Uragano Sandy a Cuba: una catastrofe ignorata dai media mainstream
Pecco io di malafede a pensare che lo facciano per avere argomenti contro il governo quando tra qualche mese i problemi per la popolazione saranno ancora ingenti ma i lettori/consumatori occidentali avranno rimosso l’uragano come possibile causale?
Rick Santorum: Conservatives Will "Never Have The Elite, Smart People On Our Side" - BuzzFeed
Santorum means this as a put-down. He’s trying to use “smart” as an insult combined with elite. But combined with his prior remarks about President Obama being a snob because he wants people to be able to go to college, he’s revealed a whole lot about himself and certain aspects of the conservative movement.
Not that smart people are immune from doing stupid things and good governance isn’t all about where you went to college — but intelligence as a perceived negative ought to have no place in an advanced society. You can celebrate intelligence and education without pissing on people who don’t have a B.A.
There are many ways to be smart.
(The real topper here is that Santorum actually is kind of on to something, but in the wrong way: there is an elite in the media that does relate more to the people they cover in D.C. and other state capitals than the people they are ostensibly supposed to be reporting for. The problem is that for many politicians — on both sides, but mostly GOPers — this “elite” is conflated with “liberal” or, in recent years the “RINO” phenomenon. Thus “elite” = “smart” = THEM, and intelligence becomes a pejorative.)
Are U.S.-NATO setting up pretext for attack on Syria?
Workers World editorial, May 29, 2012:
Spokespeople from the NATO countries and their loyal media outlets have seized upon a massacre at Houla, Syria, to mobilize for open imperialist military intervention against the Syrian government and — and no one should doubt this — against the people of Syria. NATO governments have already begun expelling Syrian diplomats.
There seems to be no doubt at this time — May 29 — that a massacre took place. There is, however, much confusion about who exactly carried out the massacre. The corporate media is blaming the killings on the Syrian government and calling for foreign intervention. The Syrians, however, deny that their armed forces or police have taken part, blame the killings on the armed opposition and have themselves condemned the killings and are organizing an investigation.
While we have no special knowledge about what did or didn’t happen, we do have a treasury of knowledge of how the imperialists have manipulated such events in order to justify a war or intervention on a “humanitarian” basis. It is this type of manipulation that anti-war and anti-imperialist forces should be most on the alert for.
classe: this is exactly my position about the massacre. And about Syria’s crisis in general.
You’re at a Parisian café, and you’re reading your Sartre book and you’re reading Le Monde and you’re thinking of the big issues of the world and you see there’s a dog under the table next to you and you pet the dog. You don’t suddenly become stupid when you pet the dog.
Castro, Baseball and the Thought Police
What a pitiful spectacle. Ozzie Guillen, the hard-partying eccentric who manages the Florida Marlins, sits weeping in the harsh glare of TV lights, forced by his bosses to recant his praise for Fidel Castro. He’s already been punished with a five-game suspension, but the baseball thought-police won’t be placated until he does a literal “mea culpa.”
So, in his wonderfully mangled English, he begs forgiveness for saying “I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that fucker is still here.” But what he really meant, he now says, is ever-so-subtly different: “Everybody in the world hates Fidel Castro, including myself.”
(via classe)
47 years late, NY Times reports on anti-communist massacre in Indonesia
From Stephen Millies:
In 1965, Indonesia—which has the largest Muslim population in the world—also had the largest communist party in the world outside the socialist bloc. Three million people belonged to the PKI (the initials of the communist party), which was the oldest CP in Asia, with roots dating back before World War I. Twenty million people belonged to trade unions, women’s groups, peasant leagues and other organizations that were affiliated to the PKI.
The biggest political massacre since Hitler began in the fall of 1965. One million Indonesians were murdered, including 1 out of 10 people on the island of Bali. The U.S. embassy prepared lists of communists to be executed. The political genocide in Indonesia became the template for fascists around the world. The code name used by the coup plotters in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973 was “Jakarta.”
After many years of silence, the Jan. 19 New York Times has a large article on what happened in Indonesia. Using the search feature on the Times web site, I found that this is the first time in at least 31 years that this so-called paper of record has even mentioned the PKI.
New York Times: Veil of Silence Lifted in Indonesia
(via classe)
Hunter S. Thomson to Mike Peterson in response to a piece he submitted to the magazine in 1971. (via Dean Praetorious)
The world reacts to the video of alleged Marines desecrating corpses in Afghanistan. But none react with the passion of Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan.
No one, least of all me, is suggesting that running a newspaper company is a piece of cake. But the people in the industry who are content to slide people out of the back of the truck until it runs out of gas not only don’t deserve tens of millions in bonuses, they don’t deserve jobs.
David Carr gives media execs who lay off workers while lavishing bonuses on themselves the SMACKDOWN. Worth a read. (via cmonstah)
This is a really important point that doesn’t get made enough: A lot of big media’s wounds are self-inflicted. To take an example from one truck that ran out of gas, the total compensation for the top 15 people (combined business and editorial) at Newsweek in 2009 (the year it lost $30 million) was more than the entire budget for the Newsweek.com Website.
(via markcoatney)
(via soupsoup)
Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold, Workers World
Not one U.S. newspaper, television or radio outlet has reported or commented on these cables released by WikiLeaks, nor on the Telegraph story about them. It is as though they fell into a bottomless chasm.
Is it because the media here don’t believe the report is credible? Hardly.
The New York Times knows it’s credible. Their own Beijing bureau chief at the time, Nicholas Kristof, confirmed it in an extensive article entitled “China Update: How the Hardliners Won,” published in the Sunday Times magazine on Nov. 12, 1989, five months after the supposed massacre in the square.
At the very end of this long article, which purported to give an inside view of a debate within the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Kristof stated categorically: “Based on my observations in the streets, neither the official account nor many of the foreign versions are quite correct. There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”
Had there been fighting in Beijing? Absolutely. But there was no massacre of unarmed students in the square. That was an invention by the West, intended to demonize the Chinese government and win public sympathy for a counter-revolution.
The turn toward a market economy under Deng Xiaoping had alienated many workers. There was also a counter-revolutionary element trying to take advantage of popular grievances to completely restore capitalism.
The imperialists were hoping the struggles in Beijing would bring down the Chinese Communist Party and destroy the planned economy — similar to what was to happen two years later in the Soviet Union. They wanted to “open up” China, not to truth, but to the looting of the people’s property by imperialist banks and corporations.
After much wavering at the top, the army was called out and the uprising crushed. China was not broken up like the Soviet Union; its economy has not imploded nor has the standard of living declined. Quite the opposite. Wages and social conditions have been improving at a time when workers elsewhere are being forced backward by a severe capitalist economic crisis.
Despite deep concessions to capitalism, foreign and domestic, China continues to have a planned economy based on a strong state-owned infrastructure.
(via classe)
Village Voice Staff Stages Walk-Out
At exactly 4pm this afternoon, a creaking of chairs could be heard across the 3rd floor of 36 Cooper Square, and then an eerie silence as over 50 union employees and sympathizers walked off the job at the Village Voice, as a sign of dissatisfaction over the lack of movement by management at the bargaining table. The contract expires tonight at midnight.
Many of the walk-outs wore t-shirts emblazoned with a quote from Norman Mailer, one of the Village Voice founders: “Revolutions are the periods when individuals count most.”
After 30 minutes of spontaneous speeches, and the general consensus that the employees can’t keep working if the final offer by management will result in a reduction of their wages, they returned to work.
Stay tuned here for further updates.
(via soupsoup)
Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media
The truth is that the numbers for AOL’s Patch efforts look bad, based on the southern California numbers leaked to Business Insider. It’s especially bad when you contrast them with traffic generated by Huffington Post, with is topical, not local.
The reality is people don’t want ‘reportage’ on a local level: they may want better search, and the ability to complain about potholes, but they aren’t super excited about the PTA board meeting, or even the local high school sports. Yawn.
People are signing up in the millions for experiences online like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where traditional news has been reduced to a stream of social objects, and these find their way to us in social streams. Patch is the effort to build thousands of destination sites in a world where people are spending less time on sites, and more time inside social apps.
The saddest thing of all is that Greg Narain and I sketched out a project for AOL years ago called Nerdvana, which would have been a breakthrough in that area, building on the very considerable headstart that AOL had with AIM.
That’s what people still want, though. So AOL could divert a few million of that Patch money to a startup taking a hard look at what’s going on in Twitter and Tumblr, and do something interesting, instead of building a massive and unsustainable flop.
*cough* Neighborhoodr *cough*
