The Distant Ocean

Verified: the CommonDreams Ministry of Truth

Someone else had a near-identical experience to the one I described with CommonDreams, which they wrote up last night in a comment on the same "Overcoming Censorship" article on CommonDreams here (comment 11).  That's my saved version, because--as I'm sure you couldn't possibly have guessed--by this morning CommonDreams had removed the comment.

I'd been holding back a bit in my first posting on this issue on the theory that there might be some other explanation--like, say, someone tripping as they walked by a laptop that had an active MySQL session going, banging into the keyboard, and accidentally typing out "DELETE FROM WP_COMMENT_TABLE WHERE WP_COMMENT_USER = 'distantocean' OR CONTAINS(WP_COMMENT_TEXT, 'distantocean');" with their elbow and then inadvertently hitting the ENTER key with their nose as they completed their fall, no doubt theatrically screaming "Noooooooooooooo!" in the milliseconds before they made contact with the floor.  Hey, it's possible.

But at this point I feel confident in saying, with no hyperbole, that the CommonDreams editors responsible for this are worse than the Stasi and the Gestapo combined, and that if they had their way we'd be living under the yoke of their tyranny day after grinding day, lashed mercilessly for even thinking forbidden thoughts of the bright summertime we'd lost forever to their iron rule.

HIGHLY AMUSING UPDATE: I submitted my original posting to Sunil K. Sharma, the editor of Dissident Voice, who in my experience is an all-around cool and friendly guy.  He responded as follows, and told me to feel free to publish it if I wanted to.  I think you'll see why I've decided to take him up on that offer:

Common Dreams is run by a bunch of assholes. Dissident Voice articles are banned from Common Dreams because we took them to task for posting a couple of articles of ours without permission or without citing us as the original source (we only ask that people do the latter, they don't have to ask for permission, though it's a nice courtesy) a few years ago. They ignored my repeated calls and e-mails to rectify the matter and so finally I sent an e-mail threatening a lawsuit for infringement (I wasn't serious, just trying to see if they'd actually respond to that letter). Chris Brown, or whatever the slimy fucker's name is who founded Common Dreams, then responded by calling me a lunatic and proceeded to remove the articles in question without any explanation to CD's readers, and said he would inform his staff that any submissions from Dissident Voice were to be banned. We tried to make nice a year later and CD ignored us. They have to cite original sources for the articles they post when it comes from mainstream publications, but somehow they feel they're not obligated to do the same with alternative sites like DV.

Looks like it's Craig Brown, BTW.  So there you have it: CommonDreams is run by a bunch of assholes (safe for work, I promise).

LESS AMUSING UPDATE: Yet more accounts of CommonDreams' overweening control freakery are available here and here.  So my experience is by no means unique; they've apparently been at it for as long as they've had comments.

BRAIN-SEARING IRONY UPDATE: As if there's not already enough irony in CommonDreams' practice of censoring political speech, their (apparent) webmaster has a blog, and he has a posting there titled "We've always been at war with Eastasia."  He also has a sidebar on his site that says "Taking my cue from Alberto Gonzales, I've dumped of [sic] a few items on the site that I felt were not loyal to my cause."  Hey, at least now we know where they go for inspiration.

I don't know if this guy is one of the actual censors, but I do know that when I emailed webmaster@commondreams.org to ask (politely) about my comments disappearing, I never received a response.  They clearly like the communication path to be one-way.

The schadenfreude of typos

In an article about Osama bin Laden's plans to taunt the United States a second time, AFP informs us that he was "Born in Jeddah as the 12th son of construction magnet Mohammad bin Aaud Bin Laden."

You may now feel free to make all the obvious jokes yourself.

(Look quickly--the first page where I found it has already been corrected, so the updated AFP article will probably soon make it to the link above as well.)

CommonDreams erases me from their site

CommonDreams has erased me from their web site.

On Wednesday, August 5th, I posted a comment on CommonDreams in response to an article there by Medea Benjamin.  I initially had trouble getting the comment to appear on the site, but chalked that up to technical problems with their comment script (since they've had various issues with it).  A few hours later my comment disappeared from the comment thread.  I still thought this might be a technical glitch and so I posted the comment again...but it disappeared yet again, this time within a few minutes.  By the afternoon I'd posted it yet one more time, as well as posting a response to another person ("Rebel Farmer"); within minutes, both his comment and my reply to him were deleted as well.

Throughout this time there were long periods where comments I submitted would seem to fall into a black hole; the comment form would take them, but they never appeared in the comment thread.  But if I tried to submit the same comment again the site would respond with "Duplicate comment detected"--so it was accepting them, but also holding them for some reason.  Still hoping that this might be a technical issue rather than a ban or block, I tried creating a different user and posting from it, which worked initially...but then it started being blackholed as well.  Thanks to a referral the next day to my site from the URL "http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-admin/moderation.php", I can say with certainty that the editors were intercepting and silently deleting my comments.

It gets worse.  After my comments had been deleted from the Medea Benjamin article thread for the fourth time, I searched Google for all appearances of my username (distantocean) on commondreams.org.  I'd been posting comments there for about two months, so there were a fair number of hits.  But when I followed one of the article links, I was shocked to see that the text "distantocean" didn't appear anywhere in the page--my comment was gone.  I tried another article, and again, the comment I'd posted there was nowhere to be found.  I tried all of the remaining article links, and I found that only one comment I'd posted there--the first one, back on July 12th--remained intact (presumably an oversight).  Every other comment I'd ever posted on CommonDreams had been deleted.

The cold feeling that had been spreading through my stomach throughout the day exploded.  I honestly felt like I'd just been punched in the gut.  I'd spent hours crafting those comments, and now they were gone--just vanished.  And the fact that my comments were still in the Google cache made it clear that this had happened just recently.

Believe it or not, it still gets worse.  Not only had my own comments been removed, but comments by other users that simply mentioned my username had also been deleted.  I'd understand if you find this difficult to credit; believe me, it was very hard for me to accept as well.  But thanks to Google, I have proof.  Below are two copies of an article on CommonDreams ("Democrats’ Responsibility for Bush Radicalism"), including the comment thread; the first is a copy of Google's cached version of the page, and the second is the current version of the same page:

1. The uncensored version from Google's cache
2. The censored version as it currently stands on the CommonDreams web site

If you look at the comment counts in these pages (just after the article itself) you'll see that the uncensored version from Google's cache has 133 comments--but the current page from the CommonDreams site has only 127.  And if you look more closely you'll see that of the six deleted comments, three of them were written by me and the other three (two by "baska" and one by "srelf") mentioned my username.  The specific comments that were deleted are numbers 92, 94, 99, 104, 126, and 127 in the uncensored version.  No other comments are missing--just mine, and those that mentioned my username.

I'd invite you to read my comments in the uncensored version (you can find them via CTRL-F "distantocean") and see if you think there was anything in them that justified their deletion from the site--not that anything could justify deleting the comments of other people whose only transgression was responding to me, of course.  I spent so much time writing the main comment that I reposted it on my own site, here; Arthur Silber felt it was worthwhile enough to link to it.

CommonDreams has ignored every query I've sent them about this.  I've emailed them directly, and I've tried contacting them via comments (since I know they read those--even if only for a moment, before they delete them).  But they've refused to respond.  Since I know that they've visited my web site in the process of moderating (and deleting) one of my comment-queries, I know they've seen what I've written, and so I'm left with no doubt that these have been deliberate actions.  Based on their first set of deletions of my comments, I have to assume that this started because someone at CommonDreams didn't like my response to Medea Benjamin, and decided to retaliate not just by deleting my response to that article but by wiping out everything I'd written on the site.  And removing my own comments wasn't enough for them--they went further and actually destroyed all traces of my existence on the site, with no regard for the effects on innocent bystanders.

I'm not the only person CommonDreams has censored--in fact there were other people on that very same Medea Benjamin thread asking where their comments had gone (they also received no answers), and I saw comments by other people appear briefly and then disappear minutes later.  And here's another article discussing censorship by CommonDreams.  As that article notes and as I've seen for myself, when people ask about the censorship, CommonDreams typically responds by censoring those comments as well.  But I've never heard of them erasing someone completely from their site (though how would I? after all, they control the medium, and they obviously don't hesitate to  exercise that control).

I can barely express how dumbfounded, disappointed, and disillusioned I am by this.  One of the major progressives web sites on the Internet, a site that regularly publishes articles about threats to freedom of speech, apparently feels that it's perfectly acceptable to censor writing based solely on the political content.  They issue no warnings; they offer no explanations; they allow no appeals.  They haven't even posted a comment policy that I can find anywhere on the site (maybe because "we'll delete any comment we like, and there's nothing you can do about it" sounds a bit too authoritarian). They're in control, and they apparently like it that way.  The contempt that this shows for their readership and for the principles of free expression and free association is breathtaking.

To anyone who posts on CommonDreams: you should know that nothing you write there is permanent.  If the CommonDreams editors disagree with what you've written--no matter how thoughtfully you've expressed it or how relevant it may be--they can simply delete it.  And if they disagree strongly enough, they may do to you what they did to me and delete every trace of you from the site.  I wouldn't have believed it myself, but at this point the evidence is overwhelming.  Don't take my word for it; look at the before and after versions of the article I've provided above and see for yourself.

I've saved the crowning irony for last.  The very day after they vanished me from their site, CommonDreams published an article by Ruth Conniff titled "Overcoming Censorship".  Though perhaps I can even top that one: I tried to post a comment in response to the article, but it never showed up.

UPDATE: A friend noticed a comment last night on CommonDreams that independently verifies my own experience, which puts my last doubts on the matter to rest.

UPDATE 2: It took them a few days, but CommonDreams finally deleted that one last comment of mine that they'd somehow missed in the initial sweep (I'd guess that queries from readers of this article prompted them to look again).  So my erasure from their site is now complete.

News Flash: Ron Paul no longer a Republican!

Or at least that would appear to be the case going by the title ("Republicans, Paul Clash Over Iraq War") and the first paragraph of this AP story:

DURHAM, N.H. (AP) - Republican presidential contenders voiced support for the Iraq war Wednesday night despite a warning from anti-war candidate Ron Paul that they risk dragging the party down to defeat in 2008.

On the one side, "Republicans" or "Republican presidential contenders"; on the other side, "Ron Paul".

Yes, this is less than a quibble, and I'm mainly posting about it because it struck me as funny.  But it's always instructive to see how the mainstream media constructs a frame when positions that are popular with the public but widely rejected by elites arise within the context of elites themselves.  It's in circumstances like these--as with Paul, or with Dennis Kucinich, or even with Al Gore's "populist" rhetoric in 2000--that you'll typically see mainstream media biases displayed the most openly.  The media take their role as the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion very seriously, and when an ostensible insider goes off the reservation, the reaction ranges anywhere from mild derision to outright hysteria.

Medea Benjamin: Why does my foot hurt right where I shot it?

Medea Benjamin complains that Nancy Pelosi makes time to meet with Democratic coffee klatches and "high-dollar donors" but won't meet with activists from Benjamin's CODEPINK.  My response:

_____________________

The Democrats generally (and Nancy Pelosi in particular) learned that they could ignore people like CODEPINK generally (and Medea Benjamin in particular) in 2004, when progressives made it eminently clear that they would vote for a Democrat who was as bad as (or worse than) George Bush on the most crucial issues--especially Iraq.   Medea Benjamin was right at the forefront of this complete surrender of power to the Democrats, openly campaigning for progressives to vote for Kerry and working to prevent the Green Party from nominating Nader and Camejo.  She put all of her efforts in 2004 into guaranteeing the ascendancy of conservative Democrats, and--as a direct result--undermining progressive causes and weakening the Green Party, perhaps fatally.

So if Nancy Pelosi won't meet with you now, Medea, it's because she knows that there's absolutely no need for her to do so.  You can sputter all you want about how "Pelosi has alienated CODEPINK and most of the peace movement" and how "disillusioned" you are, but you've already proven that in the only place that Democrats care about what you do--the voting booth--you're willing to sacrifice your principles and give them your support, no matter how bad a candidate they offer you.  They have no reason to believe that you won't do it again in 2008.  As far as they're concerned, you're just crying wolf.

So you can sit outside Pelosi's house as long as you want, and she'll continue to ignore you for just as long.  You've voluntarily surrendered the only leverage you had over her and the Democrats.  And the only way you'll ever be effective again is by acknowledging that mistake, realizing just how damaging it was, and doing what it takes to make it right.

Jeff Cohen: Don't support the DLC in 2008 like I did in 2004

Jeff Cohen has written an article criticizing the "netroots" for their failure to recognize the dangers of the Democratic Leadership Council and to slow the candidacy of the major DLC candidate of 2008, Hillary Clinton.  I can barely control my gag reflex long enough to craft a comparison, but this would be approximately analogous to the New York Times publishing an editorial chiding its readers for not sufficiently questioning the Bush administration's claims about WMDs in Iraq.  My response (in comments) to this astounding example of hypocrisy is below.

For more about the anti-democratic and unprincipled behavior of Cohen and other prominent progressives and progressive organizations back in 2004, you can read this.

____________________

The irony in having Jeff Cohen write this article is simply unbelievable.  Cohen was in the vanguard of those who did everything they could to smear Ralph Nader in 2004 and convince progressives to vote for Kerry, who was one of the worst DLC-type Democrats to come along in years. To hear Cohen now saying things like “there is insufficient grasp of how the Clintons’ rise to power was intertwined with the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council - set up 22 years ago to weaken the power of the grassroots (labor, feminist, civil rights) inside the party” and “they ‘misunderestimate’ the potential hazards of another Clinton White House,” with no mea culpa whatsoever for his own shameful and destructive performance in 2004, simply boggles the mind.

Jeff: You and MoveOn are personally responsible for the ascendancy of conservative Democrats (and for the 2004 victory of George Bush, who won largely because he faced a Democrat who was no more than a faux Republican).  If Hillary Clinton is a frontrunner now, it’s in no small measure because of millions of progressives like you who sold out your principles and let the Democratic Party know that your vote was theirs no matter how bad a candidate they might field.  Until you’re able to see that, admit it, and vow never to repeat it, your main achievement will continue to be undercutting the causes that you say matter the most to you.

I count myself as lucky...

...for many reasons, but I think you'll agree that one of them is that this is just a 15-mile bike ride from my front door:

Navy cleared to kill whales again

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to let the Navy kill whales again:

"We are currently engaged in war, in two countries," said [Judge Andrew] Kleinfeld, joined by Judge Consuelo Callahan. "There are no guarantees extending from 2007 to 2009 or at any other time against other countries deciding to engage us, or our determining that it is necessary to engage other countries.

"The safety of the whales must be weighed, and so must the safety of our warriors. And of our country."

I'm writing about this because I nearly passed a stone when I hit that bit about "the safety of our warriors."  Our warriors?  Is this what passes for objective judicial language from these bozos?

You can read the full decision here (pdf).  If you do you'll see that they cite the critical use of this technology: "The Navy uses something called medium frequency active sonar, which basically bounces a loud noise off the hulls of extremely quiet submarines to detect their presence."  Given that they state that "we are currently engaged in war, in two countries" as justification for the decision, are they seriously mooting the possibility that Iraqi insurgents or Taliban fighters might try attacking in their "extremely quiet submarines"?  News flash, Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges: I think I can state with confidence that these groups have extremely limited naval capabilities.

(Yeah, I see the bit about "other countries deciding to engage us," but unless they're talking about Israel I don't think the threat of underwater attack looms particularly large.)

So what's the environmental cost of having the Navy train to protect us from this potential onslaught of super-stealthy Islamic submersibles?

The Navy’s Environmental Assessment (“EA”) reports that the planned SOCAL exercises may result in approximately 170,000 “takes” of marine mammals and, according to the district court’s order, may include “approximately 8,000 exposures powerful enough to cause a temporary threshold shift in the affected mammals’ sense of hearing and an additional 466 instances of permanent injury to beaked and ziphiid whales.”

And the Navy bastards don't even plan to have a few sailors scan the horizon for whales, as they were required to do in the past by a court settlement.

I took a look at the background of the three judges (whale-haters Kleinfeld and Callahan and the lone voice of reason, Smith), since I was curious to see if there might be any correspondence between their nomination pedigrees and their decisions in this case.  But as it turns out they're all Republican appointees--and Smith was appointed by none other than George W. Bush.  So the sliver of light here is that just as in the Dover "intelligent design" case, we see that ostensibly conservative judges can (and at least occasionally do) put principles before ideology.

UPDATE: The Chronicle made extensive updates to the article I cited after I posted this, which is not uncommon for them.  The article now contains an unsourced claim that the Navy does plan to post lookouts--in contradiction to what the court decision states ("the Navy proposed to use medium frequency active sonar in training exercises off the coast of Southern California without mitigation measures").  Also, a Navy spin doctor who is now quoted at length in the article says that the Navy "employs extensive mitigation measures, approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to minimize the risk to marine life whenever active sonar is used," contradicting both the court decision and the Navy's own Environmental Assessment for this exercise (as I cited).

You can decide how you feel these contradictions can best be reconciled, but my own feeling is that instead of "Navy bastards" I should have written "lying Navy bastards."