DISGRASIAN™

He Said WHAT?! Obama Has Never Used Twitter

The internetz is spazzing out today over a bomb Obama dropped Sunday at a town hall meeting of university students in Shanghai, the third stop on his Asia tour. When asked if the Chinese should be able to “use Twitter freely”–Twitter and Facebook are both blocked in China–our president, who has 2.6 million followers on the social networking platform, said:

Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people — they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.

Obama also addressed those little matters of censorship and human rights, calling freedom of expression and religion “universal rights” before the Chinese government-selected crowd, but never mind that.

The takeaway here, OBVS, is that Obama has never used Twitter. Because all the blogs are talking about it, it’s become, like, this big internet meme overnight, and it’s one of the hottest trending topics on Twitter at the moment, right up there with  “bad romance,” the Lady Gaga single, and “Stephen Jackson,” a recently-traded basketball player.

You know, like the stuff that really matters?

[ReadWriteWeb: Obama: "I Have Never Used Twitter"]

Filed under: China, China Censorship, China Human Rights, Important Stuff, Obama Asia Tour, Obama I Have Never Used Twitter, Obama in China, Obama Shanghai Town Hall, President Barack Obama, Social Networking, Trending Topics, Twitter

Grass-Mud Hydrasian

A day after the New York Times wrote a story about the grass-mud horse video that’s become a subversive protest of censorship and authoritarianism in China, the original video, which had garnered 1.4 million hits, was removed from YouTube. If you click on the url for the video, you get the standard YouTube removal message: “This video has been removed by the user.” Of course, since we’re talking about a video that fucks with the Chinese government, you can’t help but worry that “the user,” too, has been “removed,” in the way that the Tibetan Panchen Lama was removed and has not been seen nor heard from in the last 14 years since he was named successor to the Dalai Lama.

But the beauty of the internet is that it functions like a Hydra. If you cut off one of its heads, two will spring back in its place. As soon as the original grass-mud horse video was taken down, three more were uploaded right back onto YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google, which has been accused–along with Microsoft and Yahoo!–of aiding the Chinese government with online censorship, but how long can that last when The People keep finding new ways to be heard?

Source

Filed under: Big Brother, Cao Ni Ma, Censoring the Internet, China, China Censorship, Fuck Your Mother, Grass Mud Horse, Hydra, Panchen Lama, Silencing the Masses, Tibet, YouTube

F*ck Your Mother Ship, F*ck Censorship

Remember when you first learned to cuss and how great that felt? I can still recall the exact conversation I had with my friend Carolyn when we were 10, when we brainstormed every bad word we knew, and what I did after. I hopped on my red Schwinn bicycle–that I had nicknamed “Little Red Corvette”–and rode around my small-town neighborhood, which was surrounded by piney woods where you could often find petrified wood and, on occasion, an armadillo, yelling “fuck fuck fuck” into the wind. It was like a door being opened to a secret universe, a first taste of freedom on the tongue.

I didn’t learn how to properly curse in Mandarin until I went to China to teach English after college. One of my students, “Doug”–they were all given Anglo names freshman year–didn’t care a whit about the writing class I taught, but he did want to know how to throw down in English, and in exchange, he taught me a few insulting Chinese phrases. The worst was “Cao ni ma” or “Fuck your mother,” which Doug advised me never to use (and I still haven’t).

In January of this year, a video about the “cao ni ma,” or “grass-mud horse,” an alpaca-like creature, accompanied by an excruciatingly catchy “It’s a Small World”-type children’s song appeared on a Chinese web page and found its way onto YouTube. Of course the word for grass-mud horse has different tonal inflections than the insult, but the effect is the same:

But this is China we’re talking about, so the video isn’t just funny, punny wordplay. And since its appearance on the internet, the grass-mud horse has become a national symbol of resistance to authority and censorship. The NY Times reported Wednesday:

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

I also love the double entendre of “Fuck your mother.” Fuck your mother, Fuck your mother country, Fuck your mother ship. So what better time is there for me to finally bust out my nastiest Mandarin?

Hey Chinese government!

Cao ni ma!

Ahhh. The first taste of freedom on the tongue.

[NY Times: "A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors"]

UPDATE: The original video is removed from YouTube.

Thanks, Bobby!

Filed under: Cao Ni Ma, Censoring the Internet, China, China Censorship, Curse Words, Cursing, Cussing, Double Entendres, Double Meanings, Fuck Your Mother, Grass Mud Horse, Protests, Rise Up My People