Carnal Reason

The house pictured above is Barbara Streisand’s estate in Malibu. The picture became famous precisely because Ms Streisand sued the California Coastal Records Project in an effort to have it suppressed. The lawsuit gave rise to the notion of the Streisand Effect:

… a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized.

The censored image de jour is the brief film called Fitna. It promulgates the preposterous idea that adherents of the Religion of Peace often use violence to suppress ideas. Due to threats of violence, the original internet distributor, LiveLeak, has pulled the plug:

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.

Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one anothers culture.

We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.

There are any number of sites still distributing the movie. I could name several, but rather than giving you a fish, I want to show you how to fish. Sites come and go, but knowledge of how to find stuff lasts a little longer.

Go to google and search on the string “Fitna torrent”. This should return any number of torrent sites carrying the movie. Or just go to old reliable, The Pirate Bay. Enter the search term, and hit the search button. Your results should look something like this.

Now click on one of the returned names, and you should see something like this.
Click on the green DOWNLOAD THIS TORRENT link. This will not download the movie; it will download a torrent file. In my case it was called Fitna_the_movie_-_English_-_AVI_and_FLV_format.4102738.TPB.torrent.

In order to download the movie, open the torrent file with a BitTorrent client. There are any number of good ones; I use Azureus because it is available on many platforms, and is featureful and solid. As I mentioned, there are many good clients. Download one, install it, and open that torrent file. The torrent client will download the file. Welcome to the dark side.

Disclaimer. Sites such as Pirate Bay are essentially search engines that search for torrents. The torrents provide access to all manner of files distributed by third parties, including copyrighted works such as movies, software, music, and porn. So far as I know the owners of Fitna want it distributed. Not so with a lot of other stuff. If you decide to download copyrighted files, you might want to carefully weigh the pros and cons. Netflix is cheap, convenient, and legal. Your call.

Posted on March 29th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: Uncategorized