What do Australia, Brazil, India, the United States and Britain have in common? This week, Google named each of these nations among the list of countries that most often contact it with requests for content removal and user data. Google's disclosure is a bold step towards quantifying this trend. Whether it leads to greater protection of user privacy and free expression on the Internet will depend on the policies that guide the companies' responses to these government requests. But for now this move should prompt other companies to consider how to be more transparent about the censorship restrictions they face.
What is college supposed to be about? Back in my day, younguns, many of us hoped it would be about discovering of an intellectual 'real world' beyond the borders of our (mainstream media mediated) conventional ideas. Even now, I'm sure for a few freshpeople that is part of what they hope their college academic experience will provide them.
But that's not how it generally works out. Most professors care almost exclusively about tenure and the academic mole hill, and besides, they fear where things might go if they did their duty to nurture or even fucking provoke a 'worldly' awareness (however unsettling) in their students. So they think and act 'by the book', keeping their ears to the mainstream world and listening for instructions on which thoughts win points there and which are over the line. Boring.
These profs, of course, have long been intimidated into silence or at best muddled concern over the actions of America's number one ally Israel, while happily railing on the evils of official U.S. enemies Iran, 'the Taliban', Sudan, and, earlier, Serbia, Saddam, and the Soviets.
Nonetheless, Israel's razing of Gaza last January compelled UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson to rashly provoke his 'sociology and globalization' students with an e-mailed photographic comparison of the Gaza and Warsaw ghettoes. Over the line.
Two of his 80 students complained, saying the Jewish professor was anti-Semitic. Because criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and because comparisons between barbed-wire-enclosed ghettoes - no one in or out enforced with deadly force - created by Nazi-era Germany and GWOT-era Israel are anti-Semitic.
This is not about the people running this blog. It's about: do (would) bloggers have a different relationship with the public from other politicians, can boggistas become politicians, can politicians become bloggers, will Obama continue the direct connection to the public that his blog has now?, Do you already write as if every word will be screened by a voting public?, does that make better thinkers?, writers?, even, better people?
Thats it, all I wanted was to ask the questions, set some goals and throw out some thoughts I had.
Amnesty International reported yesterday that China is the world's top executioner. From ITN News in the UK:
But as with everything else in life, there are unseen ties that link China's use of the death penalty with the United States' use of torture in conducting the "war on terror".
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