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Weiye Loh

Arab Spring: Join Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State for a "Future Te... - 0 views

www.slate.com/2298585

New Media Internet Democracy Authoritarianism

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
    Can social media really spur a revolution? Who benefits more from advances in technology-activists or authoritarian governments? What can the rest of the world do when Big Brother turns off the Internet? How did the successful Arab Spring turn into a complicated, bloody summer in Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere? Can blogging make a difference in Cuba and North Korea?
Weiye Loh

North Korea's cinema of dreams - 101 East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...2011217113256267999.html

North Korea Propaganda Cinema Film Industry Film

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached

  • North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il's love of film is well-documented, but few outsiders know that he is revered as a genius of cinema by his own people.

    Now, this groundbreaking film opens a window inside the world's most secretive country and an elite academy, where young actors are hand-picked to serve a massive propaganda machine.

Weiye Loh

Have you heard of the Koch Brothers? | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10234

News media bias Protest Violence Union

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
  • It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests  - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
  • In the March 2nd episode of The Colbert Report, it was shown that the Fox News coverage of the Wisconsin protests had re-used footage from more violent protests in California (the palm trees in the background gave Fox News away). Bill O’Reilly at Fox News had apparently issued an apology – but how many viewers who had seen the footage and believed it to be on-the-ground footage of Wisconsin would have followed-up on the report and the apology? And anyway, why portray the teacher protests as violent?
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.
  • as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.
  • The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.
  • In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.
  • I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”
  • Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.
  • Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)
  • Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘
  • K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.
  • with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece
  • with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”
  • What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But It Will Be Tweeted - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...levised-but-it-will-be-tweeted

Information Revolution

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • information alone does not destabilize an oppressive regime. In fact, more information (and the control of that information) is a major source of political strength for any ruling party. The state controlled media of North Korea is a current example of the power of propaganda, much as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, where the state heavily subsidized the diffusion of radios during the 1930s to help spread Nazi propaganda.
  • changes in technology do not by themselves weaken the state. While Twitter played a role in the Iranian protests in 2009, the medium was used effectively by the Iranian regime to spread rumors and disinformation. But, if information becomes not just more widespread but more reliable, the regime’s chances of survival are significantly diminished. In this sense, though social media like Twitter and Facebook appear to be a scattered mess, they are more reliable than state controlled messages.
  • The model predicts that a given percentage increase in information reliability has exactly twice as large an effect on the regime’s chances as the same percentage increase in information quantity, so, overall, an information revolution that leads to roughly equal-sized percentage increases in both these characteristics will reduce a regime’s chances of surviving.-
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 11
     
    If the quantity of information available to citizens is sufficiently high, then the regime has a better chance of surviving. However, an increase in the reliability of information can reduce the regime's chances. These two effects are always in tension: a regime benefits from an increase in information quantity if and only if an increase in information reliability reduces its chances. The model allows for two kinds of information revolutions. In the first, associated with radio and mass newspapers under the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards media institutions more accommodative of the regime and, in this sense, a decrease in information reliability. In this case, both effects help the regime. In the second kind, associated with diffuse technologies like modern social media, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards sources of information less accommodative of the regime and an increase in information reliability. This makes the quantity and reliability effects work against each other.
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