The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.23 Meet Deborah Sue Culwell. A Monster. Britney Spears, & Explaining 996 Censorship & Protests

Starting point is 00:00:00 Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Tuesday. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show and a quick note slash announcement today. As some of you already saw because I snuck it into yesterday's description, our news website roguerocket.com has now officially launched. At launch we'll include some stories we cover on the show, so just another way for people to consume those stories as well as other things we don't cover on the show. Keep in mind this is a new expansion for us, this part is just starting but it's very exciting for us. Also if you're like, I wonder if there was a new PDS today, rather than having to rely on YouTube systems, you can now just go to RogueRocket.com. But with that said, let's just jump into it. And the first thing we're going to talk about today is our douchebag of the day,

Starting point is 00:00:34 54-year-old Debra Sue Colwell. And the reason we're talking about Debra today, the reason she is our douchebag of the day, is because she was in a Now Viral video. And that video is some surveillance footage. In that video, we see a woman who turns out to be Deborah. She drives a white Jeep Wrangler up to a row of dumpsters. This reportedly outside of an auto parts store in Coachella, California. She gets out with a plastic bag. She throws the plastic bag away.

Starting point is 00:00:55 She kind of looks and then she leaves. And if at this point you're like, well, Phil, how is she the douche bag of the day for that? What, because she used someone else's dumpster? No, it was because inside of that plastic bag, reportedly there were seven puppies that were just days old. She literally threw a bag of alive puppies into a dumpster.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Now before moving on, the good news here, luckily there happened to be another person in the area. He ended up looking into the dumpster shortly after Deborah left. He found the puppies, he brought them into the auto shop store, they called animal services. According to John Welsh, a spokesperson for animal services,

Starting point is 00:01:24 if he had not come across these puppies in the 15 minute window that he did, they would be dead. They were reportedly alive. They've been transported to a local rescue group. They're being bottle fed. Now, as far as Deborah, as you can tell from that mugshot that we first showed, she has been arrested. According to reports, she is currently facing

Starting point is 00:01:39 seven felony counts of animal cruelty, as well as seven misdemeanor counts of abandoning dogs. She's facing up to nine years in prison on the felony charges alone if convicted. Also, it's been reported that they found 38 dogs at this woman's home. They have all been impounded. Those dogs there were described as being in somewhat healthy condition, but when you look at the house, it is just... it's actually kind of disturbing to look at. Yeah, as of right now, that's the story. Personally, I hope she is punished to the fullest extent of the law. I already have a massive issue with people

Starting point is 00:02:07 that dump dogs on the side of the road, let alone someone that just throws a literal bag of puppies into a dumpster in 90 degree weather. And there's actually something kind of poetic that because she did this, she herself could end up in a small box for many, many years. And then let's talk about Britney Spears and the Free Britney protests that happened

Starting point is 00:02:24 in West Hollywood yesterday. Now, for those that are not aware, some of her fans believe about Britney Spears and the Free Britney protests that happened in West Hollywood yesterday. Now for those that are not aware, some of her fans believe that Britney Spears is being held in a mental health facility against her will. And the theories around this are pretty long, but I'm gonna try and simplify and break them down. Fans have been very suspicious about Britney's well-being after she canceled her second Vegas residency

Starting point is 00:02:37 back in January right after announcing it. At that time, Britney reportedly posted to Instagram, "'A couple of months ago, my father was hospitalized "'and almost died. "'We're all so grateful that he came out of it alive, "'but he still has a long road ahead of him. "'I had to make the difficult decision "'to put my full focus and energy on my family at this time.'"

Starting point is 00:02:51 And something important to note before moving forward is that her father, Jamie, is also her conservator, which is sort of like a legal guardian. Ever since 2008, both he and a lawyer by the name of Andrew Wallet have been Britney's conservators. Wallet has reportedly been in charge of her estate, while Jamie has control of her assets,

Starting point is 00:03:04 career, and personal life. And this conservatorship really gives them a lot of control in Britney's conservators. While it has reportedly been in charge of her estate, while Jamie has control of her assets, career and personal life. And this conservatorship really gives them a lot of control in Britney's life. She needs their permission to spend money, even get married. Okay, so you know that Britney cancels the tour, we fast forward a couple of months, we don't really hear much from Britney. Her Instagram, where she usually posts frequently,

Starting point is 00:03:17 is relatively inactive, there are no public sightings of her. Then in early March, after over a decade, while it resigns from his role, making Jamie Britney's only conservator. And in the first week of April, we learned that Britney was checked into a mental health facility. The reports at that time saying that she was likely dealing

Starting point is 00:03:30 with emotional distress, mainly connected to Jamie's health issues. And so as these reports spread, Britney posts to Instagram for the first time in three months with the caption, "'We all need to take time for a little me time.'" And this is when fans began to theorize that Britney didn't check herself

Starting point is 00:03:42 into the mental health facility. Instead, people saying that it was her father's decision, that they don't think that it was actually Britney posting to Instagram herself, and then the situation evolved and got a little weirder. Last week, a popular podcast called Britney's Gram received an anonymous call. A man who claims to be a paralegal in the office

Starting point is 00:03:56 working on Britney's conservatorship dialed in with a tip. And while the man remained anonymous, the two hosts said that they reached out to verify his identity, and in his tip, he said that the conspiracy theories fans were creating might be justified. Essentially, his message said that while Britney was rehearsing for her second Vegas residency,

Starting point is 00:04:10 her father learned she wasn't taking her medication. So he told her to either get back on the medications, talk to a doctor to find new ones, or cancel the show. And going on to say that when she refused, Jamie then canceled the show and said they could blame it on his health. And according to this source, Britney has actually been in the mental health facility since January

Starting point is 00:04:23 when the show was canceled. Adding, and this is the reason why we saw the hashtag as well as protests out in the real world, she did not want to go. From what I understand, this is not a decision she made at all. And so this all started the Free Britney movement, which trended on Twitter, it sparked yesterday's protests. You had people gathering outside of West Hollywood City Hall with posters that said things like hashtag Free Britney and Britney's management is toxic. And while many have been reporting that this movement is to get her out of the mental health facility, it doesn't appear that that's actually their cause. Their real goal appears to be to get Britney out of her conservatorship with her father,

Starting point is 00:04:53 citing the fact that this type of conservatorship is mainly common among people in comas, people with dementia, and other very serious illnesses. And there is a group of people that believe that Jamie is using this conservatorship to have control over Britney's finances for his own financial gain. So we just kind of believe that through the proof of her work, through the past X number of years, that she has proven herself that she is capable of being her own person. We can't speak exactly to her mental health, but we can speak to what we've seen as fans and as the public

Starting point is 00:05:16 and what she's able to do. And it's obvious that she shouldn't be under that amount of control. And according to Britney's gram, Britney Spears has actually filed a motion in court this year, potentially to get out of the conservatorship, but saying that the records on the case are sealed. So you have this odd situation where you have people kind of protesting in the digital space, the online space,

Starting point is 00:05:32 you have an anonymous source. And as of now, no one from Britney's team has really responded to this situation. And overall, it's just this generally weird situation that makes me feel uncomfortable even talking about it. As we're seeing this develop, more people are keeping an eye on it. We're seeing more information coming out,

Starting point is 00:05:45 like maybe Jamie did not force his daughter into this facility because the conservatorship does not grant him that ability. The reason I feel uncomfortable about it is there's all this talk, there's actually movements out there, but we don't actually know things. I mean, when you look out there,

Starting point is 00:05:58 there are some sources you wouldn't feel comfortable citing. There are a lot of things that haven't been overwhelmingly verified. It ends up feeling like a different version of exploiting a celebrity's mental health issues It ends up feeling like a different version of exploiting a celebrity's mental health issues. I feel like over the past decade there has been this this kind of larger learning experience regarding mental health in general. Right, I think there are a lot of us who maybe said off-color things when there was the Britney Spears who shaved her head back in the day. Probably have a much different reaction today when you see a story about Britney Spears' mental health. You see these fucking celebrity gossip mags talking about a celebrity that maybe was thinking about killing themselves and smacking their face on a front cover. And so with this story, I want to say something that was said many, many moons ago,

Starting point is 00:06:34 although I will say in a much calmer fashion, leave Britney alone. If she's in this facility, hopefully it's going to make her better, and what's not going to make her better are fucking paparazzi snapping shots of her outside of the facility. I don't know, that's the story. That's my kind of just initial reaction to it. And of course, I'd love to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this? Then a kind of quickie industry news that I wanted to include yesterday,

Starting point is 00:06:53 but just for time's sake, I couldn't include. Yesterday, we briefly mentioned India banning PewDiePie videos, specifically two of them, but Felix wasn't the only thing being banned in India. If you haven't heard, India banned TikTok, like the whole app. And it appears that this has been incredibly devastating to TikTok.

Starting point is 00:07:08 According to an analytics firm called Sensor Tower, the app had been downloaded in India over 300 million times. It's a big number on its own, but it's even bigger when you consider that the total global downloads is over one billion. As far as the reason for this, an Indian court said the app was promoting pornography.

Starting point is 00:07:22 As a result, we saw Apple and Google removing TikTok from their app stores. And over the weekend, we got a much closer look at the devastating impact this could be having on ByteDance, who owns TikTok. According to Reuters, in the filing made to India's Supreme Court on Saturday, ByteDance urged the court to quash the ban

Starting point is 00:07:37 and direct the federal IT ministry to tell companies such as Google and Apple to make the app available again on their platforms. And in that filing, ByteDance pegged financial losses at $500,000 each day which it said includes destruction the value of its investments and loss of commercial revenue and quote Banning has had adverse impact on the user base of this app losing close to 1 million new users per day It is estimated that approximately 6 million requests for downloads could not be affected since the ban came into effect and because of all this they Say 250 jobs are at risk.

Starting point is 00:08:06 And so that's where we are with this right now. It's gonna be very interesting to track this, not only because of what it involves as far as TikTok, which has become just this massive, massive apping company, but also to see what kind of crackdown we are going to see out of India, which has just blown up as far as internet media consumption.

Starting point is 00:08:21 Yeah, for now, we're just gonna have to wait to see. And the last thing we're going to talk about today is China's tech sector. Over the last thing we're going to talk about today is China's tech sector. Over the last month, hundreds of thousands of tech workers in China have started an online protest against unfair working conditions. And you might hear protest in China and think, how? Showing any form of dissent in China

Starting point is 00:08:35 is incredibly difficult, especially online. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are blocked. In China, other social media platforms are heavily censored. So in order to even find a place where tech workers could organize, they had to get creative. And that's where the platform GitHub comes in. And if you don't know GitHub, it's owned by Microsoft and it's the world's biggest open source website

Starting point is 00:08:52 that allows programmers to work together on code. So these workers created what is called a repository on GitHub, which is essentially a project where any number of people can collaborate together. But instead of writing code, they shared thousands of posts protesting 996 schedules, which if you're not familiar with, it's the concept that tech workers should work

Starting point is 00:09:06 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. And if that sounds nuts, it's because it is, but that philosophy has become the industry standard in China. Workers called the project 996.ICU, referring to an apparent joke that working a 996 schedule will send you to the intensive care unit, which yeah, I also deal with horrible situations

Starting point is 00:09:22 with dark humor. Yeah, the point of this project was to demand better working conditions and demonstrate against 996 schedules, which workers also say are illegal under Chinese labor laws, which is why according to the description for the project, they say, This is not a political movement. We firmly uphold the labor law and request employers to respect the legitimate rights and interests of their employees. The repository includes evidence of bad working conditions as well as legal resources for workers and petitions to Chinese government ministries. It also has a blacklist of more than 150 companies

Starting point is 00:09:48 that workers say have inhumane working conditions. And that blacklist includes huge tech firms like Huawei, Alibaba, and of course we mentioned ByteDance, which created TikTok. And just a few weeks after it was started, 996.icu received more than 200,000 stars, making it one of the most popular GitHub repositories ever. So why are we talking about this today?

Starting point is 00:10:05 Well, because we mentioned those words, China and protests. Unsurprisingly, some Chinese browsers have started to block access to 996.ICU. And so yesterday, a group of Microsoft employees published an open letter supporting the project and calling on Microsoft to protect the repository from censorship.

Starting point is 00:10:19 And on that last point, you might be wondering, why would Microsoft censor a project on a platform it owns? Well, because it turns out that the branch of the company that operates in China censors search results on its search engine Bing in order to comply with Chinese laws. And so around that, now Microsoft employees are speaking out to make sure that doesn't happen.

Starting point is 00:10:34 And while Microsoft obviously can't stop other browsers from censoring the project, they do have the power to continue to allow people to access it through Bing. That is exactly what this open letter urges Microsoft to do. With the Microsoft employees writing, in response to these events, we, the workers of Microsoft and GitHub

Starting point is 00:10:46 support the 996.ICU movement and stand in solidarity with tech workers in China. We know this is a problem that crosses national borders. These same issues permeate across full-time and contingent jobs at Microsoft and the industry as a whole. And continuing, we encourage Microsoft and GitHub to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone.

Starting point is 00:11:04 And as of recording this video, the letter has been signed by at least 100 different tech workers and is being updated by the administrators as more people sign it. Which on that note, it's not just Microsoft workers. According to the letter, the employees launched the petition publicly at the same time that they announced it with Microsoft.

Starting point is 00:11:16 So employees at lots of different tech firms from all over have signed it, including Google and Facebook. And so with this story and the petition gaining traction, it's gonna be very interesting to see how Microsoft and China respond. And I say that because recently we've actually seen examples of petitions and letters like this actually having an impact on tech company policies. For example, just last year,

Starting point is 00:11:33 Google employees circulated a letter demanding that the company shut down a censored search engine for China that Google was secretly working on. Some software engineers even quit their jobs in protest. As a result of everything, we saw Google CEOs saying they will not launch the search project just yet. But also on the other side of instances like this, you might remember there were Google employees

Starting point is 00:11:49 who staged a walk-off back in November of last year. That in part to protest an executive who had been fired for sexual harassment and received a $90 million severance package. Some of them are now reporting that they're experiencing internal backlash, even demotions. This despite the fact that Google agreed to new policies

Starting point is 00:12:03 regarding sexual harassment and diversity. And specifically in China, that kind of backlash has to motions. This despite the fact that Google agreed to new policies regarding sexual harassment and diversity. And specifically in China, that kind of backlash has serious implications. One 996 programmer in China anonymously told NPR that he was scared to death of political retribution continuing, I am not optimistic about our long-term prospects, I think the Chinese Communist Party will see us as terrorists and use the most modern weaponry

Starting point is 00:12:21 to make us obey. And in fact, according to NPR, more than 30 students, activists, and factory workers have been detained since last summer for trying to unionize factory workers. And the potential backlash against GitHub is especially concerning. The site's been known for being an important and influential space for programmers to create

Starting point is 00:12:35 and share anti-censorship tools in the country, which of course makes it a perceived threat, which is why it's not surprising that this is not the first time GitHub has been targeted in China. GitHub was actually briefly blocked in the country back in 2013. Also in 2015, GitHub was taken offline by a cyber attack that servers eventually traced back

Starting point is 00:12:50 to a Chinese state-owned telecom company. And in general, access to certain pages and projects have been selectively censored. So for now, we're in a situation where you have to kind of just wait to see what Microsoft and China will do here. Really looking at the situation, it's more of a question of what will Microsoft do?

Starting point is 00:13:03 Based off of the stories that we've seen coming out of China historically, I don't feel like China's gonna be like, actually, you know, it's more of a question of what will Microsoft do? Based off of the stories that we've seen coming out of China historically, I don't feel like China's gonna be like, actually, you know, it's fine. Maybe we're going a little too far with the censorship. You know, for these tech companies, it creates this weird situation of, do you play so that you can maybe change the game from the inside? Or for moral or ethical reasons, do you say, no, we're not gonna play your game?

Starting point is 00:13:20 And so regarding this whole situation and that specific thing that I just hit on, I'd love to know your thoughts, your opinions, what you hope that Microsoft does or does not do. Of course, let me know what you're thinking in those comments down below. And that's where we're going to end today's show. And remember, if you liked the video, hit that like button. If you're new here, you want more,

Starting point is 00:13:36 be sure to hit that subscribe button. Also, if you're not 100% filled in, oh, you got options today. If you missed yesterday's PDS, you wanna catch up, click or tap right there to watch that. Morning show, miss that, click or tap right there to watch that. Morning show, miss that? Click or tap right there to watch that. Wanna check out some stories that I didn't get to

Starting point is 00:13:47 in today's show? Go to the description. But with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in. I love yo faces and I'll see you tomorrow.

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The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.23 Meet Deborah Sue Culwell. A Monster. Britney Spears, & Explaining 996 Censorship & Protests

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