are you sure the problem is the speed of light and not the miles of wire?;-) from what i understand, we're still not using the third (spatial) dimension when we make chips. seems like we could fix that long before we figure out how to take advantage of quantum tunneling.
What about *International* calls? Is it illegal to intercept a cell phone call from Canada from within the US? What about vice versa? Can canadians intercept US phone calls legally? And what about calls from airplanes in neutral zones? And of course, what about intercepting calls from outer space (satellite spying)? It seems like we're in for a lot of international legal problems as countries get closer in terms of travel and more and more connected in terms of communications. Maybe some day there will have to be a system of international law...
The idea of crediting TV with inciting revolution is like saying that cake caused Bastille Day... it's ridiculous. If there's one force that's *held back* revolution in the second half of the 20th century, it's been television.
But you're right, there is a cycle to rebellion about 30-40 years long. In fact, we should be heading into a new cultural revolution pretty soon now, in reaction to reagan/bush/clinton, unless TV has completely destroyed the minds of our youth already, which it may have.
It's possible that resisting pop-culture will be the next revolution.
Burn custom CD's with N MP3 files on them selected manually by users from a huge demo web site like MP3.com. $.25 a song, overnight delivery. The RIAA members could beat MP3.com to the punch with their huge catalogs and the profit margins would be enormously higher. Then you split off the art materials and fan stuff which eats into the profit margin into pay-zines and e-commerce items which you can order along with the songs. *DUUUUH*!!
Sounds like a pretty negative attitude to me. Yes, the world is going to hell right now. But my point is that we should all get up and do something about it. Wake up! Get informed. Learn what the MAI is about. Learn about what the US government is doing on your behalf in foreign countries. And then, above all, VOTE! VOTE relentlessly and in every election for someone outside the democrat/republican hegemony. VOTE for Ralph Nader and Green/Socialist/Independent candidates on a local level. We are a democracy and we can take power back from the corporations.
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" -- Edward Abbey
"Now I am totally and utterly depressed. Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I might get sued."
Don't laugh. We haven't seen the first set of corporate class action suits against individuals for "defamation of corporations", but there's no reason it couldn't happen. The Beef Industry's failed suit against Oprah Winfrey for "defamation" was perhaps the beginning of what will be an ongoing grab for absolute mind control over US citizens.
Yes, the US is well along on the way down the slippery slope to Corporate Totalitarianism now. It all started when corporations were given the rights of citizens in the late 1800's. If the US corporate elite manage to push the MAI through, it's going to be all downhill from there. Then corporations will have roughly the rights of states.
Haven't heard of the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment)? Maybe that's because you get all your news from the corporations that want to push it through. So much for the "free press".
I've got a *GREAT* idea!
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Digital VCRs
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· Score: 1
DON'T buy a new VCR and, better yet... TURN OFF YOUR TV! there's nothing "cool" about being another faceless and willing victim of consumer culture/advertising. there is life beyond the cable box and you don't need a better way to watch floods of corporate advertising.
INSTEAD... make Linus proud of you... go hack on Linux!
I've been reading The Onion for a while now. I even have a big stack of back issues in my closet. The cool thing about The Onion is that they get it in a way that straight-ahead journalism doesn't.
The robots piece could easily be re-written in stuffy academic style with a title like "On Post-Industrial Technological Fatalism" and they'd have like 10 readers, 9 of whom wouldn't get it. The Onion's biting satire gets to the heart of things much more effectively than all the editorial/news pieces in the world combined. What makes it so funny is the core truth of it all. You can write a long tedious piece on the breakdown of family and moral values and their relationship to child abuse, or you can write the same piece as a single headline: "New York to Institute Baby-Only Dumpsters".
This isn't to say that the normal news is completely worthless (although, admittedly, it is massively distorted and thinly veiled corporate propaganda), but The Onion is just so much better.
At present, I'd have to say the three best publications on the planet are: The Onion, AdBusters and Z Magazine . If you like The Onion's irreverent Left flavor, you might want to check out the other two.
The US doesn't need that kind of censorship to effectively spin and control the media. A great deal of the news falls into the category of "impolite" or "unreportable" by corporate news sources.
For example, a high level official has been quoted in marginalized radical magazines as having said "we intentionally set the bar too high on kosovo. what they really needed was a good bombing" or something to that effect. Why that wouldn't make news in a truly free press, is beyond me! Another good example of self-censorship of US media is the failure to report the actual contents of Appendix B of the rambouillet document or the order of events regarding the negotiation (including serbian willingness to accept terms with UN occupation at the outset!). A more recent example of a very blatant act of self-censorship is the fact that The New York TImes, the de-facto journal of record for history, failed to report Clinton's flagrant violation of the War Powers Act on May 25.
US corporate news self-censoring works well enough that actual censorship is rarely if ever required. The really insidious thing about it though is that (unlike Serbian/Russian/Chinese etc. censorship) it's not apparent that anything is being surpressed.
Yes, but for the most part they don't have to resort to that sort of thing. Journalists are the product of a very rigorous homogenizing system that produces remarkable conformity of thought among the "cream of the crop". It's really not possible for a journalist for an agency like CNN/MSNBC/ABC etc. to get to that position without repeatedly demonstrating that they know what's "polite" to report on. Any that happen to slip through the cracks are demoted or, in the case of a british journalist fired over his opinion on kosovo... whose name escapes me right now, simply fired. Those who really want to rake the muck almost always get filtered out *long* before they can cause any real damage. So the system is self-censoring in a way. It's just not possible for reporters in a corporate media structure to think outside the lines. That's not why they're there.
Yes, very interesting isn't that? It's not that NATO objects to Serbian propaganda internally. It's that they don't want objective evidence of what's really going on to leak out without being spun properly first!
Re:US Censorship == Corporate Tyranny
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Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
Yes, that's right. You could not get set up with the FCC to broadcast TV. Not because you don't theoretically have a right to the airwaves, but because they're a limited resource which is controlled by government proxy by powerful corporations.
I had a couple friends in college who spent 10 years of their lives in court battles to try to get FCC approval for a radio station. Ultimately, after spending huge amounts of money and time, they succeeded... but not before their alternative/progressive format had been essentially mandated as "easy listening".
The kind of corporate "censorship" I'm talking about has nothing to do with freedom of speech. So it's not a matter of constitutional law. The problem has to do with control of the medium. Especially a limited medium like the airwaves. Cable gets more interesting and the Internet even more interesting in terms of the potential to break the corporate stranglehold on media.
In face, we do have "community access cable". That's one pretty significant win against corporate power. Unfortunately, it is not being used to the extent or positive effect that it might be. And there is no mechanism for broader distribution (i.e., there is no national level community access that I know of). Probably the reason community access cable is being allowed to exist is because it doesn't (yet) threaten the powers that be.
Sounds like you're just looking for something to get upset about. First of all, I know for a fact that we haven't all been processing the same data since day one because the results from the 3 chunks that I've processed myself have been quite different (and are different from the results posted on the top 20 spikes and gaussians page). Second of all, even if there were a bug... they're a *non-profit* looking for *aliens*. If I had something better to be doing with my CPU, I'd be doing it already. Obviously, I don't... so SETI is more than welcome to it. I for one, am not "up in arms". Good grief!
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
Sounds like you're just looking for something to get upset about. First of all, I know for a fact that we haven't all been processing the same data since day one because the results from the 3 chunks that I've processed myself have been quite different (and are different from the results posted on the top 20 spikes and gaussians page). Second of all, even if there were a bug... they're a *non-profit* looking for *aliens*. If I had something better to be doing with my CPU, I'd be doing it already. Obviously, I don't... so SETI is more than welcome to it.
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
On the contrary, I think we are interested in non-Science because it represents a different kind of Truth, the depths of which Science is incapable of plumbing. Science doesn't reveal *intransient* Truths about our phenomenal world. Instead, it is merely a process of *refinement* (as opposed to *discovery*) of very narrowly defined "truths", and which only reveals answers to shallow questions that generally begin with "how". It utterly fails to address the bigger and more complex questions in life (particularly in social and moral life) and can never, by definition, prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality (in particular, it can't touch the Eastern mind-only school of thought because the whole phenomenal world and its rules for operation are considered projections of the mind).
And so the fascination with non-scientific viewpoints will only increase as it becomes more and more apparent how very weak and fragile Science really is. There are, of course, more ignorant ways of reaching the same fascination with non-Science, but I'm not sure it makes a difference in the end how you arrive. In some ways, a non-naive understanding is more tainted than the simple understanding because the sense of wonder is still completely intact. The most ignorant and ultimately irrational) thing I can think of is a closed mind. Unfortunately, many scientists choose to dogmatically follow Science as if it were a religion, when in fact it is scarcely more than a tool for developing technology at this point.
Ultimately, the question that always bothers us in our private moments and which Science is powerless to explain is "WHY *anything* at all?" It really makes one wonder. And in the end, I think that a sense of wonder at the universe is more worthwhile and useful than any scientific knowledge. Sadly, the West has yet to learn much about wisdom. This is the problem with the Cult of Science and the Cult of Youth.
Thanks for the info! But that wasn't my understanding at all. There are a wide variety of sects though. Is it possible we're talking about two different sets of beliefs? The modern Tibetan tradition I'm most familiar with (NKT) makes many assertions that appear to my naive mind to be very much in the mind-only school. Your point about non-duality of subject and object is well taken and understood. At the same time, the whole universe and its laws are taken to be a result of our collective karma (i.e., one wouldn't be here to begin with if it wasn't for one's karma... okay... now we're *way* off topic and in even deeper water).
I find that Buddhism gets less and less Scientifically coherent in the higher teachings. The lower teachings (;-)?) though are extremely accessible and logical... and are very practically useful to all who care to study them. Actually, Einstein had some positive things to say about this...
Thanks for the info! But that wasn't my understanding at all. There are a wide variety of sects though. Is it possible we're talking about two different sets of beliefs? The modern Tibetan tradition I'm most familiar with (NKT) makes many assertions that appear to my naive mind to be very much in the mind-only school. Your point about non-duality of subject and object is well taken and understood. At the same time, the whole universe and its laws are taken to be a result of our collective karma (i.e., one wouldn't be here to begin with if it wasn't for one's karma... okay... now we're *way* off topic and in even deeper water).
I find that Buddhism gets less and less Scientifically coherent in the higher teachings. The lower teachings (;-)?) though are extremely accessible and logical... and are very practically useful to all who care to study them.
Although I agree with the bit about Science being a journey rather than a destination, I think some of your other arguments are really absurd (and I think the reason you hold these views is probably because you have a bipolar viewpoint that it's either Science or Religion somehow and not both). Especially the bit about "All things are knowable". We don't know this to be true. In fact, it's a concrete result of Quantum Physics at the moment that All things are NOT knowable! So you are spouting dogma every bit as irrational as traditional religious dogma.
The idea that Science progresses towards all-knowingness is an axiomatic *assumption* about the universe, which may (I predict *will*) ultimately fail to be true. Any *true* scientist is Rational first, which leaves open the possibility that Science is limited, not wholly rational or that it doesn't "progress" because there's no end-goal (aside from omniscience, which is provably impossible within Science at this point). That's not to say Science is not useful. It's just not The Search for The Penultimate Source of Truth(tm) anymore.
Also, I'd like to point out that there are many things which religious teachings have to say which strike at deep core Truths of human existence and the human condition which science doesn't even have a language for talking about (and can therefore never "disprove" by definition). To give you an idea of how ridiculous your position is, consider Buddhist beliefs about the origins of suffering (in the mind). How would you devise a scientific experiment to determine whether the statement is true when it's based on our individual social / emotional / psychological experiences? No. The statement can only be validated or invalidated by individuals based on their own experience in life (I have yet to meet anyone who really understood what was being said and disagreed with it... although many people disagree on what to do about it). That doesn't make it any less True, though. It just makes it a non-scientific Truth.
It's my experience that Science totally breaks down beyond the realm of the purely physical. The more complex and human things get, the more Science falls apart. And there's no good reason to think this will change. Given that, it's a really stupid idea to live life as a pursuit of Science. There are other meta-physical journies going on where Truth is much softer and more personal. Where Truth is more human.
Interesting grassroots site for those interested in stalling or reversing corporate dominance. It really reveals just how one sided the whole thing has become.
US Censorship == Corporate Tyranny
on
Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
Technically the airwaves are licensed to privately owned corporate tyrannies who decide what is fit to air (mainly through institutions which filter out the kind of people who would make decisions that are "bad for business"). Politically, "censorship" of the kind of television shows you're talking about isn't a very important issue.
The problem in the US is that corporate censorship and "community decency" standards apply to news coverage too. It isn't polite or respectable to talk about certain kinds of events as they pertain to the US government and US multinational corporations. It "wouldn't do" to talk about things like US complicity and military involvement in Turkey and East Timor. Or the MAI (which you may not even know exists, given the cooperation of corporate-controlled media). That's why you don't hear about the stuff that matters until it's too late. Just take a close look at the Balkans conflict. It's a tour-de-force in media control/spin.
Re:Except that China is censoring the Internet
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Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
I think Malaysia is also looking for ways to silence foreign websites that are critical of the Malaysian government. A really sick attitude in my opinion! And obviously, it's not going to work unless they unplug themselves from the reset of the world.
"This time, it's just a TV show that was pulled off the air for arbitrary corporate reasons. But what if it had been a critically important news story, pulled from the papers for arbitrary corporate reasons?"
What do you mean "what if"? WAKE UP! That's exactly what's been going on for the past 2+ months wrt the Balkan conflict and for much longer with respect to East Timor, Turkey, Columbia, etc. In case you hadn't checked lately, the media *is* run by corporate power and US institutions ensure that only people with the right kind of mindset ever get to decide what's "fit to print" or "worthy of coverage". These are just euphemisms for (self) censorship.
There are many things going on in the world *right now* that are just too controversial for mainstream US media coverage. They don't fit in the realm of what's considered "polite" by the elite. It's not "polite", for example, to talk about the US's refusal to sign treaties banning anti-personnel mines, which take lives and limbs on an almost daily basis in places like cambodia. It's not "polite" to talk about Appendix B (unconditional terms of surrender of sovereignty to NATO, including unlimited NATO occupation), which was tacked onto the rambouillet agreement at the last minute to provide a pretext for bombing Yugoslavia (who agreed to the treaty to begin with, with only *one exception* -- the UN should be involved instead of NATO). What does *that* tell us about NATO motives in the Balkans? Well you certainly won't hear it debated on CNN. The only two choices you will hear raised by CNN are should we: 1) Continue the bombing or 2) Send in troops. It's worse than 1984. There's no discussion of whether the war is illegal and reckless or whether it upsets the global balance of power, let alone whether it's moral. And there's certainly no discussion of the almost trivially false "humanitarian" underpinnings of the whole operation.
"Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny."
While I would agree that the free flow of information is requisite, it is not sufficient. The US theoretically has a free flow of information, but witness all the other factors which permit corporate tyranny to exist in the US... ignorance of history, the pressure of conformance, advertising, the socially unacceptable nature of real political discourse, rejection of diversity by the mainstream, complicity of media in spinning the news to suit (corporate) power, etc.
It's clear that free flow of information is not *enough*. The society also has to be willing to listen to that information. Even when it has something really unappealing to say (which is a real challenge in the super-nationalistic US). Bring up a really gory political concern in the US and you largely get shocked looks and reactions which reveal how deeply unacceptable it really is to raise serious issues. Go ahead. Try it. Just *try* to get someone from the media to answer questions and investigate US military involvement/support in East Timor or Turkey! Or hell, get them to report the recent violation of the War Powers Act. They won't do it. But not because of any overt censorship. Institutions in the US are a manufacturing place for people who can be trusted to hold power *without* bringing up messy issues. That's *how* you get to be a journalist to begin with... it's known that you won't rock the boat. Getting through the system far enough to be a reporter is proof that you know the limits and won't report outside the lines.
For a far better discussion of this, please read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". It's a real eye opener.
Slashdot Mirror
are you sure the problem is the speed of light and not the miles of wire? ;-) from what i understand, we're still not using the third (spatial) dimension when we make chips. seems like we could fix that long before we figure out how to take advantage of quantum tunneling.
What about *International* calls? Is it illegal to intercept a cell phone call from Canada from within the US? What about vice versa? Can canadians intercept US phone calls legally? And what about calls from airplanes in neutral zones? And of course, what about intercepting calls from outer space (satellite spying)? It seems like we're in for a lot of international legal problems as countries get closer in terms of travel and more and more connected in terms of communications. Maybe some day there will have to be a system of international law...
What about sites advertising or advocating terrorism? Shouldn't we ban those too?
Maybe sites that contain violent images or concern guns.
What about sites that are anti-American?
Welcome to the 1950's!
But you're right, there is a cycle to rebellion about 30-40 years long. In fact, we should be heading into a new cultural revolution pretty soon now, in reaction to reagan/bush/clinton, unless TV has completely destroyed the minds of our youth already, which it may have.
It's possible that resisting pop-culture will be the next revolution.
Burn custom CD's with N MP3 files on them selected manually by users from a huge demo web site like MP3.com. $.25 a song, overnight delivery. The RIAA members could beat MP3.com to the punch with their huge catalogs and the profit margins would be enormously higher. Then you split off the art materials and fan stuff which eats into the profit margin into pay-zines and e-commerce items which you can order along with the songs. *DUUUUH*!!
Sounds like a pretty negative attitude to me. Yes, the world is going to hell right now. But my point is that we should all get up and do something about it. Wake up! Get informed. Learn what the MAI is about. Learn about what the US government is doing on your behalf in foreign countries. And then, above all, VOTE! VOTE relentlessly and in every election for someone outside the democrat/republican hegemony. VOTE for Ralph Nader and Green/Socialist/Independent candidates on a local level. We are a democracy and we can take power back from the corporations.
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" -- Edward Abbey
Don't laugh. We haven't seen the first set of corporate class action suits against individuals for "defamation of corporations", but there's no reason it couldn't happen. The Beef Industry's failed suit against Oprah Winfrey for "defamation" was perhaps the beginning of what will be an ongoing grab for absolute mind control over US citizens.
Yes, the US is well along on the way down the slippery slope to Corporate Totalitarianism now. It all started when corporations were given the rights of citizens in the late 1800's. If the US corporate elite manage to push the MAI through, it's going to be all downhill from there. Then corporations will have roughly the rights of states.
Haven't heard of the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment)? Maybe that's because you get all your news from the corporations that want to push it through. So much for the "free press".
INSTEAD... make Linus proud of you... go hack on Linux!
The robots piece could easily be re-written in stuffy academic style with a title like "On Post-Industrial Technological Fatalism" and they'd have like 10 readers, 9 of whom wouldn't get it. The Onion's biting satire gets to the heart of things much more effectively than all the editorial/news pieces in the world combined. What makes it so funny is the core truth of it all. You can write a long tedious piece on the breakdown of family and moral values and their relationship to child abuse, or you can write the same piece as a single headline: "New York to Institute Baby-Only Dumpsters".
This isn't to say that the normal news is completely worthless (although, admittedly, it is massively distorted and thinly veiled corporate propaganda), but The Onion is just so much better.
At present, I'd have to say the three best publications on the planet are: The Onion, AdBusters and Z Magazine . If you like The Onion's irreverent Left flavor, you might want to check out the other two.
For example, a high level official has been quoted in marginalized radical magazines as having said "we intentionally set the bar too high on kosovo. what they really needed was a good bombing" or something to that effect. Why that wouldn't make news in a truly free press, is beyond me! Another good example of self-censorship of US media is the failure to report the actual contents of Appendix B of the rambouillet document or the order of events regarding the negotiation (including serbian willingness to accept terms with UN occupation at the outset!). A more recent example of a very blatant act of self-censorship is the fact that The New York TImes, the de-facto journal of record for history, failed to report Clinton's flagrant violation of the War Powers Act on May 25.
US corporate news self-censoring works well enough that actual censorship is rarely if ever required. The really insidious thing about it though is that (unlike Serbian/Russian/Chinese etc. censorship) it's not apparent that anything is being surpressed.
Yes, but for the most part they don't have to resort to that sort of thing. Journalists are the product of a very rigorous homogenizing system that produces remarkable conformity of thought among the "cream of the crop". It's really not possible for a journalist for an agency like CNN/MSNBC/ABC etc. to get to that position without repeatedly demonstrating that they know what's "polite" to report on. Any that happen to slip through the cracks are demoted or, in the case of a british journalist fired over his opinion on kosovo... whose name escapes me right now, simply fired. Those who really want to rake the muck almost always get filtered out *long* before they can cause any real damage. So the system is self-censoring in a way. It's just not possible for reporters in a corporate media structure to think outside the lines. That's not why they're there.
Yes, very interesting isn't that? It's not that NATO objects to Serbian propaganda internally. It's that they don't want objective evidence of what's really going on to leak out without being spun properly first!
I had a couple friends in college who spent 10 years of their lives in court battles to try to get FCC approval for a radio station. Ultimately, after spending huge amounts of money and time, they succeeded... but not before their alternative/progressive format had been essentially mandated as "easy listening".
The kind of corporate "censorship" I'm talking about has nothing to do with freedom of speech. So it's not a matter of constitutional law. The problem has to do with control of the medium. Especially a limited medium like the airwaves. Cable gets more interesting and the Internet even more interesting in terms of the potential to break the corporate stranglehold on media.
In face, we do have "community access cable". That's one pretty significant win against corporate power. Unfortunately, it is not being used to the extent or positive effect that it might be. And there is no mechanism for broader distribution (i.e., there is no national level community access that I know of). Probably the reason community access cable is being allowed to exist is because it doesn't (yet) threaten the powers that be.
Really puts the "efficiency" of (US Corporate) Capitalism in question doesn't it?
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
And so the fascination with non-scientific viewpoints will only increase as it becomes more and more apparent how very weak and fragile Science really is. There are, of course, more ignorant ways of reaching the same fascination with non-Science, but I'm not sure it makes a difference in the end how you arrive. In some ways, a non-naive understanding is more tainted than the simple understanding because the sense of wonder is still completely intact. The most ignorant and ultimately irrational) thing I can think of is a closed mind. Unfortunately, many scientists choose to dogmatically follow Science as if it were a religion, when in fact it is scarcely more than a tool for developing technology at this point.
Ultimately, the question that always bothers us in our private moments and which Science is powerless to explain is "WHY *anything* at all?" It really makes one wonder. And in the end, I think that a sense of wonder at the universe is more worthwhile and useful than any scientific knowledge. Sadly, the West has yet to learn much about wisdom. This is the problem with the Cult of Science and the Cult of Youth.
I find that Buddhism gets less and less Scientifically coherent in the higher teachings. The lower teachings (;-)?) though are extremely accessible and logical... and are very practically useful to all who care to study them. Actually, Einstein had some positive things to say about this...
I find that Buddhism gets less and less Scientifically coherent in the higher teachings. The lower teachings (;-)?) though are extremely accessible and logical... and are very practically useful to all who care to study them.
The idea that Science progresses towards all-knowingness is an axiomatic *assumption* about the universe, which may (I predict *will*) ultimately fail to be true. Any *true* scientist is Rational first, which leaves open the possibility that Science is limited, not wholly rational or that it doesn't "progress" because there's no end-goal (aside from omniscience, which is provably impossible within Science at this point). That's not to say Science is not useful. It's just not The Search for The Penultimate Source of Truth(tm) anymore.
Also, I'd like to point out that there are many things which religious teachings have to say which strike at deep core Truths of human existence and the human condition which science doesn't even have a language for talking about (and can therefore never "disprove" by definition). To give you an idea of how ridiculous your position is, consider Buddhist beliefs about the origins of suffering (in the mind). How would you devise a scientific experiment to determine whether the statement is true when it's based on our individual social / emotional / psychological experiences? No. The statement can only be validated or invalidated by individuals based on their own experience in life (I have yet to meet anyone who really understood what was being said and disagreed with it... although many people disagree on what to do about it). That doesn't make it any less True, though. It just makes it a non-scientific Truth.
It's my experience that Science totally breaks down beyond the realm of the purely physical. The more complex and human things get, the more Science falls apart. And there's no good reason to think this will change. Given that, it's a really stupid idea to live life as a pursuit of Science. There are other meta-physical journies going on where Truth is much softer and more personal. Where Truth is more human.
Interesting grassroots site for those interested in stalling or reversing corporate dominance. It really reveals just how one sided the whole thing has become.
The problem in the US is that corporate censorship and "community decency" standards apply to news coverage too. It isn't polite or respectable to talk about certain kinds of events as they pertain to the US government and US multinational corporations. It "wouldn't do" to talk about things like US complicity and military involvement in Turkey and East Timor. Or the MAI (which you may not even know exists, given the cooperation of corporate-controlled media). That's why you don't hear about the stuff that matters until it's too late. Just take a close look at the Balkans conflict. It's a tour-de-force in media control/spin.
I think Malaysia is also looking for ways to silence foreign websites that are critical of the Malaysian government. A really sick attitude in my opinion! And obviously, it's not going to work unless they unplug themselves from the reset of the world.
What do you mean "what if"? WAKE UP! That's exactly what's been going on for the past 2+ months wrt the Balkan conflict and for much longer with respect to East Timor, Turkey, Columbia, etc. In case you hadn't checked lately, the media *is* run by corporate power and US institutions ensure that only people with the right kind of mindset ever get to decide what's "fit to print" or "worthy of coverage". These are just euphemisms for (self) censorship.
There are many things going on in the world *right now* that are just too controversial for mainstream US media coverage. They don't fit in the realm of what's considered "polite" by the elite. It's not "polite", for example, to talk about the US's refusal to sign treaties banning anti-personnel mines, which take lives and limbs on an almost daily basis in places like cambodia. It's not "polite" to talk about Appendix B (unconditional terms of surrender of sovereignty to NATO, including unlimited NATO occupation), which was tacked onto the rambouillet agreement at the last minute to provide a pretext for bombing Yugoslavia (who agreed to the treaty to begin with, with only *one exception* -- the UN should be involved instead of NATO). What does *that* tell us about NATO motives in the Balkans? Well you certainly won't hear it debated on CNN. The only two choices you will hear raised by CNN are should we: 1) Continue the bombing or 2) Send in troops. It's worse than 1984. There's no discussion of whether the war is illegal and reckless or whether it upsets the global balance of power, let alone whether it's moral. And there's certainly no discussion of the almost trivially false "humanitarian" underpinnings of the whole operation.
So much for the "free press"!
While I would agree that the free flow of information is requisite, it is not sufficient. The US theoretically has a free flow of information, but witness all the other factors which permit corporate tyranny to exist in the US... ignorance of history, the pressure of conformance, advertising, the socially unacceptable nature of real political discourse, rejection of diversity by the mainstream, complicity of media in spinning the news to suit (corporate) power, etc.
It's clear that free flow of information is not *enough*. The society also has to be willing to listen to that information. Even when it has something really unappealing to say (which is a real challenge in the super-nationalistic US). Bring up a really gory political concern in the US and you largely get shocked looks and reactions which reveal how deeply unacceptable it really is to raise serious issues. Go ahead. Try it. Just *try* to get someone from the media to answer questions and investigate US military involvement/support in East Timor or Turkey! Or hell, get them to report the recent violation of the War Powers Act. They won't do it. But not because of any overt censorship. Institutions in the US are a manufacturing place for people who can be trusted to hold power *without* bringing up messy issues. That's *how* you get to be a journalist to begin with... it's known that you won't rock the boat. Getting through the system far enough to be a reporter is proof that you know the limits and won't report outside the lines.
For a far better discussion of this, please read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". It's a real eye opener.