Google+ Unblocked In China; President Obama's Page Flooded With Comments 187
An anonymous reader writes "Google+ has recently been unblocked in China and Chinese netizens have found their way to President Obama's G+ page. The result is that topic after topic has hit the limit of 500 comments, most of them in Chinese. Some express political views, but many are just everyday banter or showing off."
China unblocks Google+ (Score:5, Funny)
China unblocks Google+ Figures no one uses it anyway. Myspace is next to be unblocked.
Re:China unblocks Google+ (Score:5, Funny)
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Hm, so actually what you're saying is that the Great Firewall of China is protecting us from the Chinese?
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Just like Hadrians wall protected the Romans from the Scots
Re:China unblocks Google+ (Score:5, Funny)
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The lameness filter already does it job. Lack of Unicode support is a pain when I need to quote something.
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G+ has ~54mil daily users. Nothing to sneeze at, but still small compared to FB's 400+mil daily users.
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>small compared to FB's 400+mil daily users. which is nothing compared with China's 1.3 billion people
G+ has about 13% of the number of users of FB, FB has about 30% of the number of Chinese citizens.
Widespread interest (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting how much of the world is interested in our politics.
Several years ago, I was walking around Porvoo, Finland, taking pictures. I talked to a few teenagers doing skateboard tricks. In their perfect English, they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice. It's all they wanted to talk about.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Insightful)
The US now seems to treat politics like just another reality TV show.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Was there another final debate?
After the final debate?
That followed the final debate?
That was really just childish bickering, pointing fingers, and attacks instead of an actual debate?
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True. I remember Obama make a huge selling point over Hillary in their debates that he would never force a mandate on people for healthcare. He did a good job making himself seem like a moderate version of her.
Debates are easy when you don't bind yourself to the truth.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Insightful)
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The difference being that on a reality show, even if you're not crazy about any of the contestants, voting for one and having them win is mostly harmless...
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No, we care who wins reality TV shows. More people vote for American Idol then for their representatives.
With the decades of bullshit that our politicians put this country through, is it really any surprise?
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I hear this a lot but there are some problems with this stat, the chief being that people get to vote multiple times so basing the amount of votes on America Idol to the amount of votes in elections is not fair comparison.
Also, we would probably have a higher turnout on our elections if people could phone or text in their votes like they can on America Idol. But I actually don't want people to lazy to go to the voting booth voting.
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It is reality TV (Score:2)
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Funny)
Are you trying to say ignorance of foreign issues and jingoism isn't a the best way to form opinions on international matters? You're such a communist.
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As if the population in other countries don't actually make decisions in exactly the same way.
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On the other hand, few Europeans can place and name all 50 American states as well as their capitals, yet they somehow feel Americans should be able to do this for Europe. They don't realise that the pride they take in keeping track of what happens in Germany when they live in Spain is just like an American reading news about the state next over.
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There are only 35 (give or take one or two, I can't count) states in America.
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Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Funny)
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I was simply asking for Europe(you know, the continent...), not the Czech Republic...
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Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Insightful)
In fairness, there are a number of eurocrats in Brussels, etc. who don't recognise this either.
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Obligatory Youtube video [youtube.com]
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ3RrqBqk14 [youtube.com]
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Show me one other country in the world with the word "America" in its name and then you'll get some sympathy.
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So you would ok, with France using the word "Europeans" to only refer to the French and claim there is no country with the word "Europe" in its name and so it is fine.
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My point somehow got cutoff. The point is it is not ok, to forget there are countries in the continent and pretty much consider themselves exclusive residents of the continent.
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Your point is (a) terrible and (b) a strawman:
(a) terrible because the name of France does not include the word "europe"
(b) a strawman because using short form of a country's name does not in any way shape or form mean that the residents "consider themselves exclusive resides of the continent"
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Fair enough, I should have gone with "South Africa" or "UAE". The point still stands though. If a South African uses the word African to refer to elusively people of South Africa, I would say he believes South Africans are the only residents of Africa.
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I replied to the wrong post, so reposting here: Fair enough, I should have gone with "South Africa" or "UAE". The point still stands though. If a South African uses the word African to refer to elusively people of South Africa, I would say he believes South Africans are the only residents of Africa.
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Well, there is at least one other country on the continent with "Africa" in the name. But just how many people who live outside of the USA call themselves "americans" -- not americanos, americans -- versus how many people outside of SA call themselves "africans?" No one using the term "american" is even referring to a continent in the first place. The problem here is nothing more than fauxrage.
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Ok assume, Central African Republic renames itself to something else today, I would still not find it acceptable. Would you?
I have seen people from South America getting annoyed by this, as they consider themselves Americans (as in people from the Americas) too; I am not sure which country they are really from.
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I have seen people from South America getting annoyed by this, as they consider themselves Americans (as in people from the Americas) too; I am not sure which country they are really from.
Again, fauxrage. They aren't "Americans" they are "South Americans" (or more likely sudamericanos or sulamericanos) - if dropping the "United States" is too much of an abbreviation then dropping the "South" is too much of an abberviation too. They can't have it both ways.
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Americas refers to both South and North America. They want the word American to refer to people from Americas (again both North and South America). I never mentioned that they wanted to use the word American to refer to people from South America. Learn to read.
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Learn to read.
When an argument on colloquialisms comes down to splitting hairs, it's over.
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Hell, I'd be happy if they just realized that I don't want to call myself a United Statesian or a Statesian or... well you get the picture. Hell, Mexico is the United States of Mexico. If we used that, some smart ass Mexican would accuse us of failing to realize there's other United Stateses out there.
And yes, people in the US really *do* know that Central America is not another name for Iowa.
I don't blame you all for being butthurt about the US setting up a bunch of dictatorships and banana republics in
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Insightful)
What's even more interesting, is how little interest our politicians have in us.
As opposed to their own careers and their paymasters.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Interesting)
I blame this on only having two political parties. Since each party only really has one competitor, it boils down to us versus them rhetoric.
With a viable third or fourth party, I think we'd see less "that party wants to eat your children" attacks and more stands on what they believe in. Because it's much harder to go on the attack against two or three opponents, the merits of a particular stance would have to take center stage or least get out of the back alley behind the concert where it's drinking it's cheap whiskey and crying itself to sleep.
But, for that to happen we'd need to have less of a winner takes all approach to our election system.
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Hi, UK here.
We had a third party, the Liberal Democrats.
It all kind of went downhill when they did the exact opposite of the thing that they explicitly said that would do. [telegraph.co.uk] They pretty much do everything our highly unpopular Conservative Party tells them to. In doing so, they forfeit the tiny bit of credibility that fell to them mostly by default, after our previous highly unpopular Labour government departed.
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UK student here. If the tuition fees U-turn was simply a party "manifesto pledge" that they had to compromise on, that would be acceptable. Painful, but acceptable. This defence that "you can't expect us to achieve everything we want to if we don't win" is a straw man used to deflect valid criticism. The NUS pledge was a personal pledge written in unambiguous language and signed by every subsequently-elected Liberal Democrat MP.
“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.”
They can't reasonably claim to have been tricked into agreeing to this, and the
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I blame this on only having two political parties. Since each party only really has one competitor, it boils down to us versus them rhetoric.
Kind of like our ISP situation, then?
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I completely agree. I find two party systems encourage going negative. It doesn't matter how bad you make yourself look when attacking the other party, as long as you make them look worse.
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In Finnish election system, when electing president, we have second round where we have the only two most voted candidates from first round.
This year top 2 candidates got 37% and 19% of votes on the first round. On the second round they got 63% and 37%.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had five parties running, the winner might win with 22% of the voting population's support, and then the 22% would be able to impose their political views on the remaining 78%
That is indeed what happens with "winner takes all". If instead the winner wins a 22% stake (say, 22 seats in a 100-seat house) then the result is representative of the electorate.
So a multi-partisan system for Congress and the Senate would not have to be undemocratic at all. The Presidential election would, by your definition, but if the President is able to "impose their political views on the remaining 78%" then that's a flaw with the Presidential powers, not with the election process.
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What??????
Here is how to solve that problem:
First: don't let the people elect a president. The president/leader of the goverment should be elected by the parlement. Having the leader of a country which does have a majority of the parlement against him/he is such a problematic concept that it should just be stopped.
Now to be the leader of the goverment, you need to form a coalision so you get at leats half the parlement not to vote against your goverment. So if the largest party get 22% of the votes, it need
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> Having the leader of a country which does have a
> majority of the parlement against him/he is such a
> problematic concept that it should just be stopped.
That depends on whether the goal is to make it easy or hard for the government to create new laws.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Informative)
It could easily be extended to more rounds, where the least popular candidate is eliminated in each voting round until there is an absolute majority for one candidate, but it's usually simpler to just take the top 2 winners and have one more election between them.
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We have that problem because our voting system forces us to only have two candidates, because if two similar candidates who would get the support of the same voters in a head to head (Bush Sr and Perot), then those voters lose out for splitting their vote. If you correct the ballot as lexman said, you can then allow more candidates on the final ballot, say 3 or 5 per party, and a total of 15-30. Then, people should have plenty of choices and apathy should no longer be an issue because most people should hav
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* Replac
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I am aware that the U.S.'s bipartisan system is a result of the winner-takes-all electorate system, that shifting to a party-proportional representation system would reduce the centric pressures of the winner-takes-all system, thereby preventing a tyranny of the majority that I mentioned above. However, party-proportional representation systems have their own flaws as well, particularly that of legislative gridlock and the problem of a "cacophony of voices," whereby the number of increasingly differing political opinions worsens the signal-to-noise ratio in the legislative system.
But playing tricks with your electoral system does not change the fact that (free) human societies are a "cacophony of voices". A bipartisan system is basically an equivalent of deliberately ignoring it on the basis that it's inconvenient; but ignoring inconvenient reality is not constructive. In bipartisan system, what you end up with is a pretense of "representative of the majority", because the party that got the majority of votes is not necessarily actually fully supported by people that voted for it -
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You're still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality. When the winner has only 22% that means he has to negotiate with other parties to form a coalition that has 51%. That means the winner can still not impose anything but has to negotiate with his coalition partners. This will lead to at least 51% of the population being represented.
Once those negotiations are done the coalition can rule, as long as they don't do stupid stuff that makes the coalition fall apart. There is no problem of a "cacophony of voi
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they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice
Because the alternatives were Al Gore and John Kerry.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Interesting)
I can only speak for me, but I wage that it helps to a lot of other Brazilians. Your politics reflect on ours.
Recently, one of our center-right parties renamed themselves Democrats (yeah, you read right, center-right) and have tried to mirror the Democrats politics here. And even without taken them into considerations, a lot of politics and companies keep an eye on what is going on there to try to mirror it on national legislation. Thing about things like SOPA, had it passed, there would be a hard push to implement similar language here. So your politics directly influence ours indirectly. And also directly.
Let's say for example that Grinch becomes president and he works on his campaign promise to invade Iran. Suddenly it is a new Middle East war and again we are thrown on the Iraq war cycle of problems on the international scales. So yeah, we need to pay lots of attentions to your politics.
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Interesting how much of the world is interested in our politics.
Several years ago, I was walking around Porvoo, Finland, taking pictures. I talked to a few teenagers doing skateboard tricks. In their perfect English, they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice. It's all they wanted to talk about.
They were probably interested because it directly impacts them. It's something I think our politicians don't think about enough. If we decide to go start a few wars around the world we bring all of our allies with us whether they like it or not.
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Finnland is not a NATO member, so US wars affect the country only marginally. It has about 260 peacekeepers around the world though: http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?nodeid=32296&contentlan=2&culture=en-US#Map [finland.fi]
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Interesting)
If your government and corporations didn't interfere with the rest of the world's nations, believe me, we wouldn't give a shit about American politics.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Insightful)
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Interesting how much of the world is interested in our politics.
Several years ago, I was walking around Porvoo, Finland, taking pictures. I talked to a few teenagers doing skateboard tricks. In their perfect English, they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice. It's all they wanted to talk about.
I thought Bush was only actually elected once, for his second term... (As a non-American, I can't complain about his presidency too much, as his decisions made my country's economy much stronger by comparison.)
Same thing when I was living in South Korea. So much attention is paid to American politics. There were massive protests in the streets during August's protest season over some American policy.
I find it odd how defensive Americans get when we talk about their politics. Just because you happen live
Re:Widespread interest (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, it's a form of voyeurism for a lot of us non-Americans. How badly can you fuck things up this week? Tune in 24/7 for as much as you can read!
The really scary thing is watching our own governments follow your mistakes after :(
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On vacation in India I met 2 Norwegians and a Dutch guy that were on holiday from working in Dubai. (Oil). They were very interested as well. They were actually super freaked out about Palin being on the ballot (this was 2 weeks before the election). The best thing I could do was just talk about America, while they sort of understood US politics, they really didn't have any idea how non homogenous the US was in terms of everything. I also had to explain how large and spread out.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of this is because of the influence the U.S. has on our countries. I guess we need to keep an eye always looking at you to know if you are planning to sign a free trade agreement with us, change the amount of monetary aid you send our way, pass some law that makes us outlaws, try to change our style of government or just bomb us. You have the power to change our lives maybe more than even we do.
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Yea, and it seems like more and more our government is spending our tax money changing the lives of others instead of our own people. Why can't we improve our bridges and schools rather than build them for our new found "allies" after bombing their previous government into submission?
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Well of course. What happens in the USA effects us all.
Whether it's
extraditions,
financials. Dollar fund routing going througj the usa,
Who's going to be bombed next,
Technological developments,
The influence of usa tv,
what's happening with the internet ivluding riaa, dns and new standards...
So while it's not everything, many things are USA led. There's so much reach from the usa the whole world is effected and cannot escape. Is venezuela a notable exception? Iran?
Some of that is natural dominance (silicone val
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Why should it be surprising?
1) The USA is the most powerful country in the world, has nukes, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, etc.
2) Of the world's total military spending the USA is 43%, China at second place is 7.3%[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
3) The USA is one of the few countries in the world that regularly exerts significant military, covert and political influence on other countries, including countries far from its borders. Sometimes for good reaso
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Have you ever thought that it's because "your politics" influence the whole world in very relevant ways? Specially considering the warmongering attitude and the very real ability to see it through.
Obama is a communist (Score:2)
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Would he be eligible to run for Premier?
This could have some possibilities in 4 years...
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True. For the most part, the KKK was founded and run by Democrats.
Yes, the Democrats were much different than what they are now, but it is funny to hear people pointing to the Republicans as the ones who would join the KKK. In the old days, it would be the Republicans calling out the Federal troops to put down the KKK. How times change.
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FOX would never say that. That would imply he isn't already a member of the CCP.
500 is a lame limit (Score:5, Interesting)
(it's per post though).
pretty nice way of "occopying" something though. one comment explaining something..
We have no chance to occupy our president Hu. He hates Internet and has no account on any sns website, so we can just occupy Obama, forgive us.
This is a good thing! (Score:2, Funny)
Not surprised. (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to recall plenty of people milling about when the Berlin wall came down. When you give people access to something formerly restricted, plenty of people will show up just to say they were there.
The Internet will be an interesting place on the day the "Great Firewall" finally gets shut down for good.
Totalitarian regimes today... (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel solidarity with these chinese people who wrote to Obama just to say "we need freedom"... (This theme is also relevant to me as I was born in another totalitarian regime, the soviet one, a year before it broke; now we still have to build our country and resurrect its culture, persisting against all the pro-soviet-russian forces (i'm from Ukraine.)
Re:Totalitarian regimes today... (Score:4, Funny)
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War is the usually the only path to freedom and peace, since no totalitarian regime will go down by itself.
Somehow, I imagined.. (Score:2)
I was very disappointed in not seeing those.
Unblocked? (Score:2)
I'm far more interested in why G+ has been unblocked, while FB/Twitter/etc. are still firewalled. Did the Chinese gov't realize every post having a real / potentially verified name attached is more convenient than the site being inaccessible?
Dunno why the Chinese bother... (Score:2)
The result is that topic after topic has hit the limit of 500 comments, most of them in Chinese.
They have other American Presidents who were and remain quite willing (some with unseemly eagerness) to put the interests of China's people far ahead of the American people's [whiteoutpress.com].
Of course, some few real people in America did benefit... [huffingtonpost.com] as did some corporate "people", too... [cnn.com]
The Best Way to Rule a Country (Score:4, Insightful)
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You may want to stop ranting for a bit to notice the rush of air past your head.
DOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting. Half a billion people exercising free speech is indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.
Our society and the way we structure our conversations, both on the Net and off it, aren't really equipped to deal with the problem of billions of people trying to have a conversation in the same room. We need a new way to think about mass communication in a way that doesn't cause information overload. I wonder if self-moderating systems like Slashcode are part of the answer...
money and effort (Score:3)
Tried it in China, it is still not working (Score:2)
I just checked. It still does not work. Part of the problem is that Google appears to only have a small allocation in P.R. China. As such most attempts to use it time out.
Back to the point, I am still unable to access it.
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Not to mention the suicide of one of the guys. I think it was built on such faddy stuff because the developers were in college. ;) Java might actually be a good choice.
Lets start again with COBOL
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