My Beauty Best Teacher

The Economist reports on the suprising emergent success of Nigeria's Nollywood and the goverment's ham-fisted attempts at 'guidance':

Today, filmmaking employs about a million people in Nigeria, split equally between production and distribution, making it the country's biggest employer after agriculture...The industry has sales of $200m-300m a year...So far, the industry has grown with little or no help from Nigeria's government.

But in typical bungling style the goverment now seeks to 'help' the industry:

the government worries that Nigeria's film industry reflects badly on the country. “When I travel abroad, people complain to me about the voodoo themes and the poor technical quality compared to Western movies,” says Emeka Mba, director-general of the NFVCB.

Jonathan Elendu's Elendu Reports and Sowore Omoleye's Sahara Reporters are a pointer to the promise of bottom-up methods. More familiar but maverick instruments like Al-Jazeera have been positively disruptive to the social-political fabric of the Middle East and beyond,however their establishment and operational costs have been prohibitive and a barrier to scrappy potential new entrants. Elendu Reports demonstrates the potential of diligent no holds barred investigative reporting for the continent of Africa enabled by the tools of web 1.0 and 2.0 . Recent reports of corrupt goverment officials with the accompanying images of their ill-gotten luxury properties in Western cities is threshold breaking,the denials and obfuscations of the past by the officials is now indefensible the brigandage seemingly more brazen . The effect of this is undeniable, it brings the third dimension of texture to accusations of corruption, in the flesh so to speak, the world can now see what happens to the revenue and resources of some of the most impoverished countries in the world, while the leaders don the caps of debt-relief and aid. This medium yet to include podcasting (sound) and vodcasting (video),are the developing worlds alternatives to '60 Minutes' etc. The erosion of the digital divide and its interactive enabling nature could have an accelerated cleansing effect on the hitherto incorrigibles that rule the roost, accountability and transparency sought so long in Africa's leadership might now be within its grasp.

The Guardian comments on the rising pragmatism of the Communist West Bengal goverment in India,a shift that has relevance for the 'peoples' regime of Ethiopia and other communist/socialist movements elsewhere in the continent:
"...Calcutta, the first capital of the British Raj, is a bastion of Indian communism. The left has run this Indian state for almost three decades, a period which has seen West Bengal become a byword for labour unrest. But in recent years, like its ideological cousin in China, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been busy rebranding itself - bearhugging foreign investors and Indian businessmen...West Bengal's increasingly warm embrace of foreign capital has paid off. The state has just sold 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of agricultural land to an Indonesian group in a $10bn deal for a software park and industrial zone building motorbikes, across the river from Calcutta. The state says investors from Singapore are keen to fund and build a new airport. Last year West Bengal signed a $235m contract with P&O to build India's first private port..."

Over the last several years, I have been fighting my own brand of war against those people who are the enemies of freedom and liberty. My style of fighting is to write about freedom and liberty; to discuss and expand on the ideas found in our founding documents; and attempt to apply to modern day policies the principles of protection of life, support of liberty, and protection of property. And those who oppose me have also been fighting me.

But unlike my style of warfare, the thugs who oppose me rely on intimidation, threats, attempts to damage my property, and efforts to silence me. And I am just the sort of target that these thugs like- although elected officials and big-time bloggers are good targets too, they are able to fight back and could become martyrs to the cause, but me and those who support the elected officials and bigger bloggers and private citizens who are attacked are one removed from the dispute and smaller so make much better targets for the thugs and cowards out there who disagree with our views and policy positions.

Although there is no way to compare what I have faced to the attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, and others, being a secondary target does not mean that I haven't been attacked too.

In recent years, the worst attacks that I have suffered have come after I have supported and defended those who were attacked by liberal thugs. My defense of the Koch brothers from the President Barack Obama's orchestrated attacks on them caused left-wing fascists to respond by attempting to shut down my blog. The vile creeps even went so far to write a letter to the employer of one of my loyal readers- they thought they were targeting me- as they attempted to respond to differences in views by causing the loss of employment and income. They didn't like the fact that I defended private citizens from slanderous attacks by the President of our nation, and responded to it by engaging in slanderous and personal attacks on me.

Another round of attacks came on me after I defended the tea party on several blogs and forums, responding with reasoning and calls for a more adult discussion to those who called those who supported tea party views and ideas various names. Those who disagreed with my views- those on the left who call themselves progressives or liberals but in reality are simply fascists- responded by filling up the comment sections of all of my posts with their various rants and foul language, and because I didn't want my blog to be a forum for their hate I was forced to disable the comment section on my blog.

One of the most clever attacks on me came after I defended in blogs and in forums and on social media Rocky Raczkowski, who was tea-party favorite and GOP nominee in 2010 for Michigan's 9th District. Someone emailed me pretending to agree with my comments and asked questions about the advertisers on my blog, and the next day my advertisers dropped me and confiscated my money due to what they said was fraud. I'm not going to say exactly what happened (I don't want to give the thugs ammunition), but the result was a loss of income for me and the loss of a good sum of money (Google never responded to my inquiries or pleas for reconsideration).

These attacks on me are not isolated to just me. Over at Legal Insurrection, Will has a story up that rings very close to my own experiences, called Welcome to total political war:

...I’m not talking about the attempt to get advertisers to stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s show, or Fox News, although that would be bad enough. I’m talking about the second-tier of the warfare, the attempt to intimidate those removed by one or more degrees of separation from the dispute, and to use them as tools against the target.

We have seen it a number of times in the past couple of years.

When King & Spalding agreed to represent the U.S. House of Representative after Obama changed positions and announced that the Justice Department no longer would defend DOMA in court, there were not only protests against King & Spalding, but threats to picket and protest clients of the firm who had nothing to do with the dispute. The threat that clients of the firm who were completely unconnected to the dispute would be harrasseed was enough to cause the firm to withdraw the representation.

Similarly, when the new Rhode Island Attorney General announced that he would cooperate with the federal goverment in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, protesters not only invaded the lobby of his offices, they picketed his house and confronted neighbors about the issue. Dragging his neighbors into a dispute which had nothing to do with them did not cause the RI AG to back down, although not for lack of trying.

Which brings me to the present dispute with Rush Limbaugh, and radio show host Kim Komando, who has a very well-known computer talk show. What did or does Komando have to do with the dispute? Nothing, except that one or more of the advertisers targeted by the anti-Limbaugh groups also advertises on Komando’s show. Komando received a flood of e-mails demanding that she drop the advertisers....

...What is happening goes beyond Obama’s call for people to argue with their neighbors and get in their faces. It goes far beyond Bill Clinton’s politics of personal destruction directed at accusers, and beyond name-calling by right wing pundits.

This total war, in which no one is allowed to be non-political and neighbors and clients become mere pressure points, is a dangerous development.

This is indeed total war, and that realization has only slowly dawned on me over the years that I have been writing on this blog. It is scary, but not surprising- most of humanity today lives in a state of fear and oppression from tyrants, and for most of human history humanity has lived in fear and oppression from tyrants.

It is in the worst nature of people to attempt to oppress others and use them as slaves- use their labor and intelligence and skills and drive to provide them with things they did not earn- food, clothing, shelter, medicine, drugs, influence, power, money, loans, etc. The worst nature of people is to react to arguments and reasoning with intimidation, threats, and personal attacks. And the worst nature of people is to take that which they did not earn, suppress and lessen the freedom and liberty of others, and if possible choke the very life out of those who oppose them.

It's a total war and it's getting worse as our opponents grow more bold and get closer to winning the war. I can only hope that in 2012, you and your friends and family recognize that we're at war and take the proper steps, because the last time the American people pretended that they weren't at war, we saw the error of that thinking on September 11.

UPDATE: Thank you for linking to this post Conservatives on Fire and Fuzzy Logic!