Slashdot Mirror
Blogging Sweeps China
An anonymous reader writes "Dissident astro-physicist, Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley, interviews Isaac Mao, founder of CNBlog for New Scientist. Asked what is his strategy to expand blogging under China's censorship regime, Mao's response is typically Taoist: 'What is our strategy? We do not have a strategy. But the information flow in the blogosphere has its own Way. The Way is our strategy: personal, fast, connected and networked.'"
China is one of those funny places where they really crack down on the incoming news. Taking a look at some of their latest news, it's hard to reconcile the rosy glow that they have in regards to their country with the actual happenings of their military overseas (submarine in Japanese waters) and communist neighbors (not a word about the imminent overthrow of Kim Jong Illmatic).
On the other hand, unlike many Western countries *cough cough* that send the secret police to "visit" people who wish to express an unpopular opinion, China allows its dissidents a full voice. They of course drown out the voices with their own party-led voices proclaiming the benefits of the Komintang. But as far as stifling free speech, China has one of the best records in that area.
The sound of one hand blogging
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
.. of a Douglas Adams quote:
He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to... to...
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
More spam comes from the US than from China or South Korea. It just happens that there are more servers that allow spam in China.
So how would you like to write an apology to 1billion+ people? Perhaps a mass email?
Sounds like an IBM ad!
Tomorrows news.
China blocks all blog sites.
I like muppets.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"The Way is our strategy: personal, fast, connected and networked.'"
I think they forgot "...and censored, too."
It is interesting that once again sex became the big reason many people have jumped on to a new technology. As that article said, blogging got a big boost from a sex blog, the sex increased visibility for the blog server and introduced many new users to blogging. It just seems to be a pity to me that people can't find something better than sex to get people to assert their collective voice.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
You say: China allows its dissidents a full voice.
http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=1964
Tiananmen dissident tortured to the point of becoming psychotic. He splattered paint on Mao Zedong's portrait.
Beijing (AsiaNews/SCMP) - An imprisoned Chinese dissident has become psychotic as a result of the torture inflicted upon him, one of the man's friend told Free Asia after fleeing China.
Yu Dongyue is a former newspaper editor who was arrested during the Tiananmen protests and sentenced to life for "counter-revolutionary propaganda": he had defaced Mao's portrait by splattering it with paint.
In 2001 Lu Decheng, another dissident, who was jailed for years but released early, saw Yu in Hunan No1 Prison. "He was almost unrecognisable," Mr Lu said who recently escaped the mainland in a perilous three-month journey. "He had a totally dull look in his eyes, and he kept repeating words over and over again as if he were chanting a mantra. He didn't recognise anyone."
"There was a big scar on the right side of his head. I asked his mother if Yu had ever received a head injury, but she said he never had."
Mr Lu said that another inmate at the prison told him that Yu had been tied to a power pole and left in the sun for several days.
"After that, they locked him in solitary confinement for two years and that's when he got like that," Mr Lu stressed. "He has been tortured to the point of psychosis."
Officials at the Hunan No1 Prison were not available for comment.
Yu Dongyue, Lu Decheng and Yu Zhijian were school friends from Hunan province and had been active in the pro-democracy movement before travelling to Beijing in May 1989 to join thousands of demonstrators on Tiananmen Square.
As a result of his involvement, Mr Lu said, his house was demolished, his wife threatened to the point that the authorities forced her to divorce him, and his minibus confiscated, depriving him of the means to earn a living.
Phone tapping, mail interception and surveillance became a regular part of his life, he added.
Speaking from an undisclosed location, he said he fled so that he could tell Yu's story. He did not reveal any details about his escape.
Good for the Chinese. Courage to communicate in spite of government's attitude is a positive sign from a country coming out of the dark ages. Now, how about some Iraqi blogs? For all the funds being pumped in there, one would think the Iraqis would have something to say. I'm tired of hearing everything about what is really happening there, third hand. Just so they use a language that can be translated by services such as http://www.worldlingo.com/
Haha. but seriously...
I got up this morning and took a shit so that I could survive until the next time I had sex.
I took the dog out because owning another creature raises the possibility of having sex with another interested human.
I made blueberry muffins because eating is fundamental to survival, and attracting the opposite sex with a special skill like cooking is important to having sex.
I checked my email in order to 1) answer emails from friends who may introduce me to future sex partners, and 2) make money which increases the chances that I have sex.
I updates some DNS zones because it increases the possibility of having sex with women who may understand what that is.
I had coffee because I like coffee and what I like is reflected in my outlook of the day, and if I look happy and content my possibility to havce sex increases.
I brushed my teeth because it increases my chances of having sex.
I checked the forum that I moderate because there might be a female posting which I can attract with moderation points. I may also be able to increase my sexual attractiveness by making myself more well-rounded.
I spent the day idling on IRC and browsing because there might be a chance that a female may log onto IRC, and there is always the possibility of rubbing one out to some internet porn (not quite sex, but a reasonable approximation).
Yes. All about sex.
Rubbish, I took a shit because bowell problems are painful.
Some people hate animals!
What garbage. I made muffin because I like it, generally I don't cook.
because, faceless automation and system log files are a great way of meeting new sexual partners?
I don't think so
Wrong, I drink coffee beause I'm heavily addicted to caffine. Shaking, twitching and having foul coffee breath doesn't increase the possibility of me having sex at all.
I brush my teeth because tooth decay is painful
No, I checked the forum, hosted on my server, because it's me that gets to deal with the legal threats and complaints if I don't.
Why the fuck would I be looking for sexual partners on IRC where it's impossible to determine gender?
No it isn't.
What you never heard on the news at any point is that these people who practice Falun Gong/Dafa were primarily peasants and farmers in the country side. These people became so enamored with it that they made their kids do it too, and then everyone became so enamored with the promise of Falun Gong that the kids stopped going to school. Now whats better for poor peasant kids? Hoping to find a spinning wheel in your stomach so you can ascend to heaven, or going to school to learn some skills so they can join the world economy? You decide. This wasn't happening to people in the big cities. It was happening to poor peasants who have little to hope for, and for them, Falun Gong is a cult just like the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, etc. While peasants aren't stupid necessarily, they don't realize the value of education in the same way that people in western/modern cities/nations do. These idiotic Falun Gong cultists find solace in the western idea of ideological freedom, because it's the easy way to cover up their true beliefs. I have no problem with people wanting to perform exercises to maintain health of mind and body - I do have problems when people want to start a cult with little kids in it.
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
Somehow I'm a little skeptical of the "meh, it'll all work out by itself in the end" style of planning
Blogging Sweeps China
Great that those bloggers are lending a hand! With the economic expansion and lack of time and all, the dust has really been piling up in the corners lately.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...of the current government in China. It'll one day, not to long from now, end with political protest, but the government will be virtually dead by then due to the internet.
Chinese Blogger Executed After Testicle Electrocution.
There are a lot of cats in China.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Shouldn't you be asking if mainstream media is accurate and trustworthy, assuming you're being sincere and not sarcastic of course?.
To answer your sincere question then, bloggers as a whole may not be accurate and trustworthy - can you really trust someone you barely know, except through the thoughts they choose to post online?
However, Bloggers do tell you about their lives, as they live it, about the things that happen in their country and how it affects them. So while blogs may lack decent grammar and spelling, it is at least, to me, a more realistic view of the average person's situation. (Note: this does not apply to the ravings of bored teenage girls with smiley addictions! - of which there are way too many in the blogosphere)
"I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me" - Lu-Tze "Thief of Time"
So very true...
I think most things can be linked to sex, but maybe not directly. How about my schedule this morning:
Anyway, there are a three things we need to survive: food, shelter, clothing. Food so we don't starve, shelter and clothing so we don't get sick and die from the weather. We survive to procreate. So yes, stuff like making muffins and drinking coffee mean food to survive so you can have sex eventually.
I think the root issue here is not only that we need to have sex to keep the species alive, but sex is fun (as long as the other person is hot). We have sex and sexual innuendos in TV shows, movies, newspaper ads, interpersonal communicates (e.g. jokes around the office), the bedroom, everywhere. Why? It is one of our primal instincts, and we like it.
I am not surprised that sex would start something in China, be it a revolution or just blogging, because they are so repressed there. I am still skeptical of this story and several of the posts here, but the general idea seems natural to me.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Better for poor peasant kids? How about growing up in a society where one can believe in or do whatever one wants so long as it doesn't harm someone else?
"Some of Mr Li's pronouncements are certainly unconventional, some would say just plain strange. He believes aliens walk the Earth and he has reportedly said he can walk through walls and make himself invisible. Mr Li says that he is a being from from a higher level who has come to help humankind from the destruction it could face as the result of rampant evil. "
Similar characterization from articles in magazines like Newsweek and Times I've read in the past paint him as just another charlatan using a bogus mixture of old traditions and modern fads to spread his own crazy ideas. The tragedy is, China is just begining to open up and so is ripe for reception of this kind of crap. We in the US have had more than our share of lunatics like David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite. By now, we are jaded by bizzare ideas like this. But most chinese are still relatively naive about such things, and so they get caught up in the frenzy. To be fair, you can characterize this thing any way you like. But it is important to keep in mind most slashdotters can't really understand either the Beijing Government or Falun Gong from the perspective of an average Chinese citizen. At the end of the day, most of these political comments from tech enthusiasts are just hot air.Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Be careful my friend. One is just as free to choose ignorance and self limitation as one is of choosing happiness and prosperity. The thing about Falun Gong is that it takes obsolete ideas that are often detramental to one's well-being and guilding it over with a thin layer of spirituality and metaphysics. As a health regiment, practitioners have more often than not forgone legitimate medical treatment for serious conditions. You can say such tragedies do not harm anyone else, but that is only in the physical sense. Consider the case when out of 70 million practitioners, true medical health care is devoted to treating the late stages and serious consequences of neglected illnesses. The burden to the national health care system would be huge. It would be like Christian Science being revived in America on a massive scale. Everyone begins to engage in medicinal prayers for health. Meanwhile, doctors in hospitals all over the nation are being forced to deal with the expensive and often fatal late stages of easily treatable ailment. Would *you* be willing to subsidize such religious freedom?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
So how would you like to write an apology to 1billion+ people? Perhaps a mass email?
They deserve nothing. As compared to administrators in the US and Canada that i've had to deal with, admin types in China/Korea/Taiwan have been useless when dealing with spam.
In fact, I don't think i've ever recieved a single piece of return communication when trying to resolve an unsolicited-mail problem with someone in those areas - the crap mail just keeps coming, and I finally had to go ahead and summarily reject or delete any mail I recieved from the aforementioned countries.
The fact that the idiots send a lot of it in a language I can't even read makes it a lot easier to filter, too.
In that case I'd propose those individuals be denied care unless they can pay for it themselves. I'd have no problem with tax money being spent on educating people about the possible consequenses of their actions (just like anti-smoking commercials). People should be free to live their lives as they see fit, even if they are harming themselves, but they must also take responsibility for their actions. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. I'd rather have both than neither.
By now, we are jaded by bizzare ideas like this. But most chinese are still relatively naive about such things, and so they get caught up in the frenzy.
China had groups that got into these "bizarre ideas" long before Western cynicism. A recent example (by Chinese standards) that Westerners might remember was the Boxer Rebellion, very similar to the Falun Gong, which occured about a hundred years ago.
I wouldn't write the Falun Gongs off as unsophisticated rubes just yet. There's a reason why the Beijing government wants to get rid of them, and it's not because they care how superstitous their people are; China is filled with superstitions. It's because when lots of people in China (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, other countries) start joining a religious society, it's generally because they're tired of their political society. Those guys may sound like they're talking daft superstition, but what they're really talking about is a change in the government, and I'm quite sure that Beijing knows this.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
The Boxers were *nothing* like the Falun Gong of today. The boxers, right from the beginning, had political motives. Primarily though, they were anti-foreigners rather than anti-government and were not rebel in the strictest sense of the world. But that is besides the point. It seems to me such a pairing compares apples to oranges. The Boxers incident may be recent relative to the entire history of Chinese culture, but in terms of direct influence (and by this I mean the continuity of cultural consciousness) it was a lifetime ago. The Chinese society of today bares little resemblence to the one of the early 1900s. For the culture of the period, the ideas that sustained the boxers were not strange at all. A more appropriate analogy of the Boxers would be with the Native American "Ghost Dancers" of wounded knee. My personal opinion is that both groups had legitimate grips and were confronting them more or less directly within the expressive limits of their beliefs. Falun Gong, on the other hand, is a cult that spews wishy-washy political criticism under the veil of religious activities. As a religion, it is too inconsistant and immature to be taken seriously. The only thing it has going for it is really the same kind of momentum generated by a good advertising campaign in a large consumer population hungry for a new fad. In spiritual beliefs, I think they're closer to Christian Science. (For a good expose of Christian Science, consult Mark Twain or Martin Gardner.)
But you are right on several points. Falun Gong is blatantly political in private motives if not public expression. And they are not unsophisticated at all. More than any conventional dissident political movement, they have mastered the use of the Internet (instant messaging, usenet, etc.) to effectively coordinate activity and communicate among organizers. The sordidness lies in the fact that ordinary practitioners are being unwittingly manipulated into being foot soldiers for political oposition against the central government. Think about it, if you practice any religion properly within the privacy of your own home, who really cares? Falun Gong, on the other hand, has organized huge crowds of practitioners who perform in public places as publicity stunts to intentionally piss off critics. The Falun Gong movement is a tool for political motives with no real regard for what little spirituality it embodies. I think you're right Beijing knows Falun Gong has ill intentions toward the current regime, but the sad thing is most Falun Gong followers don't.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I think that is a very good private attitude to adopt. In fact, I'm inclined to endorse such an action for public implimentation out of personal conviction. But I feel such a thing is not practical or realistic. The ACLU (or it's equivalent, should there be one) would be up in arms over religious discrimination. Comparing it to anti-smoking commercials just illustrates how silly the whole thing really is. I mean, why do we even bother to continue allowing tobacco products to be produced and sold given it's negative effects? Is there anything of tangible value in cigarettes? The idea of freedom is concieved with the goal of removing obstacles and barriers to growth and development. In contrast, the american attitude of "just because I can" is just an idiotic notion with no redeeming value.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Yes, smoking should be illegal. Tobacco products have no redeeming value and in the light of all it's negative effects, there is no reason at all for anyone to be consuming this product.
Aids and other STDs are not an intrinsic part of human sexuality. People don't get sick just by virtue of being gay or male or female. Anyone is capable of choosing to practicing safe sex. Being of one gender or one orientation does not give a person free reigns to engage in risky behaviour. And that should be good enough for any health care system.
I believe a person does not choose his/her sexuality, and so should not be held responsible for the consequences of ones gender or orientation. This is something society needs to accept and integrate into existing institutions. As far as sexuality is concerned, I don't believe there is any personal freedom at all. You are what you are. The rest of the world just has to learn to deal with it.
But religion is different. Religion is not who you are. It is something you're taught and choose to accept. Certainly one should have the freedom to choose. But morality dictates that you must choose within the confines of ethics acceptable to your religion. If your religion condones prosperng at the expense of others, it is an idea you choose to accept.
I believe one should have the wisdom to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one and be rational enough to understand cause and effect. But the very nature of freedom dictates that one should be also free to choose harm. But why should anyone what to choose harm? The only reasons I can concieve of are that you are either too stupid to know any better or you are plain malicious. Since neither are of benefit to anyone, it makes sense to nip both in the bud. As far as I'm concerned, when you excercise the personal freedom to be evil or idiotic, you don't deserve to be a part of any program be it socialist or otherwise.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Or maybe not.
fish and pipes
fish and pipes