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Forget MTV, I Want My Internet!
shystershep writes "Teenagers in China are apparently pretty serious about getting internet access. This article on the English version of the online newspaper Xinhuanet details gang-type activity to get around China's ban on persons under 18 entering internet cafes. I may get a little cranky if I don't get my daily net fix, but I've never beat anyone with a fire extinguisher because of it (not that I remember, anyway)."
Those kids should have been beating up the government officials that made the law, not the cafe workers who are forced to enforce it.
Of course if they're caught they'll probably be shot one way or the other.
-JemIt doesn't look like they're getting it yet. From the article:
China has shut down more than 8,600 unlicensed Internet cafes for admitting juveniles since February. To bar minors from Internet cafes, local governments across China have been ordered not to approve any Internet cafe operations in residential areas or within 200 meters of primary and high schools.
They have high ambitions if they want to prevent any teenager from using the internet. Communism vs. Free speech?
Please remember the source when discussing this; Xinhua is the state news agency, and will print whatever they are told. The last "cafes are evil" story they ran was about a couple of kids who used the internet for 48 hours straight, and then sat on railway tracks to recover. El Reg has a decent write-up on the subject. You don't close 8600 internet cafes for "safety reasons", you close them because the population is suddenly aware of their alternatives.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Execution for doing so may persist for a while though.
No internet for you unless you put in your ID number.
7 18 496&req=
http://www.interfax.com/com?item=Chin&pg=0&id=5
What was it you said about having nothing to hide?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Xinhua (New China News Agency) is not necessarily a reliable source of independent reporting or information.
Since the tragic Internet cafe fire in Beijing in 2001, the central Government has been increasingly active in demonising the internet. This is just an extension of that on-going propaganda war.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it incredibly disturbing that Xinhua and Voice of America are the top article on Google News so often? I accidentally clicked on a Xinhua story the other day and it's very disorienting to be reading about prisoner abuse and see "Mao Zedong, a forever warm memory" in a sidebar.
In my travels through China I've used a lot of Internet Cafes. Often it was hard to find a seat because, they're so popular.
When I did, I often found that I was the only one 'using' the Internet. Everyone else was immersed in on line games (ok, they probably played over the Internet as well). Apart from the occasional chatter I was the only one using a browser.
Regards,
X.
I'm not an expert in large scale networking. But, wouldn't it be possible for the people of China to access the Internet through satellite access? Could free nations allow the Chinese access to their satellites? I'm sure that would really piss off the CCP! After all, their government wants to invade Taiwan. What better way to put a kink in the works by starting a revolution among the Chinese people for freedom.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've spent the last 4 months traveling throughout Asia and am currently in Shanghai, China.
China is the only place I've ever been, which inludes about 100 countries and 6 continents, where I've actually been physically assaulted by a street vagrant. The kid was about 14 and begging for money. He saw that I gave his much younger brother some Yuan coins and approached me.
He stuck his hand out, and I pointed to his little brother as if to say, "I already gave your little brother some money." He then starts punching me in the stomach. Not hard enough to hurt, but not soft enough to not be annoying, either. He kept this up for 3 minutes while I was waiting to cross the street, then he followed me across the street, punching me the entire time.
A fast, well-placed elbow to his temple made him stop, but the Chinese in general are quite aggressive.
Now, people who have never been to China and have no idea what it's really like but who don't like what I just said, this is when you mod me down. Wouldn't want you to miss an opportunity to flout your ignorant righteousness.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
It couldn't be that the US invites critics where the totalitarian regimes, every arab one for instance, control media and always pick one scapegoat to point the finger at. Please, there is essentially zero drive to control what's fit to print over the arab and muslim world. The US abdicated what people around the world seem to think is a responability to make sure everyone can run to their lexus in slow motion in malibu. They didn't try to control the presentation of the US image in the middle east. And the totalitarian regimes sang the blame america song night and day. Small wonder that the whole region doesn't know any better.
Tell you what. I don't care why those people are fuckwits. It isn't my fucking problem. I DO care that they murdered 3,000 of my countrymen. That is my business. They are my fucking problem. And my vote controls who's finger is at the ready to turn them into shadows. And some way, one day, that WILL be THEIR fucking problem.
Little bitches want to sing the Blame America song, it's all good by me. I just want to give you an occasion to remember it by.
What a moron, around the middle east anyone can freely say anything they want about the US, and if they did the same about their own government they just disappear in the night, but the US is the problem. Give me a break. I could get more insight trepanning. I guess it's all America's fault people in North Korea are resorting to cannibalism, and that China sends the refugees back. We really are bastards.
Try freenet for a while. The anonymous P2P network. Very much a tool for freespeech. Allows anyone to post material without fear of being found out. Now try looking at what is actually there. Child porn and copyright infringement and frankly a whole lot of perfectly legal stuff.
Not exactly the kind of stuff Amnesty International is fighting for eh?
If you see the internet as simply a tool for playing games or accesing porn (as china would like to do) then putting an age restriction on it is not that insane. No more insane then an age limit on driving, drinking, smoking or indeed riding a rollercoaster. Kids who raid liquour stores are not freedom fighters.
If the story is true then this plays right into the chinese goverment hands. See the evil internet turns kids into thugs. We must restrict access more!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Most of you Westerners just don't get what it is like to be Chinese. I am one. I may not exactly live in China, or speak Chinese well enough, but I guess it's always an inescapable part of Chinese culture.
Chinese culture emphasises filial piety, almost blind faith of authority, etc. I don't know if Confucianism came because of the influence by the Warring periods (where, due to pure greed, Chinese armies attempted to seize control of all the states and unify them); or something else.
Don't ever forget that Chinese culture, as NatGeo once put it, looks to the future with one foot firmly in the past. It's something that we are sort of proud of. (I also remember the various Dynasties variably as periods of plunder, unrest, and corruption.)
Why does China insist on the one-China policy with the Republic of China? It's not because, I believe, of evil people; it's an almost blind faith to the belief that all Chinese belong in one nation. In Mandarin, Chinese is called Zhongguo - Zhong being "central" or "most significant", or something along those lines. Is there a United States of Besterica? They'd probably be trying to take Singapore - where I live - too, if there weren't such a large proportion of other races.
They were so eager to claim HK from the British, and have been generally not-so-militant about it (there is still incredible press freedom in HK). Why? Because authoritarianism isn't as important as housing all Chinese into one China.
My Chinese teacher once said - these types of people are a rarity in Singapore - that if you're Chinese and have nowhere to go, guess which country will welcome you with open arms.
What am I trying to say? That authoritarian control that you Americans resist, yes, that is not a good thing, but it has come about due to the influence of Chinese culture, not because of evil people. You people do not exactly understand *why* authoritarianism exists, choosing to see it in only a romantic, black-and-white, good-and-evil thing.
George Bush junior - not the best example of a good man, I guess - once said "there ought to be limits to freedom"; indeed, that's one of the most insightful things a man can say.
In the future if broadband could be provided at low cost from Low Earth Orbiting Satalites it would be nearly impossible for governments to control their citizens use of the Internet (unless they controlled the satalites). If the chineese teenagers were capable of acquiring the correct hardware it would be very difficult to restrict or censor their Internet usage in anyway.
It could even be possible for such a teenage to make money on the Internet and pay for his Internet service (with a service like PayPal) without the government ever having any knowledge of the financial transactions.
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
To be more precise, Marx made PROJECTIONS, not predictions (see Bertell Ollman). What has set the Marxist enterprise apart from the start is its attempt to base itself in social science, not dogma or predictions--'this MUST happen'. The Communist Manifesto is, on the other hand, a political document rather than a theoretical document, which is why it both seems so much more clearly written than anything else Marx wrote and so much more imperatively, categorically stated. It is, however, an exaggeration, and does not represent the bulk of the theory.
I assume what you're referring to with peasants overthrowing the aristocracy is feudal society in which peasants are rising up against their feudal landlords. The trouble is, *before* capitalism, peasant revolts were frequent, but could never take power because they basically had neither a viable alternative to the aristocracy nor the military or economic might. The bourgeoisie however, which were growing inside feudal society engaging in the capitalist mode of production, had already built up this mode so far by the time they openly revolted that they had the economic might and the alternative ready at hand. They were therefore able to overthrow the last vestiges of feudal power.
But historical materialism is not a stage based, unilineal framework to be just sloppily applied in the same way to every society on earth (as many in the 2nd International and later the Soviet Union would have had us believe). Societies engage in complex constellations of different modes of production, and the ones Marx traced out as the specific precursors of capitalism, which only developed once--in Europe--are the ones that are emphasised in his writing (with minimal mention of the so-called 'Asiatic Mode of Production' which was based on the extremely limited evidence to hand from 19th century anthropology).
Marx's point was that in the theoretical model of the capitalist mode of production, which of course never exists in pure form, the tendencies are toward the oppressed class--*for the first time in history*--to successfully be responsible for the bringing about of a new dominant mode of production. Every previous transition had been brought about by some other forces, some other oppressor class, etc.
But what we saw developing in the 20th century is the possibility of peasant revolution. Simultaneoulsy developed by Mariategui and Mao, although in two different forms obviously, is the idea that global, imperialist capitalism actually stifles social development in the colonies or neocolonies, preserving feudal, slave, or other modes of production where it is most expeditious. Furthermore, as Engels had pointed out long before, societies do not have to linearly develop through the same series of modes of production--they can 'skip stages', in the stadial wording, if there are other societies which have created preconditions (i.e. an example to follow). Thus most of the socialist revolutions in the 20th century had peasants as their motive force, both thanks to the development of guerrilla warfare tactics, and thanks to advent of socialist theory, which was an outgrowth of European capitalism.
Because Marx was a social scientist, and not a witch making predictions with a crystal ball, this does not invalidate the whole of Marx's theory. On the contrary, it augments it with a greater understanding of the situation once we see what happens when capitalism reaches a truly global scale and starts to interact in new ways with other modes of production as a result.
How are two forms of forcibly-imposed collectivist statism "on totally opposite ends of the political spectrum"?
Granted, their methods did differ a bit: Communists attempted to eliminate private business and put everything under the direct control of the state while Fascists just usurped private enteprise and turned it into a de facto agency of the state, but the underlying goal -- establishing a centralised, totalitarian society -- was the same.
The ideological differences can largely be seen as methodological accomodations needed to implement totalitarianism in different cultures. In countries like Germany and Italy, with well-developed civil societies, it would have been impossible to simply destroy the traditional institutions, so they were usurped and their symbols applied toward the totalitarian agenda instead. In Russia and other impoverished feudal cultures, where there was already little in the way of a civil society outside of the state, the totalitarians advanced an agenda of material advancement to be obtained by overthrowing the existing state's power.
The ultimate result was the same -- Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were ruled very similarly. In fact, Hitler and Stalin's original non-aggression pact made explicit note of the similarity of their worldviews.
There were some minor differences, of course, but to claim that they're polar opposites is ridiculous.
"The fact is though, that while some force is authorized, a beating isn't. And having seen protests where the guy trying to leave peacefully gets his teeth knocked out, I'd say there's an ugly side too."
My argument to that is simply: It's not goverment mandated by any stretch of the imagination. It's up to the individuals at that point. It's hard to label the gov't as oppressive over the acts of individuals. The other consideration is though a 'peaceful guy getting his teeth knocked out' situation can and does occur, we know nothing of the danger the officer felt by the rest of the people being there. I'll say again, I have witnessed this first hand. Protestors, as a group of people are shitheads. It's sad that an innocent person can get what he doesn't deserve out of it, but the group as a whole often causes that situation in the first place.
"Hopefully somebody will label you deservedly as flamebait. "
That would be disappointing. Flamebait because I disagree with you? Troll because I have a differing view? Give me a little credit, it's not like I put you down here. Plus, I'm taking the time to back up my views here. Whether I'm right or wrong, I'm not challenging you because of something personal. I'm certainly not doing this simply to cause an argument.
"Derp de derp."