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Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I tend to hit the feeds first before reading news from “traditional” sources like the New York Times, where I would have seen news of Bhutto’s assassination front and center, it’s pretty incredible to see the way her death instantly reverberated across the web.

Global Voices’ Neha Viswanathan has a superb write-up of blog coverage of the assassination from across the Pakistani and Indian blogosphere, and the site has set up a special coverage page devoted to online analysis of the terrible event, from which Pakistan and the world will be reeling for months, if not years.

Political assassinations like this are always world events, rarely confined to the locality in which they occur, so it’s fitting that Global Voices links to posts from Venezuela, Brunei, the Caribbean, Singapore, and Cuba.

As Chris Matthews and his fellow American narcissists* blather away as they consider how this might be good for John McCain and bad for Barack Obama, bloggers around the world are busy weighing the human relevance of such a profound and tragic event. It’s too bad it takes the emergence of terrible moments like this — events like the deadly earthquakes or the Asian tsunami — to remind us of what an essential part of our lives the blogosphere has become.

*[UPDATE] It’s not just the pundits; the candidates are also guilty. “The leading Dem candidates for president appear to be in a pitched battle to make the most craven and insipid uses of the Bhutto assassination for immediate political advantage,” wrote Josh Marshall.

A rally where each speaker denounces Ahmadinejad’s reactionary policies and just a few call explicitly for military action will still be perceived, on campus and around the U.S., as pro-war. The right-wing media, from Fox News to the New York tabloids, has already jumped on the event, and will spin it to favor their cause. Conservative organizations with no affiliation to Columbia’s campus, such as the David Project, have already signed on to the rally on Facebook, and are likely to distribute hundreds of warmongering flyers and picket signs. The rally will seem to be a sea of pro-war demonstrators — and the more people who attend it and the more organizations that endorse it, the more powerful this disastrous message will be.

A U.S. attack on Iran, which is not an inevitability but is a real possibility, would have consequences just as terrible as the invasion of Iraq. Thousands would die in initial air strikes, and more in the resulting backlash and regional conflagration. The work of Iranian campaigners for free speech, women’s rights, and lesbian and gay liberation, and against racism and anti-semitism, would be set back immeasurably. As Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi has pointed out, “Human rights are not established by throwing cluster bombs on people. You cannot introduce democracy to a country by using tanks.”

The Times called Mr. TanColin Powell, the hippie activist Wavy Gravy, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robin Williams, Jane Goodall, Tom Brokaw, George Soros and James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, have all posed with Mr. Tan,” writes Steve Lohr.  “the company’s in-house Zelig,” who celebrities now clamor to see when the visit the site.  “It is an eclectic group.”

It’s a quirky and fun piece that might have found a good home in the Technology section in the middle of the week, but what was it doing on the front page of the Saturday Times?  Maybe Labor Day weekend has something to do with it.  But this completely uncritical piece of puffery is the kind of article that makes you wonder how the relationship between Google and the Times got so cozy.

And then, buried on page A7 of the same paper, is an article about YouTube agreeing to block (read: censor) anti-monarchist videos in Thailand.  Apparently there are pretty harsh laws in Thailand about making fun of the king, and after Thailand blocked YouTube completely, the company found a way back into the market by promising to block offensive material.

“Any clip that we think is illegal, we will inform YouTube and YouTube
will have a look independently,” minister of information Sittichai Pookaiyaudom said.  “If YouTube agrees that it is
illegal for Thailand or against Thai culture, they will block it from viewers in Thailand.”

Only in the 13th paragraph does the article mention Google, which happens to own YouTube.  And even there, it refers to Google’s ownership implicitly, in the context of its dealings with the Thai government.  Writer Seth Mydans never explicitly says that Google owns YouTube, and that it was Google, not YouTube, that made the decision to censor videos in Thailand. 

Mydans compares the censorship to Google’s blocking of Holocaust denial and hate sites in Germany and France, where there are laws against such speech, but this is different.  In Thailand, Google isn’t censoring hate speech but legitimate political protest in the form of making fun of the King.  I fear it’s becoming more and more comfortable with these sorts of policies.    

So it needs to be asked: why the puff piece on A1, and why approval of censorship in Thailand on A7?  Why did the Times go out of its way to paint such a rosy picture of Google?  And am I missing something about the Thailand case?

Technorati Tags: Google, YouTube, censorship, Thailand

Why couldn’t we flip the script and think about a bottom up approach? In other words, instead of just going after the rich and rich governements, what if all of us took responsibility for getting a billion people to each give between $1 and $100. We already know the power of what is possible through a smart mob approach…take rock band U2′s “One” campaign. During concerts, lead singer Bono told fans to take out their cell phones and text their support for OXFAM to a short code which then got flashed up on a big screen above the stage. Thousands did as Bono told. Now imagine if Bono told his fans to do the same thing only this time donating 99 cents or more to a global poverty relief effort?

If we all gave just a little bit it could be more than the billions donated by Gates and Buffets and others (though their contributions are welcome).

Lamb announced that he’s donating $50 to The People’s Campaign to End Global Poverty and has provided a website to help others donate too. It’s just a little, but it’s a start.

Tags: charity, donations, peter singer

In another sense, though, viva YouTube! They continue to be an amazing democratizing force in our culture, springing up from out of nowhere to take over the business of online video-sharing in just eighteen months.

Check out this long — but compelling and terrifying — account of police abuse in Zimbabwe. To those who think this video-sharing is kids’ stuff, or only for rich Westerners, think again: if we push to use it right, it will be one of the most powerful vehicles for free expression on the planet. Just keep your eye on this monopoly business.

Tags: google, youtube, zimbabwe