Volume Two, Number One

Hey yeah we’re back and this time we’re bad. Probably gonna piss off a couple of people with this next one, since we’re basically calling out entire nation-states and other system-level structures, but someone’s gotta say it.

Here’s the cover:

The Cover – v2n1

And here’s the interior:

The Inside – v2n1

• What shenanigans be these: Ferguson, informational riot control, and the new mass media

 

Much can be learned from the propaganda emitted by the Israeli government. The IDF inflicts picturesque damage, the case against them making itself. On the other hand, with the Hamas rockets causing relatively minimal physical damage, we are not confronted with pictures of overflowing makeshift trauma wards. Instead, we are given cartoonish proclamations, accompanied by cartoons. “Hamas used funds for kindergartens for Gaza’s children to build tunnels of terror to strike at Israeli kindergartens.” tweets the Prime Minister. Turns out the tunnels came out miles away from any kibbutz, let alone a kindergarten, and were used exclusively to target the IDF. [“Were Gaza tunnels built to harm Israeli civilians?” +972 Blog. 11 Aug 2014]
Anyone remember those cartoons of mobile WMD factories in Iraq?

What shenanigans be these: Ferguson, informational riot control, and the new mass media

While researching our article on Ferguson PD Darren Wilson’s shooting of Mike Brown, and the ensuing eruption of crackdown resistance, we came upon something odd.

In our notes, the fact that the Ferguson Police Department possessed but did not use dashboard cameras was sourced to an article called “Police shooting of black teen in Missouri focus of federal inquiry,” in the Los Angeles Times. A Google search for that title turns up another LATimes article, this one having no mention of boxed cameras (several unspecified changes have been made in the article since publication, according to the end notes). The search results also include multiple sites reposting the original article, which contains the mention of cameras still in boxes:

It doesn’t do so any more, but for a while, if you used the Los Angeles Times search bar, and entered that title, you’d get this results page:

Take a look at the URL – the search terms in the query are correct. Yet the reported results have removed the terms ‘black’ and ‘teen’ and inserted the term “black steel”, thus insisting that any search contain that phrase in particular. Other search terms seemed to work fine. Huh?

Out of curiosity, we applied #2 from this list of Wikipedia blackout workarounds, and appended ‘?banner=none’ to the end of the URL. This pulled up no results, but the reported results were at least correct. Wha?

We aren’t webdevs; we can’t be sure if this was just a sloppy glitch following the updating of an article or a deliberate memory-holing of certain facts. Anyone out there know?