China Bans Physical Punishment For Net Addicts 139
gimmebeer writes to tell us that months after a teen was beaten to death in an Internet boot camp, China has banned the use of physical punishment to help teens kick their net addiction. "The death of 15-year-old Deng Senshan, just hours after he checked into an Internet bootcamp in the southwestern Guangxi region in early August, caused a media storm in China. Days later, another teenager, Pu Liang, was taken to hospital with water in the lungs and kidney failure after a similar attack in Sichuan Province. The government in July had already banned electroshock therapy as a treatment for Internet addiction, after media reports about a controversial psychiatrist who administered electric currents to nearly 3,000 teenagers. The latest guidelines suggest officials in Beijing do not think that those with unhealthy Internet habits should be forced offline permanently."
Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nice spin. What this is, is regulations on treatments requested by parents, akin to Outward Bound in the US.
Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
a person who is confined; especially a prisoner of war
lets see here, the kids A) Didn't choose to come on their free will B) Can't leave when they choose C) Are mentally stable and can make their own decisions and D) are being held against their will. I would call them prisoners.
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C) Are mentally stable and can make their own decisions
Without an objective criteria for mental stability, that's a real hard one to avoid the ''captors'' satisfying.
They can claim that someone demonstrated to have an internet addition is unstable and can't make good decisions.
For example, if they choose to leave, they will be satisfying their addiction in a way that harms them, negatively impacts their social life, etc.
Further, their mental stability may be questioned on the basis of them spending
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Certainly there are more kids who come out of these places saying it helped them than who die, but obviously 1 death is too many.
[citation needed]
Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Didn't choose to come on their free will B) Can't leave when they choose C) Are mentally stable and can make their own decisions and D) are being held against their will.
By your intrepretation a toddler put in a crib is also a prisoner.
Methinks you skipped some of the criteria there.
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You'll notice two contradictory sentiments on slashdot: 1) parents are responsible for everything their kids do and leaving it up to technology or laws is reprehensible, and 2) parents are wrong for doing anything to their kids because someday they'll have to make their own decisions.
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I think you're exaggerating a bit. Here's where they aren't contradictory:
Parents are responsible for raising their kids. It is reprehensible to try to replace this with laws or technology. It can be assisted with rules, to a point -- for instance, kids can't get into R-rated movies alone. But this can too easily make parents lazy ("T for Teen? Well, I guess it's ok.") or remove their ability to make decisions, like effectively banning kids from seeing certain things, regardless of what their parents want.
M
Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:4, Informative)
NO! They're not. You clearly didn't bother to actually didn't read his post, did you?
You missed the first line of his post: "C) Are mentally stable and can make their own decisions"
Toddlers are not mentally stable and can't make their own rational decisions, which is exactly what he was referring to.
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A toddler does not fit C
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Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
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It might work (Score:4, Funny)
After all the only way to "win" the "war" on drugs - is to start punishing those who DO drugs - not the ones selling it.
Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Your reply is a commonly used and rather disingenuous ploy to misdirect attention from the topic being discussed. I could easily rephrase it as "but bad things happen in other parts of the world, so this doesn't matter!" Such silly attacks on the U.S. contribute nothing to attempts at addressing the matter at hand.
Try living in China for a year. Try living in the United States for a year. While the U.S. certainly has its own problems, I'd love to hear your report on how awful things are here compared to China.
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Re:Wow, that's impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
I am quite familiar with the methods employed by the Chinese government to paint a pretty picture of the nation for tourists, and I'm not fooled. Let's have a look at the number of people emigrating to the U.S. from China, and contrast it with the number of people moving in the opposite direction.
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News flash, people in China don't care about "human rights" nearly as much as how well off they are economically. As long as you use "human rights" as the stick in your left hand while the protectionism/economic imperialism stick in your right hand is waving menacingly nobody will listen to your propagand
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The US doesn't have free trade with China? What planet do you live on? We definitely have our trade disputes and protectionism, but that runs both ways and is in no way specific to China. We have had similar tariff and trade disputes with every other country that is a major trading partner (easy exampl
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Your country IS impoverished. When your 'absolute poverty' is less than $90(US) per year, and almost 10% of the population is below that line, yes, your co
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Yes, there's things in China that shouldn't be - and likely more and worse than in your and my parts of the world, but for the majority of the 1 billion people, life is reasonably good. They'll get there, eventually, and so will you.
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I'm so glad we invite domestic and foreign terrorists to destroy everything America holds dear, makes me feel safer knowing terrorist's freedom isn't being hindered.
You lost any shred of credibility you might have had by attempting to compare journalists to terrorists. Good job.
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Life in china is fine.
As long as you haven't been imprisoned for being addicted to the internet.
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Or attempt the free practice of religion or speech.
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Oh, wait, we were talking about China, sorry.
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Certainly, I think anyone would say life in the United States is superior, the standard of living is just generally higher in the US.
The 'internet addicts' are sent to these camps by their parents, not the government. These are privately run camps. It's not like the government is rounding these children up and shipping them off to addiction camps.
As for life in China, I think you would find it quite livable provided that you have a decent source of income, and assuming that you don't do things to annoy the
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Your experiences would depend a lot on your choice of recreational activities, though you're almost an order of magnitude more likely to end up in a US prison.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita [nationmaster.com]
Still, I expect if you're wealthy enough, both would be pretty comfortable. It's normally only people on
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Yes. In this case, one is government sanctioned, the other is illegal. One has no recourse, the other has (theoretically) the recourse of a criminal proceeding.
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Realistically.. what can be done about prison rape.. throw the perpetrator in jail? oh wait...
Personally, I think prisons should be required to monitor 24/7 for such activities, video surveillance over every nook and cranny, and isolate prisoners at all times when not directly supervised: no 'visiting' other prisoners' cells, no case at any time whatsoever that multiple prisoners are in the same cell: no unsupervised groups, period.
Criminals by the very definition require that isolation and super
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Prison rape is not sanctioned by the US National Institute of Corrections. We're talking about China's human rights violations that are 100% government sanctioned. Makes you wonder what happens between prisoners when they turn a blind eye.
It's also painfully ironic that they punish "internet addicts" at all. With so much repression going on, who'd want to go outside?
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It's better news than hearing that China decided to just shoot them in the head instead. It's true China is extremely bad when it comes to maintaining human rights but really this kind of "treatment" needed to be banned.
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It's better news than hearing that China decided to just shoot them in the head instead.
The larger problem is the fact that efforts by journalists in China to report on such events typically results in said journalists being arrested or simply disappearing.
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Wow, so you banned beatings for ONE class of prisoners. What a step forward China.
Change takes time. If they keep the rate of one ban on beating certian types of prisoners, they won't have any more beatings in just three short years!
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When was it that the chinese forced their own youth to fight wars on foreign soil, for ideological reasons alone?
Surely for ideological reasons is better than for, say, money....? What other reasons are there (killing dictators probably counts as ideology)? But it's probably true that the US is a hell-hole, much like everywhere else.
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Physical Punishment (Score:2, Funny)
So, the Chinese are banning beating off to porn or something?
No, I haven' read the article yet. Why do you ask?
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Say goodbye to the internet BD/SM crowd in China.
suddenoutbreakofcommonsense (Score:2)
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And you think physical punishment is a good thing for "hardened" criminals? How is that common sense? You're just setting the bar slightly higher, you're just as bad as they are.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. (Score:1, Insightful)
Or at least in this case you have a choice.
You get a life or you lose your life.
Keepin' the Chinaman down!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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They don't understand why you need to be on the internet so much so they decide you are sick, deamonize the "illness", and take steps to cure you.
They don't understand why I need my medicine (comes in 40 ounce bottles, you know), and are taking actions to "cure" me.
Re:Keepin' the Chinaman down!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not even close, dood. I'm not going to kill a family of 4 if I crash my computer because I'm on the damn net too much.
Great strides are being made (Score:3, Funny)
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There have been definite improvements in the past two decades or so (OK so Mao took them backwards a huge bit). So most of the people in China will just put up with it - they are getting richer. Many of them are rabidly proud of their country.
Car analogy: they're stuck in the car and the CCP is driving, the scenery is crap, but getting better and they look like they're getting somewhere[1] (and quite fast too by some standards). So most will stick around for the ride, grumble a bit ("are we there yet?"), bu
I read this as.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Parent should be modded insightful, not funny. If things go in the wrong direction this is exactly the sort of thing we could be reading in the papers in just about any country in a few years.
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Wrong source? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Electroshock therapy for Internet addiction? Are you sure this isn't from The Onion?
You mean using onions to beat teens to break them of their shameful internet addictions? Interesting, I'll have to try that at my bootcamp.
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Why don't they go all the way? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why don't they go all the way? (Score:4, Interesting)
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But Wait (Score:1)
I'll take the damned punishment if they just give me the 'net back
How to freak them out (Score:2, Interesting)
As proposed earlier: Give gaming addicts a computer, where they can start whichever game they want, however where all the games only play themselves.
That should teach them, and after about a week of staring at the screen they might just start to do other things a slight bit at a time.
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Re:How to freak them out (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you know on Korea you can watch Starcraft games on TV ? With excited commentators and all ? Didn't know a word of Korean but that was fun anyway.
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Back to phychoterror then... (Score:4, Insightful)
...because in the eyes of the uneducated masses, that is still seen as "not real" and "just imaginary hurting". Despite modern neurology having proven, that the brain literally can't distinguish between those types of pains. (So a broken heart really actually hurts! And hurting you feelings creates real actual physical pain.)
Also, it is much harder to heal a fucked up mind, that a fucked up body. (From what is seen as "equally bad".)
But hey: It's invisible, so it can't be real. Any don't be a pussy anyway! Stop crying! He didn't beat you. It's just words. Right??
Welcome to the dark ages. You never left them.
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You never left them.
It's amazing how deluded people can get about themselves. We think that human nature has changed and that society/culture/psychology/education/liberalism/conservatism/government/what-have-you has somehow fixed some basic fundamental problems in humanity. And then we're surprised at people when they manifest it (while excusing ourselves when we manifest it). Self-deception is amazing.
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I would argue that without physical punishment, psychological warfare isn't as bad. Don't get me wrong, it's still abhorrent, but once it's purely psychological it becomes possible for some individuals to resist it, and it's also a lot harder to implement since you need a decent understanding of the individual for it to be truly effective against them.
these camps (Score:5, Interesting)
Parents take the children (not always children, at least in one case it's an adult - university student) to the camps, with force or deception, pay the camp owner money and leave. No questions asked - they don't care whether the "patients" are really "net addicted" or not. Then the victims are stuck here, beaten and drugged by the drillmasters every day. Most of them are runied forever when they leave (alive).
So it's basically a way for the parents to get rid of their problematic children, without trying to solve the real problem behind - survey indicates that most "net-addicted" children's parents have bad habits, e.g. addiction to gambling, and don't care what does the child think.
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In don't understand why parents would do that, given that each family is only going to have one child anyway.
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Although the behavior of all people on Earth is superficially similar, many cultures such as the Asians have decidedly different attitudes toward children than we do in the US. In Asian cultures the family name comes before the individual's name, emphasizing the fact that the individual is less important than the family. Any member of a family that causes the family to "lose face", or become dishonored in the eyes of others, is seen as a liability to the family. Protecting the family name is often put befor
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many cultures such as the Asians have decidedly different attitudes toward children than we do in the US.
True to a point. My wife is a third generation Malaysian of Cantonese origin. Her families attitudes towards children are pretty much in line with those you would find in a western country. One exception is about divorce. The children always go with the mother. In one case where a mother in my wife's family died the children went to the mothers parents and never saw their father again, which I find a bit weird.
A woman I met from Hong Kong told me that when she moved out of home at the age of 18 her parents
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In the places in China where parents are likely to send their children to one of these types of camps, we are usually talking about a large concentrated population. I doubt the people in such areas feel any particular need to maintain the local population growth since the local population is already straining the carrying capacity of the area. In the many outlying village areas of China which are still mostly low density agriculture-based communities, I'm sure the mentality toward protecting children is dec
Painful punishment can be non-physical too (Score:1)
They haven't ruled out punishments like sending someone to pwn kids' level 80 Rogue in PK. Imposing cash fines/property seizure type penalties.
Or (oh no) use firewalls to block access from their network to World of Warcraft, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc, while instead forcing kids to watch the chinese equivalent to Don't copy that floppy II and similar propaganda.
Some pretty severe punishments can be non-physical in nature.
The Real WTF... (Score:1)
girlfriends (Score:2)
Why not find the teenagers a compatible partner and force them to date? Seems simpler than electroshock to kick the internet habit.
At start-ups and on open source projects I know it's the kiss of death for the project when key developers get girlfriends. I can only assume it's the same for MMORPGs.
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what's wrong with a kiss, boy? (Score:2)
What's wrong with a kiss, boy? Hmm? Why not start her off with a nice kiss? ... You don't have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate. Give her a kiss, boy.
China sucks, (Score:1)
We have always had this kind of regulations (Score:1)
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In China they take half the powder out of the bullet when they shoot you in the head. The bullet just swirls around inside your skull and no exit wound = less mess to clean up.
If you ask me all governments do fucked up things. In the case of China killing kids for spending too much time online is just one out of a very impressivly long list.
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If you shoot someone in the head with a pistol round, the bullet doesn't make it all the way through ever.
Really, a rifle round never makes it all the way through either, what's coming out the other side is usually just fragments and a lot of bloody pulp.
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There are some very potent pistol rounds (.44 magnum,.45 ACP, .50 AE, .454 Casull, et al.) Usually, there's a much bigger hole going out than going in, regardless of fragment size.
This could be a test for MythBusters.
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I nominate this exchange for Worst Analogy Ever.
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And I'm still confused. Why couldn't they just go with a car analogy?
You mean they should shoot a car at your head, and then see what's coming out?
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Interesting)
Better analogy...
China: You were shot in the head 20 years ago... every few years, the doctor is working on the bullet a little more, taking another piece out safely. You can't leave the bed until every bit is removed.
The US: You haven't quite been shot yet.. you are strapped down to a table, fully restrained, the gun is above your head, at the other end of a tube also strapped to your head, the trigger was pulled 20 years ago.
The bullet is inching down a few centimeters every year.
It's only a matter of time before it hits you... one year was the Sonny Bono copyright extension act... next year was the DMCA... pirate act of 2004... next year was the broadcast flag......
The bullet is coming towards you.. they've put you on just enough tranquilizers to keep you from moving, you're fully conscious of your fate, and there are lots of people in the room, but they've all got iPod earbuds or plugs in their ears, so they can't hear your screams..
So which one's worse?
Re:Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, actually, I would say that your analogy is much, much worse.
Re:STFU if you're an American! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:STFU if you're an American! (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is a difference between not supporting torture (maybe even tolerating it, since it is "just against the bad guys") and being against torture. You only describe the further.
Also, the European understanding is that capital/corporal punishment is against the human rights. Which makes the US not necessarily shine (although not comparable to China of course). That is one major reason why Governor Schwarzenegger got huge criticism from the county where he was born (he adjusted to the US view and did not obj
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Keep in mind... (Score:1, Interesting)
Nothing in China is illegal or immoral; until caught that its. Rest assure some other form of abuse will be invented in its place until its application results in death (again.) Then another, and another. Rinse and repeat. Never underestimate the creativity of the human mind to formulate new forms of torture to be inflicted on fellow human beings, nor its ability to following letters of laws while raping the intend of the law.
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There, fixed that for you.
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