There are things that make you think WTF

I saw a very NSFW article.  The text was a serious article.  The pictures though were the NSFW part.

The article is about the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, considered to be a dissident, and the latest of his escapades involve him tweeting a picture titled "Trusting Fully" with him and 4 females all nude.  The Chinese have draconian anti-pornography laws, and the photographer has been arrested.

The same act in the US would have mostly gotten angry sermons from the pulpits, and bored reviews at the art galleries.

These same anti-pornography laws also got people arrested for attempting to distribute Bibles.

Draconian is a very appropriate adjective for those laws, written so broadly that it includes anything the people in power want it to include, even if the original writers never intended it used that way.

text from the article :

BEIJING — When Ai Weiwei’s assistant, Beijing artist Zhao Zhao, was brought in for questioning recently, the supposed charges were simple: distribution of pornography. The image in question was “One Tiger, Eight Breasts,” a shot of Ai with four young women, all of them naked. I first saw the photo in August 2010, when he tweeted a link to it and said “Trusting each other fully,” though the link to the image no longer works.

The average art student can tell you these are simply artistic nudes, nothing more, but the charges seem serious. From The Guardian‘s Jonathan Watts:

He said police had questioned his cameraman Zhao Zhao on Thursday over pictures Zhao had taken of the artist. “They clearly told him this is an investigation, now, they are doing on me, on pornography,” Ai told the AFP news agency.

Netizens wouldn’t stand for this. Quickly, a meme emerged: post pictures of yourself naked in support of Ai Weiwei and Zhao Zhao. A few months back, I wrote about the Wenzhou train collision spurring off a series of satire photos I dubbed online street art. But this is online assembly. Unable to assemble in person, Chinese citizens in the mainland and abroad are using the power of the internet meme to assemble online.

On Sina Weibo and Twitter, they used the hashtags #艾裸裸 and #爱裸裸, both pronounced Ai Luo Luo. It’s a play on words with Ai Weiwei’s name and can mean something like “Love getting naked.” Predictably, the hashtag on Twitter was quickly flooded (or “polluted,” in Chinese parlance) by spam messages from the 50 Cent Party, a paid army of pro-Party internet commentators, to make it difficult to locate images.

The links to the article I left out so no one can inadvertently click the link and see the naked people.  The central problem is not the nudity --- it's the lack of toleration for going outside of accepted doctrine.  This intolerance of dissent is how we lost millions of lives in the dark ages.

The pictures also showed me something besides the nudity.  The men covered their crotch areas with a stuffed llama plush toy.  That's how I learned that the Chinese for llama sounds similar to the Chinese words for "F--- you,"  something I did not know.

The Chinese are more fascinating to me now... they may have more freedom in their prison than Americans have in their prison.

When you ask who is this Ai Wei Wei ?  He created that wonderful stadium used in the Beijing Olympic games.  The man is an artist, and a genius.  And he is being persecuted by the Chinese government with every law they can stretch to fit to imprison him.

China is not a barbaric nation, and the same things done there can easily happen here in the US.  

Martin Luther King said it well.  Injustice anywhere is an attack on justice everywhere.