New "Iron Curtain" for Russian Internet 239
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points out a story about the Russian government's interest in expanding anti-extremism laws to include the blocking of websites and ISPs. The laws would match those already in use for the country's print media. Russian internet users may soon be forced to deal with the same issues facing Chinese citizens. Quoting:
"An official at the Russian prosecutor's general office, Vyacheslav Sizov, told the Russian-language newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that any web site that is determined to host what he terms 'extremist material' would be blocked from being accessible from within the Russian Federation. Given the Putin government's history with the media, 'extremist material' may be very broadly interpreted as any content unfriendly to the interests of the Russian government."
"message force multipliers"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:US and Europe not far behind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Been done before (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course in the marketplace of ideas, you're allowed to try to sell anything no matter how quirky. But that does not mean that all ideas will sell equally well. Some ideas will be popular like iPods and some will be unpopular like feces brown Zunes.
Maybe you're the indoctrinated one, and you only believe in Socialism because you avoid reading anything that disagrees with your preconceptions. Certainly what I've read about planned economies and dictatorships of the proletariat makes me think they just end up making most people poor, unfree and unhappy while a spoiled, vicious elite wields absolute power. If someone seriously advocated them to me, I'd argue with them just like people argue with you.
From what you're saying you'd be happier in a country where no one argues with Socialist ideas. Now I've read enough about those places to tell you that you'd probably end up in a concentration camp for unorthodox thought. It's the idealists and true believers that end up getting martyred, not the vast mass of people that are basically uninterested in politics.
And incidentally the fact that you're able in America to read only progressive media that agrees with you while other people are free to watch only Fox news that agrees with them tells me that the government is not indoctrinating people, it's more that they indoctrinate themselves. Which is fair enough of course, they will all end up being wrong politically but in different ways.
I think of it as error terms from the Platonic ideal set of policies that no individual can know. Imagine that the political spectrum is represented as a two dimensional line. The far left have a large negative number and the far right have large positive ones. The average is zero. Now the average may not coincide with the Platonic ideal of course, since there are some key facts that no one knows. No one can know how well the policies being debated will actually work in practice of course. But the average is not bad per se, just not perfect. It is much better than fringe ideas.
You can think of the democratic process - free elections and a free press - as averaging out all the large individual errors to produce a smaller error in the policies of the governing party which will try to get elected by having policies that most people support.
Of course if I were on the far left or the far right this process would work very much against me. But to me that's the point of democracy, a few people at the fringes of the political spectrum end up not having any power at all ever and the vast mass of centrists get to compete for it.
Re:Sounds like America? (Score:4, Interesting)
I strongly believe that while one can turn on the television and be disheartened by Faux news, the fact that information is out there that is readily available sets America apart from countries such as Russia and China. None of us can really relate to how life must be in a country such as N. Korea. Drawing parallels from these countries to America is a bit cynical, no? Is it not belittling the extreme censorship they endure?
You cant expect the masses to get it, thats why they have their title as the masses. While one could argue that the masses control who gets elected, I think it is just as easy to argue that the masses do not know what they are getting in a representative.
Long gone are the days where candidates actually take meaningful stances on issues. Even campaign promises can quickly be broken due to "unexpected" budget cuts.
I believe our founding fathers were quite familiar with this idea, and hence decided that we should not govern our selves directly, since we clearly do not know what is best for us.
Now whether the people making the decisions in America... that is a whole different nut to crack...
Re:I don't know how yet, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Been done before (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically enough, most western mass media plays along by creating an image of Russia that has little in common with what is actually happening here. Not saying the western mass media is to blame, but it's most certainly a factor.
On a brighter note, it's not all that bad as it may seem. These tricks 'only' work with the generally badly educated population, and lack of a proverbial 'middle class' which is about the worst thing about today's Russia. If said middle class will develop and achieve a certain threshold, the process will become irreversible and no iron curtain policies will be sustainable.
Let me restate: the way I understand it, having a sizable middle class is not compatible with any iron curtain policies whatsoever. And as a middle class is like a pre-requisite to be able to compete in today's globalized world, I hope these attempts at creating an informational shield are just convulsions of the old system where people would just blindly believe what their government tells them to.
Re:Been done before (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
or rather (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"message force multipliers"? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that we have to rail against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iraq with little actual knowledge of those countries. Those countries will "always" be our public villians or such even if they are more our allies than enemies.
My 10 year old daughter has it in her head that she hates China. I ask her "why what did China ever do to you?" and she just gives me a blank stare and can't come up with anything, but she still dislikes China. When I was growing up mainly in the 80s anything Russian in the movies was nearly automatically the bad guy. (Unless it was the hot Russian girl that liked the US more that Russia.) I couldn't name a single thing that Russia ever did against the US, but our entire country hated there guts. During the whole late 90s, the new bad guys were anyone from the middle east. Those folks are mostly terrorists or support terrorists so its o.k. for you to hate them.
The only place that I really hear people talk against North Korea is on slashdot. I think North Korea is under the mental radar of most of the public around here as just not being worth it to bother to hate. We'd rather hate our neighbor that's going to the wrong cult of Christ than spend time worrying about what anyone in Asia is doing.
Something like it is inevitable for all countries (Score:4, Interesting)
1. It makes many laws nearly impossible to enforce on people in your country (the various laws in France banning Holocaust denial, globalised P2P in less RIAA/MPAA friendly countries).
2. It makes it easier for corporations and other employers to provide services and product in your country while employing few if any of your citizens.
3. It creates a tax-gathering nightmare for revenue officials.
4. It provides free and open access for foreigners who are inclined to break your laws, and exploit and defraud your citizens. Commercially operated botnets and the total hijacking of e-mail for spam, protected with a wink and a nod by corrupt officials and organized crime sponsors are just the start.
5. Foreign militaries, paramilitaries, intelligence agencies, and terrorist groups have a direct, hard to trace, and nearly impossible to stop communications line into your country, on top of a map to attack your critical network infrastructure (and physical infrastructure too, if you're like the US and are stupid enough to connect power plant control systems directly to the Internet).
6. Critical Internet infrastructure, and new development is often at the whim of an unfriendly or hostile government. (though this government is generally the US in just about every case, with its control of ICANN)
Again, this is governments. The people don't like a lot of the negatives too, and that means that in general they are going to be pleased if action to cut off "bad actors" from flooding their inboxes with spam, or stopping the US government from controlling the DNS system, or the Chinese military from attacking their country, or Russian hackers taking their entire country offline if they do something that Russia doesn't particularly like. The fact that it gives governments nothing but nightmares is eventually going to create a lot of little internets, with countrycountry access governed by treaty. The Wile West was tamed a long time ago, and the Internet will be as well, just like every other frontier. You've just got to create a new one.
Re:there are 3 choices actually (Score:3, Interesting)
The reality is that US law enforcement is very good at catching certain TYPES of criminals, like petty drug offenders (BTW, most people in jail for gun offenses are really there for drug offenses). Because of "conspiracy" laws it's now incredibly easy to pin drug crimes on people, so we have very high conviction rates for this particular crime. We have very low conviction rates for corporate fraud, for example, because those people can actually hire/bribe police, lawyers, judges, politicians, etc.
Most American criminals are in jail for drugs. One big difference between Denmark and the USA is that marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. are either de-facto legal or the penalties are very low. This alone could account for the low rate of incarceration in Denmark, but there's more to the story. Most people who end up in jail are effectively there because they're poor (this is easily proven). Danish society is much more egalitarian than the USA, so poor people that would turn to street crime in the USA (like drug addicts) have access to public assistance, housing assistance, and drug treatment. Prostitution is also legal in DK. So all of this together means there is little street crime. Relatively tight regulations means less fraud (though higher costs). Law enforcement tends to concentrate on teenagers, domestic violence (pretty uncommon in DK), traffic, and the occasional serious crime (like murder).