Self-Censorship

Friends of the CBC are fighting back on the Harper Regime's political interference with a very clever ad, which also serves as a quick summary of this government's crimes against democracy.




While the group has the dough to pay for broadcast, the CBC won't air them.

A new ad campaign to “Free the CBC” from political interference will not air on the public broadcaster’s programs, say representatives from the non-profit media watchdog group that created the commercials.

“I’m a little surprised and disappointed that they wouldn’t take our money for the ads,” said Friends of Canadian Broadcasting spokesperson Ian Morrison. “It proves our point a little bit about the nature of the problem.”

I'd agree with Mr Morrison there.

Or, as William Burroughs put it: 'A functioning police state needs no police.'

Canadians don't want to see the government meddle with our CBC either.

Morrison adds that results from a recent Nanos poll – also released Monday – show that Canadians care about the CBC and its independence from government. In an online survey of 1,000 Canadians, respondents were asked about their views on government’s intentions to “take direct control of the wages and working conditions of all CBC employees.” The majority — 81 per cent — said the CBC should remain independent from government while 12 per cent said they agreed with the government’s intentions. The remaining respondents were unsure where they stood on the issue.

Shame on you, CBC.

So, where's the CONspiracy? Has #TGDN gone global or delusional?

#TGDN = Twitter Gulag Defense Network.

In case you don't gaze towards the Excited States of America much these days, or don't tweet, this little right-wing nutjob conspiracy hoohaw might have not caught your attention.

From here:

Twitter makes it easy to report accounts for spam. When enough users report an account, it automatically gets suspended. Some users abuse this feature by organizing a group to report or “spam-block” a single account in order to get it suspended.

Conservatives created the “Twitter Gulag Defense Network” or #TGDN to stop spam-blocking attacks. Aware that accounts with more followers are less likely to get suspended, they mutually followed anyone else using #TGDN. Now that their group is organized and members are protected, they have begun targeted spam-blocking of progressive accounts, exactly what their group was created to oppose. Ironic.

Bloggers at LGF have been diligently following this phenomena and its permutations. Many have posted about the various Hatriots and other right-wing, firearm-fetishizing nutjobs who are involved.

One of my twitter friends, @fem_progress, drew my attention to this item:

A little known policy slips quietly under the radar in January 2012 as our friends at Twitter announce they will censor tweets, if a country’s government requests them to do so. A year later, Australia becomes the first modern democracy to identify, filter and ban free speech whilst not in a state of War.

In recent weeks, the censoring of tweets by Australian conservatives, or, indeed anyone who dares to either engage in political debate or offer opinion on the ruling Labor-Green alliance, has become so pervasive many have thought it was a bug with Twitter. You can read Twitter’s well hidden censorship policy here.

But now I can reveal that Twitter is actively censoring Australian tweets at the direct request of the government.

It sounds like the rantings of disgruntled Australian RWNJs and neo-cons, but if that Twitter policy does indeed exist, it could be deployed in accordance with the whims of a tinpot dictator like PMSHithead, at the request of his PMO/Politburo, to censor progressive or anti-Harper conservative tweets.

So, if this Aussie idiot has stumbled upon a MASSIVE ploy by his government, why hasn't that happened in Canada yet?  Critics of the Harper regime have certainly been quite vociferous in their excoriation of CPC electoral fraud, its corruption, its censorship of scientists and other public servants, its quasi-legal and illicit manipulations, its incessant prevarications and Rovian tactics.

My intuition tells me that it serves a greater purpose to have us scurrying around in plain view, expressing our anger, our fears, our hopes.

Harper's CPC is focused on perfecting the military precision of a volunteer and staff infrastructure that will facilitate the rigging of the next federal election in their favour, while their opponents are distraught, scattered and distracted.

Their May 2011 machinations were a taste of things to come.  Alison at Creekside has done an extraordinary job of investigative work on this matter.

So we have to get cracking on the coalition and cooperation-building NOW.  Talk is cheap, and the Cons have millions in their election war-chest, likely from the Koch Brothers foundations and possibly more that will be siphoned off from public funds now that Kevin Page is gone.

Who is Franke James ...

and why is the Contempt Party government trying to shut down her exhibition currently scheduled to travel through major cities in Europe?

From here:

The Canadian Government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, is actively working to shut down my solo European art exhibition, which is set to tour 20 cities in Europe. The government’s interference includes phoning the corporate sponsor, and persuading them to cancel their $75,000 sponsorship.

Canadian officials have also bullied the NGO, Nektarina Non Profit, and warned them repeatedly to cancel the exhibition because they are opposed to “Franke James.” They are doing everything in their power to make sure my show is killed. An employee with Amnesty International in Croatia reacted to the news by saying, “This is a sad day for Canadian democracy.”

A long time before he became the PM with 39% of the votes cast in the last federal election, SHithead aka Stevie Spiteful said to Susan Crean, the co-author of 'Two Nations' with Quebec activist/sociologist Marcel Rioux: "You should not have been allowed to write that book."

Les fées ont soif.

It was 31 years ago today that extreme, fundamentalist, ultra-conservative catholics tried to stop the opening of the controversial feminist play "Les fées ont soif." in Montréal.

Though Catholics did everything they could to keep the show from going on (including picketing the theatre and reciting the rosary in the audience during the play), the work went on to several translations and productions here and abroad and the published play went into three printings.

From here:

A whore, a housewife, and the holy virgin walk into a bar. Ouch! But seriously folks, it's no joke for these three ladies desperately trying to find themselves in an oppressive world. Montreal playwright Denise Boucher unconventionally explores the oh-too conventional achetypes of women.

After all we've achieved, how far have we come? The most notorious case of theatre censorship in contemporary Quebec was the attempted ban of Les Fées ont soif when it was first produced almost 30 years ago at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. The play challenged traditional roles and images imposed by social practice and dramatized women's angry rejection of those roles.

These issues persist today, as women's shelters from increasinly beyond their capacity, as sex workers are forced into dangerous situations by outdated laws, and as 'women's work' continues to be undervalued - the fairies are still thirsty!

The author Denise Boucher also wrote "Jézabel", an alternate version of the biblical confrontation between the heathen queen and the testerical prophet Elijah.