In Protest, Chinese Artist Paints Self To OctoCamo Perfection

Ok, the reason behind this is very serious stuff, but the end result is pretty cool. Fans of Metal Gear Solid 4 will appreciate this.

Anyone know where I can find a picture of this guy?

I think that's him:

He's pretty amazing:

Who? Where?

yeah, that is cool. I've seen others do something similar

it can mean many things and it's very powerful. esp in a country which treats it's citizens like they are disposable

Pretty cool to see. Shame you really hear about such talents in China due to the oppressive gov.

Hearing about such things is less to do with what the Chinese government represses than with what the US media chooses to report.

and many americans (and the american media) don't care about art anyway. it's not exciting enough.

Obviously I mistyped "rarely", but you got what I meant. I'm a bit miffed that you are suggesting the US is more repressive than the Chinese gov.

It's not what I said but there are two main points here: one that I wrote about and the other that you bring up with your misinterpretation.

The first point is that if something happens in the world and you aren't there to see it then you won't know abut it unless someone tells you. The further away that thing happens the less likely you are to know someone who knows someone who will tell you. However, in former times you would be more likely to hear about "important" news because it WOULD be the kind of news that people would pass on from one to the next (even if coloured and bent to be wrong). Now we have far fewer sources of news generally controlled by senior editors who work for a few dozen major outlet owners and who know what they have to do if they want to continue paying their mortgages (and keeping their credit scores clean).

If news serves the preferred viewpoint of the owners (or simply doesn't have any negative associations for the owners) then it can be freely disseminated. Otherwise it will be suppressed (back pages or simply ignored).

What we have in the west and increasingly so is a view of the world shown to us through a tiny window by people who own that window and use it to show us only the things that agree with their biases. When there were more news outlet owners there were more and varied biases. We see reports of a million anti war protesters being represented as a few thousand leftists and we see pro-war protests of a few hundred being reported as popular grass roots outpourings from average patriotic Americans. We see poor people as the cause of poverty and the rich as the only hope for salvation. We see protests for a change of government in Iran but we don't see protests for a change of government in (ex-Soviet) Georgia. Given the choice between a report on 911 Commissioners asking for a reopening of the 911 investigation because they were lied to and have later found that important information was with held despite subpoena or a report that Angelina Joli once modeled in a photo shoot in which she was topless but for some electrical tape then you and I know which report will win and they'll always say that it's because the public wants to know about Joli's nipples and not about what goes on in government.

I'll write about the second point in a separate post.

The other matter is on oppression and repression. All oppression is relative and cultural.

Take, for example, a child being raised in a family. The child has to comply with the family rules. Some families are more repressive than other families but they all tend to justify this as being "for the good". Some super churchy families may be super repressive and yet many of the children raised in such families will grow up feeling like that repression is not only normal but necessary and any of the members of the group such as children who wish to leave are viewed as deviant.

Generally if you are the type to go along to get along and don't have a problem with that then you will not feel repressed. If you conform because you believe it is everyone's duty to do so to keep society together then an individualist looks like a threat. These Xtians, for example, who feel that gay marriage will destroy society are the kind of herd animal that seeks comfort in conforming to strict rules and feel threatened by other people who have nothing to do with them acting differently.

Some repression is more obvious than other forms and if they are more noticeable then they are likely to be referred to as "oppressive". When the repression comes from an identifiable source but is of a different nature to the local repressive regime (regime not used in the pejorative here) then it is oppressive but if the repression rises out of the social group itself then it is invisible to everyone except those who disagree. Propaganda can mask the source and given time transfer the oppression to the psyche of the oppressed until it pervades the society and becomes a self enforcing voluntary repression like Sharia or Mosaic law.

If you support the war and the president and the government in general then you can rally just about anywhere you want. If you are against the same things (and therefore against the elites in whose interests these things are done) then you will be relegated to special "free speech zones" out of view and organizers of such events will be vilified and persecuted. The vast majority of apolitical society will not notice this nor see it as repressive. In fact, many are happy to join in with yelling "get a job" or "liberal" without any comprehension of the issues being raised because they are still part of the self repressive society. The majority of the people will always go along with what they think the majority of the people want (and that is the art of public relations - making a special interest position appear to be majority).