The site's moved, kids. If you're still coming to this site directly, you're probably going to the url www.straybulletins.com/LMB/weblog . That's sooo last week.
The new url for Lying Media Bastards is:
www.LyingMediaBastards.com
Thank you.
If the new site gives you trouble, go here for help.
I have heard from several folks that they are having trouble viewing the new site. For some reason, on their system, the right column overlaps the left column. We're working on it, but your input might help out.
If you are having this problem, please leave a comment below, and tell us:
1) what operating system you are using (eg Windows 95, Windows ME, Mac OS X, etc.)?
2) What web browser software are you using (Microsoft Internet Exlorer, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.)?
3) What screen resolution are you using (on Windows systems you can find this out by going to Control Panel, then Display, then Settings. Probaby will be 800x600, or 1024x764)?
If you have a different problem than the one mentioned above, go ahead and describe it in the comments as well.
Thanks.
[edit]
So far, all of the complaints have come from people using Internet Explorer. We'll try to make the new site compatible with that program, but I'd recommend a better browser, Firefox. Not just because you can see my site that way, but because it is a better and easier piece of software. The benefits of Firefox include:
- it's fast
- it blocks most pop-up ads
- it's open source
- it's not Microsoft
- it views the new LMB site just fine
And while I'm sticking it to The (software) Man, let me recommend the program Trillian to anyone who uses any Instant Messenger type program (main benefits: one program to use all IM accounts-- AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, IRC; no ads)
[/edit]
If all goes right, this will be the last (or close to last) posts on this version of Lying Media Bastards.
In a couple days' time, the new LMB site will be open for business. Our redesign is done but for some minor de-glitching, and frankly we'll probably need your input to find out what all of those glitches are.
I'm about to switch over the domain name server, which is some kind of e-signpost which tells your computer exactly where to go when you type in your www's. As I understand it, it takes 2, 3, 6 days or so to get all of the signposts repainted and pointed in the proper direction, so it might take a while before y'all can see the new site.
(I just watched a western, can you tell?)
I'll post the new url later. Well, new to some of you. Officially, this site here is www.straybulletins.com/LMB/weblog/index.html , but my pal John K rigged up some tricky code for me so that lyingmediabastards.com would take you here. But once the internet gets itself sorted out, lyingmediabastards.com will take you straight to our new home.
See y'all on the other side.
While on the topic of rarely discussed topics, here's another great read about a riot in Australia. On Sunday, police chased a young Aborigine boy to his death, and his community rose up. The article describes that specific situation, and then goes wider to discuss the massive problem of anti-Aborigine racism in Australia, a subject which is apparently kept quiet there among the white citizenry (probably like anti-Black or anti-Indian racism here in the States).
I feel kinda odd highlighting that article as "a great read" when it's so damn depressing.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Haiti to put the recent news events there into context. Pretty much all my knowledge about the country comes from this chapter of the book Killing Hope. Long story short, Haiti faced dictatorships from the 50s through the 80s, overthrew the dictator, elected Jean Bertrand-Aristide, a man who seemd to truly care about the country's poor and set about reforming the country as best he could, and was then forced into exile in a military coup. What follows is a little fuzzy to me, but it seems as though the US (who seem to have abetted the coup in the first place) offered to return Aristide to power, if he agreed to a number of US demands. And since then, I've heard nothing positive said about Aristide. Don't know what to make of it.
Fast forward to the present. It seems that gangs of thugs are taking over Hatian cities, claiming that they are anti-Aristide and want to overthrow his government.
So my questions are:
1) What's up with Aristide? Was he truly the compassionate man he originally made himself out to be? Did he turn bad? Is he bad now, or am I just hearing one biased version of events? What do the people of Haiti think about Aristide right now?
2) Are these gangs truly revolutionaries, or are they petty thugs hungry for power?
3) Is the US involved in this at all? That might sound a bit conspiracy-theory to some of y'all, but the US has a long, dark history of interfering in Latin America. It's almost naive to assume that the US has nothing to do with Haiti right now.
4) Is this going to turn into an international incident?
The best answers I've found so far are here and here, and I don't have enough background to gauge their accuracy.
I'd like to research this further, but I just don't have the time at the moment. If someone else wants to dig and report back, that'd be nice.
[update]
Just discovered a Haiti-centric blog, Haiti Pundit, which seems to have all kinds of news, background and links.
[/update]
In response to Bush's claims that Democrats would endanger America's fiscal health, blogger Josh Marshall says:
This is the arsonist in your house telling you that stranger outside with the hose can't be trusted.
[rimshot]
Are More Bidders Waiting to Pounce?- about the biggest news story of the moment, the potential Disney-Comcast merger. It would create the largest media company in the world, beating out AOL-Time Warner (well, I guess it's just called Time Warner now). Disney refused Comcast's $47 billion-ish bid, more or less demanding another $7 billion. Will Comcast agree? And if they don't, asks this article, how are other media outlets likely to react? Does a good job of displaying the complicated chess moves of this industry.
Mega Media Mergers: How Dangerous?- from that leftist rag "Business Week," another examination of the Disney-Comcast thing, but with a broader view of the effects of media oligopolies. I like their quote on the subject from John McCain, "At some point, you'll have many voices -- and one ventriloquist."
British government considering dismantling BBC- yipes! The BBC has always managed to do some pretty good, impartial news reporting, despite the fact that it is fully funded by the British government. But the Blair regime is pissed at the way that the BBC opposed the Iraq war and exposed scandal within the administration. In the wake of the whitewashing Hutton report, which shifts blame of Iraq-intelligence-related scandal from Downing Street to the BBC, the Blair government is pondering fragmenting the BBC into several regional media outlets, stripping away some of its funding, and giving a government watchdog power to control final BBC content. Not good.
Miller Time (Again)- followup article to last week's Now They Tell US, criticizing the pre-Iraq war news media. This particular article focuses on NYT reporter Judith Miller, who parroted many false WMD claims from the shady Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi defectors. Oddly, Miller's definition of "investigative journalism" seems to be "to report what people in power think about a situation" rather than reporting about the situation itself.
Wake-Up Time- nice piece by a couple of liberal/progressives who outline some simple ways that journalists can take back the power that they relinquished to the White House post-9/11.
Echo Effect: A New Generation Of Media Users, Ad Distrusters- results of a poll of Americans ages 12-17 (irritatingly dubbed by big business "Echo Boomers". They're children of Baby Boomers, an "echo" of the "boom", get it?) by a market research firm about their attitudes towards media and life. And to my delight, it finds that "82% are skeptical about the accuracy of the news media" and that less than a third don't trust any form of advertising (well, they say they don't, anyway). Right on, my young brothers and sisters.
Fairly Creative and Somewhat Mean Valentines
Print em out, give em to your sweetie and/or that ass who dumped you by email.
The numbers are surely changing as I type this, but between Thursday morning and Saturday morning, 665 homosexual couples have gotten married across the U.S., often in flagrant violation of the law.
This rocks.
It's part of the most socially benign form of civil disobedience: peacefully breaking an unjust law to oppose it and point out how ridiculous it is. The anti-gay-marriage laws are stupid, no one's getting hurt in this mass protest, and lots of hugging, kissing, and long loving gazes are taking place.
On top of that, this is the first mass activism I have seen by the gay community in quite some time.
I am ambivalent on the issue of gay marriage only because I am ambivalent on the issue of marriage. Is it really a good idea? Seems to me that since all humans change over time, that very few pairs of humans are going to remain in love and compatible to death do they part. But if you want to give it a shot, I say go for it.
But I fervently reject the underlying argument against gay marriage, which is essentially that homosexuals are less than human and therefore do not deserve the same rights, respect or treatment of "real" humans. My brother predicts that one day we'll look back on this the way we look back with disgust and bewilderment at the Jim Crow South. I think he might be right.
Of course, the issue of gay marriage has little to do with marriage, no matter what the conservatives tell you. It's about feelings about homosexuality, feelings about homosexual sex, gender roles, and a particular interpretation of Judeo-Christian texts. I could elaborate, but I think y'all know the steps to this song and dance.
My ony addition is that the Bible says a lot of things, and that some people would read the whole thing and decide to focus their life's work on flogging the passage condeming gay sex says more about the traits of the person who selected those issues than about the religion. While there are surely some occasions where a person might adopt an anti-gay agenda because they read a passage in the Bible, but I imagine there are many more who hate gays and find personal strength and justification in those few Bible passages. And as far as I'm concerned, those people can fuck right off.
Conservatives have begun (continued?) to bash away at John Kerry in the oddest of ways: trying to connect him to Jane Fonda. I'm sure that plenty of you don't understand why they'd do that, and that's why I think that this tactic is destined to fail.
During the Vietnam (Indochina) war(s), actress Jane Fonda was a vocal opponent of the US invasion, and in her most outrageous action, she visited North Vietnam in 1972 and spoke out against the US and in favor of the North Vietnamese cause. She has since publicly apologized several times, maybe sincerely, maybe not, I don't know. It seems to me that the public considered her a traitor or an idiot.
But modern anger against her runs deep (if not that wide). Whenever I would take my mother to a doctor's appointment, there was always an aging, faded Buick in the parking lot with matching front and back bumper stickers that read: I'm Not Fonda Hanoi Jane. And I kid you not, just this morning as I drove around thinking about this issue, I saw a pick-up truck with the bumper sticker: Boycott Jane Fonda - American Traitor Bitch.
Conservatives have found a and spread a photograph of an 1970 anti-war rally featuring Jane Fonda in the foreground, with someone who is probably John Kerry about three or four rows behind her and off to one side.
See, see! John Kerry's a traitor just like Jane Fonda.
Taking it one step further, they're also distributing a fake, photoshopped picture of Fonda and Kerry sharing a podium together, allegedly at an anti-war rally. As that link shows, the photo was doctored, taken from a solo shot of Kerry at a podium, and with a photo of Fonda pasted in.
Sigh. A lot of people are going to be taken in by that.
The point is to highlight John Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam war after he returned from duty there, in an attempt to counter his "military cred."
One problem with the specific strategy: people my age and younger think of Jane Fonda as that 80s workout video chick, not as some traitor from the Age of Aquarius. We're likely to think that Kerry and Fonda are speaking out at some sort of protest about aerobics or something, leaving said military cred intact.
The other Kerry attack is a fairly unsubstantiated report from King of the Rumormongers Matt Drudge, which claims that Kerry had an affair. Maybe that story has some backing, maybe not, maybe it'll take off, maybe it won't, but I do appreciate this article pre-empitvely mocking journalists who might choose to pretend that this rumor is an important story.
I don't put much faith in polls, but these numbers made me feel good inside.*
In a random nationwide survey, 1003 adults were asked this question (among many others):
Before the war began, do you think the George W. Bush administration did or did not intentionally exaggerate its evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
"Yes, they did exaggerate"- 54%
"No, they did not exaggerate"- 42%
(margin of error +/-3%)
There're a lot of other comforting numbers in there, about declining support for and trust in President Bush, but that set above is what is most meaningful to me. The White House and their trained parrots in the media have been telling a bunch of warmongering lies and half-truths about Iraq for almost two years now, and the public always bought it. Now, finally it seems like my fellow Americans are getting their skepticism back. These numbers could be inaccurate, and they could always swing back the other way with the proper media twist, but for now, I feel kind of at peace.
Yay, truth.
*washingtonpost.com has just instituted mandatory (free) registration to see articles on their website. If you want to see this piece, you've got to register with them and give them far too much personal info. I suggest lying.
What Causes Rape? Anatomy of a rape culture is a very good post over at Alas, A Blog. It looks at the three key concepts/themes/attitudes in American culture that shape men in such a way that some feel driven to rape, or that raping women (or men for that matter) is not a big deal.
I'm trying to describe the article so that it doesn't sound as though the author is exonerating men of responsibility for their actions, because he isn't. Maybe I can make an analogy that the author "blames" culture for some men committing rape in a similar way you can "blame" culture for some women becoming bulimic. The beliefs and values of the culture at large lead some people to feel that these pathological actions are both necessary and acceptable, when they're not.
And, since the Alas blog is such a debate/discussion-oriented site, you can already see plenty of discourse in the comments. Join in, or comment here, either way.
Male readers, you should definitely go read it, as I think many men like to ignore the problem and pretend it isn't there. And like the old ACT UP slogan goes, "Silence = Death".
I really don't care much about the Bush-National Guard-AWOL story. We already know that Bush is a reckless liar who's gotten by on Daddy's money and connections, so the facts of this case don't interest me. But since it's becoming a media scandal that could take him down a few pegs in the polls, and maybe inform voters that he is a lying asshole, I have to give the investigation my support.
Calpundit seems ahead of the game in this story. If you want details, go check him out.
To any conservative readers who will accuse me of mudslinging or dirty politics, you might have a point. But this isn't about me wanting "my side" to win (I'm not a Democrat anyway). I truly believe the facts back me up when I say that Bush as president is doing incredible damage to the United States, and to the rest of the world. If reporters have to veer from covering the issues to digging through Bush's sordid past to get his ass thrown out of office, so be it.
And in related news, oft-cynical columnist Geov Parrish truly believes that Bush is going to lose this election. Why? Because this election won't be about Bush vs. Democratic Contender X, but Bush vs. Bush. In 2000, he was a down-home, straight-talkin', charming conservative that no one knew much about. In 2004, his media-clumsy self is going to be on TV every day, trying to stumble through explanations of why he attacked an unarmed country, lost 2 million jobs, and drove the American economy into the crapper (yes, I'm aware that the idea that the president controls the job market or economy is arguable, but tell that to the voters). Don't know if I agree with Geov's optimism, but he makes a good case.
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on Bush's Meet the Press appearance. It's a video clip of the whole segment, Quicktime format.
[thanks again to Oliver]
[update]
That link appears to have expired. I think it was personally captured video posted to a personal website to show to friends, and I guess they got tired of all these strangers visiting a non-public part of their site. But you can still view the clip (at least for now) at TheDailyShow.com and click on "Meet the Prez".
[/update]
