Microsoft Bans 'Democracy' for China's Web Users 430
Doc Ruby writes "As reported, paradoxically, on MSN, 'Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words 'democracy' and 'freedom' from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors.' MSN China says it must comply with local laws, but there is no Chinese law against the use of these words."
Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember Pastor Ken Hutcherson [slashdot.org], and how he leaned on Bill about the whole gay issue? Where the hell is he now?
Surely, if he and his band of fundies can kick up that much of a fuss about homosexuality, they can certainly flex their muscles in the defense of human liberty and dignity.
C'mon, Ken...you've still got Bill's number...and here's a cause actually worth fighting for.
In Communist China... (Score:5, Insightful)
The more heinous laws may never be written down.
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:2, Insightful)
MSNBC? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey! Check this out! The company i work for is being immoral!
Re:Democracy is Eurocentric idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
No law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Law? You don't need law to enforce the will of the party in China.
PS. Before this is mark flamebait- I am a chinese.
RedHat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:1, Insightful)
The unfortunate truth is that neither fanatics nor capitalists care much about the concepts "human liberty" and "dignity".
If they did, fanatics would soon have to recognize that whatever produced this world produced ~everything and everyone on it~ and all the "holy" books are not the words of any God.
If they did, Microsoft would stop struggling to build a secure network operating system and would simply become a Linux distributor.
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:5, Insightful)
We shouldnt be doing buisness with the Chinese (Score:3, Insightful)
How does it benefit OUR citizens? As you can see... China's priorities clearly have nothing to do with our beleifs, our products or our labor force. China only wants our dollar, and corperate America just wants slave labor?
Why do we allow this to continue? What is the real benefits of allowing our US based corperations, to exploit the world and devalue our country?
THE CHINESE CENTURY? Not gonna happen (Score:1, Insightful)
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 12/06/2005)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and T
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Both are publicly traded corporations. They are not human beings with the ability to be moral. To expect the end result of a collection of managers and paper shufflers to be concern for human liberty and dignity stretches the imagination. If Congress cannot do it, even though they're supposed to, how the heck can an artificial corporate entity ever possibly hope to?
A private corporation might be able to, only because it has one or two actual leaders at the top. But public corporations do not. They might have figureheads like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but the inertia created by several layers of management prevent them from doing much more than giving speeches and approving of the quarterly report. And even if they did try to step in and take hands-on control, they're still employees able to be fired by the board of directors. And the board of directors can get replaced. The entire company can get sold. Ultimately no one is accountable at a public corporation.
Do you really expect every moral employee at Microsoft to quit their jobs over this? To you really expect every Microsoft stockholder to dump their shares over this? Do you know how many millions of shareholders there actually are? Have YOU checked that your pension or retirement fund doesn't have any Microsoft stock in it? And if it does, are you willing to dump all of it today?
Re:In Communist China... (Score:5, Insightful)
All the government has to do is:
-pass regulations penalizing media outlets
-refuse to inform the outlets when releasing news items
-ignore questions and refuse to call on certain reporters during press conferences, if not outright banning certain people
-use other media outlets to turn one into a scape goat
-sabotage reporting for that outlet with false evidence from "anonymous" sources
-start accusations that the reporting is reclessly endangering others and threaten to prosecute
-"accidently" shoot at and imprison field reporters
-consistantly confiscate all of above reporter's recordings and notes as "evidence"
-question the patriotism and loyalty
-etc
Re:We shouldnt be doing buisness with the Chinese (Score:1, Insightful)
Cheap manufactured goods...
> How does it benefit OUR citizens?
It allows Walmart to keep "rolling back" prices. You do want cheap manufactured goods right?
> China only wants our dollar, and corperate America just wants slave labor?
Yep. Seems to be working out pretty well for everyone except the Chinese citizens that want to promote "freedom" and "democracy".
> Why do we allow this to continue?
And lose out on the cheap manufactured goods? That's unAmerican!
Well, hell (Score:4, Insightful)
And because I'm a left-wing radical like Justice Rehnquist, I can't help but wonder how long before the same thing happens here?
Re:MSNBC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft isn't to blame for China's problems (Score:4, Insightful)
As a nation, we (the US) have decided to look the other way about whatever problems China might have, in exchange for money. A huge proportion of the stuff at Wal-Mart is made in China. We swallow our principles and take the cheap prices.
Why should MS be better than anyone else?
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
Re:of religion and self-censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
This is certainly not unique to the US, or China, or anywhere else. Even in Israel, the media coverage of the government's perpetuation of the war with Palestinians is inverse to the people's criticisms of it. It's even worse in Palestine, where the government's thugs, who embody the word-of-mouth media of the street, kill Palestinians who criticize their goverment's perpetuation of the war with Israel, as "collaborators".
None of this is necessary, but it's easy. And as long as its profits keep the government/media corporate cartels (fascism) in power and profits, it's going to stay that way.
What about the freedom to not extoll freedom? (Score:3, Insightful)
odd and interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
MS isn't the worst offender... (Score:2, Insightful)
So yeah, it's lame that MS is doing this. But why do they have to? Because Cisco and other American companies provided router, firewall, and filtering tech to China, showed them how to set it up, and still maintain an active role in restricting the browsing of 100 million internet users. What MS is doing is a symptom, not a cause -- follow the money.
Re:No law? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like that in the US now, too.
Microsoft teh Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:4, Insightful)
What they are or are not is entirely a construct, and a very modern one at that. Arguing in the abstract may be appropriate when writing a term paper for a Dead German Philosophers 101 class, or when drinking espressos and smoking Gauloise at a cafe, but it has little place in the real world where Life has a tendency to intervene and bitch slap you when you get out of line or otherwise behave in a manner that's not in the common good.
Is it such a challenge to consider that corporations are made up of people, and hence share a collective social responsibility?
If it is, may I suggest watching The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.
Re:Mercenary Taiwanese Scum (Score:1, Insightful)
No, most Americans don't care. Or they think it's just the "liberal media," at it again. Just like how they don't care about the impact of driving their SUV alone to and from work every day, etc...
Re:Have Linus and Stallman asked Red Flag develope (Score:3, Insightful)
The story is naive. How much business have you done in China? When a representative of the government expresses concern over some issue that is as significant as something on paper. Reality is far more complex than academic arguments.
Re:In Communist China... (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind of says something about the state of affairs in America these days.
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact remains that if all he cared about was the number in his bankbook he wouldn't give anything away.
Re:Have Linus and Stallman asked Red Flag develope (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't think so. It does point out the fact that MS is lying when it says it must censor to remain within the law, because there is no such law. If it said "policy" rather than law, it would be more honest. If it listed the forbidden words in its TOS, it would be in the open. Contrast Google, which when faced with legal orders to remove links to contentious sites brings up documentation of why they are doing it, and a link to another site which does have the information linked. Though Google has I think chickened out on its Google.cn version from even trying.
China has many journalists in prison on unspecified charges for breaking such non-laws. (Anything the govt doesn't want you to write about can be declared a "state secret", and you become a spy &/or traitor.) Unfortunately the US has lost all its moral authority to argue against that, and China knows it can do so with little fear of embarrassment, let alone real pressure.
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:1, Insightful)
But you appear to be speaking for "our lives", which must mean you are including me -- so, tell me how the fact that I have been sickly all my life and that my parents never purchased insurance and that now I am an adult I am ineligible for appropriate insurance means that I should be praising Rand and Smith rather than Marx and Bevan.
I work as hard as I can, I enjoy no luxuries beyond an old computer for browsing the Internet from time to time (which I have because I use to work or study anyway), I have very good academic qualifications (though they took an inordinate amount of time to achieve), but misfortunes of birth means I would never be able to hold a regular job, and would benefit far more from a society which gave me better welfare care, to the point that I could be cured and make a much greater contribution back.
Were I living in certain of the more socialist European countries, I would be given appropriate care. As it is, I do not have the wealth to pay up front for such treatment.
None of this is hypothetical -- this is the state I am in right now.
(Just in case you spurt out any prejudices -- I am happy to say that my disabilities are overtly physical so you would believe me if you met me
heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:3, Insightful)
People want freedom. People also want property, and the power that provides it. There is tension between those two desires: humans are animals who think, not thoughts in animals. So we contain contradictions, even fundamentally. As time goes on through history, some events favor freedom, some favor exclusive property, some both (and some neither, but this discussion is already too ambitious for Slashdot
Re:Since when did communism become a religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's Pastor Ken when you *need* him? (Score:3, Insightful)