China Blanks Nobel Peace Prize Searches 326
1 a bee writes "CNN is reporting that China is attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Even texting is affected: 'Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."' Might as well add Slashdot to the censored list."
Further coverage is available from NBC.
But, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
China is just trying to protect it's citizens against the terrorist and child porn. Sheesh.
Hacktivism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As long as we Americans keep buying made in Chi (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Believe me, it's just your observation. At least he knows how to post on-topic.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Social stability or autocracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?
No, it's something that is resonant with people that want to suppress speech. Look at recent articles and you will see similar lame excuses (ie. stopping terror, child porn, copyright protection) for allowing the NSA/FBI/etc to spy on citizens or try to take down their computers.
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:5, Insightful)
So a Chinese man is kept in prison purely because his opinions disagree with the government and he gets a Nobel prize and now the government will censor your website, email and even deactivate your cellphone if you as much as mention his name. If they really don't care they most definitely should.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As long as we Americans keep buying made in Chi (Score:4, Insightful)
I see you've never taken an introductory logic course before.
It is historically sound - People who are named in the Bible have been found to exist.
People named in the Futurama cartoon exist too, therefore it must be historically sound!
I'd continue, but actually I think I will go watch some historically accurate Futurama episodes instead.
Re:Letter From America (Score:2, Insightful)
lol Tax cuts don't cost money. Spending cost money.
Re:Another Nobel Peace Prize dud (Score:3, Insightful)
North Korea's artillery, and its nukes, are not a sufficient deterrent.
The only thing keeping it alive is China. And the only reason we don't liberate North Korea is that it would cause a shooting war with China, which, if it were democratic, would join with us.
Freeing Tibet is the world's problem, just as much as imprisoning Tibet is China's problem.
Taiwan wants to be free of China, but can't even discuss it without getting China's saber rattled at it.
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's very different, it is as different as it can be. One billion people, zero message about the news.
Isn't it interesting that liberals never miss a chance to defend an evil regime and downplay their evilness?
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is real censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:3, Insightful)
And please don't pretend to be a Chinese expert. We (Chinese) know your kind, and we know why you live in China. We despise you.
Care to share your insight on why he lives in China?
Re:As long as we Americans keep buying made in Chi (Score:2, Insightful)
Pi is only 3 if you assume that bowls have no thickness.
Which is a pretty dumb assumption, really.
6000 years isn't anywhere in the Bible, and was created via a priest who added up essentially random strings of numbers from geneologies. Given that he lived within the last few centuries, this is far from essential church doctrine. Similarly, interpreting the beginning of Genesis as anything other than poetry is extremely recent - most well respect theologians have historically held this to be true - see Aquinas, for example.
Even if you are to ignore the poetic elements, you quickly run into issues - measuring time would be devilishly tricky without any matter to establish a reference frame, for example.
It's not like there's a verse that says "And then YHWH took Moses away for seventy years, starting him on basic mathematics and proceeding through higher and more accurate models of the universe, until Moses was an expert in the most advanced and arcane of physics, adept at quantum and a master of relativity. And then He said unto Moses 'Now that I have shown you all this, I will relate unto you an in depth account of exactly how I created the universe'."
Not Bush (Score:2, Insightful)
The Chinese state may not be happy about him winning now, but hopefully in the future, the Chinese will fondly remember him as their first Nobel price prize winner.
No matter how much the government thinks that they can hide that he won this year, the information is still leaking through the blocks.
They is a large Chinese scientific community that follow the Nobel prizes each year, and most will notice that there will be omissions in the reporting this year.
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. I figured that was the extent of your insight. Just wanted to make sure.
Re:Trade will encourage Democracy. Sure it will. (Score:4, Insightful)
The middle-class will never rise up for human rights and freedoms. All over the place, from Turkey to India, from Russia to China, the burgeoning middle-class is a hotbed of bigotry and hysterical nationalism.
In fact, everywhere, it's the middle-class with its fucking "values" who has sabotaged again and again any idea of fairness and liberty.
Re:Chinese people know... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank you for proving my point. Yep. Chinese Community Party is at least better than George W Bush.
Yep.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a bassackwards solution to me. There's plenty of things the government should be taking care of that they're not, and plenty of things that they should be doing, and are, but in an unnecessarily inefficient way. Rather than gunning for more inefficiency so that the government can't do things they shouldn't, which they seem to manage to do just fine anyway, why not elect leaders and enact laws that prevent the abuse from happening in the first place?
Advocating increased inefficiency as the solution to bad government is like saying that you can't run very well in clown shoes so we can lower the crime rate by making everyone wear clown shoes so they can't get away from the cops. It doesn't really address the root of the problem, barely addresses the symptoms and brings a host of new problems along for the ride.
Re:Trade will encourage Democracy. Sure it will. (Score:1, Insightful)
It's a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch serves little purpose beyond being a figurehead, like many, many other developed countries, including a large amount of Western democracies. If you think that's equivalent to the human rights violation machine that is the Chinese government, you are absolutely insane.
Rare Earth Metals and self-sufficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
"On the topic of valuable materials too where do you think we're even going to get the rare-earth metals for our iPhones, and LCDs, or communication grade lasers given that China has pretty much all the worlds supply"
Pretty much every country that has a rare earth mine (and they're not really that rare) put it back into production after last month's fiasco.
Again I like the ideal but the though is shallow and the consequences are more far reaching than you could imagine.
Oh, kid, I got the grey hair to remember what it was like before we started whoring ourselves out to the Chinese government. I can remember when a blue-collar job could buy a house and put your kids through college. Meat-packers and construction workers used to make comfortable livings. Now airline pilots in charge of hundreds of lives have to apply for food stamps.
The United States, unlike Japan or Britain, is not a tiny little island with few natural resources. We don't HAVE to do business with the outside world. Unlike North Korea, we are capable of feeding ourselves. We can supply all of our own manufacturing inputs for steel, plastic, electronics, etc.
The ONLY people who benefit from trade with the Chinese are the wealthy in this country who get access to slave labor by proxy, who get to shirk their environmental responsibilities because the monsters in Beijing don't care if entire peasant towns die from cancer. You and I don't benefit from it because prices are already set as high as the market will bear. All that trade with the Chinese does is cut the legs out from underneath labor, allowing the wealthy to roll back all the gains that were made when the muckrakers ruled.
Welcome back to the bad old days.
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead. I WANT to see China join the civilized world. I WANT to see a real democracy in China. I would love to think those three thousand college kids did not die in vain.
But what I want more than that is that my own children do not join those Chinese kids in servitude, which is precisely where we're headed.
Re:Rare Earth Metals and self-sufficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead.
It won't. China is big, they can take care of themselves too. Not only that, any pain caused by our severing ties will be viewed as an attack on China, and will build ill-will against the US, not against the Chinese government. It will take longer for the Chinese to pull themselves up that way, but they will. And they will be mad when they do. If the great leap forward didn't cause the government to collapse, it will take more than something they can so conveniently blame on the outside world.
There is reason to believe that economic development leads to greater political freedom. It happened in South Korea, once the per capita income rose enough, and it happened in Taiwan. We better hope it will happen in China, because we can't stop their economic rise. All we can do is slow it down a bit.
Re:Rare Earth Metals and self-sufficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
Made in America used to be a sign of quality and people would happily pay a premium. Back then electronic gadgets were this amazing new thing and people would happily pay top dollar for them, Back then things were also built to last.
These days Japan has gone from making the worlds crap to being a sign of quality production, China is the new cheap actively driving down prices of gadgets all over the world, and Made in America carries with it a stigma of something that is overpriced and often blamed on the Patent Pending words stamped on every product. This is a world which can't just cut off China in one quick swoop because Westerners as a culture have come to expect more.
In a world where my sister drops here phone in the toilet and complains more about how she will get her contact list back than the cost of a replacement the majority of the culture can't go back to suddenly paying premium price for premium goods. Again in case you haven't noticed there world is economically fucked once again and the shiny Bang and Olufsen hifi that once graced our living room has been replaced with an MTV branded iPod dock that cost $10, not because I wanted it, but because that's the way of life at the moment. And in the thick of this all I can't believe you think it is at all possible to cut off the worlds biggest manufacturer of "stuff".
And sure every country has it's rare earth metals, but you're in a catch-22. We the shiny westerners are more than happy to let China dig up the most dangerous and carcinogenic crap in the world and ship them to our nations, and in return we sell them back our garbage. You blame them for the filth they have yet America isn't prepared to deal with it's own waste. You're too busy putting warning labels on anything that could potentially one day cause cancer. Rare earth metals may not be "rare" in the strictest sense but it's environmentally devastating to extract them at mass, and it still doesn't change the fact that China sits on the largest supply. Think about that considering it's likely we are going to run out of these long before we run out of oil or helium or other such stuff.
Trust me I want to see China become part of our world as much as you. But cutting them off in todays socio-economic climate, and culture will do more to make your children end up in exactly the same kind of situation building electronics on production lines while begging to the boss, "Please sir, can I have some more?"
Rash harsh actions never work very well. I don't understand why Americans especially do not seem to get this, and don't call me kid, it's condescending I don't call you old fart either.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure it was because of that?