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Conquering dictatorship with bad spelling | Feb 03, 2006 11:50
Was it something I wrote? The mysterious "capital T" exception for searches on Google China, as noted yesterday, no longer applies. A search on "Tiananmen" will now get you the same set of bland, regime-approved results as a search on "tiananmen", although bad spelling still does the trick. I'm not sure whether to feel smug or slightly guilty.
No Right Turn has a useful take on the fascinating (and occasionally alarming) storm over the Danish cartoons. As I've said in comments elsewhere, a cartoon of The Prophet with a bomb for a turban is perhaps not the best use of free speech, but banal speech is free too.
Media Guardian notes that a Jordanian paper has published a selection of the cartoons (registration required), and the Guardian's Organ Grinder blog notes that the first British media organisation to air the cartoons was the BBC.
Christchurch comedy troupe Outwits have a video for you.
The Daily Show looks at truth and lies.
And I'm really delighted to have the first of the 2006 Fairburn series online today. Rex's daughter, Dinah Holman, has been very helpful with this, and Sound Archives' decision to let me have the audio of the original broadcast of My Imaginary Journey was very welcome. Do take some time to read and listen to it: I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
And, er, I'm off to lunch …
Results May Vary | Feb 02, 2006 11:32
Okay, this is weird. You'll be aware of the fuss over Google acceding to the Chinese regime's demand for censorship of results via the new Google China site. And, as every blogger and his dog has been demonstrating, if you do a Google Images search on "tiananmen square", you will find various regime-approved pictures, from tourist snaps to mugshots of "protest planners". But if your search is "Tiananmen square" (note the capital "T"), it brings up multiple instances of the iconic brave-student-versus-the-tanks photograph, among others.
The same principle holds for standard text searches. The top result in a search for "tiananmen square" is this bit of "biggest square in the world" tourist puff, while for "Tiananmen square" it's the Wikipedia entry on the 1989 protests.
Derek Tearne of @URL drew my attention to this, but confesses that he hasn't been able to work out why it should be so either, beyond speculating that "there's a difference between how it treats POST form submissions and GET URLs".
He also notes that results can be considerably skewed by the way you fiddle with the country codes. For instance, here is a search request with the syntax "http://images.google.cn/images?cr=countryCN&q=Tiananmen+square". Back to the friendly tourist snaps. And compare to the same search with the country code substituted as USA and NZ (note that the top result is Rodney Hide's blog).
Derek: "It looks what Google is doing is skewing the results towards sites from local domains - which appears far less like censorship than one assumes at first glance. After all, if I search for Auckland I'd rather get pictures of Auckland New Zealand than Auckland Castle UK."
Some more: if you search for "hardcore porn" in Google China Images (and I am not for a moment suggesting you do) you get what I presume to be a safe search-type message in Chinese; click the web search link above the search window and you get more New Zealand-skewed results and a URL with a "NZ" country code. Hit return to conduct the exact same search from the web search page and you get a different set of results. I need hardly remind you that these are not worksafe searches …
I'd be grateful if anyone knows a bit more and can shed light on this.
Meanwhile, Just Left had a discussion thread on the latest PC outrage to be targeted by The Eradicator - that "During this year's census, every person will be asked whether they want the census form in English or in Maori." Actually, this is bollocks. As the Stats NZ press release says, a limited number of bilingual forms have been printed for delivery to areas with a high Maori population or a high number of Maori speakers.
"When did we have the debate on whether New Zealand should become bilingual?" asks Mapp. Maybe around the time Parliament passed the Maori Language Act 1987, says No Right Turn.
Mapp's arse-about take on the census issue comes from a very earnest speech in which he plods through an attempted classification of the different sorts of political correctness. In its attempt to retrospectively rope in any number of disparate phenomena (airline flying policies to allegedly banned lolly scrambles to traffic planning and invasive plant control) to its theory, it reads oddly like some desperate lefty thesis from the 70s, where everything is ideological.
There are genuine and worthwhile complaints tucked into it, but they are diminished and trivialised by their inclusion in this sprawling, tenuous taxonomy. And I'm sorry, but the Ministry of Social Development deciding to refer to children with "additional needs" rather than "special needs" just does not get me going even the tiniest little bit - and I have a direct interest in this. Is Wayne suggesting we just get back to the good old days and call them "retarded"?
Seriously: with Labour looking tired, and some intellectual firepower in its new intake, National has a chance to express new ideas and outline a vision. This sort of Muriel Newman blather is certainly not that.
Also: Gordon Dryden noted this release on the 2006 IBISWorld Global Performance Index. For all the kvetching about our performance relative to Australia, it ranks us a place above our Aussie cousins, although we've both dropped out of the Top 10 since last year, with roughly the same economic problems - high dollar, high current account deficit - affecting NZ to a greater degree. New Zealand's government performance - based on perceived lack of corruption, civil liberties and debt levels - is ranked No.1 in the world.
I've got the BBC Horizon documentary War On Science - which looks at the "intelligent design" movement - but haven't had a chance to watch it yet (torrent here if you fancy it). A survey conducted alongside the programme discovered a surprising number of Britons want faith to be taught in science classes.
And Christiaan Briggs alerted me to this hilarious video of NBC's Keith Olberman handing Fox's Bill O'Reilly his pompous ass. Heh.
Threats and stuff | Jan 31, 2006 10:26
I've been telling people that tonight's address in Orewa will be the don't-scare-the-ladies speech; that National has acknowledged that its campaign rhetoric on race, the Treaty and belonging to the "mainstream" deterred women and urban voters and possibly lost it the election last year. That Don Brash would hammer the economy instead.
But today's Herald claims in a front-page story that Brash is "likely to take a tougher line on immigration", and to suggest "that Western ideals such as personal liberty and New Zealand's belief in the importance of a secular society could be compromised by immigration."
Followers of conservative intellectual fads will know the score here. It is fashionable in such circles to state that immigrants - translation: Muslim immigrants - must assume the values and customs of their host countries, lest those values and customs be trampled underfoot in the clash of civilisations.
I do personally treasure a belief on a modern, secular society. But I believe it to be more imminently compromised by a major political party secretly getting into bed with an authoritarian religious sect like the Exclusive Brethren, than by a tiny handful of immigrants.
Perhaps the Herald is overplaying this; perhaps Brash will concentrate on the economy and the health bureaucracy, and will manage to get through one of these speeches without actually scapegoating any sector of New Zealand society. I certainly hope so.
Anyway, there was a Kiwiblog discussion on Google vs China which had its moments. But it bears noting that the Chinese government is hardly the only one keen to control the flow of information to the public. I am quite outraged by the White House clampdown on James Hansen, NASA's most senior climate scientist, who persists in saying things about climate change that the administration would not wish the public to hear.
Last month, Hansen published data indicating that 2005 was the warmest year for at least a century - and was ordered to withdraw it by officials. Since then, a series of directives have seen Hansen's lectures, papers and website postings vetted, and some bizarre exchanges between public affairs officials and journalists seeking access to Hansen. Hansen claims to have been warned of "dire consequences" if he continues to speak frankly.
The Washington Post has a story on the debate over the global warming "tipping point" that also quotes Hansen:
"They're trying to control what's getting out to the public," Hansen said, adding that many of his colleagues are afraid to talk about the issue. "They're not willing to say much, because they've been pressured and they're afraid they'll get into trouble."
Well, let's hear it for a free and vigorous press …
Meanwhile, Stuart Page directed me to an extraordinary story about the contents of Information Operations Roadmap, a 2003 Pentagon report obtained under the US Official Information Act.
The report acknowledges that bogus information generated as part of "psyops" projects is already finding its way onto the computer and TV screens of "much larger audiences, including the American public." But I found this part the most unnerving:
[The document] seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.
"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.
The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.
The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence.
"Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."
And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".
US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".
Consider that for a moment.
The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Newsweek's Palace Revolt story seems exquisitely informed: it backgrounds the battle in the White House between executive power absolutists and those who believed that presidents ought to be constitutionally accountable - a battle that turned loyal troops into whistleblowers.
Tim Cavanaugh has a pungent column on Reason.com about the "good news from Iraq" movement, noting a piece by Bill Crawford in the National Review that, in the now-familiar style, rounds up a bunch of press-release-derived happy tidbits from Iraq:
That's what you've bought with more than $220 billion and 2,000 American lives: a set of process-oriented half-measures so humble they wouldn't have made it into a Brezhnev-era progress report to the Supreme Soviet. War supporters counter that while these achievements may look pathetic to Americans, they're vital to Iraqis. That may or may not be true, but the point is whether this stuff is worth it to Americans. Can any American worthy of the name suggest that public-works boondoggles in a foreign country are worth a red cent or a drop of American blood?
The story isn't that the media ignore the good news out of hatred for President Bush. It's that, just as in the prewar period, the media are doing the president a huge favor. If the good news were regularly circulated, if the American people were daily presented with the idea that this is what success looks like and that teacher training programs are the payoff for a grim toll of blood and treasure, they'd be abandoning the war effort even faster than they are now.
Britain's Mail on Sunday makes whoopee with an updated version of Philippe Sands QC's book Lawless World, which claims, unsurprisingly, that Bush and Blair's public undertaking to go to the UN for a mandate on Iraq was a charade.
The WaPo has graphs demonstrating the extraordinary growth in "pork barrel projects" (that is, otherwise related sweeteners tacked onto US federal legislation) in the past 10 years, and more particularly since 2000, where the number of such legislative favours has more than doubled.
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