China Bans Letter N From Internet as Xi Jinping Extends Grip on Power (theguardian.com) 196
Speaking of things the Chinese government has been censoring in the country, The Guardian reports: It is the 14th letter in the English alphabet and, in Scrabble, the springboard for more than 600 8-letter words. But for the Communist party of China it is also a subversive and intolerable character that was this week banished from the internet as Chinese censors battled to silence criticism of Xi Jinping's bid to set himself up as ruler for life. The contravening consonant was perhaps the most unusual victim of a crackdown targeting words, phrases and even solitary letters censors feared might be used to attack Beijing's controversial decision to abolish constitutional term limits for China's president. The Communist party has painted the move -- which experts say paves the way for Xi to become a dictator for life -- as an expression of overwhelming popular support for China's strongman leader. However, there has been widespread online push-back in China since it was announced on Sunday on the eve of an annual political congress in Beijing.
Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:5, Funny)
o, it makes sese.
Log live Xi Jipig!
Re:Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't ban the use of the letter "n" inside words. Only the use of "n" as a standalone character.
It is not clear why it was banned, but sometimes characters and phrases will be used symbolically to get around censorship. For instance the number 64 is often censored because it is used to mean "June 4th" the date of the Tiananmen Square "incident". 54 is also sometimes censored because it is used as a symbol for corruption and betrayal, since the terms of the Versailles Treaty were published in Chinese newspapers on May 4th of 1919 [wikipedia.org]. The treaty was seen as a betrayal of China, and a sellout to the Japanese by the Western Allies, resulting in riots and unrest.
One conjecture is that "n" was being used in the sense of "an arbitrary number" to mean the new term limit for the leader of China, replacing the old limit of two terms of five years each.
Re:Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Only the use of "n" as a standalone character."
Gives the N-word a complete new meaning.
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"Only the use of "n" as a standalone character."
Gives the N-word a complete new meaning.
Makes it that much harder to get anywhere in nethack - sorry, "ethack" - if you can't see the nymphs or Nagas coming.
Harder than, well, hard. (Score:2)
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Do you feel pressured to defend China?
No. As a native-born American citizen living in California, I feel no pressure to defend China.
Ella Minnow Pea (Score:3)
I'm sure Ella Minnow Pea was consulted. https://www.amazon.com/Ella-Mi... [amazon.com]
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+1 Funny. Sorry, no mod points today, but this is utterly hilarious.
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Well that makes sense.
China is just copying from a Greek military junta, who banned the letter "Z" following assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis.
At least they did in the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00... [imdb.com]
If other totalitarian countries start doing this as well . . . we won't have any alphabet left!
It's time for a world leader to step up and make our alphabet great again!
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Score: 5, Fuy
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Re: Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:2)
China has a lot of people and bueracary.
Also communist China did things smart for many many years the true start of the downhill slide is breaking tradition and changing the term limit.
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China has a lot of people and bueracary.
You don't have to obfuscate that word - there aren't any "n"s in "bureaucracy".
Adyway, this sort of thing dever works - people just fide workarouds (like typig as if you have a stuffed dose). Perhaps the government censors are looking for that - they don't want to catch people using "n", they want to catch the sort of people who are sufficiently motivated to be subversive without it.
Re: Chia Bas Letter From Iteret ? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can they not see this is a bad plan with no good long term prospects.
The Chinese people do see it as bad, but what can they do? XJP has all the power. He directly controls the administration and the army. The legislature is just a rubber stamp and has no power. The judiciary is not independent, and follows the directions of the party. He has spent the last 5 years purging the government of anyone disloyal or likely to dissent, under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.
This is an example of why it is important to start opposing authoritarianism at the outset. If you wait until the oppressor's intentions are clear, it will be too late.
404 Not Found (Score:5, Funny)
Did you mean "M" Comrade?
Re:404 Not Found (Score:4, Funny)
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Shouldn't this be "404 ot Found" ?
"404 ot Foud"
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Surely you meant "404 ot foud", or "404 (m/2)ot fou(m/2)d".
Re:404 Not Found (Score:4, Funny)
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- Steve _artin, "Hostages"
LMOP... (Score:2, Funny)
Ch-ch-ch-chia
So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Where have you been? China's had its own internet for years now.
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de facto, pretty much, yes they had their own internet.
Foreign sites are very slow, if not impossible to access in a reliable manner. It doesn't help that pretty much every foreign website loads stuff from websites blocked by China's firewall - Google APIs, Social Media's like buttons, etc. In addition, regular users on e.g. China Telecom, are on a network that has very low bandwidth to outside China (this could be circumvented in the past by paying extra, e.g. for the China Telecom "VIP Package"). Finally,
They've also seriously butchered the character set (Score:2)
E.g. look what they've done to wan4sui4. Simplified Chinese stripped down version on the left, Traditional Chinese version on the right
https://translate.google.com/?... [google.com]
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While many things are wrong with China, simplified Chinese characters are not one of them. I would much prefer to learn simplified writing than traditional. Anyone upset with simplified characters (Taiwan) is exhibiting the same protectionism given to cursive and (in France) the French language. However easier is always better - lets more of those poor pheasants learn writing and integrate with society. Korea had a similar epiphany centuries ago, much to their benefit.
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The simplified character set is lipstick on a pig.
Both should be abolished in favour of pinyin, or some other phonetic alphabet.
Thanks to computers, the archaic Chinese writing system is not quite the handicap it used to be, but it is still a significant drag on Chinese progress.
How old are kids before they've rote-learned enough characters to read a newspaper?
Cultural Differences? (Score:2)
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Apparently you aren't aware of these things called timezones or the international date line.
It is April 1st in China right now.
Well, that is it for China as a Superpower (Score:2)
They obviously prefer to go deeply into Fascism instead. What an utterly deranged decision.
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Why do you think Fascism and being a superpower are mutually exclusive? Nazi Germany, the canonical Fascist state, was pretty much a superpower and the USSR adopted a lot of Fascist ideas (militarism, strong central personality-based leadership, merging of corporation and state). During its rise, the British Empire also had a lot of these attributes (including concentration camps and a quasi-governmental East India Company).
There's no rule that says that superpowers have to be nice...
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What is with people these days? They have been a Communist dictatorship/kleptocracy since about 1949, with all the degradation, repression, starvation, purges, and death that entails. Only the gullible and like minded willing dupes ever imagined differently.
And in any case, the USSR was an undeniable super-power for the better part of 50 years despite nearly universal despotism that always comes with leftism. As long at they have a land army of 1.6 million men and a substantial nuclear
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I don't think they have that option. They are not militaristic enough. Of course, with all the US Dollars and things in the US they own, they may become an economic Fascist Superpower. That would be pretty interesting from a historical point-of-view as it would be a first.
Ah well. Interesting times.
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Read the news. China has been massively upgrading its military. With modern weapons. Air craft carrier.
Not yet a match for the USA. But fast becoming able to massively overpower their first target. Taiwan.
wheel of fortune needs to ax any trips to china (Score:5, Funny)
wheel of fortune needs to ax any trips to china
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wheel of fortune needs to ax
"Ax"? Have E's been restricted in your country? Run out of money for vowels?
Long episode of Sesame Street in China (Score:4, Funny)
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Wonder Showzen already went there. [youtube.com]
Cogratulatios Xi Jipig for removig the letter "" (Score:2)
China bans letter N... (Score:2)
This makes o sese (Score:2)
I do't uderstad how this is supposed to work. But will be fu to watch, I suppose...
for ( ittr = vec.begi(); ittr != vec.ed(); ++ittr ) {
if ( ittr != ullptr ) {
ittr->update();
}
}
So... China is now... (Score:2)
Chia?
Do we have to water dear leader now? And dump shit on him to promote growth?
Well, here's an idea (Score:2)
Do chinese citizens need some of the USA's extra guns to take care of this little problem yet?
Did someone tell Dear Maximum Leader (Score:2)
That if we obey this Anglos will now call him Jipig which sounds close to "the pig?"
There is |\|O WAY you can defe|\|d this. (Score:2)
How ca|\| anyo|\|e defe|\|d the Commu|\|ist Chi|\|ese gover|\|ment whe|\| they act the way they do?
Leet circumvention (Score:2)
Do you waut iuteruet to stop usiug a character, to preveut them from from sayiug "Zo!" ?
Good luck with that! I expect that this will be takeu as a challeuge!
Claude Shauuou once showed that Euglish only coutaius about 1.2 bits of iuformatiou per character. Thus one cau remove a lot more characters and still make seuse out of it!
Joking aside, I'm a bit sad that what the tools that once was seen as the tools for liberating and informing people, have turned into tools for disinformation and oppression.
Why so worried? (Score:2)
Google is suppressing gun-identifies shopping results, at least in the US, even for legal products. What could be wrong with this?
I'm not sure I see the problem here.... (Score:2)
By my understanding, they only removed the limit on the number of consecutive terms allowed, they did not remove any limit on the duration of any single term. Individual terms are still 5 years long, afaik, and he could still be voted out after any one of them.
Lots of countries don't have limits on the number of terms that a person can be elected, and there's not any significant problems there. This is mitigated either by upper fixed bounds on the length of any single term (or fixed term lengths) that
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Well, maybe not lots... but certainly more than a few..
I live in one: Canada.
The UK and Australia do not impose hard limits on the number of terms for their elected officials either.
But it's a fair point you raised.... a situation where term limits existed and where then *removed* might be an indicator of a problem. The countries that I know of which do not have a set limit on the number of terms have never had them, to the best of my knowledge.
Um (Score:2)
which experts say paves the way for Xi to become a dictator for life
China has been a communist dictatorship for longer than most of us have been alive.
For Western sources to cover this little internal squabble as though it has much significance is disturbing, at least in the clueless way it is being covered. China is still a brutal communist dictatorship, whether they periodically rotate people into and out of various positions or not.
Obscure enough except for 1.3 billion (Score:2)
Miss Little Bottle yet?
What a silly bunt. (Score:2)
overwhelming popular support ... (Score:2)
If he really had ''overwhelming popular support'' then he would have little problem with some on-line criticisms. That he feels it necessary to stamp out any dissent suggests either: that his grip on power is not as it appears, or: that he is a snowflake that cannot stand any criticism.
What he does not understand
So to all those companies that shipped jobs... (Score:2)
... over to China: That looks like it might not have been such a good idea now does it?
Think you'll have much bargaining power with some petty tyrant that wants to be dictator-for-life and whose first move is to ban letters of the alphabet?
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Plus, capitalism calls for maximizing profits dammed of the consequences. Who cares that the technology and IP was stolen at the same time, cheap labor and almost no environmental laws!
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If I were a US corporation that just moved all my manufacturing over to China, I might be be a little worried that the new emperor, er, dictator might just say "Ours now". As you said, they have a billion customers. Would they need non-Chinese customers? Really?
I need to follow up on it but there are some stories going around about how fragile the Chinese economy really is and how close it might be to collapse. We may be close to living in those "interesting" times.
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OK... second move.
Just say o! (Score:2)
_/t
Nice editorializing (Score:2)
Letter N returns! (Score:2)
Great news, everybody! Letter N is out of rehab. [youtube.com]
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Nope. Note I provided as many arguments as you did. :)
Re:The two requirements for a trustworthy county (Score:5, Insightful)
We know why the first is important, But I don't know what the point is to the second. You must have a way of removing a leader from office, but a limit on their term doesn't make any real sense. If you have the best leader ever, you need to kick them out despite overwhelming public support just because some arbitrary date has passed? Conversely, many countries with term limits fail to have any way to remove a horrible leader before a set amount of time has passed (a term minimum?) which is, in my opinion, an even worse problem.
No, I think #2 should be replaced with: An effective mechanism to remove leaders.
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We know why the first is important, But I don't know what the point is to the second. You must have a way of removing a leader from office, but a limit on their term doesn't make any real sense. If you have the best leader ever, you need to kick them out despite overwhelming public support just because some arbitrary date has passed? Conversely, many countries with term limits fail to have any way to remove a horrible leader before a set amount of time has passed (a term minimum?) which is, in my opinion, an even worse problem.
No, I think #2 should be replaced with: An effective mechanism to remove leaders.
Interestingly I think, the UK has no limit on Prime Ministers, so every single one of them ends in failure, either by being voted out of power and resigning from leading their party, or being kicked out by their own party, or leaving of their own accord (but usually this is after some pressure). So all past PMs in the UK are tainted. With term limits you get to have 'successful' past leaders, who leave without actually losing face. There is a disadvantage though, the last term is a free-for-all where they d
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And that last term I think is the problem. Politicians should never have an opportunity where they don't have to listen, because they tend to exploit it.
As for "successful" past leaders. You can still have those in the UK, or any of the MANY other countries without term limits. They just have to know when to call it a day (and many have. They retire and don't seek re-election). That said, why do I care if a past leader was "tainted" or not? I care that I have the best person for the job at any given time. I
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That doesn't necessarily follow. A Prime Minister can decide to retire at any point with their legacy intact., the problem is that the position attracts people who are bad at judging when it's time for someone else. The benefit of term limits is that they're forced to step down for a while. The Chinese limit of consecutive terms is probably a good one: if you take a few years off and still look like the best bet then you can come back, but you can also leave gracefully.
Is the ultimate problem with being in charge - you always have to give way to someone less 'qualified' than you are. Nomatter how virtuous you are, that's got to be hard to choose to do.
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There is a danger #2 mitigates though - the longer a leader is in power, the more high-level connections and back-room deals they can form, and the more tightly they can consolidate their grip on power.
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Hence the ability to remove the leader being far more important. Once they're in power, it's too late. Most of those high-level connections and back-room deals happened long before they actually got in to office, otherwise they'd be unlikely to get there in the first place.
I see no reason to oust a good leader just to try to thwart a bad one. The much better approach is to make sure that the process is in place to remove the bad one.
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If you have the best leader ever, you need to kick them out despite overwhelming public support just because some arbitrary date has passed?
Yes. Because power corrupts. Especially when you have a truly altruistic leader who looks out for the people and manages to bridge divides. Give them 20 years and they will feel that the good they did means everything they do will automatically be good.
Some democracies do not need term limits as such, because the way their elections are designed make long-term reigns very unlikely. Still, even for those it is good safeguard to have, just in case.
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That still is no justification for term limits. What guarantees that the corruption won't take place on day 1? or that it won't take until year 23? Term limits are arbitrary, and hence useless for fighting that corruption.
If you want to fight the corruption, don't have an arbitrary term limit, instead have a method in place to remove a bad leader at ANY time, not just at specific multi-year intervals.
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.
The U.S military has a complicated mandatory retirement system for high ranking officers to prevent exactly this sort of stagnation
One unique aspect of Communist China v
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I can think of a few more, but these two are an absolute must.
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You however do your argument, and peoples desire to respect your opinion no favors by spinning it to look like something it isn't.
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Get your news somewhere better.
It was funny when US right-wingers started freaking out over what is literally nothing more than free prenatal screenings for pregnant women (for a wide range of diseases), as part of extensive prenatal (and postnatal) healthcare coverage. Literally nothing more than that. That many (no, not 100%) choose to terminate their pregnancy if they find out the
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It's still a case of "curing" a genetic condition through eugenics. I'm sure sure whether it's evil, but it sure is creepy. We shouldn't pretend it's anything other than aborting babies with undesirable genetics.
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I'm sorry, could you explain again what part here is bothering you? The part where we give mothers prenatal care, the part where we have among the most restrictive abortion laws in the west, the part where rates of Down's Syndrome births are pretty much the same as the US, or the part where we treat people with Down's well?
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That part where people claim Iceland has "Cured Down's syndrome" instead of saying "we use eugenics to avoid substandard people". I've read such newspaper articles.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not sure whether the practice is moral, amoral, or immoral. I think that's a very hard question, and not one to be taken lightly. But ignoring the question by pretending it's not eugenics? I'm sure that's the wrong answer.
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And as I have very clearly spelled out to you, both of those claims are incorrect. So get your news from better sources.
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Ah, so we're both annoyed by claims that Iceland has "cured Down's Symdrome". So, sure, 1-2 Down's births a year in Iceland, mostly due to the test being imperfect. Pedantry FTW.
But the moral questions raised by a society choosing to abort (effectively) all fetuses with a particular undesirable quality: those questions remain. And never doubt: this will become a larger effect on the species over time, as the technology becomes commonplace for more and more conditions. Couple that with fallible human jud
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Wrong. Do you not read?
You have a fictional version of Iceland in your mind. Our rate of Down's births is nearly the same as the US; what little difference exists has more to do with our younger average age of mo
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>Iceland needs moar retard babbies!
You Amerikuks are hilarious.
What about Gay babies? What about babies with the wrong racial ancestry? What about babies with merely below average IQ? Autism? What about 2-year-olds?
Eugenics raises serious philosophical and moral questions, and to be dismissive of it, or pretend it's not eugenics, is the only answer I'm sure is wrong.
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What about it? Why is it your business the reason a woman ends their pregnancy?
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Why is it my business the reason a woman kills her toddler? Same reason. It's the same moral question regardless of the age of the child.
Again, the only answer here that's certainly wrong is being dismissive of the question.
Here's a question for you. You are in a burning building making your escape and you hear a child crying in a room. You go in to get them and notice on the other side is a room is a box marked, fertilised human fetus x 1000. Which do you save? You can't do both because then you all die. One or the other.
And don't go around pretending abortion is the same as child murder or that people do it on a whim.
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Trolley problems are a bit contrived. Let's just say I'm not sure what the morally correct answer is. Nor should you be, unless informed by religious faith.
I don't know whether abortion is murder - it certainly seems to be late in a pregnancy, and I'm pretty skeptical that it would be early in a pregnancy, but what do I know? What do you know? I'm 99% sure that souls aren't a thing, but would you fire a bullet in the air in a city if it had a 1% chance of killing someone? The actual odds are a lot less
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Trolley problems are a bit contrived. Let's just say I'm not sure what the morally correct answer is. Nor should you be, unless informed by religious faith.
The child, the living breathing actual child is the correct answer.
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As long as it's under the ~24 week mark, the mother should be able to abort for any reason she wants. It's less about the fetus, and more about forcing the mother to host and birth a child she may or may not want.
Why 24 weeks? Why not 2 years? What different about detecting downs syndrome in the fetus, and discovering severe autism in a toddler? Do you know, with moral and philosophical certitude, when a person becomes a moral entity? I don't see how you could, unless your certainty is a result of religious faith. Or just lack of thinking about the question has left you with an unquestioned belief.
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So you're going to adopt all the unwanted babies? If not, you're hand-wringing is just shallow concern-trolling.
Perhaps parents have a moral duty to care for their offspring, wanted or not?
Perhaps the state has a duty?
Perhaps we just kill anyone overly inconvenient?
Do you think these are easy questions?
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"1. There is no capital punishment."
China does not have capital punishment. They treat capital "N" and lowercase "n" the same.
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Trump is obviously idiotic, but your post is terrible.
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TFA has zero to do with DJT. Let's keep it that way. Nobody's accusing DJT of being "worse than this" except you.
Re:Let's Organize! (Score:5, Informative)
Liberals restricted the govt's ability to hold people with mental issues.
And by "liberals", you are no doubt referring to Ronald Reagan. As governor of California, he signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act [lacourt.org], which ended the practice of holding mental patients against their will. Then, as president in 1981, Reagan signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act [kqed.org], largely un-doing Carter's work at improving the federal mental health care system, which itself built upon ideas outlined by Kennedy before his assassination.
Liberals indeed.
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Costa Gavras was a self proclaimed Communist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out anti Communist regimes tended to be authoritarian - if you didn't get involved in politics they'd mostly leave you alone. Communist regimes tended to be totalitarian - they wanted to reformat the culture.
https://www.commentarymagazine... [commentarymagazine.com]
Surely it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos are much more repressive than those of the despised previous rulers; that the government of the People's Republic of China is more repressive than that of Taiwan, that North Korea is more repressive than South Korea, and so forth. This is the most important lesson of Vietnam and Cambodia. It is not new but it is a gruesome reminder of harsh facts.
From time to time a truly bestial ruler can come to power in either type of autocracy--Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot are examples--but neither type regularly produces such moral monsters (though democracy regularly prevents their accession to power). There are, however, systemic differences between traditional and revolutionary autocracies that have a predictable effect on their degree of repressiveness. Generally speaking, traditional autocrats tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty while revolutionary autocracies create them.
Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.
Precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes. They create refugees by the million because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will "fit" better in a foreign country than in their native land.
The former deputy chairman of Vietnam's National Assembly from 1976 to his defection early in August 1979, Hoang Van Hoan, described recently the impact of Vietnam's ongoing revolution on that country's more than one million Chinese inhabitants:
They have been expelled from places they have lived in for generations. They have been dispossessed of virtually all possessions--their lands, their houses. They have been driven into areas called new economic zones, but they have not been given any aid. How can they eke out a living in such conditions reclaiming new land? They gradually die for a number of reasons--diseases, the hard life. They also die of humiliation.
It is not only the Chinese who have suffered in Southeast Asia since the "liberation," and it is not only in Vietnam that the Chinese suffer. By the end of 1978 more than six million refugees had fled countries ruled by Marxist governments. In spite of walls, fences, guns, and sharks, the steady stream of people fleeing revolutionary utopias continues..
There is a damning, contrast between the number of refugees created by Marxist regimes and those created by other autocracies: more than a million Cubans have left their homeland since Castro's rise (one refugee for every nine inhabitants) as compared to about 35,000 each from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. In Africa more than five times as many refugees have fled Guinea and Guinea Bissau as have left Zimbabwe Rhodesia, suggesting that civil war and racial discrimination are easier for most people to bear than Marxist-style liberation.
Moreover, the history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves. At the moment there is a far greater likelihood of progressive liberalization and democratization in the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile than in the government of Cuba; in Taiwan than in the People's Republic of China; in South Korea than in North Korea; in Zaire than in Angola; and so forth.
Since many traditional autocracies permit limited contestation and participation, it is not impossible that U.S. policy could effectively encourage this process of liberalization and democratization, provided that the effort is not made at a time when the incumbent government is fighting for its life against violent adversaries, and that proposed reforms are aimed at producing gradual change rather than perfect democracy overnight. To accomplish this, policymakers are needed who understand how actual democracies have actually come into being. History is a better guide than good intentions.
I.e. Costa Gavras is being a bit disingenuous here. The anti communist dictatorship banned few things than the communist dictatorship it preempted. And the anti com
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Is this supposed to be a early April fools joke, or is this real?
Are they filterig the letter from every website ad text?
How do they deal with pictures cotaiig the word?
The same way XKCD extracts passwords from 1024-bit encryption, I presume.