BasBasBas.com

Tag: media

  • Why the announcement that radicals would hijack Dutch student protests is just spin-doctoring

    Protester holds a sign that says "smart does not equal rich"Leading up to the organized student manifestation against the financial cuts in higher education, there were a bunch of news reports about there being ‘signals‘ that radicals would come and hijack the protest and try to create riots. Radicals was obviously never defined, but at the time I didn’t think much of it. A little while later, I realized what a genius piece of spin-doctoring it had been.

    What the message did, was create an expectation of radicals getting violent. For one, radicals can mean football hooligans, for another it can be anarchists, or communists, or foreigners, or anything else which they perceive as dramatically different than them. The manifestation itself was more like a political rally more suitable for election time. When students decided to go to the political quarters to let themselves be heard, they were met by police and violence ensued.

    The spin makes it seem like the violence was caused by radicals. I think it was caused by upset students. The difference?

    For any government, it’s important to create the impression that the general population is content with the government. The label ‘radicals’ was defined by a set of actions and expectations (mainly disobedience and perhaps violent actions or rioting), so when normal people acted this way, they became radicals. This makes sure that ‘normal people’ don’t identify with these radicals (formerly known as normal people).

    Identification creates understanding creates support. The last thing a government which plans to make drastic financial cuts and reforms wants, is people supporting a disobedient protest movement.

    Most of the (25) people arrested last Friday were obviously not radicals. They were students. They were normal people (they still are). They were people like you and me.

  • Politics 2.0

    The influence of new media on current day politics

    An essay by Bas Grasmayer

    The 20th century was the age of mass media. The impact of radio during the first half of the century and that of television during the second brought politics closer to home. Starting from people grouping around the one radio in their neighbourhood, to the radio in their street, until the point that everyone had a radio in their home. The same happened for television and through these media politics entered the living room. Through sound at first, but later through moving images which became more detailed and more accurately coloured over the course of the last century.

    We’re now close to ten years into the new century. Television and radio are still important, but there is a new player in the field of mass media: the internet. This essay will look at how the internet has already influenced politics and hopes to answer, in part, the following question:

    How is the World Wide Web as a medium influencing
    politics and the government right now?

    New Media

    In the 2008 US Presidential elections, politicians were seen embracing new media. Barack Obama became microblogging service Twitter’s most followed user and YouTube set up a site called You Choose ’08 dedicated to the elections. On the latter, campaign teams posted videos hoping they would go ‘viral’, a term used to describe the phenomenon of certain content on the internet being spread out through huge networks of users, which is often initially an exponential process. Ron Paul, who was running to become the Republican presidential candidate, had so much support on the internet that TIME magazine at one point commented that due to “his  success  recruiting  supporters  through  new  social  media  channels” he was “the  new  2.0  candidate”.

    (more…)

  • Dutch Journalists Tricked by ‘Magic’ Mushroom Ban Opponents

    You would think that journalists’ intelligence and street smarts prevents them from falling for hoaxes, but recent attempts to show the insanity of the Dutch ‘magic’ mushroom ban by opponents of the ban show otherwise.

    Ridiculing the mushroom ban, a website called PaddoBestrijding.nl (Shroom Removal) has been created promoting a service that supposedly helps keep innocent people safe from the long arm of the law. PaddoBestrijding’s press release reports that home-, land- and gardenowners as well as nature preservation organisations risk prosecution over ownership of one of the 186 mushroom types banned in The Netherlands, starting the 1st of December. This could lead to sentence of up to 6 year imprisonment or a 740,000 euro fine.

    The ban is quite controversial as I’ve stated before in the following two articles:

    One of the mushrooms getting banned is the Fly Agaric, or Amanita muscaria (picture below, by Roger B.), a popular mushroom in European folklore (and in Super Mario), one of our nature’s beauties, and a popular sacrament in ritual shamanic use. Looks like the Christian Democrats are still on a witchhunt, with the aid of the Labour Party.

    The Fly Agaric is one of the mushrooms illegalized in the Netherlands

    It took me a second to figure out that PaddoBestrijding was an eleborate hoax, but three sections of the site really give it away and I’m stumped that journalists didn’t get the joke. Then again, the Dutch government did try to ban the use of satire once (1, 2, 3). The pages that really give the spoof away are the methods, testimonials and shroom of the month. Some translated quotes from the various pages:

    ShroomRemoval about methods:

    “Depending on the scale of infection and the soil type, we choose for a surface-, or a depth treatment. With the latter a fungicide is sprayed into the soil under high pressure as deep as 70 cm. Thankfully this is not always necessary and most of the time a surface spray can be utilized, after which the fungi killing substances slowly seep into the soil. Modern fungicides are extremely poisonous, meaning that only a small amount has to be used; a comforting thought.“

    If that last sentence doesn’t give it away, maybe one of the silly testimonials might:

    “When we could access our garden again, eight weeks after the mushroom removal, all mushrooms were gone. We were warned about dead animals, but luckily it wasn’t that bad. The plantgrowth has recovered a bit by now and every now and then we’re also seeing some birds in our garden again. In a few years we will once again be able to safely eat from our garden.”

    Hellooooo gullible journalists… you got it yet?! No? How about the mushroom of the month, where an opposition to the new mushroom ban is subcommunicated. Strange, for a company that can profit so much from this, no? Here it goes:

    “Even though the ‘orange funnel’ (Rickenella fibula) doesn’t contain psylocibin or other related tryptamines, it has still been put on the list of banned mushroom types under the aged synonym ‘gerronema fibula‘.”

    All of this, combined with pictures of people in yellow suits and gas masks spraying toxic chemicals should raise some doubts in the mind of journalists, but nope, they fell for the hoax. An eleborate and modern version of the type of jokes Provo’s played on Dutch society, which I blogged about before.

    I must admit that as I started writing this article I wasn’t 100% sure about this being a joke. Since I don’t want to spread misinformation, I did some research, like any self-respecting journalist should. Through some very simple domain name research I found out that MushMush.nl registered PaddoBestrijding.nl. MushMush was selling magic mushroom growkits until the ban and talks about growing methods. So of course it is a hoax!

    So far ShroomRemoval has been featured in the following media:

    • Spits (Rush Hour), one of the biggest (if not the biggest) free newspapers in Holland. [web article, newspaper clipping (from the frontpage apparently)]
    • NOS Headlines on 3FM (Radio), one of Holland’s most popular radio stations. [online, direct download]
    • FunX (Radio), popular radio station for teenagers and other people with a poor taste in music. The two DJ’s spoke with a representative of PaddoBestrijding on the air and showed particularly gullible behaviour and nauseating stupidity. 😉 [direct download]

    Just shows how gullible the media is and makes one think twice about the trustworthiness of news. With one I mean me, and hopefully you too.

    BasBasBas.com is about a Dutch student living in Istanbul. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Turkey seeks names of YouTube’s Ataturk insulters from U.S. government

    Hurriyet Daily News reports the following:

    Turkey seeks names of YouTube's Ataturk insulters from U.S. gov't article

    Excuse me? Is this the Soviet Union I’m living in? In the past I’ve made a comparison between Turkey and China regarding the freedom of the press and I also said at the time that it was an exaggerated comparison, as Turkey’s press enjoys a lot more freedom than China’s. But this, this has not been equaled by China, I believe.

    This summer we saw American Tibetan activists hold demonstrations in China during the Olympic games; they could not have done that if they got detained upon entering the country. Yes, they were arrested and deported, but only after committing a criminal fact in China. Most of their names could have and should have been known to the Chinese government. They write about the Tibetan cause publicly.

    What this prosecuter is asking for is detestable and I am shocked and outraged.

    “Those YouTube users determined to be living outside Turkey will be detained upon entering the country.”

    Detained and then what? Imprisoned for insulting Turkey? They did not commit any illegal acts if they published these videos outside of Turkey, unless they are Turkish citizens, which might make it illegal. If I were to say “the US is a big pile of smelly cowdung”, I cannot be arrested upon entering the US. If I however threaten someone in the US, particularly government officials, there’s a good case for them to find out my name and to detain me upon entering the country. What this prosecutor is asking for is to limit the freedom of speech with matters pertaining to Turkey worldwide.

    The whole YouTube ban is pointless anyway. Research in Alexa.com’s traffic ranking system has shown that YouTube is the 10th most popular site in Turkey. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan surprised everyone when he stated that even he uses YouTube.

    In other news Hurriyet reports the following:

    ““There was a vigorous internal debate between Wong and her colleagues at the top of Google’s legal pyramid.” Wong, who had to play mediator, decided that Google, by using a technique called IP blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, this solution seemed to work for the Turkish judges, who reopened access to YouTube.

    But last June a Turkish prosecutor made a demand that Google block access to the offending videos all over the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government should not be able to set limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. As a result Youtube has remained blocked in Turkey.”

    Me: Hey Twitter! Some guy on your network said my site sucks and used some profanity. I feel really insulted. Can you ban the entire network from saying bad things about me? Oh you can just make it so that my IP address can not see it anymore? Well, I’ll be using proxies to see it anyway, but I’d prefer if you would make any insulting depictions of my site invisible all around the world.

    FAIL.

    The vice president of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-Committee, Howitt, criticized the ban, saying that around 1,000 websites are blocked in Turkey and this places the country alongside some of the world’s worst nations for cyber censorship.

    The information age is here and it’s never going away. You’re a really marvelous country Turkey, but it’s time to do something about these ridiculous prosecutions.

    BasBasBas.com is about a Dutch student living in Istanbul. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

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