The Great Firewall of China, Continued 484
rcs1000 writes "Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...) has a terrific article on The Filtered Future and how China's censorship is changing - for the worse - the Internet. The piece makes a few points: firstly, China is really trying (largely succefully) to seperate its Internet from the rest of the World; secondly, it may be possible to use technology to circumvent restrictions, but that makes them no less onoreous; thirdly, the sheer invisibility of the restrictions makes them worse (when Google doesn't even show up articles about democracy, that's no good thing); and finally, some Western companies are actively co-operating with the Chinese government in their censorship. Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?"
fp? (Score:5, Funny)
Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think they should act otherwise, then you should get your government to make rules about that banning the companies from bending to Chinese will.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right but it's difficult to abandon a rule that isn't officially a rule, merely a side effect of circumstances.
Companies are driven by the desire for personal gain of their shareholders. Shareholders are quite often only interested in making money, not in exercising responsible control of their company shares. This is especially true for mutual funds [wikipedia.org].
What government can do when personal greed dictates the rul
Re:Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, from what I understand, France has a law that holds executives personally responsible for the wrongdoings of their companies - this was enacted after the Elf scandal [corpwatch.org]. We should do the same thing here, as well as suspend (or revoke in really egregious cases) the company's privilege to do business.
Re:Companies in prison. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say that if a company does something bad enough to be worth a long-term suspension, let it start from the bottom again (just like humans) when it "gets out."
Re:Companies in prison. (Score:4, Interesting)
A picture is worth a 1000 words (Score:5, Interesting)
...and a few chuckles
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
These companies are not bending to Chinese will , They are simply doing what they do best.
I was watching a rather interesting documentary a few weeks back called "the corporation" which went over a few things in this area (along with describing the way that in America since corporations are described as legal people , they could be classified as psychopathic).
http://www.thecorporation.com/ [thecorporation.com]
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
'The Corporation' is a fascinating documentry on the effects that multi-nationals have on our every day lives. Here (SE UK) I found a copy at the local blockbusters (and no, the irony is not wasted on me) if you can find a copy it is well-worth checking out.
You may never drink milk or eat dairy products again!
Don't complain just because you don't agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually bother to read the above posts, they are not being anti-capitalist. They are simply against corporate capitalism, which isn't really capitalism, but a form of mercantalism (anyone remember their US Revolutionary War history?).
People who talk about getting rid of government interference in business forget that the mere existence of corporations is a form of interference. In real capitalism, individuals would own companies and be held directly responsible for what the company does, both financially and criminally. In corporate capitalism, the absolute worst that can happen is that the corporation goes bankrupt. But even then, if you have good lobbyists and "honest" politicians (to use the Gilded Age euphemism), you can get the government to pass laws that are favorable to your business or even bail you out if you are in trouble.
Since you are complaining that the above was modded "insightful", keep in mind that even though it is something that you disagree with, it may still be insightful. Also, if you have mod points, many on /. would appreciate you and others not modding down something simply because you disagree with it. I never mod comments like yours down because I know that it is your opinion, even though I happen to disagree with it.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Europe, as I believe it is in the US too, Companies are given rights akin to people. They want to be treated like people. They create brands which reflect their 'personalities'.
So, were I to say that people are only there to make money, and need no 'moral or social values', would you agree?
Would it be alright if I used slave labour [nike.com]?
Would it be alright if I killed for a more take-home every month [haliburton.com]?
Lie [enron.com] and cheat [worldcom.com]?
Bully my neighbours [microsoft.com] to score me a better deal?
Were I such a person, I would be lynched real quick!
Corporates are Sociopaths! [amazon.com]
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
If a tobacco company proudly offers tips on quitting smoking, you can bet that there is a memo (with backing evidence) from the CEO in a drawer that says that this program will create more profit from goodwill than it w
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking that it's governments responsibility to make moral rules is so stupid. Moral and law are not the same thing. There is laws that are immoral and you are not supposed to make rules for all moral behavior. Law and moral may overlap but they are not the same thing. Moral behavior means that you behave morally even if there is no punishment. Only immoral people (and immoral companies) act morally because they fear punishment.
Moral values are to be expressed in all human behavior. Personal lives, work and politics. It's absurd to think that if enough people join together to run organization to make money (company), moral values do not apply.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2)
Just look at the amount of companies and corporations that employ sweatshop labour with abhorrent working conditions and wages, I would like to bet that a majority of the work force within that organisation would be disgusted if they knew.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, you have the fact that as part of a corporation, you are more or less anonymous when creating policy, unless you are at the very top of the chain, so like trolls on the internet, you have less restraint in your et
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I would hold it against them. If it is legal for a corporation to kill retarded people and sell their kidneys for profit, I would also hold it against companies who did that.
"Agreed, they work terrible hours, get no rights, and get paid very little - but if they didn't do the work, they would not get paid AT ALL."
If the children didn't do the work, their parents
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
We have laws because we cannot trust people to make up their own moral code.
We can not trust people to make up their own moral code, maybe. But we can expect them do.
I think that's one of the major problems. With comments like "they're a company, don't expect them to care about anything except profit" we demonstrate how we have stopped expecting people to act ethically. If we did, we'd have considerably more ethical people. And if we specifically said that those ethics applied to what you did at work, and what you contributed to, then I think we'd have more ethical companies and offices.
But we don't. We have been taught to think that whatever the market does it right. Or, if it's not right, that it's inevitable.
But people are made by their environment as much as they make it. It is a two way street. If we would start expecting people to have some humanity, they will start to. It might be disheartening because you feel like you're the one moral person who is getting beat up by the people who don't. (If you do, feel better knowing there are others out there who still feel that there is such thing as right and wrong and that trying to live ethically makes life fuller.)
But the alternative is no better -- we will continue to have to do more and more reprehensible things just to get by. Our kids have to take ritalin to compete in school now. To make it up the corperate ladder you have to stab people in the back. These kinds of awful realities are only going to increase unless we fight against it and insist that our business, cultural, and political leaders have some decency.
Laws aren't the basis of morality in the society, they're (hopefully) the product. But once we deffer too much to law and too little to our own ability to konw what is right and wrong, the more we have to depend on those laws just to maintain our society.
A cultural insistance on personal morality and responsibility would provide us a means to resisting the world we're heading towards (and are already wading in.)
This isn't some kind of "we need religion in our government" dogmatic position. We need a balance. But just withdrawing and saying, "to each his own" leaves us with a soceity that only hasn't collapsed because we have a reasonably well rooted judicial system.
DO blame companies (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM Germany was happy to make punch card systems to help the Nazis run their concentration camps. Companies are run by human beings. Decisions are made by human beings. We can blame the human beings who make immoral choices. Nuremberg established the principle that "I was just followong orders" does not absolve you of personal responsibility. Even less does it mean they cannot be criticised.
Re:DO blame companies (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be curious to see the consequences of US soldiers taking their personal responsibilities......
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Communism. Thats the problem causing the Great Firewall of China, not Google or Microsoft or Cisco, but the underlying Totalitarianism of China.
This is a system that's killed far more people than Hitler in the 20th Century. This is a Government bent on far more demanding and bloody Imperalism than the United States would ever think of and to get it's "lost" Taiwan back might very well embark on a war that would destablize not only the Pacific Rim but the entire World's Economy.
Yet, on Slashdot, most of the time from what I've seen when theres a story about the Chinese Space Program or Linux, it's "Go China! Those good and resourceful folks!" And when it's about censorship, "Booo Capitalist Corporations who as enabling China!".
China wants the Internet censored, if all the Corps in the Free World banned togeather and said no, China would roll thier own solution. If it wasn't Google and Cisco doing this, but IT companies in Germany would
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
China is not a communist state.
Its got a capitalistic system running. No communist would want to be a good capitalist.
China is a country run by a dictatorship which calls itself communist just out of tradition.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Be consistent which is it? Totalitarianism or communism? One does not necessarily imply the other.
Additionally, to call China "communist" has been laughable for more than a decade now. Don't be confused, the reason for this is totalitarianism, not communism. Whether their previous status as a communist state is the reason for their current totalitarianism is a debate for another day, but it's clearly neither what they are now, nor what is (or even would be) causing this problem.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop splitting hairs and listen to the grandparents' point. It's a good one--it's not the western companies that are the root cause of this, but the Chinese government.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly Karl Marx is nowadays subject of study of many great economists. If you study economics in Ivy League you might have to reed Marx. Reason why the father of communism is so hip is because Marx had very good understanding of capitalism.
[1]The Political Science of Karl Marx [ox.ac.uk]Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations are fictitious entities. They don't exist in any real form. The people who constitute the organized group activity we apply the label to, however, are quite real.
And it's incumbant upon those people to act in an ethical fashion. Simply being part of the organization called 'a corporation' doesn't excuse immoral behavior. It's unfortunate that the courts allow the fiction of 'corporation' to shield evil-doers from prosecution in many cases and, I think, a rather clear perversion of any rational definition of the word 'person'.
Sadly, there is no penalty for dealing with brutal dictatorships, or for betraying every ideal America supposedly holds dear by assisting that dictatorship in retaining power. But it's rather hard to press home the case for blame when the government does the very same thing (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Even so, I personally think that anyone willing to betray the ideals embodied in the Constitution are traitors and vermin. That includes both the swine at Google who assist the Chinese in building their great firewall and the swine in the federal government who actively prop up the Saudi royal family. And at the end of the day it isn't a 'corporation' or a 'government' that's to blame, but the people hiding behind these labels who're actually doing the dirty work that assists these dictatorships in maintaining their power.
Max
At least it's not us. (Score:2)
Re:At least it's not us. (Score:2)
Firstly, it is a loss because many people will find it difficult to communicate effectively with people over there..
Secondly, and unfortunately more importantly for lots of people with money, it makes China more difficult to deal with as an investment. China is a huge potential market for many many companies, and some of these are internet companies. With China's stranglehold on its internet, breaking into the market may be problematic at best, and impossible at worst.
T
Re:At least it's not us. (Score:2)
Taking your comment from the specific to the general, it's interesting that the American biologist E. O. Wilson [edge.org] has noted, in a different article I can't now locate, that China is the test case for humanity. His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems.
While civ
Re:At least it's not us. (Score:2)
They're related, Chinese who've been poisoned by industrial waste are persecuted by local governments if they protest; newspapers which cover these stories are shut down or have their editors fired.
Re:At least it's not us. (Score:2)
I think that the Chinese government is doing a remarkable job at making the people believe that their government is really much kinder to them than it really is. I've had Chinese people accuse me of being crazy because I like to have the freedom to bad-mouth my government if it needs bad-mouthing.
The best slaves are the ones who think they're free -- and yes, that was a bit of irony. The Chinese government does not have a monopoly on oppressive policy.
Re:At least it's not us. (Score:2)
Until 20% of the males of a billion people are sent to take back Taiwan. And then teach Japan a lesson about WW II. And then for sake of national security decide to clean up the mess the Imperialist Capitalists have made of the Middle East.
The reason why you do not grasp the problem is that the thought police has decided they would rather make a buck off of China, rather than indulge in fearmongering. And that you're stupi
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Funny)
http://brain.cx/DNS-HOWTO/ [brain.cx]
Irony rears its head (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Irony rears its head (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Irony rears its head (Score:2)
uncensored?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:uncensored?? (Score:2, Funny)
Nothing to see here, folks. Just a citizen expressing his glee with a good old hip hip hooray and all that. Move along, I hear there's a new Natalie Portman film, or a Dungeons and Dragons game, or something.
Your pal,
Dan... Dan... Dan Up Baby? Is that seriously hi--my name? Of course.
Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:5, Interesting)
* There is a legitimate concern that people reading articles critical of the government will cause enough upset to collapse the government.
* The number of people involved that you are trying to black out information to number in the billions.
* You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
I mean, yes, it's distasteful and all that, but beautifully executed. I don't think *I* could sucker 1.3 billion people, no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
The chinese people didn't give anything up because they've never had that ability in the first place.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Sell? It's not like the people had a choice. China has a very stringent central government. P
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Promoting social policy via financial incentives is nothing new. The US tax system rewards being married (in most cases), which of course means that it penalizes unmarried couples. And many countries with low birth rates give extra money to people who have children. The Chinese one-child policy is just the same thing, only in reverse, which makes sense for a country that already has an
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Informative)
1) And end to US occupation of Saudi Arabia (the troops where there primarily to defend it against Iraq)
2) And end to the sanctions against Iraq
3) An end to aid to Israel
As a result of the Iraq war 2 of this 3 demands have been essentially met.
Does this mean ... (Score:3, Funny)
That the IP tables syntax will change from geek jibberish to simplified-Chinese?
Damn, I will never learn how this CLI stuff.
What happened to freedom of information? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even more unfortunate is a mostly non-free Chinese market and a country that denies its citizen freedom to information, while a mostly free USA aids them in closing off information access.
It's a companies perogative to decide what it wants to do. But it's also a duty of a government to protect while not oppressing its people.
Limiting circulation of governmental data to strengthen security is one thing. To prevent a people from accessing
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ironically, it's Capitalism's Fault (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ironically, it's Capitalism's Fault (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really about power, the people who have it, and their desire to keep it. Socialism, Capitalism, Boontism, who cares, as long as the power stays where it is.
I agree with a later poster, that having a freewheeling, energetic, innovative economy, PLUS rigid control from the top with perpetuation of power is an inconsistent model.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ironically, it's Capitalism's Fault (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to echo this sentiment. By participating with Chinese censorship, these corporations are keeping the door open. The last thing we want is for China to put up an iron curtain and block access to anything outside of China. It's a delicate balance.
Look at it this way. Technology alw
In Soviet Russia ... (Score:3, Funny)
This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Strange censorship... (Score:4, Interesting)
For a while, we all thought he was too busy to respond to our random email conversations. Turns out that he never received a lot of those emails. We all decided that it was because censorship but could never figure out what keywords brought it on. There didn't seem to be any rule-based system. It was almost as if millions of Chinese were censoring the emails of the other millions by hand.
Well, except the sentence "Hey, is this getting censored?" That email always got censored.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Strange censorship... (Score:2)
It shoul
Re:Strange censorship... (Score:2)
But steganography may help.
Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:2)
/Mikael
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
No, it's a difference in kind, not just of degree. It is illegal in the many countries to access child porn, but it is not illegal to debate the merits of child porn on the internet. Democracy is not the legal form of government in China, and it *is* illegal to debate its merits on the internet.
Do you not see the differ
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:2)
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:2)
It's not internet access that's being censored, but speech. Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, at least according to the UN.
That's like saying there is no ethical issues with smashing printing presses, as owning a printing press is not a Basic Human Right.
Same principle, newer technology.
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:2)
"Freedom of Speech" standards vary wildly from country to country, with most countries having laws that would be considered terribly restrictive in the United States. The US and UK have quite different standards for what speech is considered "acceptable", and libel lawsuits are often filed in the UK for speech that is perfectly fine in the US. Sweden bans "offensive" s
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Interesting)
In abstract, I agree with the idea that a sovergen nation should be able to have it's own laws. Basically, if a bunch of people want to get together and live under whatever waky laws they can come up with like wood should smell different on wednesdays or it's a capitol crime to drink water from a seventeen
It only applies to some ISP's in Norway (Score:2, Informative)
expression of ideas is key (Score:5, Insightful)
No, neither is access to paper to print on, or printing presses, but we still take for granted that the government should not seize printing presses based on what ideas they were used to disseminate, and that that is a natural continuation of a basic human right, the freedom of expression (UN Declaration of the Human Rights, article 19, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html [un.org]).
So, if you regulate the Internet to weed out uncomfortable ideas, you are indeed violating the UN declaration of the Human Rights, to which I believe China is a party.
Also:
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws.
Indeed, but by signing said convention, you are giving up a part of the sovereignity of the country (article 2).
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
Do that. However, not that the freedom of expression protects the exchange of ideas and information. It can be argued that child porn is not an opinion. In all western democracies that prohibit child porn, it is still legal to have opinions about child porn (that it should be legal, for instance).
The comparison had been more accurate if you had compared with how some companies cooperate with the French government to stop foreign nazi sites and goods to be served to the French public. The quite common European prohibition against racist incitement and other hate crimes are indeed an limitation of the freedom of expression (well-founded as it may be).
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Belarus, a place gradually moving from moderate dictatorship to totalitarism. We have all the censorship in traditional media, and now there are moves to control the net access as well: forums impose self-censorship in fear of being shut down, gay sites get blocked, and opposition resources abroad suppressed during large political events.
So I beg to disagree. Unless you don't give a damn about Human Rights in general, Internet censorhip is ammoral and harmful.
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. That is an outdated notion, stemming from the Peace of Westphalia, the notion that the fundamental political unit is the State.
Modern political theory holds that the fundamental political unit is the individual. You may be familiar with a popular espousal of this political theory:
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:2)
.
.
.
sorry, your post just made think of Monty Python. You wouldn't be related to that peasant, would you?
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. According to your criteria, the United Kingdom does not have a legitimate government (due to the lack of a Constitution).
I think that the legitimacy of a government basically comes down to how well it serves the people that it governs. I think that if you ask most people in China today how things are going, they would reply that they are pleased by ho
I see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Can they filter it all out?
Re:I see... (Score:2)
Of course the above sentence would then just read: "in it".
no access to western websites (Score:2, Interesting)
Sensationalism (and IPv6) (Score:2)
"This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable."
As
IPV6 (Score:2)
It will take some big reason to make the switch; CHINA is hopefully a big enough reason.
China is moving slowly towards a more open society (Score:3, Interesting)
A switch in China, which was to be expected after the fall of the Soviet Union, would probably solve these freedom problems, but replace it with utter poverty for more people, and will most likely break more civil and human rights.
The chinese people know about democracy, they know what is wrong, and they have their own underground movements to push the right buttons to improve the situation. The attitude of chinese people is luckily a more mellow attitude than that of the US or western world, giving them the time to get those changes without a lot of blood shed.
So for the mean time there will be a chinese firewall. Since we can not stop the chinese goverment from doing this, the chinese themselves will show them one day that it needs to stop. Lets try to stop our own goverments from imposing blocks on the internet, for example the US goverment forbids international gambling and pr0n sites. US companies (VISA/MASTER) help the goverment in this by preventing people who want to visit those sites from being able to pay using their creditcard. There are probably other blocks which are less visible (conspiracy theory?), and enough examples to fight in the US and other countries, where we live ourselves.
Re:China is moving slowly towards a more open soci (Score:3, Informative)
Hello from China (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I just read this article from an Internet connection in Shanghai. It will be interesting to see if it posts.
Capitalist dictatorship (Score:3, Informative)
Blame the confusion between free enterprise and democracy for the sorry spectacle of companies from supposedly "democratic" countries going out of their way to cater to the whims of a supposedly "communist" country.
For a long time free enterprise did equal democracy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was held up as the prime example of a non-capitalist and non-democratic state. Here was proof for the peoples of the developing world that democracy went hand-in-hand with capitalism. China's success proved that this need not be the case.
Some free enterprise appears to be necessary to promote democracy: the right to be as rich as the corrupt bureaucrat next door. But China proved that it's possible to get rich in a supposedly socialist setting even if you're not a card-carrying member of the party. You can make money if you know when to shut up.
And who's to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the US gov't is doing the same thing, just on a more subtle and un-obvious way.
Just because we think we live in an open and free society doesn't mean that we're not fed as much propaganda as the rest of the world - it just means it's not so blatant.
My favorite example is CNN.com - if you visit the page often enough, you'll occasionally see a major headline story show up, and two minutes later it's gone... with NO word about that story ever again (anywhere on CNN.com). Searching overseas news sources will often bring up the whole story, but not always.
Obviously, someone censors these things after they appear - in a country where freedom of the press is supposedly paramount, this is a very scary thing.
MadCow.
Re:And who's to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
> freedom of the press is supposedly paramount, this is a very scary thing.
You want to talk scary... Judith Miller is sitting in a jail cell _right
now_, for being unwilling to reveal an anonymous source for story on
the Valerie Plame leak.
Things are tough all over.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2)
Chinese Internet Users & Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chinese Internet Users & Democracy (Score:3, Informative)
But before full scale fighting breaks out, you need people who actually have power to start the war. Look at the Islamist who really cause problems: they are well educated people from
Good ole censorship (Score:4, Interesting)
"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime." - Justice Potter Stewart, US Supreme Court
From an American expat in China (Score:5, Insightful)
But when you make a comparison, you find that the United states has these same problems, but only to a different degree. The US has poverty and financial hardship - you can easily find statistics through a google search. The US indirectly censors the media, if you consider that the vast majority of the public only receives it's information from mainstream corportate sources that are deeply tied with members of the US government and will only present a certain view point. And the people really don't have a real say in the political process, considering that the US isn't really a true democracy - it's a pseudo-republic, one with two entrenched millionaire clubs that are highly exclusive and aristocratic.
You only have to look at the last thousand Slashdot stories to find hundreds of examples of abuse of power in the US. I'm living in China and find everything just as comfortable here, and I am actually able to access almost all the information that those in the US are.
Ideologically the US and China are different, but in reality they are not much different.
LS
A shadow from the past... (Score:3, Informative)
China is now trying to prove the opposite. They are trying to control their own people, and motivate them through a shared sense of national purpose and recovery of past greatness.
The last government that tried this was the Nazis. And it took millions of lives to suppress that threat.
The government of China is replaying the experiment. But they have time, numbers, capital, and unlimited reserves of patience on their side.
We are now engaged in the last great test of freedom, people. Wake up, we live in interesting times.
LEgislate against censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod me down, but ... (Score:3)
Note: I'm not a liberal arts major -- I have two engineering degrees. Being a technologist does not excuse you from knowing your language. Cue arguments for why knowing your language matters ...
Re:average /. reader sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:average /. reader sucks (Score:2)
It's really quite unfortunate. I still think
I mean, journalism 101; you don't need to provide your audience with an opinion; they can make up their own. If
Re:average /. reader sucks (Score:2)
Re:I WANTED FIRST POST (Score:2)
Re:I WANTED FIRST POST (Score:3, Insightful)