Pushed back a day due to the Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving, it’s digg! Digg.com! Let’s see what’s in the internet news this week.

What Digg Dugg Most

And people say we Monk-ey around

What a depressing week for digg. The #1 story of the week was this one (#1 Digg: 5370) which is just, well, wow — taken out of context, it’s a dead monk in a swamp. Taken in context, it’s a dead monk in a swamp in Burma. In the realm of world news, it’s a tragedy, and a wake-up call to first-world nations that are currently preoccupied with liberating people who, after three years, seem rather at odds with first-world views on liberty. In the realm of history, it’ll probably be the next Rage Against the Machine album cover.

What got this all the attention was, in actuality, a comment posted by digg user “hiphoc”, who writes:

What about the atrocities that is Stallones face. But seriously. Thousands of unarmed monks are being killed and a video by Colbert gets more diggs. We can force the press to cover this more. Its been an almost black out on the Myanmar situation since the monks started being killed. But we can see 5 days straight coverage of Anna Nicole Smith when she dies? What the FUCK. This media is run by corrupt filthy cold hearted slugs. They know that if they give this situation Anna Nicole Smith or Britney like attention it can shame the government into stopping. It can also cause this non violence to spread to china and other dictatorships. If this doesnt prove the media is controlled by arms dealers and big oil, I dont know what will prove it to people. Fuck it, someone should put IPHONE or HALO 3 into the subject of one of these Burma stories. Maybe we get a few thousand diggs and shame the Media into giving us more coverage. An injustice for one is an injustice for all. People in America sat back while poor whites, black and Hispanics complained about police abuse for years. Now that white college kids are getting their asses beat its a problem. This is a test to see if the youth of the new millennium will put up with this. Remember the free Tibet movement? Where are the artists? The students? WHY ARE PEOPLE SO FUCKING JADED AND APATHETIC? My heart is aching for this human suffering and I feel helpless for the people in this country who are suffering, Iraq and now Myanmar.

Remember that DVD unlocking code issue? Remember how Digg and the blogs forced this into the main stream. People are dying and being tortured right now. Lets do something.

And, while, yes, his heart is in the right place, you’ve got to wonder about the current state of political activism. I’ve touched on this before, but in a little under fifty years our youth has gone from chaining themselves to factories and getting shot at with bean-bag guns to clicking a button on the internet and feeling all smug and involved. Now, yeah, I know, there are still people out there on the streets, making a difference, but this whole “lets spread the word about a third-world issue through the internet!” thing is kind of asinine in the face of the issue also being spread through, you know, The Daily Mail (where the picture originated), The New York Times, CNN, and every other major media outlet there is.

But, hell, man, you better make sure DotNetHacka who only reads digg, slashdot and the Team Fortress 2 Forums knows about what’s going on! With him on board, the crisis is more than half way toward solved.

And, really, that reference to the AACS encryption key controversy? Come the fuck on. While staring down some lawyers who don’t want you to post their DVD encryption key is commendable as whatever, I’m pretty sure the doesn’t qualify you to sit back, dust your hands together, smile broadly and say “And that’s that. Now let’s save Burma”.

In summation, and to all digg users, and the internet as a whole: social activism is important. Comedy is funny. Tech news is interesting. We can have all three simultaneously, and still be good, upstanding, moral people.

The Runners Up

Proving my point even further

And, continuing on the above theme, there’s Stop War the Geeky Way (#6 Digg: 4368):

It’s one of those things that starts off unfunny, gets even unfunnier when you think about all the planning and thought that went into it, and then starts to get funny once you begin to imagine a bunch of aging hippies standing around this guy just all fucking baffled by his goddamn inclusion of an html joke in their anti-war protest.

The 1998 Nostalgia Tour Rolls On

And just so you don’t think this week was all about politics and protests, of course we had the requisite retread of something that was being forwarded around via e-mail almost a decade ago. Look, it’s DemotivationalPosters (#2 Digg: 4738).

I got kind of excited by this one because it was titled “Top 40 Demotivational Posters” which made me think of something more like this:

And I just feel like that has more potential, honestly.

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