Rerouting around censorship

Found in Yahoo Answers: a private school starts banning books. One student takes the law in her own hands and starts her own library:

I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we’re not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well… I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality.

The story is three years old, but still inspiring to see somebody involved enough not to take censorship laying down. If the school library refuses to stock certain books because they’re anti-Christian, start your own library. Pretty cool.

Google: threat or menace

It’s a bit self serving, but this Torrentfreak article about Google censorship does raise a genuine concern about its power as the world’s number one search engine:

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

If you’re not on Google, you’re effectively invisible on the internet. Google therefore has an inordinate amount of power, yet barely any accountability. As a commercial organisation, their only responsibility is to their bottom line, fluff about “not being evil” notwithstanding, Yet having say a nationalised version of Google would not fill me with confidence either. Google is one of the ‘net’s natural chokepoints and what we need to get if we want to keep the internet free is a decentralised Google. Think what might have happened had Google censored the news of the Egyptian revolution.

A tale of two kinds of victims

Charles and Camilla shocked at public anger aimed at them

A report about the attack by rioters on the car carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall will be completed by Friday, the home secretary has said.

A victim of police brutality carried away by two London cops

No report on the attack by police on peaceful protesters will be completed by Friday, nor is any promised by the home secretary. The home secretary is however of the opinion that organised thugs infiltrated the protests.

In either case the violence perpetruated by the ruling classes on students and young people — ending of EMA grants, the raise in tuition fees — remains invisible, part of the “peaceful democratic process”.

Fear the demon teenager

Imagine if newspapers consistently stereotyped any other group this way:

The portrayal of teenage boys as “yobs” in the media has made the boys wary of other teenagers, according to new research.

Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was “yobs” (591 times), followed by “thugs” (254 times), “sick” (119 times) and “feral” (96 times).

Other terms often used included “hoodie”, “louts”, “heartless”, “evil” “frightening”, “scum”, “monsters”, “inhuman” and “threatening”.

The research – commissioned by Women in Journalism – showed the best chance a teenager had of receiving sympathetic coverage was if they died.

“We found some news coverage where teen boys were described in glowing terms – ‘model student’, ‘angel’, ‘altar boy’ or ‘every mother’s perfect son’,” the research concluded, “but sadly these were reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and untimely death.”

At the same time a survey of nearly 1,000 teenage boys found 85 per cent believed newspapers portray them in a bad light.

Media demonisation of youths is not new of course; it’s an old and venerable tradition with British tabloids. Mods/rockers, punks, hip-hop gangstas: every new subculture has been demonised in turn. But there’s also our media created obsession with safety: we cocoon our kids until they hit puberyt and then suddenly they’re all purse snatching knife criming yobbos: two sides of the same coin. Fear the other kids, keep our own safe at home. I’d hate to be a teenager right now, to be harassed and hassled everywhere I went just for being a teenager, having to be controlled all the time.

And teenagers are nearly powerless in our society as well. There is no Teenage Defense League after all, no real political consciousness of teenagers as an interest group. Most of them can’t even vote, so there’s nothing in it for politicians to cater for them. As the article goes on to mention:

The research found that – for all the coverage of teenage issues – the boys’ voices themselves were rarely heard in newspapers. Fewer than one in 10 articles about young people actually quoted young people or included their perspectives in the debate.

Fiona Bawden, the WiJ committee member who presented the research at the British Library, said: “When a photo of a group of perfectly ordinary lads standing around wearing hooded tops has become visual shorthand for urban menace, or even the breakdown of society, it’s clear teenage boys have a serious image problem.

It’s not surprising that teenagers have no voice in the newspapers: they don’t buy the papers, the papers’ advertisers are not interested in their business and therefore they are safe to be demonised. The market in action.

Holland is becoming a human rights pariah

That’s the conclusion an Amnesty International led symposium reached last Friday, due to our immigration policies and especially the detention of socalled illegal immigrants. Between eight and ten thousand immigrants are jailed each year without having comitted a crime and they stay there on average some 97 days, with twenty percent being in prison for half a year or longer. These are people who have applied for asylum or leave to remain but were rejected and/or who didn’t have the right kind of documents and I.D. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that many of those jailed will leave prison without being either deported or leave to remain, but are just thrown out on the streets again, to be jailed again the next time the police taks to them.

Once in prison you can’t do anything but sit in your cell. Neither work nor study is allowed, contact with the outside world is limited and there is little to no organised activity within prison. In some cases the detention centre is worse than a regular prison is ever allowed to be, which means murderers and rapists are treated better than people whose only fault was to not have the right kind of papers.

The criticism isn’t new, as it’s largely unchanged from the criticism in the 2008 Amnesty International report on migrant detention in the Netherlands (PDF). What’s worrying is that the current government is much more hardlined on migration, actually planning to make not having valid papers a crime. It also wants to “intensify” deportion policies i.e. wants to deport more people more often. Already the government tried to deport Iraki Chritians depsite having recieved a letter from the European Court of Human Rights forbidding this. Incidently the responsible minister, Gerd Leers, was once mayor of Maastricht but had to leave his post because of alleged corruption — nothing proven, but enough smoke that the city council was afraid to find fire and sacked him.

But that’s just a coincidence. It doesn’t matter whether Leers is corrupt or not, because we’ve seen the immigration policies of successive governments in the Netherlands only get worse during the past decade. For a certain part of the electorate, being tough on immigration is a good thing and whether or not the methods use are illegal or immortal is not important. With the PVV feeding the flames of xenophobia (loudly drumming on their desks during the emergency debate about the deportation of those Iraqi refugees) and our rightwing minority government dependent on their support, I expect things will be getting worser still. There certainly doesn’t seem to have been any great rush in improving migrant detention after the publication of Amnesty’s first report two years ago…