Cross-posted from Pando Daily:
Pando Daily: Russian propagandists get caught smearing U.S. but it totally doesn’t matter
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Cross-posted from Pando Daily:
Everyone deploys propaganda during wartime, but people know more about their enemy’s lies than their own government’s. Which is why you probably know that comrades who fell out of favor in the Soviet Union got their faces erased from official photos, but perhaps not that the famous newsreel of Hitler doing a silly dance to celebrate the defeat of France was faked by the Allies, or that a U.S. Marines psy-ops team choreographed the group of supposedly random Iraqis who supposedly spontaneously pulled down Saddam’s statue in 2003.
The latest example of propagandists behaving badly (i.e., getting caught) concerns a photo that Russian media presented as proof that American mercenaries from the company formerly known as Blackwater are in Ukraine, backing the new post-coup Ukrainian government in Kiev.
In fact, it appears that the image of heavily armed goons actually depicts police or security contractors (more on that below) carrying automatic assault rifles on the streets of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina struck the city in 2005.
Like a certain enigma wrapped in a whatever, layering makes this story fascinating.
First there’s Internet as double-edged sword. The Russians found the Katrina photo online. Here it is:
To turn Katrina-era New Orelans into eastern Ukraine under U.S. thug occupation, shirt insignias were changed to what the German national tabloid newspaper Bild am Sonntag said were mercs working for Academi, corporate heir to the infamous Blackwater security firm.
Also, that Wendy’s had to go:
What the Web giveth it taketh away, and so bloggers located the original source material, debunking the “proof.”
“The Internet is a wonderful thing, and eventually people can find out where photographs came from,” Daniel Baer, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe told The Los Angeles Times.
Yes they can and yes they did. Baer continued: “The allegations that there are somehow ‘U.S mercenaries’ operating in Ukraine are false.” Well, maybe. One thing about propaganda is, in order for it to be effective, it has to hit close to some bigger truth — not exactly The truth — or no one will buy it. The truth is, the United States is providing support, both overt and covert, to the new government of rump Ukraine.
It’s like Hitler’s dance. People believed it because they thought he was nuts.
People all over the world may or may not believe that the U.S. has sent rent-a-goons to Ukraine. That said, it’s hardly beyond the American government to sic private contractors on foreign civilians, or blow kids up with drones, or crawl in bed with sketchy regimes. So the mud sticks, at least a little — and, because we’re on their side, reduces the credibility of Ukraine-minus-Crimea.
The underlying politics are even more convoluted and fascinating.
In their search for imagery that would smear their Ukrainian foes as pawns of the same mooks who shot up a square full of Iraqi civilians for the hell of it — and an American government happy to let them off the hook — Russian propagandists inadvertently date-checked the U.S. government’s appalling response to Hurricane Katrina, a debacle epitomized by The Onion headline: “Officials Uncertain Whether to Save or Shoot Victims.” Oh, the irony: it’s entirely possible that the men in the photo really did work for Blackwater.
A little more peeling:
Russia got caught faking “U.S. Mercenaries in Ukraine,” only to remind the world that “U.S. Doesn’t Care About Americans Unless They’re Not Black and Not Poor.” Katrina, of course, has nothing to do with Ukraine. But here’s the thing about that doctored “Ukraine” photo: It still shows goons. Goons somewhere they ought not to have been, intimidating innocent people.
So we wind up with a draw. We get to laugh at the clumsy propagandists. They convince more people that we’re scum, and that the Ukrainian government is guilty by association.
Pando: Media shitstorms are now even shittier. Thanks, Internet
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Cross-posted from Pando Daily:
Finding yourself in the vortex of a media firestorm has never been fun. Every White House intern is a sloppy encounter away from triggering a horde of reporters determined to unearth your elementary school report card, your driver’s license photo and the real reason Tori Spelling didn’t invite you to her party.
The Internet is making it even worse.
Ask Donald Sterling.
Sterling has plenty on his plate. Exposed as a racist of the troglodyte variety we assumed went extinct with the John Birch Society (as opposed to the new, improved Obama-is-Kenyan genus), the disgraced NBA owner has been summoned to a June 3rd hearing whose highlights will include a vote to determine whether to strip him of his-but-maybe-not-for-long Los Angeles Clippers. The 80-year-old Sterling’s 31-year-old ex-girlfriend V. Stiviano is due on Dr. Phil Wednesday. (Adding to the weirdness, someone tried to break into Stiviano’s house last night.)
Due to vast keyword-searchable archives of public data, however, sleazy (and relatively trivial) deeds that never would have seen the light of day are emerging as fast as eager journalists can summon up Boolean search phrases — and items that would have elicited yawns from old-school editors are breaking big. Which is why Sterling is watching reputation-scorching fires burst out faster than dry tinder in drought-stricken San Diego County.
From its grandiose title and presentation, “Divorce, death and Donald Sterling’s boyhood home: A USA TODAY Sports investigation finds a 30-year secret in a Los Angeles neighborhood” promises ginormous, must-read dish — in all honesty, I was hoping/fearing that the Gannett-owned hotel paper had found dead babies in the Golden State’s currently most notorious bigot’s manse.
What this bait-and-switch offers instead is something highly amusing — if you stop to think about it, but that would interfere with the witch-burning fun — though not particularly scandalous: a man worth $1.9 billion cheats on his property taxes.
To the tune of roughly 11 grand a year.
USA Today’s Josh Peter explains:
“California law requires the death of a homeowner to be reported to the county assessor — a step that triggers a reassessment of the property at market value and typically a property tax increase. The responsibility to report the death falls upon the surviving spouse or partner, executor of the will, administrator of the estate or the successor trustee of the trust. The report must be made within 150 days of the death to avoid penalties, according to the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office.”
To avoid a reassessment that would result in a higher tax rate, Sterling, it appears, issues annual money orders to Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector’s office for two modest houses he inherited from his mother and grandmother, both of whom died decades ago, under the dead women’s names. As far as Peter can tell, their estates never went to probate.
“In 2013, the property tax for Sterling’s boyhood home was $603.66; the tax for the property listed in his mother’s name was $1,545.11. Based on their current market value, the combined annual taxes would be at least $13,000.”
Net annual savings: “at least” $10851.23.
The issue here is moral: Sterling’s alleged property tax fraud costs hurts other, law-abiding, Angelenos — the poorest of whom pay the highest rates. California is just coming out of nearly a decade of serious budget problems; billionaires who don’t pay their (tiny) fair share aren’t helping.
“This is just the first wave.” Nancy Armour writes, also in USA Today. “Reporters across the country have been combing through Sterling’s life and business since NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned the Clippers owner for life April 29 for the derogatory and racially insensitive comments he made to a girlfriend, V. Stiviano. What else might they find? And who else could be caught up in it?” She answers her own question: “His sister, perhaps. Or one of his children. Or the wife he claims to be so sorry for hurting.”
Is it a big deal? To be spectacularly wealthy is almost always to have skeletons in your fiscal closet — and often to dazzle and amaze with your cheapness. Even in the context of the sordid racist and sexual revelations about Donald Sterling, skipping out on property taxes is more of a footnote to an endnote than a scandal.
But it sure is easy to find out about. Not to mention, fun to read.
[illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]
Pando: Instagram surrenders to cartoon toplessness: Will cartoon full frontage (or worse) be next? [NSFW?]
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Cross-posted from Pando Daily:
The Daily Dot reports:
“On Friday, Vogue’s creative director Grace Coddington posted her first photo [sic] to Instagram: a nude cartoon selfie of her sitting in a beach chair. It was a promotional photo for the Paddle8 ‘No Clothes‘ auction, but it apparently violated Instagram’s terms of service, which prohibit nudity. On Saturday, her account was removed.”
Artist Anna Gensler, the photographer Petra Collins and Rihanna have also had direct or indirect run-ins with Instagram over various depictions of nudity, including Gensler’s drawings of gross dudes.
Here’s the drawing:
Following the outcry, Instagram backed down. Yay for cartoon boobs and cartoon dot nipples!
But now that we have Instagram back on its heels, as it were, I wonder — as a boundary-pushing artist myself — whether we can push transgressive/obscene/nude cartoon art even further:
Pando: Russians censor official’s pro-censorship brainfart
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Cross-posted from Pando Daily:
Maksim Ksendzov had a shitty weekend.
The Russian official, who threatened to block social media sites like Twitter has been publicly dressed down by his boss as well as the prime minister, reports state-owned RT television.
“Based on the conclusions of the commission that carried out the official investigation against Deputy Head of Roskomnadzor Maksim Ksendzov, it has been decided to apply a disciplinary sanction,” the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media said in a statement.
Chair without armrests? Non-dairy creamer? Forced to tweet Gulag jokes? No word on the exact nature of said disciplinary sanction.
As if being hung out to dry in front of the entire Internet didn’t suck enough, Prime Minister/Putin Handpuppet Dmitry Medvedev posted the following on Facebook: “As an active user of social networks, I hold that the Russian laws must be observed by everyone – the networks and the users alike. But certain civil servants responsible for the development of the industry must sometimes turn their brains on and give no interviews that announce the shutdown of social networks.”
Pando Daily Has Hired Me
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Pando Daily, a web publication that offers technology news, analysis, and commentary, with a focus on Silicon Valley, has hired me as a full-time staff cartoonist and writer.
I will be drawing editorial cartoons, spot illustrations and comix journalism, as well as writing both short-form as well as feature-length commentary and journalism about politics, tech and the intersection between politics and tech — in other words, tech as politics. Whatever feels smart and right; we’ll do it.
This is exciting.
Having witnessed the disintegration of print media since before there was an Internet, mostly due to terrible management decisions, I’m thrilled to join a news organization that is forward-looking, gutsy and smart. It says a lot about Pando’s understanding of the value of visual media that, while newspapers and magazines fire cartoonists, they’re hiring them. This will be first full-time job as a cartoonist, and I couldn’t be happier.
Editorial cartooning has been dying/getting killed, so my hiring — coupled with that of Matt Bors at Medium last year — points the way to a possible way out of the print newspaper trap. Lots of websites that can obviously afford to hire writers — Salon, Slate, HuffPo, etc. — can easily afford to take on cartoonists…and they should, because cartoons are popular online, and provide a type of commentary no other medium can replicate.
All you have to do to see that this is a good fit is to spend a few minutes reading stories at Pando. They do what I care about: go after the truth, and kick ass.
If you’re a fan of my syndicated political cartoons and columns, don’t worry — those will go on. I will also continue my cartoons and blog for The Los Angeles Times. I will continue to work on new book projects, including international conflict reporting.
Thanks for supporting me and my work.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Censor Google
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Last week’s EU court ruling ordering Google and other search engines (there are other search engines?) to process requests from European citizens to erase links to material about them is being criticized by techno-libertarians. Allowing people to clean up what has become the dreaded Permanent Record That Will Follow You the Rest of Your Life, they complain, creates an onerous inconvenience to tech companies, amounts to censorship, and infringes upon the free flow of information on the Internet.
Even if those concerns were valid — and they’re not — I’d agree with the European Court of Justice’s unappealable, final verdict in the case of Mario Costeja González, a Spanish national who asked that a Google link to a property foreclosure ought to be deleted since the debt had since been paid off and the matter has been resolved. He did not request, nor did the court rule, that the legal record itself, which dated back to 1998, be expunged from cyberspace — merely that he ought not to suffer shame or embarrassment for his former financial difficulties every time an acquaintance or potential employer types his name into a browser, for the remainder of his time on earth, and beyond.
Offline, the notion that people deserve a fresh start is not a radical concept; in the United States, even unpaid debts vanish from your credit report after seven years. So much stuff online is factually unreliable that “according to the Internet” is a joke. There are smears spread by angry ex-lovers, political enemies, bullies and other random sociopaths. The right to eliminate such material from search results is long overdue. It’s also not without cyber-precedent: after refusing to moderate comments by “reviewers,” many of whom had not read the books in question, Amazon now removes erroneous comments.
The ruling only affects Europe. But Congress should also introduce the U.S. Internet to the joys of forgetting. Obviously, obvious lies ought to be deleted: just last week, conservative bloggers spread the meme that I had “made fun of” the Americans killed in Benghazi. I didn’t; not even close. Google can’t stop right-wingers from lying about me, but it would sure be nice of them to stop linking to those lies.
But I’d go further. Lots of information is accurate yet ought to stay hidden. An unretouched nude photo is basically “true,” but should it be made public without your consent?
We Americans are rightly chastised for our lack of historical memory, yet society benefits enormously from the flip side of our forgetfulness — our ability to outgrow the shame of our mistakes in order to reinvent ourselves.
“More and more Internet users want a little of the ephemerality and the forgetfulness of predigital days,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute, said after the EU court issued its decision. Whether your youthful indiscretions include drunk driving or you had an affair with your boss as an intern, everyone deserves a second chance, a fresh start. “If you’re always tied to the past, it’s difficult to grow, to change,” Mayer-Schönberger notes. “Do we want to go into a world where we largely undo forgetting?”
Ah, but what of poor Google? “Search engine companies now face a potential avalanche of requests for redaction,” Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, fretted in a New York Times op/ed.
Maybe. So what?
Unemployment, even among STEM majors, is high. Tech companies have been almost criminally impecunious, hiring a small fraction of the number of employees needed to get the economy moving again, not to mention provide decent customer service.
Google has fewer employees than a minor GM parts supplier.
Would it really be so terrible for Google to hire 10,000 American workers to process link deletion requests? So what if lawyers make more money? They buy, they spend; everything trickles down, right? Google is worth more than Great Britain. It’s not like they can’t afford it.
Onerous? Google has a space program. It is mapping every curb and bump on America’s 4 million miles of roads.
They’re smart. They can figure this out.
“In the United States, the court’s ruling would clash with the First Amendment,” the Times reported with an unwarranted level of certitude. But I don’t see how. The First Amendment prohibits censorship by the government. Google isn’t a government agency — it’s a publisher.
This is what the EU story is really about, what makes it important. In order to avoid legal liability for, among other things, linking to libelous content, Google, Bing and other search engines have always maintained that they are neutral “platforms.” As Zittrain says, “Data is data.” But it’s not.
Google currently enjoys the liberal regulatory regime of a truly neutral communications platform, like the Postal Service and a phone company. Because what people choose to write in a letter or say on the phone is beyond anyone’s control, it would be unreasonable to blame the USPS or AT&T for what gets written or said (though the NSA would like to change that).
Google-as-platform is, and always was, a ridiculous fiction. Search results, Google claims, are objective. What comes up first, second and so on isn’t up to them. It’s just algorithms. Data is data. The thing is, algorithms are codes. Computer programs. They’re programmed by people. By definition, coders decide.
Algorithms are not, cannot be, and never will be, “objective.”
That’s just common sense. But we also have history. We know for a fact that Google manipulates searches, tweaking their oh-so-objective algorithms when they cough up results they don’t like. For example, they downgrade duplicated content — say, the same essay cut-and-pasted across multiple blogs. They sanction websites that try to game the system for higher Google listings by using keywords that are popular (sex, girls, cats) but unrelated to the accompanying content.
They censor. Which makes them a publisher.
You probably agree with a lot of Google’s censorship — kiddie porn, for example — but it’s still censorship. Deciding that some things won’t get in is the main thing a publisher does. Google is a publisher, not a platform. This real-world truth will eventually be affirmed by American courts, exposing Google not only to libel lawsuits but also to claims by owners of intellectual property (I’m talking to you, newspapers and magazines) that they are illegally profiting by selling ads next to the relevant URLs.
Although the right to censor search results that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” (the words of the EU ruling) would prevent, say, the gossip site TMZ from digging up dirt on celebrities, there would also be a salutary effect upon the free exchange of information online.
In a well-moderated comments section, censorship of trolls elevates the level of dialogue and encourages people who might otherwise remain silent due to their fear of being targeted for online reputation to participate. A Google that purges inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant items would be a better Google.
(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Major News Monday
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I will have major (positive) news Monday. Watch this space at approximately 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern time.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: CaliCourts.com
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Equal justice under the law. That’s the promise American courts make to plaintiffs and defendants alike. But year after year of budget austerity has forced California’s court system to slash its services so deeply that it has made a mockery of that sacred pledge.
Maura Dolan reports that “recession-driven cutbacks in California’s huge court system have produced long lines and short tempers at courthouses throughout the state. Civil cases are facing growing delays in getting to trial, and court closures have forced residents in some counties to drive several hours for an appearance.”
Backups in the courts are affecting Californians’ love lives: “Clerks in Contra Costa County said they have received complaints from people who divorced and wanted to remarry but couldn’t because clerks had not yet processed the paperwork for judges’ signatures.”
Every cloud has a silver lining. Because so many courthouses have closed, some Californians are automatically getting exempted from jury duty: “In San Bernardino County, the Superior Court has stopped summoning jurors from Needles, making the guarantee of a jury of one’s peers elusive. Because of court closures in the High Desert, a trip to court from Needles can take some residents 3-1/2 hours.”
But it’s still a damned dark cloud.
“We are really on the borderline of a constitutional crisis,” Marsha Slough, San Bernardino County’s presiding judge says. “We have victims who want to give up because they don’t want to testify in criminal trials because of the driving distances and costs.”
Whether you’re fighting a traffic ticket, fending off a neighbor over a property dispute or waiting for a divorce, everyone winds up in court sooner rather than later. And contrary to what conservatives keep saying, starving government institutions of cash doesn’t make them leaner and meaner — it makes them broken and, well, mean, but not in a good way (viz, court employees report that fistfights among frustrated citizens waiting in long lines are a common occurrence…and the extra assaults just cause even more backups in the courts!).
We need a better way. Not a bigger budget — that would solve the problem and reduce unemployment.
No, what we need is to automate the court system! There are, after all, algorithm-based lie detectors that determine whether you’re telling the truth by analyzing a scan of your face. Since California’s courts handle millions of cases each year, a huge database of precedents can be uploaded and used as a basis to help determine the outcome of new and future matters. And we already know from last year’s trouble-free launch of Obamacare that the Internet is the perfect tool for replacing old-fashioned human-based bureaucracies.
What could go wrong?
