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This page contains all of the posts and discussion on MemeStreams referencing the following web page: Statement to "Indymedia". You can find discussions on MemeStreams as you surf the web, even if you aren't a MemeStreams member, using the Threads Bookmarklet.

Statement to "Indymedia"
by Dagmar at 4:06 pm EDT, Sep 7, 2008

Since there seems to be a slight problem with posts to the Indymedia site disappearing, I'm also posting this here.

Dear lunatic children,

Perhaps if you were the type of self-proclaimed anarchists who didn't believe in attempting to deceive other people and believed firmly in not engaging in acts of wanton destruction, you'd stand a chance of winning the media "war".

As people who you call your friends are gassed, beaten, and arrested while attempting to hold a peaceful protest, you guys are merrily celebrating the acts of petty vandalism and disruption that without fail gives the people who you claim to be your enemies the excuse to come down on your friends hard. Stroking your own egos and celebrating the fact that you can get away with doing something useless and stupid and then hiding in a crowd, it seems, is more important than actually allowing the evil going on around you to be seen for what it is.

Under normal circumstances, it's at least implicit that people carrying press credentials are in no way engaging in, encouraging, or participating in what they are covering, but you self-proclaimed journalists and reporters have failed miserably in this respect. There have been enough snarky comments to both the site and the audio streams to make it clear that you've been at least partially complicit in several events that simply should not have taken place had people's intentions been to remain 100% peaceful. You've been actively using the top level page of twincities.indymedia.org to rebroadcast instructions telling people where to go to make pedestrian congestion issues worse at best. ...not things about where a march supporting this and that is taking place, not details about which rallies are still on and which are not, just locations and telling people the equivalent of "hey if you want to get your fight on, go here". This is horrifically irresponsible, and it's positively mind-blowing that you express astonishment that the police are arresting people regardless of whether or not they bear press credentials in light of what you've been doing to cast serious doubt on just how impartial the smaller news outfits might actually be.

You've not just been giving the police a "good excuse" to bring a heavy boot down on your heads, you've been giving reasonable people plenty of reasons to suspect you're a part of the problem, if not near the core of it. It doesn't matter how many video clips of police brutality you collect if your hands are not clean as to why the police started busting heads. Reporters for big media have no problem with being "arguably wrong" by reporting that some lunatics broke some windows and as a result the police had to try to scatter the crowds before someone started throwing firebombs, when that's actually close (even if an incredibly skewed perspective) to what happened. That'... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]


 
RE: Statement to "Indymedia"
by Dagmar at 7:18 pm EDT, Sep 7, 2008

Hey cool, that didn't take long to get censored off their site. Excepting, they left a very critical response that was just chock full of straw men up there, unmolested.

Now if that's not an example of censorship being used to quell dissent, I don't know what is.

So... here's my response, which will (I'm sure) quickly disappear as well. I might email the next one over to the domain contacts for indymedia.org because I am really having a hard time swallowing how this is going down.

"What's interesting about this response is that it unquestioningly accepts the media's portrayal of last week's events."

No, it actually does not. How you can claim this when the post doesn't even have anything to do with any coverage but Indymedia's is beyond me--unless you're basically looking for a straw man to beat.

"You do realize (I hope) that reporters from AP, Fox and the New York Post were also gassed and arrested. Apparently, big media can be targeted just as much as anyone else."

Of course. There's no doubt that the cops were being as much a bunch of jerks (okay, so I'm being really polite about that) as anyone if not more. The problem being, it can take an overwhelming amount of evidence to convince people who weren't there and have had mostly useful and constructive relations with the police that the police actually were acting like jackbooted thugs, which means there can be no excuses for the behaviour exhibited. None. Nada. Zero. You must maintain clean hands! This is hard to manage when there's an audio stream basically chuckling about things being broken and people commenting in text about being hopeful for the construction of barricades. Oh, and lets not forget calling the disruption of the event a win. Cripes that looks bad.

"Additionally, which ones were the independent press who 'engaged' in the action, thus 'deserving' what happened? They were filming and photographing, as press are supposed to."

You really aren't good at this sort of spin-doctoring. I didn't say anyone "engaged" in this was "deserving" of anything. I did however say (among other things) that posting live updates right at the top of the website about where serious problems were happening and telling people to go there was irresponsible. Of course, I'm not so sure anything even happened to the guys responsible for putting that sort of stuff up. I'm not certain but I think they were far, far away in another city. (Bonus points for people smart enough to see the parallel here)

"For one thing, I'm not sure why you think that destruction was 'the goal'. Not only that, but mass arrests DID occur at marches where there was NO property damage occurring, so the 'you brought it on yourself' argument is null and void."

... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

 
RE: Statement to "Indymedia"
by Dagmar at 10:05 pm EDT, Sep 7, 2008

Update: Some unknown individual (really and for true) reposted my original criticism of the twincities.indymedia.org coverage, as well as a snippet of what amount to the rules governing "moderation" of Indymedia coverage. Guess what? Silently deleting content isn't allowed. Whether or not the mysterious deleter strikes again will basically dictate whether or not I drop some emails to the core of the IndyMedia Collective asking that they look into the sort of censorship that was taking place, as well as whether or not there was any impartiality going on.

Oh, and before anyone gets any crazy ideas, I'm an "anarchist" of the stripe that believes that people should be able to self-govern, which means we expect people to be civil, decent, and constructive people because otherwise we'd just be a bunch of animals. I'd be an ass to expect other people to behave better than I expect myself to behave, and I expect a lot of civility out of me, thanks. (Translation: I R NOT BOMB THROWING NUTJOB KTHXBAI)


  
RE: Statement to 'Indymedia'
by Dagmar at 4:52 pm EDT, Sep 8, 2008

Update: Yep. Days later and they're still deleting it. Tomorrow night I'll finish up that scribble that will just check it every five minutes and repost it as necessary.

Why?

Because I'm right in what I'm doing, and this is the Internet, where censorship will not be tolerated.


 
 
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