I'm appalled that the Olympics are being held in Beijing in the face of Chinese oppression of Tibetan freedom protesters and the responsibility of the Beijing regime for much of the suffering in the Sudan. I've been sounding off about it on my radio program, and we've interviewed folks on both sides of the issue. I've even designed political protest T-shirts in response, but you'll never see them if the copyright goons at CafePress have their way. (More on that later.)
The above audio streams highlight a couple of my rants and bring you interviews with Elizabeth Hankins, who wrote a novel about the situation in the Sudan called, "The Calling." She feels that we should use the 2008 games to hold Beijing's feet to the fire for their culpability in the ongoing genocide in Darfur. I agree.
On the other side of the table is Jim Trippon, who thinks that we ought to take it easy on the Chinese and let them save face while applying diplomatic pressure behind the scenes. His contention is that there is a lot of money to be made from the booming Chinese economy, that China is a young country experiencing growing pains, and after all, we did the same thing to the Indians when we were a young nation, right?
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I would hope that we're a little more enlightened in the 21st century than we were in the 18th and 19th centuries. I certainly hope that he isn't seriously trying to justify political oppression, suppression of human rights, and murder as acceptable because there's money to be made. (Yet, sadly I know he is.) If your credo is "Greed Is Good," You might want to check out his website. I was diplomatic to Jim on-air and even invited him back to discuss China's economy in more general terms. The post-interview analysis was more pointed, I assure you.
That brings us to CafePress... The lesson here is, that if you want to get your shirts produced, NEVER tag them with what they actually are. I was foolish enought to use tags like, "2008 Olympics," and "Beijing Olympic Protest." The censor bots caught those right away and flagged the images as a violation. I asked CafePress to review them, confident that any reasonable person would see them as obvious parody and political commentary. They didn't and sent me a real knee-slapper as a reply. You can read the exchange and see the verboten designs in the post continuation.
