China Blocks Wikipedia

Lemmingue writes "China government is, again, restraining the access to internet. Ars Technica says they are now blocking the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. How much time will it take for to Slashdot be blocked?"

Comments

Re:Only Chinese version of Wikipedia?

[nroose]

Wikipedia is reporting that All of wikimedia, including wikipedia is blocked as of June 12.

Internet_censorship_in_China

Re:zh.wikipedia on Tianenmen

[Jon Chatow]

At first, zh was blocked in and around Berlin a couple of days before the anniversary; this block has since expanded to cover most of our IPs, and our whole set of DNS domains, and being blocked throughout China, from what word we have had passed on.

All Wikimedia servers are hosted in Florida, so life is unaffected for the rest of the world. Sadly, this is not the case for our Chinese brethren.

Wikipedia [[User:Jdforrester]].

Re:Speaking of blocking...

[timstarling]

Apparently they can. I was talking with a computer-literate Mainlander on this subject in the Wikipedia IRC channel. He said that ordinary HTTP proxies are blocked, and that to access Wikipedia now, you need a secure tunnel.

Re:Slashdot not going to be blocked

[tobar mersa]

Given two hypothetical countries, both with brutally despotic rulers and the same amount of rights, with the exception of one being centrally planned, and the other possessing a free market, which country is freer?

They are equally unfree. Simply because a person is free to own a factory in one land does not make it more free than a land where a person is forbidden from owning a factory. The fact that a person is free to accumulate great wealth in this scenario has nothing to do about the freedom to speak out against the crimes of the Government.

My point was "Free societies require (at least mostly) free markets." Rebutting this statement by listing states which possessed a free market and yet were not completely and utterly free does not disprove my point

I probably misread your comment. You also wrote: I think it's time that people finally accepted that the Austrian / Chicago school of economic thought [emphasis added] is far closer to freedom than any of the garbage Marx, Engels, and Lenin were spewing. Thus, I assumed you considered economic and societal freedom, if not causal, at least correlational. I was simply trying to point out that Free Markets do not require Free Societies; thus, a Free Society could easily slide into a non-Free one, whilst the market still went about its work.

Certainly you will agree that a free market economy is far less hospitable for tyrannical rulers and oppressive regimes than a centrally planned economy.

I agree it is far less hospitable than other forms of economic systems. Just it is also not wholy inhospitable. After all, a dictator could easily permit a free market for anyone who does not oppose the regime.

given enough examples, perhaps one should begin doubting the divinity of communism. There are certainly enough beliefs within the dogma of communism (must be attained through a revolution, forcefully taking controll from some and giving it to others, etc.) which would be conducive to the sort of "one-party dictatorships" that have historically emerged.

I think this is more a result of having nearly all Communist countries that lasted any appreciable length of time outside the U.S.S.R. modeled their development after the U.S.S.R. This means that the Coup d'Etat launched by Lenin often termed the October Revolution provided the effective base for single-party governance, as the Coup was mainly Bolshevik in character, and the following Civil War effectively quashed the other parties. Then Uncle Joe Stalin (or, as I prefer to call him, Tsar Josif) took over after Lenin's death, and squashed any rights which interfered with his outlook on how the country should be run (N.B.: this included economic rights. Lenin established the New Economic Policy, which broke up Government owned industries into different sections, which were then ordered to compete along pseudo-Free Market Lines; also, the ownership of small factories and of small stores of under, iirc, ten people was also legalized. Stalin made an alliance with the Old Bolsheviks promising to keep the NEP if he is installed into power instead of Trotsky, who vowed to rid the U.S.S.R. of the NEP. Then, after gaining power, Stalin did away with the NEP and the Old Bolsheviks both.) Then, when other forms of authoritarian Communists were trying to gain power, they followed the way that had worked in the U.S.S.R.