesn't know much about presenting and interpreting data. Where's the r-squared value for those linear regression curves? There's also no reason to believe the relationship he's found is causative. If governments cut taxes in anticipation of a recession, you'd see the same sort of curves on the last chart.
I'm no "supply sider" by a long shot. But weak data doesn't help anyone.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I've talked to people who thought (usually justifiably) that their home country was pretty good, but the only people I've ever heard say anything like shining light, beacon of hope or pinnacle of whatever have been Americans.
My hobby: Finding old cold-war denunciations of Communist tyrranny that our current American leaders now think is a pretty good idea:
By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union. -- Ronald Reagan
Your history needs a little work. The US was founded as a secular nation. The religion wasn't injected back into your government until after WWII (except for "in God we trust" on coins). So unless you're counting 18th century and prior Europe and/or the post-1956 US as "when we had some morals (based on the bible)", you've got a problem. Personally burning heretics and arresting people for allegedly associating with people who might think communism is a neat idea isn't what I'd consider "[not nearly] as nuts."
Of course, most of our morality, including most of what's in the bible, considerably predates it. Particularly the new testament. Speaking of which, if the old testament was "washed away," why do you keep quoting it?