Censorship
A funny thing happened when, in the course of routine blog housekeeping, I reopened this long-past post.
Most of the links that were sent to me in the summer of 2011 are by now broken; this is normal, a cyberspace event known as link rot. If you click on most of the links that far back in the blog archive, you'll see pages telling you that the sites no longer exist. But this specific site does exist. The Treehugger blog became part of Dotdash Meredith, the huge corporation that now encompasses Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, and People and other big glossy magazines. And when I clicked on the article about the organic farmers suing for pesticide contamination of their products, it opened a page with three little words:
"Block--Not Acceptable"
Does this mean what it looks like? I'm afraid so. Dotdash Meredith has sold out to corporate censorship and suppressed stories about the damage "pesticide" poisoning does to genuinely organic farmers (remember, what's "US Certified Organic" is NOT necessairly "organically grown" and can only promise a little less chemical poisoning than the cheaper products--often not enough less poison that the products won't make you sick, if you're sensitive to a specific chemical e.g. glyphosate). Treehugger.com is still allowed to display Poison Green blather about "climate change," but content about what's really in "organic" food has been censored.
What does this mean, Gentle Readers? It means it's a good idea to stop buying any of those slick magazines you may have been buying. Let Dotdash Meredith know that the mere idea of censorship automatically loses any debate by default. If chemical companies can't defend the use of their products in rational debate with peoiple who oppose the use of their products, they're admitting that their products are harmful and they know it. In order to restore any credibility, Dotdash Meredith needs to stop accepting advertisements from companies that want censorship, and stop censoring the content that made their magazines. Censorship is what's not acceptable.
Comedy
Jerry Seinfeld calls out the serious problem in comedy these days.
Phonespeak
Even Twitter doesn't limit sentence length to the length of cell phone messages, any more--though that did prompt people to compose concise sentences on Twitter. May phonespeak rest in peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment