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China Detains Internet Essayist for Subversion
romcabrera writes: "Reuters reports that 'Chinese authorities have detained a civil servant, whose essays are banned by Beijing on the Internet, on charges of subversion'.
According to the article, China has created a special Internet Police Force which 'blocks some foreign sites and shuts down domestic sites posting politically incorrect fare'."
In case anyone hasn't noticed, China is a hardline socialist dictatorship. They kill people for defying the state and send the bill for the bullets to their families. This is why American protestors really have no idea how good they have it. The "state" doesn't come and kill you if you voice your opinion on something. China's government is bad, we know this. Unless we plan to invade and liberate them then there's nothing we can do about it.
I have stop considering China a communist contury. They stop following all the values pf it. I do not consider censurship communist either. It is one screwed up political system.
-Seriv
I give China a lot of credit for what its government does. I might not agree with it, but they're upfront about their censorship and their control (suppression) over their citizens. It would be refreshing if other governments had the same sense of honesty about citizens' "freedom," but I doubt we'll see it.
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"We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people. " President Bush Addresses Australian Parliament Oct. 22,2003
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
"Really? I live in a beautiful and small European town, with a very good standard of living."
Well, I'm not the original poster, and I don't like a whole lot of things about my country and my government, but... Replace "European" with "Iowan" and you've just described my situation.
Contrary to popular belief, most cities of the US are actually small, quiet, and rural-ish and not huge dirty, noisy, and over-populated.
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>The USA would probably lose any war with China.
I don't know about that. I think it would likely slag on for a hundred years, with no winner.
After the piss is already in the wine, I don't think nukes are so scary anymore. See, once somebody nukes LA, DC, NYC, and Des Moines once, and after that becomes part of our history and we move on from it, it won't seem so scary anymore (it won't be "unthinkable" anymore).
So the notion that nukes alone can settle a war go out the window. People adapt, and go back to living in dispersed territories, maybe. But it doesn't end WWIII (which any "US versus China" scenario probably represents), which goes on, and on, and on.
Nuclear weapons might start WWIII, but they aren't the end-of-the-world sort of destruction that we'll probably wish they were when this comes down. Rather, they'll be one of those severely annoying tragic things that you can't really do much about, like living in LA despite quakes. You can only play this trump card one time.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And how exactly is this different to the United States?
Average Merkins still think that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that Korea has none!
Average Merkins still think that Microsoft (tm) Windows (tm) is a state of the art operating system.
Average Merkins still think that their intelligence agency truely didn't see 911 coming.
Average Merkins still thing GWB has been elected democratically.
I don't see any U.S. Army troops and tanks on the streets of China killing people who steal CD's, either.
Judging from your post, I would guess you've just been watching the news and not actually going to the WTC protests in Seattle like some of my friends did. After a WTC protest, try checking around on the web for sites put up by the protesters. You're sure to see a few heads smashed and related things. America has it's own Tiannamen Squares if you really want to look for them. But usually American censorship is a lot more subtle. You can give an 'evildoer' person 25 seconds of airtime on a public news program as long as you interrupt them frequently. Its hard to explain a different worldview in 25 seconds with frequent interruptions, and the whole thing makes the news organization seem like it's being objective.
And there have been a number of laws passed raising the bar for what it would take to have a third party elected. Lets face it, we may have some control over national elections, but enough money can essentially force a consensus between the two parties and then we have zilch.
If the two parties agree, your vote is irrelevant. It's not like the multi-party systems found in some other democracies where you can have multiple viable parties.
Freedom and democracy? These are not binary yes-or-no things.
And while it's true that America (where I have citizenship) has a good deal more freedom than China (where I'm currently teaching English) there are a lot more comparisons which could be drawn between the two nations than most Americans would be comfortable with.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
No, you don't see that. What you do see is people getting bankrupted, blacklisted, jailed, and left with a life not worth living. In some cases, if you violate the Patriot Act, run afoul of Homeland Security, or have your profile flagged as "suspicious" (US Gov Matrix has been resurrected), your life is turned into a huge steaming brown mass. Having your name ruined and being consigned to a life of poverty in the US is worse than death in many ways. It's torture in every sense of the word, especially if it all begins when your human rights to "fair use" of creative works for personal enlightenment and enjoyment get trumped by legislation that's basically rooted in fiscal policy. DMCA is censorship for financial reasons, whereas the Patriot Act is sensorship on an political-ideological basis.
And occasionally somebody's executed (Patriot Act here, not DMCA). I think the last time I looked, Amnesty International reported that on 7% were truly and completely innocent. I'm not sure at what percentage of innocents executed it becomes State-sanctioned murder to "encourage" others to stay to the rules without question, but I'm sure there's a number when it does... They say that China is bad because it executes innocent people, well, wake up, they kill innocent people in America too, all the time. And of course there are the locked-up non-citizens in Guantanamo. Left there to rot because they [presumably] have a different point of view than American policy makers. Think "re-education camp" here.
I see these as slight variations on a theme. All governments do these things to the citizenry, and try to say it's necessary to keep peace and order. But it never is, really, the true agenda is to create an environment where wealth can be ammased by a few at the expense of the many. True, some newly established post-revolutionhary governments have given momentary respite (like the US for its first 80 years or so of existence, and France too, at about the same time and duration). It's not that I don't like America -- it's the same as every other government on Earth before it -- I am not a fan of any of them. Man dominates man to his injury, a wise man once wrote about 3,000 years ago. This will always be true.
Perhaps the most deeply unsettling phrase I've ever heard is "America -- love it or leave it." It is the chant of the profoundly ignorant.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)