Hey cool, that didn't take long to get censored off their site. Excepting, they left a very critical response that was just chock full of straw men up there, unmolested.

Now if that's not an example of censorship being used to quell dissent, I don't know what is.

So... here's my response, which will (I'm sure) quickly disappear as well. I might email the next one over to the domain contacts for indymedia.org because I am really having a hard time swallowing how this is going down.

"What's interesting about this response is that it unquestioningly accepts the media's portrayal of last week's events."

No, it actually does not. How you can claim this when the post doesn't even have anything to do with any coverage but Indymedia's is beyond me--unless you're basically looking for a straw man to beat.

"You do realize (I hope) that reporters from AP, Fox and the New York Post were also gassed and arrested. Apparently, big media can be targeted just as much as anyone else."

Of course. There's no doubt that the cops were being as much a bunch of jerks (okay, so I'm being really polite about that) as anyone if not more. The problem being, it can take an overwhelming amount of evidence to convince people who weren't there and have had mostly useful and constructive relations with the police that the police actually were acting like jackbooted thugs, which means there can be no excuses for the behaviour exhibited. None. Nada. Zero. You must maintain clean hands! This is hard to manage when there's an audio stream basically chuckling about things being broken and people commenting in text about being hopeful for the construction of barricades. Oh, and lets not forget calling the disruption of the event a win. Cripes that looks bad.

"Additionally, which ones were the independent press who 'engaged' in the action, thus 'deserving' what happened? They were filming and photographing, as press are supposed to."

You really aren't good at this sort of spin-doctoring. I didn't say anyone "engaged" in this was "deserving" of anything. I did however say (among other things) that posting live updates right at the top of the website about where serious problems were happening and telling people to go there was irresponsible. Of course, I'm not so sure anything even happened to the guys responsible for putting that sort of stuff up. I'm not certain but I think they were far, far away in another city. (Bonus points for people smart enough to see the parallel here)

"For one thing, I'm not sure why you think that destruction was 'the goal'. Not only that, but mass arrests DID occur at marches where there was NO property damage occurring, so the 'you brought it on yourself' argument is null and void."

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Update: Some unknown individual (really and for true) reposted my original criticism of the twincities.indymedia.org coverage, as well as a snippet of what amount to the rules governing "moderation" of Indymedia coverage. Guess what? Silently deleting content isn't allowed. Whether or not the mysterious deleter strikes again will basically dictate whether or not I drop some emails to the core of the IndyMedia Collective asking that they look into the sort of censorship that was taking place, as well as whether or not there was any impartiality going on.

Oh, and before anyone gets any crazy ideas, I'm an "anarchist" of the stripe that believes that people should be able to self-govern, which means we expect people to be civil, decent, and constructive people because otherwise we'd just be a bunch of animals. I'd be an ass to expect other people to behave better than I expect myself to behave, and I expect a lot of civility out of me, thanks. (Translation: I R NOT BOMB THROWING NUTJOB KTHXBAI)

Update: Yep. Days later and they're still deleting it. Tomorrow night I'll finish up that scribble that will just check it every five minutes and repost it as necessary.

Why?

Because I'm right in what I'm doing, and this is the Internet, where censorship will not be tolerated.