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China Sets New Rules On Internet News
auckland map writes "China set new regulations on Internet news content which ban the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest. Established news media needed permission to run a news Web site, while new operators had to register themselves with government information offices. This move further widens a campaign of controls Chinese government has imposed on web sites, communication, leisure and businesses." From the article: "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest ... [internet news sites] must be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."
Time and time again "national security" is shown to be the antithesis of freedom. Be it in China or the United States, putting such a focus on protecting "national security" results in severe harm to the liberties and life of the nation's citizenry.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The Reuters copy is a bit spotty in its coverage...more information can be found here, here, and here.
Interesting quote from the third source listed above:
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In the west you dont even know when "public opinion is being guided" in supposed national interest.
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
The last great communistic/socialistic/whatever government on the planet.
Hardly... While there is still some remenants of the old state-run economy, China's increasingly capitialistic these days and has been so for some time. Heck, they recently changed the rules so capitialists can join the Chinese Communist Party. I think "Authoritarian" is the word you're looking for, and there are plenty of other countries that word would also describe.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
China is NOT a "communist" country.
They have an authoritarian government with a capitalist economic system. "State capitalist" is the more correct term. (authoritarian states are not necessarily communist, although the reverse is generally true).
This may be offtopic, but usually the conversation always manages to drift towards this anyways regardless of the original topic.
The problem isn't "national security" as such, and there's nothing wrong with a community (country-sized or any other size) protecting itself.
The problem is that "national security", "patriotism", ironically even "democracy", are also the first excuses someone reaches for when they want to take your freedom away. No, let me rephrase that: the problem is that the people tend to get stuck on some _words_ instead of their _meaning_.
E.g., people are raised to rant and rave about how they have a right to free speech, but don't actually know what that right means. ("Congress shall make no law...") Most think it means the exact _opposite_: that they're allowed to troll a board or shout obscenities at the neighbour, but the government is still allowed to censor anything. I mean, duh, it's the government, of course they're supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, right? Wrong-
E.g., people are raised on ideas like that patriotism means they must obey and do their duty, but they lose focus of: to whom. Hint: it means to the country, not to one particular party or leader. Sometimes the patriotic thing to do might actually be to disobey a bad leader.
And so on.
So you're left with whole generations which have been raised basically with a Pavlov's dog kind of reflex. You ring the bell, the dog does something by reflex, without thinking. Same here. You say "patriotism", people get a knee-jerk reaction to obey anything. There's a whole bunch of magic words that just trigger a reflex, without much thinking or questioning.
And it should come as no surprise when some people do come along and use them to their own interest. It's like having a big red button that says "push here to get an immediate advantage." Is it any surprise when some people come and push it?
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What's great about the bulk of the media in the US is that they impose these limitations and bans on themselves, without having to have the government do it for them.
Ignore Alien Orders
Funny, I was going to say Democrats are. They're the socialist-wannabes, aren't they?
Actually, by European standards most US Democrats are pretty comfortably to the right of the center in politics. Everytime I hear you Neocons accuse liberal or moderate right wing politicians in the US of being Socialists I wonder what would happen if somebody introduced one of you US-American conservatives to a real live 24 carat way-left-of-center Socialist, never mind an acutal honest to goodness die hard Communist like we have them over here in Europe? My pet theory is that you would go red in the face, then steam would shoot out of your ears and your eyes would bulge out followed by a massive bang as your head explodes. Many US-Americans speak very belligerently about Communists, Socialsits and how they are the spawn of Satan etc... but I get the feeling most US-Americans have little or no idea what those words acutally mean.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Let me be the first to say [No Carrier]
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It would sound like a good constitution (it even includes the Freedom of Religion) if they didn't literally throw it away with Articles 51 and 52:
In other words, the freedoms that come before those paragraphs are only suffered at the state's whim. If they feel that you are in any way working against the state (e.g. the criticism they just "allowed" in Article 41) or attempting to undermine the "unity of the state" (e.g. the freedom of religion granted by Article 36) then the state will step in and run you over with a tank or throw you in jail.
So much for the constitution of the People's Repulic of China. Be very happy if you live in a country to whom rights are more than words on a sheet of paper.
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