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Self-Censoring 'Chinese Wikipedia' Launched
Billosaur writes "New Scientist is reporting that Baidu, China's largest search engine, is launching its own version of Wikipedia. The site, Baidupedia, differs from the more well-known Wikipedia in that it is self-censoring." From the article: "Unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to create and modify entries, Baidupedia is censored by the company to avoid offending the Chinese government. Entries to the encyclopaedia must first pass a filtering system before being added to the site. Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'."
This sort of censorship is pure unequivocal evil. The Chinese government has no right to do that under any circumstances.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
'Nothing for you to see here, move along'
Unpossible!
Everyone knows the USA is much worse than china...
...the wikipedia edits you!
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
there are plenty of Western companies that will happily develop the technology. For a modest fee, of course. I'm sure that Yahoo have much to contribute on how to stiffle free speech for the sake of profit.
Happy Fun Wiki!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I looked up "abominable snowman" and it told me it was "a large primate-like creature supposedly living in the mountains of censored."
prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Yeah, they'll give the breakers of this rule a healthy dose of soma.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
where the Western Wiki presents the Western cultural view of things and events, and the Chinese Wike presents what the Communist Dictators dictate.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
If I had half a billion Chinese chicks to choose from, I wouldn't have a negative outllok on life!
"You're entitled to your own opinion, as long as it's ours."
Does it record the origin of the offending articles and report them to the government, or merely deletes othe offending articles?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Cultural bias is interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture. This is a danger in any field of knowledge that claims objectivity and universality, such as philosophy and the natural sciences. The problem of cultural bias is central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology and sociology, which have had to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate cultural bias. [...]
Numerous such biases are believed to exist, concerning cultural norms for color, location of body parts, mate selection, concepts of justice, linguistic and logical validity, acceptability of evidence, and taboos. In brief, any normative belief of a human being seems to be caused by culture, and thus can be reasonably isolated as a cultural bias. See goodness and value theory.
Ethnocentricity is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own ethnic culture. Ironically, ethnocentrism may be something that all cultures have in common. People often feel this occurring during what some call culture shock.
This term was coined by William Graham Sumner, a social evolutionist and professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He defined it as the viewpoint that "one's own group is the center of everything," against which all other groups are judged. Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one's own race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups. Within this ideology, individuals will judge other groups in relation to their own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behaviour, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and sub-divisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.
That's a Chinese Fox News.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The irony is that this is fairly close to what many western critics of Wikipedia propose. 'Moral responsibility', stronger 'editorial controls', protection of living people, 'accountability', anyone?
I guess this post is kinda flamebaity, but well...
foreach page in wikipedia:
baidupedia.createPage(page)
See how long it takes for their censorship bureau to get out from under that...
Doing business in China!
...instead, they should have just said, "No, China, we won't do business with you! You can take your lack of a Wikipedia, and stuff it!" Or appealed to Congress... ...or something!
Complying with censors!
But not just cave in completely like that nefarious, horrible, evil, scandelous Google! Talk about in the pockets of government and industry..!
I'm afraid we consider that a negative and dispirited post.
It's the wall for you. Smile. Your children will be with you. Only one of them will have a real bullet.
KFG
Flamebait me if you want, but companies DO have rights to censorship. Heck, Slashdot censors. Otherwise, every article here might be M$ bashing or Linux raves. Or, endless dupes (oh wait, this happens already). Back to my point, companies can censor if they want. Users just don't have to go there. Why go to Baidupedia when you can go to Wikipedia? Yes, there is a Chinese language section of Wikipedia.
As far as I'm concerned, Chinese companies can censor all they want...so long as the government doesn't force them to use only Baidupedia and block Wikipedia.
By the way, Google owns 2% of Baidu. And as we all know, DO NO EVIL! (yes, full of sarcasm)
That's why I tag some article summaries (not this one) with "orientalism" and "culturalbias." These tags haven't quite caught on yet, as far as I can tell.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I welcome our new gook overlords. They have the right to surpress the population if it likes.
BTW COmmander Taco touches himself
So then are you taking the position that the high esteem for free speech is *not* a value that should be universally shared?
That it's not okay to speak out against the values of the culture you are in?
Somebody mod this guy down!!!
Er... wait...
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So ... you feel that freedom of speech isn't a inherent right for the Chinese?
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
However, we can do little more.
Freedom in China ultimately depends on the citizenry. Barring external intervention, the future of a people are determined by the people. Period.
Back in 1989, Czechoslovakia had a population of about 15.6 million. In November of that year, 800,000 citizens assembled in Prague and demanded freedom. 800,000 is about 5% of the nation's population.
The story repeated itself in all of Eastern Europe. Once it was free from the external intervention of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Europeans collectively decided that they wanted freedom, and they got it. They forced their authoritarian governments out of power.
The story is quite different in China. No one is imposing authoritarian rule on China. If the Chinese people wanted to enjoy the same democracy and human rights that we have in the West, then the Chinese people could get democracy and human rights tomorrow. The problem is that most Chinese either support authoritarianism or are indifferent to it. President Hu Jintao (the dictator of China), all by himself, cannot impose authoritarian rule on China. Hu has a lot of supporters.
That is the difference between Eastern Europe and China. I respect the Eastern Europeans.
You realize, of course, that people are criticizing a government that is absolutely convinced that the values and beliefs they hold are the ones that should be universally observed, and they WILL KILL YOU for it?
I think you can see the difference here... Besides until you can tell me you've read the Analects, as well as the various other works of classical Chinese scholasticism, I don't believe you're in ANY position to claim an understanding of Chinese ways. Period. ~a - b.a. History, focus: China.
...you do not talk about the Baidupedia.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Why are companies so scared of unions if they are not good for the employee?
I really wonder what the chinese (gov't) take on 1984 would be. The parallel are astounding. I bet they believe Winston figured it out rightly in the end.
I challenge you to make an argument in which a government that censors its people is in the right. Convince me that my personal beliefs valuing freedom of expression and speech should not apply in China or anywhere else.
Here's the Python wikipedia bot framework
Get going
Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system'
Malicious evaluation, seditious reasoning and logic, and evil, evil truth-telling.
The enemies of Democracy are
Loving Wikipedia.. with all it's faults.. like the cute but quirky girl in high school you knew things were going to work out with once you got back from college.
Then getting back from college and finding out she's living in a trailer.. with a crack habit.. and her pimp...
Not that I would have had experience in that field... or anything...
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
'...and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Everyone knows this is the job of the government.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I did a search on "Intel" and got some Intel-info, written in Chinese. :)
I then did a search on "Falun Gong" - and then got "The page cannot be displayed" from my browser. I now can't get in again. Did they ban me for that? Well, I'm not crying
So ... you feel that freedom of speech isn't a inherent right for the Chinese?
That's correct. I don't believe that freedom of speech is an inherent right. Neither do western governments. If you don't believe me, try reading pedophile poetry in a kindergarten class. Or try spreading state secrets if you come across one.
More to the point, I think freedom of speech might work at one time and in one place, and not at all in other times and places. I'm very much a believer in moral subjectivity.
What I DON'T agree with is trying to impress your own beliefs on another society just because you think yours are better than theirs.
In an unrelated story, sales of the book, "Beavis and Butt-Head Ensucklopedia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_butthead# Books) have recently sky-rocketed.
and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'
So, if I get fired from my job in China, can I get arrested for feeling blue?
My left arm is all scars and I consider that a valid excuse...
Sample Baidupedia Entries:
Freedom: A right or the power to engage in certain actions without control or interference as long as these actions do not undermine the authority of the state.
Democracy: Government of the people by wealthy people.
Communism: Government of the people by the people where the people collectively own all property and the state takes care of you so everyone is happy.
Capitalism: An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production as supervised and governed by the state
>It's a chance to read a whole bunch of responses by contributors who are absolutely
>convinced that the values and beliefs they hold are the ones that should be universally
>observed.
i find your beliefs are wrong, should not be observed and belive you should be silenced...
when you say that intolerant views should be quashed, you are intolerant youself.
you cannot simultanrously hold that value systems which silence opposition with threat of death are on a level playing field with those that allow diverse oppinions.
put another way - If you silence intolerant speech, then you are far worse than the one who speaks intolerantly.
By definition, you cannot speak ill of Chinese policies in China - which places it on equal ground or superior ground to other systems in China. In the US (and some Euro countries), the subject can be debated - therefore, by simple logic, whatever system the US has is better than what China has.
how can i say that?
I'm in the US.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
than congressmen paying people to edit out "negative entries".
Oh wait, that's just free-market..
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
I challenge you to show me a culture where anyone can say anything at anytime, and get away without suffering repercussions imposed upon them by their state or their society of peers. Here in the West we have laws against slander and libel, not to mention yelling radioactive holocaust in crowded cinemas. Some cultural regimes take this a step further, actively enforcing bans on e.g. Holocaust denial.
Ultimately the difference is where you decide to draw the line. And if China's citizens do indeed consider it worthwhile to restrict freedom of political speech to further their other goals--say, political stability in a country currently undergoing enormous transformations, not least of them rural-urban migrations unprecedented in human history; or even simple social cohesion, a goal anthropologists tell us the peoples of modern China have considered noble for longer than Greco-Roman tradition has even existed--then it's not for us to judge, except perhaps to note that they don't share our value systems constructed around individualistic freedoms.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
Ch1na sux0rs. You can never fi1t3r me, i r 2 l337 4 u!
Side note: This brings up an interesting discussion a chineese friend and I had the other day.
There are some things in America that simply won't work in China. One, he claims, is all you can eat restaraunts. People will just move in until you kick them out. When they have a salad bar, people will build 3 foot high salads (Search for it on Flicker--it's a pretty amazing sight to behold).
This also came up when we were discussing selling a house. He was wondering why we clean the house when we leave. We don't have to clean the carpets or drapes, but you just do--often spending quite a bit of money that we don't have to.
Apparently there are many other examples, all coming down to, he claims and I paraphrase: Chineese people are much less likely to look out for the "Common Good" unless forced to by law.
With this concept in mind, I kind of wonder if open source concepts (including the contents of the wikipedia) will work in China, or will it all be like our whitehouse/wallmart where everyone is only adding entries when it helps themselves personally.
ps: I wouldn't even consider that this might be a racial issue, it's obviously cultural (if it existis at all--if not please correct me!)
...and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Well that excludes about all the music from the late 70's (Punk) to the current popular rubbish. And also most of the last 100 years of Blues and others.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
There is such a thing as right and wrong in the world; some people are just too cowardly to speak up and state that.
Entries to the encyclopaedia must first pass a filtering system before being added to the site. Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Looks like Slashdot to me.
Values and beleifs like "People who wish to critisize their government should be allowed to do so"? Yes. I am absolutely convinced that that is a principle which should be universally observed. If you'd care to give us some idea why you think this principle is merely a quaint artifact of my western background, I'll be happy to consider your arguments (though I can't imagine what they would be). Until you do, I think I shall remain convinced.
I challenge you to make an argument in which a government that censors its people is in the right. Convince me that my personal beliefs valuing freedom of expression and speech should not apply in China or anywhere else.
I can't, because you clearly believe in the idea that a social construct such as freedom of speech has some fundamental, inherent "rightness", and I do not.
There is no possible agreement between us on the topic.
can't really work on all political forms of protest. What dissidents need to do is not criticise the government but make articles in which the government is not mentioned but people would be invited (without express mentioning) to associate this situation with that which they currently live in. Nazi propaganda did this and was very effective in doing so - they made films which people could easily see one thing and associate it with another (the one which comes to mind is one of a young boy committed to a cause who dies to try and preserve that cause). Maybe chineese internet needs more stories and posts about people who are different but sucessful
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Imagine if all the energy required to maintain all the censorship in China was directed towards productive goals. Economically, I think the USA wouldn't stand a chance against China. Pray it doesn't happen any time soon.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Everyone knows that the USA is great as long as it's better than China! National wiretapping? That's fine, it's not as bad as China! "Free Speech Zones"? In China, they don't even get free speech, so that's okay too! Imprisoning citizens indefinitely without trial? In China, they do it a lot more!
Yay, go USA! We're Not As Bad As China (TM)!
When one defends democracy, one stands for the principle that each nation may choose the set of values and beliefs they should observe. It's not Americans and Europeans who fight for democracy in China that are fighting against the right of Chinese people to observe their own values and beliefs.
Besides until you can tell me you've read the Analects, as well as the various other works of classical Chinese scholasticism, I don't believe you're in ANY position to claim an understanding of Chinese ways. Period. ~a - b.a. History, focus: China.
Okay, now where did I claim to have any understanding of Chinese ways? I didn't even mention China.
Oh... I get it. This way you can bring up workds like scholasticism and appear "lurn-ed". Well, good job then.
I notice that articles about China seem to bring a certain number of posts about how we in the west shouldn't be arrogant and assume, that just because we value freedom of speech and such rights, the chinese people want the same freedoms. And of course there ARE cultural differences between East and West. But I also have to wonder...if the chinese people are so content with the pace of change in society, then why does the government need all those citizen censors, and great firewalls, and controlled wikis? It would seem that there would be no need for such stringent methods of control when the people don't want western ideas.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
No, he's presenting his viewpoint in a morally prescriptive language, which does not automatically render it invalid. It's simply a framework for communicating so that others, who do subscribe to such prescription, may derive understanding. The self-inconsistency you perceive only applies within this framework, which itself constrains the range of possible meaning. The usefulness of his viewpoint comes directly from its descriptive applicability, which even in this limiting external framework would appear to be far greater than the traditional Western moral absolutism that values freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc. above all else.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
Whether or not the self-censorship is good for chinese people, this project will be good for wikipedia: it'll provide a testing ground for several proposals that have been floating around on wikipedia for awhile. For example, Wikipedia's entry on Baidupedia says it'll have "historical versions" -- otherwise known, 6 months ago, as stable versions, something that wikipedia should really implement (but hasn't yet -- lots of inertia).
That said, the site isn't exactly a wikipedia clone: the fact that content must be vetted by admins before being shown on the site means that it will be an entirely different animal: all the social processes that make wikipedia work as it does will be completely different (just as wikipedia is completely different from Everything2, though if you heard both described they'd sound quite similar to each other).
That's why I tag some article summaries (not this one) with "orientalism" and "culturalbias." These tags haven't quite caught on yet, as far as I can tell.
Maybe those tags haven't caught on because most people understand that objections to the Chinese government are all about hatred for communist tyranny, not bigotry against those with thin eyes.
Utter hatred of the PRC and North Korean governments is a sign of genuine love for the people who they are rolling the tanks over (both figuratively and literally).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is where it got them.
Seriously, you need to read up a little more on just how extensive the demonstrations around Tiananmen Square really were. That wasn't one guy and a bunch of tanks. It was thousands and thousands of people, getting shot in the back by troops armed with assault rifles as they fled. I recommend a recent Frontline special, called "The Tank Man," for more information.
Breakfast served all day!
Umm... at what point did the people of China get a say in this? It would be one thing if they chose their government, but this is not tryanical democracy, this is tryanical dictatorship.
Ah, the most familiar criticism of postmodernity. Too bad it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, even in your own language; see here.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I agree on censoring, but go to the main page and you see a lot of question marks. China, you've gone TOO far this time!
Communism's been tried? Where? I have been told that Marx never espoused a single party system, which as I see it is the problem with all the "communist" governments that have been around. Cuba, China, the USSR, all single party... Personally, I'd be very curious to see what a communist system (i.e. the government owns everything, etc) combined with democratic elections (or some other means of forcing at least some accountability on the government) would be like.
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities make sense in terms of his or her own culture. Some followers of this principle are the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban, and practitioners of Sati.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, outlining the organization's view on the human rights guaranteed to all people. Chief amount these rights are:
* The right to life, liberty and security of person.
* The right to an education.
* The right to participate fully in cultural life.
* Freedom from torture or cruel, inhumane treatment or punishment.
* Freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
* Freedom of expression and opinion.
It is interesting to note that China, being a permanent Security Council, should feel obliged to follow these declarations, but does not.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Sure. Most Western regimes censor people who spread state secrets or who knowingly and with intent to mislead spread lies about others, like "Wolf Blitzer is a dirty Republican." This is usually called libel law. Would you like to live under a government that doesn't offer these protections? (Check out Somalia.)
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
If only &#%@*^ would let me @*&%# what ever the &#%@ I want to $#% [removed for opinion]
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
I know, sometimes wikipedia might not get an article completely right, and quite often there is a bias in the editorial structure which is moderating such an enterprise. However, how can it ever be more desirable that the censorship be conducted by government mandate?
What kind of society has the most to fear from free thought and free expression of ideals? Is such a society something that should be held up as a noble goal, or is it something that should be held up as an example to others of the worst that humanity has to offer?
Slashdot, where you get modded down as redundant for stating an opposing viewpoint... Independent thought anyone?
The page of Aaron Donahue - a well known psychic - is currently in the deletion process in Wikipedia.
e view#Aaron_Donahue
e n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Donahue+aaron+donahue&g l=at&ct=clnk&cd=3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_r
Google Cache of the original page: http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:6Ex5Em7orzsJ:
How famous/politically correct does a person have to be to have a page in Wikipedia?
Agreed! We should universally support that there is no universal belief that everyone should support.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I can't, because you clearly believe in the idea that a social construct such as freedom of speech has some fundamental, inherent "rightness", and I do not.
To paraphrase Voltaire:
You are a complete idiot, but I respect your right to express your dumbass opinion, even if you are too stupid to realize that you have such a right. If it ever becomes needed, I'll willingly go to war against tyranical states in order to defend your right to foolishly assert that foreign tyrants are doing nothing wrong by suppressing speech.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
On June 4, 1989, nothing happened at Tiananmen Square.
Man, thats what I call censored! They replaced all the words with squiggles..
Orientalism and cultural bias as I use the terms have nothing to do with "bigotry against those with thin eyes"; it's just this pervasive Western blindness to the validity of value systems contrary to one's own. For example, I'm Japanese, and I can tell you that plenty of Japanese "Occidentalists" would criticize the West for its emphasis on permanence, to name one example, over acceptance of transience. Many Orientalists, I'm sure, as well as modern Japanese citizens would criticize our kamikaze ancestors' tradition of loyalty to the Emperor over rationality and individualism. It's not something I'm immune to either, but I consider understanding the nature of cultural bias essential to understanding the nature of other cultures in the first place.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
Well, this is going to be one of THOSE posts eh?
Okay, lemme tone it down then... See, you criticize people for forcing their beliefs on someone else. However, you fall into a circular argument because you believe something (that people shouldn't criticize people for having different beliefs), and yet you also criticize people who believe something different (that, oh, say, when a government starts censoring information about its activities to its people, it's bad).
Relativism, the belief that these sorts of things are relative to the person and don't exist independently of that person's thoughts, gets you no where, except suicide of the insane asylum.
Clear enough?
I realize this is a complete troll, but all socialists I know are very insistent that democracy is critical to a functioning government. You're confusing socialists with tyrants who claim to be communists in order to win the initial support of their people.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
It appears you know very little about modern China. This would have been a much more valid criticism during the regime of Mao, for instance.
In many respects, citizens of China are freer than citizens of, say, the U.K. or the U.S., especially--and I can tell you this from personal experience--if you're starting a small business or trying to do your taxes.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
That it's not okay to speak out against the values of the culture you are in?
Somebody mod this guy down!!!
That deserves a +5 funny (or even insightful).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
//I'm very much a believer in moral subjectivity.// ... which basically leads to anarchy, or worse. What fun.
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
is it April 1st (Chinese calendar) today?
Great, now I'm getting modded by Baidupedia....when will it end?
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
Relativism, the belief that these sorts of things are relative to the person and don't exist independently of that person's thoughts, gets you no where, except suicide of the insane asylum. Clear enough?
Yes. And you're right, for what it's worth. However, I choose to go only one level into the loop, and avoid the recursion that renders it useless.
Fuck this "much worse" shit. It doesn't matter if you're better than a hundred repressive totalitarian regimes.
What matters is what your ideals are and how closely you live them.
We supposedly value "justice". But we seem to be living "vigilantism". And there are people who are 100% okay with that.
The only difference between them and any Chinese executives filtering content is where they were born. If they had been born in China instead of the US, they'd be 100% behind their government's actions to stop the democracy movement.
Who the fuck is Wolf Blitzer anyway(s)?
Shining happy people...
Does it record the origin of the offending articles and report them to the government, or merely deletes othe offending articles?
Ah the age old question of the Google model versus the Yahoo! model. Feels like 1999 all over again.
It is interesting to note that China, being a permanent Security Council, should feel obliged to follow these declarations, but does not.
And guess what? I discovered another member of the permanent Security Council that does not feel obliged to follow these declarations (especially the fourth one). Now what exactly was your point? I forgot...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
So in China... NPOV becomes PGPOV? (pro government point of view)?
LOL. That's funny stuff. In the US, they reject text for not having a neutral point of view. In China, they reject text for not having a "positive" point of view.
See how long it takes for their censorship bureau to get out from under that...
Would it be so hard for a CCP-affiliated publisher with a lot of RMB to notice what you've done, block you, and bot-revert your contributions?
waaaay back in the day I remember hearing a lot of people saying "information wants to be free", the "internet will give rise to a new, more free system of expression", etc, etc. Well? Now we have technology being used to censor things. Yes you can always get around the information blocks, but only if you know how. How many chinese that use the net would know or bother to figure out how to get around such filters? my guess is not many, of course i base this assumption on the american model, where most people eat up the BS that FOX, CNN and the rest of the networks feed the population on a regular basis.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
For example, I'm Japanese, and I can tell you that plenty of Japanese "Occidentalists" would criticize the West for its emphasis on permanence, to name one example, over acceptance of transience.
It's a valid criticism. That said, "acceptance of transience" is a very central function of Eastern philosophy and religion, so anything less than slavish devotion to the concept is bound to be seen as a radical divergence.
As a novice to Japanese culture (I've been going back to college specifically for night classes in Japanese, and visited for the first time this Spring), I find it hard to argue that the particular cocktail of Shinto and Buddhism practiced in Japan is a roadmap to contentment when Japan's suicide rate is currently so shockingly high. There are obviously a lot of people in Japan who are currently failing to find a lot of reasons to go on living.
Many Orientalists, I'm sure, as well as modern Japanese citizens would criticize our kamikaze ancestors' tradition of loyalty to the Emperor over rationality and individualism.
It's a hard value to shake, I'm sure. Devotion and Loyalty served Japan very well up until the Pacific war, when a scraggly bunch of Judeo-Christian, brash, emotional cowboys managed to out-produce, out-wit, and out-fight the finest military machine Empirial Japan had ever managed to assemble.
But credit Japanese culture with this much: They bounced back from total and absolute defeat faster and better than just about any nation in history. The reconstruction of Japan is one of the great triumphs of the 20th Century.
Now if they could just figure out how to bury their power lines. It's absurd that a country with advanced subway systems blasting their way through every volcanic mountain has to cover every inch of every city with a big, steel & rubber spider web.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Agreed! We should universally support that there is no universal belief that everyone should support.
Awesome. I'll draw up a charter, and you can ignore it.
If DARPA hadn't developed the Internet, and CERN hadn't developed the World Wide Web, then China would not be censoring the Internet!!! It is time that we blame those who are REALLY responsible for this: the U.S. and Europe!!! You facist bastards!
We do have to recognize that in spite of the fact that there have been a tremendous number of governments that have arisen which claim to have primary roots in Marxism, there has never been a single one of these governments which has not become horribly oppressive. It really tends to suggest that Marxism is not a valid model for creating utopia.
But beyond all that, it is clearly obvious that any government that either declares itself to have total power over it's subjects such as the old Soviet Union or China, or governments which have held democratic elections to give themselves total control over their citizens, such as Nazi Germany, will always devolve into oppresssion. It isn't the roots of the totalitarian government, it's the totalitarian government itself.
And Marxism does require a totalitarian government to be established. Even Marx accepted that.
Slashdot, where you get modded down as redundant for stating an opposing viewpoint... Independent thought anyone?
That's a Chinese Fox News.
You mean CNN -- Commie News Network. Even so, wouldn't your suggestion correspond to Chinese Wikinews more than to Chinese Wikipedia?
I'd point out that you're using a Western philosopher, central no less to the development of liberal Western thought, to justify a Western value system in Western terms. A Chinese scholar could paraphrase Confucius to assert that there exists no fundamental reason to promote, say, monogamy. And good luck convincing him otherwise, at least with an argument derived from Western principles.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I'm not sure what you're going for here, as I'm one of the (probably) few westerners that embrace their transience. For those not caring to look it up: I don't really care if I die tomorrow; my place in society has been filled. I actually don't want to live forever. I however still value individualism and choice above all other things, and so I think the distinction you draw is orthogonal to permanence/transience. When, for instance, does transience imply bowing authority, and why?
Curious then... I presume your pro DCMA, and a crack down on civil liberties brought on by the Bush Administration? Just curious.
The Chinese version of Wikipedia has only 67k articles for several years of development, however this Baidu encyclopedia already has more articles than that within several days. Why is that? It is because Baidu doesn't care about copyrights. According to their user agreement/disclaimer (which is only available in Chinese), the content will be released under GFDL and/or CC-SA 2.5 (which are incompatible) and at the same time all copyrights are reserved by Baidu. In fact there are a bunch of other contradictions within the same document. On the other hand, its users also doesn't care about copyrights too, because many of the articles are just copied from all the sites around the web.
Therefore we don't have to take this Baidu encyclopedia seriously, because even Baidu doesn't take this encyclopedia seriously. They launch this project just to create cohesion within its users.
<conspiracy>However there is one more interesting thing about this Baidu encyclopedia: Baidu as a search engine raises to prominence in China after Google is blocked. And if you don't know already, the Chinese Wikipedia (actually all the wikimedia projects) is blocked in China. Coincidence?</conspiracy>
Somebody mod this guy down!!! Er... wait...
/. may be modded down but still be available to be read. Sometimes there is confusion between the right to speak and the right not to listen. They can co-exist without any contradiction.
The joke is funny but not really accurate. In some societies you have no right to free speech. A posting on
And as for modding down: my Reason Modifier is set at +3 for trolls and flamebait. I would hate to miss some fo the funniest posts.
Ah, but they do:
And, in case there was any doubt,
Of course, there's Article 51.
http://outcampaign.org/
Nowadays, the highest priority thing most Chinese people really wanted to enjoy like Americans are "real material-rich life" rather than something too abstract without real money coming. Chinese people are far more interesting on how many cars & fashion stuff we can buy; how much money we can get; how many place we can travel to rather than how many rights we obtained.
A high standard of democracy and human rights at the moment are less attactive to us. For example, there are two companies you can go. The first one pay 8 USD a day having many good rights such as you can say anything you want, you can go back to home after 5pm, etc. Another one is simply ask you work all the day more than 12 hours shutting up your mouth but pay you 16 USD a day. Most Chinese people will select the latter even they have lots complains on it.
Another real example is that Taiwan district of China recently has pretty radical progress on such political improvement try to keep a high standards like Amercicans. But it is obvious that their economy going down very quickly and nowadays it heavily depends on Chinese business growth. Many senior mangers just move to Shanghai and never return back.
Many Chinese people, just think most of Taiwan people are fooled by the politicians. And all the bill of each policical movement spent will finally be paid by normal people not politicians. They just want to send you to the battlefield where they never want to. So Chinese people dont want to do any such moments but just earning money, buying 32-inch LCD and watching comdies. That is it.
I read a recent NY times report about google.cn. I must point out one fact. I am pretty sure the 50 precent motivation of the blog guy they mentioned in their article is just try to find a way to be noted by western media (now he is the reporter of N.Y.Times, which is a good payment job position to many Chinese and safe from the government. How good life is like that!) Once you understand my point, reading that NY Times report will become very easy.
By the way, I am pretty curious about readers here: how will choose between gaining more political rights and gaining money? Or more slashdot style: will you to accept offer from evil MS with 300K / year or stick with Linux software development with tiny payment, even you cannot buy a decent medical insurance and pay tution fees for your children? I am just joking here, but this is a very serious question to every body in China.
A Chinese scholar could paraphrase Confucius to assert that there exists no fundamental reason to promote, say, monogamy. And good luck convincing him otherwise, at least with an argument derived from Western principles.
As a Westerner, I would agree with him.
But the thing about this East vs. West argument you keep going back to is that it implies that neither system of thought has anything to learn from the other.
Free Speech is a value worth holding up and defending, whether you've been exposed to post-enlightenment French thinkers or not. Explaining this your hypothetical Chinese scholar is as simple as sitting him down and reading Voltaire to him. The "rightness" of allowing the free exchange of ideas might not become immediately obvious to somebody who derives their concept of morality from different axioms, but the practical value to both society and the individual of such a position should become immediately clear, if he is at all capable of reason.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It seems plausible, horrible as it sounds to my ears and yours, that had she not thrown herself in front of that train, the contentment of everyone involved may well have been diminished. At the very least, yours truly wouldn't even exist to be here spewing postmodern drivel if she had committed herself to Western prejudices against suicide, so there's at least one person for it the "happier." So even if one subscribes to a moral framework like Mill's original utilitarianism, there's grounds for an argument in favor of Japan retaining its existing value system (assuming you don't also want to throw out concepts like honor, face, and all the rest).
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
You are probably referring to employment law or environmental law. In the US and UK you are free to elect a representitive that has a part in changing those laws. I doubt it is that way in China. In China, I am sure you are free to do what you wish as long as the government agrees with what you are doing.
It must be very exciting to grow up in the 'new' China despite the one party rule. The booming economy, new technology and new wealth must be exciting. At least if you are on the 'correct' side of the economic boom.
It is my hope that China will prosper, and that bounty will bring about a democratic change that respects the rights of the minority as well as the majority.
Democracy and freedom are very awsome and cool. The human heart yearns for them, no matter what culture. You will see it. Children will grow bold and speak out against their parents, their government. It will be a slow change but it will happen.
"me fail english... that's... _______________" ~Ralph
West Bengal has been running under a democratically elected communist party since 1977. See also:a rties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_p
Why?
http://outcampaign.org/
Lets see...
China's largest search engine, is launching its own version of Wikipedia.
But
"Unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to create and modify entries, Baidupedia is censored by the company to avoid offending the Chinese government.
In other words, it is Nothing like Wikipedia. They're just trying to ride on the goodwill created by the truly open encyclopedia. I think that's despicable beyond words.
"What I DON'T agree with is trying to impress your own beliefs on another society just because you think yours are better than theirs."
Cranky Weasel, you don't know how happy I am to hear you say that you don't agree with forcing your views on other people. That said, do you not see the irony and hypocrisy in what you've just said? Your disaproval of other's opinion is EXACTLY what you claim to disagree with. So, either shut up and go eat a few more stupid pills, or realize that trying to convince people that free speach is good is no different than trying to convince people that free speach is morally relative. Its the same f***ing thing.
Thank you for your time. You may now return to your regularly scheduled sense of self-rightousness.
Carrie
How, precisely, is a citizen of China freer than a citizen of the US when starting a small business or doing their taxes, since you claim to know this from personal experience?
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
I wonder if instead of the "Your contributions" tab that logged in Wikipedia users see, the equivalent here would be "your offenses." Or perhaps "your secret trial dates"?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The only thing the chinese government isn't offended by, is all the ass-kissing these corporations do to appease their tiny little 'agendas'.
I find that offensive, as a free-thinking individual.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
There's a difference between somebody sacrificing themselves for a perceived greater good (whatever greater good it was that your father's first wife thought she was striving for) and filling your car with exhaust because you're depressed over not getting in to the school you wanted to attend.
Japan has a major suicide problem on their hands right now, and even those few old-fashioned Shintoists who still think killing yourself is kinda cool are starting to see that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
And as for modding down: my Reason Modifier is set at +3 for trolls and flamebait. I would hate to miss some fo the funniest posts.
Damn, that's a good idea.
Excuse me while I go do the same.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
When they put it like that it doesn't sound so bad...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Oh, I get it now. The US is also bad so China is.... not bad?
That's easy! A citizen of PRC is more free to pay bribes to a local official when starting a small business, depending of the state of course. ;)
This is potentially a very small website. I mean, about 98% of all its entries can probably be summed up by one word, so why not just put that word up and leave it there, sort of like Something.com?
Oh, almost forgot to mention the word that they could use to replace all those entries.
CRIMETHINK.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
You also gotta love retards who don't know what liberal means.
And when they blocked wikipedia, did they also block the 96,543 wikipedia mirrors set up by spammers who are using them as Google traps?
Just checking. Cuz those things seem to be fricking everywhere.
He's a very well-named commentator on CNN. Or at least, very gutsy. I mean, it takes a certain kind of character to, when life sticks you with the name, "Wolf," grow a set of mutton chops to accentuate the point.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
That doesn't sound much different from the Bush administration's stance toward anyone who disagrees with them.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I'm afraid that the burden of proof of universal applicability of your personal beliefs is, rather, on you. What next, convincing Christian fundies that their take on morality should not be universally upheld?
The USSR had three parties. Guess what happened to the other two?
Cultural relativism, and indeed moral relativism in general are tricky subjects to deal with. I start from the position that everything is relative because there is no scale external to reality by which to measure things internal to reality. All scales are internal to our universe, created by the same process that creates the things being measured, therefore all value judgements are relative.
Okay, so does that mean Hitler was an okay dude? Yes and no. In the bigger picture, there is no right and wrong, and nothing matters. But that's not a useful picture. From a Human point of view, Hitler was bad.
Okay, so something may be okay from a particular culture's perspective and still be bad from the perspective of humanity as a whole. The universal declaration of human rights is a pretty good place to start when looking for what might be good for all of humanity.
Now other things are not so clear cut. Circumcision, for instance. Valued cultural practice, or horrible genital mutilation? Who decides?
Finally, simply because something is bad from humanity's point of view, does that give humanity as a whole the right to force an individual or culture to modify their views or behavior? In the case of Hitler, most people would agree that humanity had a moral right to place a value judgement on what he did and use force to stop him. Do we also have a moral right to go into Africa and stop them from cutting off young girls clitorises? Where do we draw the line, and more importantly, what system do we use to determine where the line should be drawn?
I don't have the answers, but I'm sure the answer isn't a simple "everything is relative and we shouldn't ever place value judgements on other cultures" or an arrogant "What I believe is right, is absolutely right, and everyone else can go hang."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wiki software typically keeps all revisions to a page. All an unhappy Chinese citizen would have to do is click on the "History" tab at the top to see all the forbidden information on depressing lifestyles.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Point being that if you want to live in a country where the "government" won't stop you from saying anything you like, Somalia's the place for you. It's an extreme example, but construed a certain way, you enjoy much less freedom of speech in the U.S. or China than in Somalia. That nobody "sane" (i.e. non-Somalian, essentially) wants to live there indicates that, hey, maybe there are things that said "sane" people value more than freedom of speech, no?
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I'm currently a bureaucrat at the Vietnamese Wikipedia. In the first 2 years it had been building up a user base, currently with around 9000 registered users and 7500 articles. It had so far managed to escape government filtering and was even featured in some popular Vietnamese media and endorsed by the official government encyclopedia. But I'm not sure about its future, with a spate of new sensitive articles this week that was generating much more discussion than content. There had been previous attempts at making "made-in-Vietnam" free encyclopedias, but none are as successful as this one.
The government of "the Good China" (a.k.a. Taiwan) should fund some money for Chinese (both simplified and traditional) versions of Wikipedia, and encourage people all over the world to leech content off of it, so that places that are let through the Great Firewall can send the data through.
The way I see it, they'd have a freely-redistributable CGI program that downloads the wikipedia page and then serves it to the end user over the local http server. Basically, allow everyone to roll their own version of a Chinese Answers.com on the fly. Then, the Chinese government will go nuts trying to block everyone on the internet from coming into China, and ultimately either a) give up, or b) block connections from outside the nation entirely, which might piss people off enough to do something about it.
That way, they can fight back against the people who want to invade them, increase dramatically the number of people aware of the new Chinese wikipedia project, and help spread Chinese language and culture all over the world, at all once! It's like a threefer!
unfortunitly, that doesn't really have any legal standing. it basically ammounts to a suggestion to countries that these are what you should have, but they are under no obligation to follow it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
this thought just ocurred to me.
.cn (they surely are the lion's share of the hack attempts at my site).
.cn from my home (dsl based) site. I usually do /16 blocks on their netblocks, as I discover them, anyway.
mostly, the portscan and connect attempts (break-ins) are from
I'm perfectly happy to ban all of
but how about this for a pro-active idea? put photos of tienenmen sq. (the REAL photos - you know what I mean) on your home page. that, alone, should get your IP blocked by the chinese gov.
end result: you've just installed a spamblock closer to the source than you could ever accomplish without their 'help'.
I think I'm going to try this. (what is there to lose?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
We can all agree that society wouldn't be as robust, lacking the free exchange of ideas; we can agree that the cultures that survive are the ones with a history of using individual freedoms to promote a meritocracy of ideas. These assertions are compatible with both Confucian and Western thought, as far as I know. And I don't think it's common in China to want Chinese culture to die out, either.
So yes, there are things China could learn from Western values, and I am happy (as are the majority of China's citizens) to have seen the government over the past twenty years liberalizing, granting freedoms to the press, allowing intercommunication between citizens, and opening its borders to the outside world. But it misses the mark to criticize China's government for encouraging freedoms in ways that look to us like repression; things need to be seen in context to be understood, and it's all too common here in the West for people to offer opinions on Chinese freedoms incompletely informed by the context of Chinese culture. That, in short, is my beef.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
...Lord_Dweomer =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Iraq is a relatively small country with little military power compared to its access to particularly desireable resources.
China is a 1,300,000,000-strong giant with immense military capability. Now, I would have gladly fought for an actual, worthy ideal, say, liberating China from an oppressive government; however, those that lead my government are not so eager to take on someone their own size, or bigger. Suddenly, logic and reasoning re-enter the equation when confronted with an adversary so behemoth, the logic and reasoning that say war is actually supposed to be a last resort, and diplomacy is a much better idea.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
No, it isn't possible if you live in a country that is either
a) under a government structure that prevents dissent (Cuba)
b) is too apathetic to dissent and hold the government accountable for its actions (the USA)
Socialism and free enterprise are two approaches to the same problems, neither of which have a guaranteed outcome.
Guess what: socialism works in a million American communities every day. Assuming you live in a city, I hope you have water, sewage, and roads. You and your community assign these responsibilities to (and pay) a government that is directly responsible to you. If the jobs don't get done, you should go to meetings and find out what the hell is wrong.
If you are too apathetic or stupid to hold your local government responsible for its failings, it isn't a failing of socialism--it is your fault for being a shitty citizen. That's Democracy, chum. And if your government is competent, you have every right as a citizen of a democracy to elect to give them whatever economic responsibilities you want to.
Go read up on rural electrification in America. It would not have happened without government sponsored electric cooperatives, because no investor in their right mind would have tackled the problem. Socialism is an extension of the idea of the cooperative approach to problem solving. It is a choice, and can coexist with free-market solutions, just like credit unions coexist with banks. It is one approach, and is not itself inherently evil or flawed.
The free enterprise approach is also neither fundamentally evil nor flawed. But, just like a cooperative approach, if you have a nest of corrupt, self-serving players running the game with no oversight or accountability, you will have a shitty outcome (Enron, Qwest, Savings & Loans).
By the way, if your local government sics police dogs on you every time you question their choices, that's not a failing of socialism either--that's a police state, and it would be that way regardless of who is in charge of building roads. The state does whatever the hell they want, to make sure that they can keep exploiting you.
If you're going to be a libertarian, at least get fscking clue. Oppression is the inevitable consequence of a monopoly on power. The monopolist will use their position to fight dirty against anybody who challenges them. This goes for politics and a free market economy. A real libertarian knows that a one-party state run by capitalist oligarchs is far more dangerous and oppressive to its citizens than a socialist democracy, because a socialist democracy has accountability and can change anytime the people are motivated.
In many respects, citizens of China are freer than citizens of, say, the U.K. or the U.S., especially--and I can tell you this from personal experience--if you're starting a small business or trying to do your taxes.
Yes, but if you are going to practice an unpopular religion, you're far better off doing so in a Western Country. It's been about 13 years since the US last committed wholesale slaughter of a minority cult, and there's still some debate about who is ultimately responsible for the destruction.
Meanwhile, China has managed to mulch through almost 3000 members (and counting) of one of their minority cults over the past seven years (and ongoing).
Apart from Germany not putting up with scientologists, and a couple of gun-toting cults being intruded upon on in the US, Western nations are extremely committed to religious freedom and tollerence. The biggest debates on the issue usually have to do with resolving conflicting religious intrests (one student's right to gather some friends to pray on campus vs. another student's right not to have to deal with organized relion intruding on their institution of learning), and not on whether people have the right to believe as they wish.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
the free encyclopedia. But not THAT free!
Three tings I hate about stars: -Wars -Treks -Gates
While the government doesn't censor wikipedia, companies sure do. Remember Walmart and their Wikipedia campaign? They're by far not the only ones. And it's not limited to companies, you have the same with political parties, politicians and so on.
Well, it's not "censorship" in the common sense, where some regulative body decides what is "allowed" to be said and what isn't. It's more a marketing campaign where a company silences everything said against it. The bottom line is the same: "Unwanted" information is suppressed.
The way Wikipedia is set up lends itself to that kind of marketing/censorship. Which is not to say that the setup of Wikipedia should be changed. What I say is that such abuse of Wikipedia should be brought to attention. So that this kind of censorship can NOT happen anymore!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wikipedia is not open, it actively censors articles. It also defames it's critics. I call on Slashdotters to stop using Wikipedia, and to vandalize it regularly. Create offensive user names against abusive admins.
NPOV and free information exisits, but not on "encyclopedias" edited by monkeys in their spare time! It's time for a respectable encyclopedia to take its place.
Doesn't surprise in the least. Cheeky. You know, there could be another one that is also the Anti-Chinese wikipedia too. We could even have domain name suffixes like .wool and .falun
If you are chinese, you cannot read the parent post. It is full of western lies. ;-)
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
isn't the yin-yang from this region of the world? how ironically aburd.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't self-censoring should study the reversion histories of either the Amway or Richard Stallman articles. It also is simply not true to say that anyone can edit any article in any circumstance. Article editing can be (and is) disabled for individual articles on a routine basis, and such also is not typically done via consensus.
Wikipedia is a great thing...I'm not denying that for a moment. What I do have a problem with however is that rather than concentrating on its' genuine good points, people have this annoying tendency to make positive claims about it which simply aren't true. It is only partially democratic; it certainly isn't entirely.
Except most things that have to do with morality are not relative at all. There are several points that pretty much everybody can agree with:
1. Killing people is usually a very bad thing to do.
2. Stealing, also not good.
3. Deception, also on the list.
etc.
Where people differ is the opinion of when an exception is acceptible or even needed.
Some people might think it's perfectly okay to kill an unborn child in the final trimester, but it's not okay to execute a convicted serial killer. Others might feel just the opposite way, that capital punishment is fine and dandy, but late-term abortion is not.
Both groups, however, believe that killing other people is a moral violation. They only differ on their opinions of when such a violation is justified.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
But it misses the mark to criticize China's government for encouraging freedoms in ways that look to us like repression; things need to be seen in context to be understood, and it's all too common here in the West for people to offer opinions on Chinese freedoms incompletely informed by the context of Chinese culture.
Any way you look at it, making over 2800 completely peaceful and harmless Falun Gong members die in prison (so far) is oppression, cultural context be damned.
I'm not Falun Gong, or even Buddhist... I have no dog in this hunt, save for a fact that my religious beliefs and personal philosophy do not completely align with the society I'm living in, and I thank GOD that I'm not living in a country, like China, where that sort of non-conformity could get me killed by a government of tyrants.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Back in the 1980's if you built a crystal set (basic diode detector radio receiver) Radio Moscow tended to come in loud and clear. They had a major presence on the Shortwave bands. Nowadays it seems like whatever shortwave broadcast band you tune around, there is an English broadcast from Radio China International. They seem to have invested really heavily in this propaganda tool, as I can't recall anything like it since Radio Moscow of the original cold war. Although it doesn't seem quite as blatant as Radio Moscow or Radio Albania, if the USA or UK are in the media due to some potential controversy, RCI seems to enjoy making the most of it.
So, China now manufacture pretty much everything we buy or own due to outsourcing.
Has anybody else noticed what's happening? Where are we heading?
"The protests of 1989 resulted in the killing of Chinese protestors in the streets to the west of the square and adjacent areas. Some sources (Graham Earnshaw and Columbia Journal Review) claim that none died on the square itself. Opponents of the Chinese democracy movement object to the Western Media's labelling of the Tiananmen Massacre, the event known to the Chinese simply as the June Fourth or June Fourth movement, and June Fourth Incident. However, Chinese expatriates that escaped the tyranny after the killing said that the numbers ended up being in the thousands. This was a combination of the hundreds killed on the spot and the miniature purge that followed. These stories are confirmed by intelligence in the country as well. [edit]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianamen_square
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
The utterly silly thing about making such an argument is that Chinese censorship and oppression is based entirely on the government's efforts to insure their own "permanence" by what they believe is the surest method available.
So even by the Eastern values you seem to think are paramount here, they are still in the wrong.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ah, nothing like screwing up an HTML tag in the middle of a good discussion. This is why Slashdot needs and "Edit" button.
... society and the individual" to mean about the same thing as do you--which is that the application of such a position sustains them (both society and individual), and is the surest guarantee that they will grow and prosper. And to say that this is better than the alternative relies, again, on a subjective judgment of permanence as preferable to transience, doesn't it?
My comment above was a response to this remark:
Ah, I very much agree. But then, I probably understand "practical value to
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Wait, wait... the oppressive government we're talking about directly descends from the theoretical father of socialism, calls itself socialism, and enjoys (or at least, has enjoyed in the past) an extremely broad base of support from those calling themselves socialists outside its domain.
But, according to you, it ain't socialism.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
All morals are relative and as such the only way to judge morality is with respect to personal beliefs
Sweet. I have a strongly held personal belief in stabbing you in the face. Morally, I'm in the clear. Thanks!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Chinese Wikipedia was blocked, and not much response came from the tech atmosphere. Wikipedians even conjectured that China was preparing to launch their own version of Wikipedia... well, now, that has happened. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia _in_mainland_China and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-10-31/China_block
This kind of behavior is exposed by Orwell on Animal Farm and, guess what? The average citizenry, in total absence of further information will take the government discourse as true.
The worst scenario is when the "West" starts to take their version as truth as well. See what happened to Tibet! What about the Goguryeo antiques found in China? In the latter case, the Chinese government spent a lot of money paying "scientists" to deliberately rewrite documents and papers about the history of that region to hide the fact that Goguryeo also was part of ancient Korea!
And screw the scientists as well (academical independence my ass!) Once the Chinese version of stuff hits Britannica, Larousse, the west will also start to believe in them.
I doubt you'll get any clear answer on that exactly because of the whole censoring thing.
"I'm sorry, we're not allowed to discuss that" *knock on the door*
Are you seriously equating "CBS won't run my favorite story, boo frickin' hoo!" to "well, you can't talk about the government, of course; there are spies everywhere"? (The latter being an actual quote from a grad student describing life growing up in China.) If CBS won't give you the airtime you so madly desire, you can damned well get a blog. The right to publish brings with it a right to be ignored. Can you seriously not tell the difference between being ignored and the mailed fist of an oppressive government telling you what can and cannot be said?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And then we should get rid of all the hate speech! Like all that Koranic and biblical crap exhorting its followers to head-chop nonbelievers. Who needs it? And you know what? It'd be a lot easier to enforce this if you needed a license to publish. We should have a standards body to enforceour community standards. A Communications Commission, of sorts. The licensing system could be subsidized by our great institutions--those heroic, risk-taking corporations--placing small, unobtrusive advertisements among the approved content. And in time, perhaps the Internet could become as shimmering a beacon of American ingenuity and creativity as television is.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is that a portmanteau of Solidus and Dot? 'Cause they call a slash a 'Solidus' in some places...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Search companies have to second guess the Chinese government. Though there's no list of banned keywords, there have been instances where Chinese police burst into the office of a search company, grabbed the CEO (or other executive, I forget) and "questioned" him. So, yes, the companies do the censoring. But the censoring is because of a fear of the Chinese government. Directly or indirectly, the Chinese government is responsible/irresponsible.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Heck, Slashdot censors. Otherwise, every article here might be M$ bashing or Linux raves.
That's not censorship, that's picking topics that are relevant and interesting. If they posted only articles that are Microsoft bashing or Linux raves, the editors would be missing much more interesting stories. There's a big difference between selecting and censoring.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
It's true that there is no sense of the common good in China. However this doesn't mean that Chinese are necessarily individually selfish.
For the Chinese the no. 1 priority is family, including extended family. Generally personal relationships trump everything and depending on their level even individual well-being. For example, in China, there are lineage clans. These still exist, including in the West. For example if you are Chinese and die in the West and have no money to pay for your funeral you go to a lineage clan (made of people with the same surname as you) and they will pay for your funeral. You have a connection with them even if you have never seen them before in your life and come from an entirely different area because you share the same ancestor.
If there example, the all-you-can eat restaurant was owned by someone you know and have a personal relationship with or you were selling the house to someone you know or someone who knows people you know then Chinese would be extremely concerned and unselfish.
For those in the "network" they will sacrifice blood and tears for them. To anyone else not in the "network" well, who cares about them?
They're right. I tried to post a picture of a dog fucking a chinese lady and they censored it. Outrageous!
Give me good ratings or I will close down the internet.
Communism isn't "where the government owns everything." That's the transitional stage Marx thought would be necessary to bring about communism. Real communism is where the government has faded away (because, as Marx thought of religion, it would no longer be necessary), there would be no private property, all would be held in common, and everyone would work not out of motivation for a paycheck, but because it would be good for your fellow man. Real communism, if it were practical, would be a great thing because "real" communism is where everyone is equal and happy and prosperous.
But, that's just not possible the way Marx thought it would be. He envisioned you would need a "temporary", transitional government to force the conversion from a privitized, ownership society to a propertyless one. After private property was redistributed and effectively ended, the autocracy would have done its purpose faded away. Except, none of those "transitional" governments have ever faded away once they've had power.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Go tell that to the Falun Dafa.
Sure, I think it's a dangerous cult too, but I still think that the freedoms above should belong to people I disagree with.
By contrast, the grandparent article gave a reference indicating that 800,000 Czechoslovakians assembled in Prague to demand human rights and democracy. 800,000 is about 5% of the population in Czechoslovakia. In other words, the strength of support for democracy in Czechoslovakia was about 50 times stronger than the "strength" of "support" for democracy in China.
These facts explain the results. Democracy succeeded in Czechoslovakia. The hope for democracy in China faded away.
I, too, respect the Eastern Europeans. When you rationalize the failure of democracy in China by saying that the Chinese people are not responsible, you indirectly denigrate the remarkable achievements of the Eastern Europeans.
The armed forces of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe all acceded to civilian, democratic rule because the strength of support for democracy and human rights was strong and widespread in Eastern Europe. Overwhelming majorities in all sectors of society -- from the peasants to the educated folks to the soldiers -- supported democracy and human rights.
Such is not and was not the case in China. The authoritarian government of China enjoys widespread support in all sectors of society -- including the military. The soldiers who shot the demonstrators in 1989 were Chinese. No external power imposed authoritarian rule on the Chinese The Chinese did "it" to themselves.
It's "Self-Censoring-before-artificial-deletion".
"Houston, we have a problem."
A Chinese beaurcrat sits in a cubicle farm in front of a monitor.
*whirr click click a newspaper arrives via a tube*
Newspaper headline:
Chinese government censors their version of Wikipedia
Beaurocrat: Scratches out headline, "Should read 'Chinese government invents honorable encyclopedia'
*toss old version in fire*
By contrast, the grandparent article gave a reference indicating that 800,000 Czechoslovakians assembled in Prague to demand human rights and democracy. 800,000 is about 5% of the population in Czechoslovakia. In other words, the strength of support for democracy in Czechoslovakia was about 50 times stronger than the "strength" of "support" for democracy in China.
These facts explain the results. Democracy succeeded in Czechoslovakia. The hope for democracy in China faded away.
I, too, respect the Eastern Europeans. When you rationalize the failure of democracy in China by saying that the Chinese people are not responsible, you indirectly denigrate the remarkable achievements of the Eastern Europeans.
The armed forces of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe all acceded to civilian, democratic rule because the strength of support for democracy and human rights was strong and widespread in Eastern Europe. Overwhelming majorities in all sectors of society -- from the peasants to the educated folks to the soldiers -- supported democracy and human rights.
Such is not and was not the case in China. The authoritarian government of China enjoys widespread support in all sectors of society -- including the military. The soldiers who shot the demonstrators in 1989 were Chinese. No external power imposed authoritarian rule on the Chinese The Chinese did "it" to themselves.
I can't wait until they launch BaiduJournal!
I'm enjoying this discussion, and I hope you are too--can we continue this after the weekend? I'm away until Monday.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
There's a link to download Mp3s at the top?
The grandparent article explicitly stated that once external intervention (that imposed an authoritarian government on the people) disappeared, the Eastern Europeans succeeded in getting democracy and human rights. In both the Hungarian uprising and Prague Spring, the Soviet Union (hint, hint, the external intervention) crushed both uprisings.
In the case of China, it not enduring any external intervention. No other nation is imposing an authoritarian government on China. Beijing remains an authoritarian government because most Chinese either support authoritarian rule or are indifferent to it.
We should all respect the Eastern Europeans.
but if we lived in an anarcho-capitalist society, which some people would consider a lot more free, we very likely would have them.
And if I had a magic bottle of pixie dust, I'd grow me some glowing green antlers. What's your point?
To recap: you claim that America has censorship just like China has censorship. I point out that what you call "censorship" in America consists of private bodies deciding whether or not to publish, and that they can be easily circumvented by self-publishing on the internet, something that real censorship (see China) does not allow for. You retort with "but if we had censorship like China does, then we'd have censorship like China does!"
What exactly do you want? Do you want CBS to be forced to publish every "lol jews did 911" twit who thinks they have story? Do you want the RIAA to publish every teenager's abortive basement band? There are limited resources to do so. The Internet removes these limits, which is why every fool has a livejournal and a myspace. If nobody cares about what you have to say, that's your problem. You're free to speak, but nobody's obliged to listen.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Neither. It deletes the origin of the offending articles. Not that I'm totally opposed to this, it sure would improve the quality of slashdot if there was a "-1, execute poster" mod.
In 1989, the pro-democracy demonstrations in China peaked at about 1 million people milling around in Beijing. One million is only 0.1% of China's total population: 1 billion people.
By contrast, the grandparent article gave a reference indicating that 800,000 Czechoslovakians assembled in Prague to demand human rights and democracy. 800,000 is about 5% of the population in Czechoslovakia. In other words, the strength of support for democracy in Czechoslovakia was about 50 times stronger than the "strength" of "support" for democracy in China. Taking the more pessimistic number of 100,000 Chinese protestors, we conclude that the Eastern European support for democracy is 500 times stronger than the Chinese support for democracy.
These facts explain the results. Democracy succeeded in Czechoslovakia. The hope for democracy in China faded away.
100,000 Chinese is a large number of people but is a tiny drop in a nation of 1 billion Chinese. Support for democracy in China is weak. Here's a quick check: the 1st/2nd-generation Chinese are overrepresented in the engineering and business colleges in the USA but are underrepresented at meetings of Amnesty International. I challenge the university students (reading this article) to prove me wrong. Just attend the local meeting of Amnesty International and see the near absence of Chinese faces.
I, too, respect the Eastern Europeans. When you rationalize the failure of democracy in China by saying that the Chinese people are not responsible, you indirectly denigrate the remarkable achievements of the Eastern Europeans.
The armed forces of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe all acceded to civilian, democratic rule because the strength of support for democracy and human rights was strong and widespread in Eastern Europe. Overwhelming majorities in all sectors of society -- from the peasants to the educated folks to the soldiers -- supported democracy and human rights.
Such is not and was not the case in China. The authoritarian government of China enjoys widespread support in all sectors of society -- including the military. The soldiers who shot the demonstrators in 1989 were Chinese. No external power imposed authoritarian rule on the Chinese The Chinese did "it" to themselves.
Please, don't do that. Banning a whole country is against the very principles of Internet. Do you realize that, in the first place, you created your public website to share information with other people, but then decide to prevent 1.3+ billion people, or 1 out of 5 people on the planet, from accessing it ? And don't say they have "no need to access it". Internet is all about sharing information to anybody, whatever the source IP address you see in the network packets.
And what about people using web proxies located in China ?
What about your friends on a 2-week trip to China ?
What about people using anonymizers services based in China ?
What about people browsing over Tor networks ?
What about search engine bots crawling from China ?
What about all of the other cases you are not thinking about ?
Sure this is your personal website so you can do what you want, but please keep in mind that (1) banning a whole country actually prevents even some "authorized" people from accessing your site, and (2) hackers will be the first ones to use open proxies not located in China to try to bypass your country firewalling rules.
Please!
Look, I AM a Bengali, and I can tell you that the CPI(M) have been winning elections by systematically brainwashing the rural poor (their main vote bloc, they are hated in Calcutta) for decades, and using goomba muscle to bully other parties out. if only the rural poor in W.B knew that they had better options, W.B would rise to the level of Maharashtra and Karnataka very quickly, as Bengalis are highly cultured (people in urban W.B. are generally better educated than in other parts of urban India) and have unlimited potential as a people.
The pinkos have bled my home state dry. Before the pinkos, W.B had a flourishing Jute industry. Now, it has all but collapsed. There is absolutely ZERO work culture in W.B. thanks to the pinkos, their labor unions and their messed up sense of entitlement. The infrastructure of Calcutta is in a horrible state, while other states like Maharashtra and Karnataka are improving steadily.
The difference between Calcutta and Mumbai/Bangalore is now almost as vast as that between New York and Mexico-City.
They are SERIOUSLY lazy bunch seeping with self-denial. Jyoti Basu, the communist CM of W.B. for many decades (before he got replaced by Buddhadeb Bhattacharya) was a total autarch, and had a personality cult about him, the same as Joseph Stalin or Mao.
Oh, and if you criticize them openly outside Calcutta, THINGS happen to you in the night.
State elections in West Bengal are a sick joke. The Liberal socialists are the worst thing to have happened to W.B since the Nawabs.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Is it actually allowed by the Wikipedia license that the content is modified by an automatic censoring application? If so, the license should be changed quickly. And the Wikimedia people should found out how they can pursue the company in international courts which abuses the content.
Just see title.
Just to make the point that life is not always a black/white affair.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The way I see it, arguments based on morality end up amounting to after-the-fact justifications. It's a way to convince yourself you shouldn't feel guilty for doing whatever you were going to do anyhow for more visceral reasons.
I mean, take the Hitler example. Does it really matter if it was a moral right of people to stop him? Such has happened, and most people are happier as a result of that. Those who acted to stop it made life better for themselves and those who would have been killed had Hitler been allowed to continue to expand unchecked.
Or a less Godwin-esque case, posit the situation that you observe a mugging in progress and have the ability to stop it. Does it matter whether you stop it because you feel its morally wrong for the mugger to steal, or if its just because you feel compassion for the victim and desire to help them?
Acting out of that compassion is dangerous when you misunderstand the desires of the victim - thats the point of relevance in cultural differences and why non-interference can make sense. If it turns out the mugger and the victim were just people practicing a play, or if the victim had some odd fetish for being mugged or something like that, then you'd achieve the opposite of the effect you wanted due to your compassion. You can try to judge if thats likely or not - in the case of the mugging, you observe how the victim is responding, or since you probably have a decent grasp of how humans in general respond to being mugged you take a chance and assume their reaction.
When you have wildly different cultures than your own, that sort of assumption can fail. Or when you have wildly different belief systems or anything like that where your ability to judge how another person would respond to your interference is compromised.
All things are relative, you just have to note where you are doing your measuring from. From the point of view of humanity as a whole, killing, stealing and deception are bad because they are counterproductive for the species. Not because of any arbitrary, external moral scale. And we could say they were bad even if a majority of people thought they were okay, because we have defined our criteria and our scale.
Most moral issues are loaded issues, so it's hard to find neutral examples. Let's look at speaking distance. In some cultures it is rude to stand too far apart, in others it is rude to stand too close together. From the point of view of humanity as a whole, neither of these are good or bad on their own. But needlessly causing another distress is bad, so it is wrong in one culture to stand too far apart, and it is wrong in the other to stand too close, and those are both perfectly valid judgements to make for those cultures.
Does that help to clarify what I'm saying about cultural relativity?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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% 3Cscript%3Ealert(document.cookie)%3C/script%3E%3Cb %20a=%22
http://passport.baidu.com/?login&tpl=wk1&u=%22%3E
Most moral issues are loaded issues, so it's hard to find neutral examples. Let's look at speaking distance. In some cultures it is rude to stand too far apart, in others it is rude to stand too close together.
What does mores of politeness in different cultures have to do with the Chinese government murdering people for practicing a fringe religion and surpressing speech which criticizes them for it!?
I'm not evaluating them "from a Western perspective." I'm evaluating them from a basic standard of Natural Law.
They are not close-talkers. They are tyrants and murderers and worse. Nit-picking about cultural context is just silly. By the moral standards of any sane person, what they are doing is flat-out evil.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You are making some very large assumptions about what I have said. You seem to think that because I am talking about the complexities of moral relativism, I am defending the Chinese. I am not, and I don't understand how you could think that I am. You seem to be defending a position that no one is attacking. I am not nit picking, merely trying to state a position on moral relativism. I'm saying it is a grey area, that some things (like what the chinese are doing) are undeniably bad, from the point of view of humanity as a whole, while other things truely are relative to a particular culture. Was I really being that unclear, or are you just in an argumentative mood?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The grandparent article explicitly stated that once external intervention (that imposed an authoritarian government on the people) disappeared, the Eastern Europeans succeeded in getting democracy and human rights. In Prague Spring (1968), the Soviet Union (hint, hint, the external intervention) crushed it.
In the case of China, it is not enduring any external intervention. No other nation is imposing an authoritarian government on China. Beijing remains an authoritarian government because most Chinese either support authoritarian rule or are indifferent to it.
We should all respect the Eastern Europeans.
You are making some very large assumptions about what I have said. You seem to think that because I am talking about the complexities of moral relativism, I am defending the Chinese. I am not, and I don't understand how you could think that I am.
Perhaps because this is a discussion about what the Chinese government is doing.
Why bring up moral relativism in such a discussion, if not to diminish the moral outrage against what is clearly an evil regime?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The article is about the Chinese government, but this thread veered into a discussion of moral relativism, which is often lambasted as an excuse for evil. I'm merely trying to point out that one can believe that all things are relative and still make judgements about what is evil, from a particular point of view. This thread began with a post about relativism which tried to excuse the Chinese government and cast aspersions of cultural insensitivity upon those who would judge it. I was trying to point out that one can be culturally sensitive and understand that certain things are relative while still making value judgements about those things that are not.
Or to put it simply, relativism is relative.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Some followers of this principle are the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban, and practitioners of Sati.
If you really think these are examples of cultural relativism, you are sorely deluded about the meaning of the term. (This is amusing given that you just provided the definition.)
Moral absolutists like the Taliban, Khmer Rouge don't argue that people with different cultures should be permitted their own moralities: they, like Bush, employ their own morality to judge everyone. This is exactly the opposite of relativism.
Now, if you had someone who was simultaneously an apologist for both sides, i.e. defending the validity of Western morality for Westerns and Taliban fundamentalism for Afghanistan, that would be at least be a reasonable moment to fling out the accusation "cultural relativism". But for the Taliban themselves it makes no bloody sense at all.
The governments of Eastern Europe are integral to the societies of Eastern Europe since these governments are staffed and run by Eastern Europeans. At the time of the peaceful revolutions in 1989, no external force was controlling these governments. The reason that they refused to murder the demonstrators is that many people in the government supported human rights and democracy.
The support for human rights and democracy was pervasive in Eastern Europe in 1989. In short, when people want human rights and democracy, the people get them.
Such is not the case in China. There is both widespread support for authoritarian governments and widespread indifference to it. Human rights and democracy cannot succeed in China because the people do not want those things.
By the way, there is no natural human desire for such concepts. Look at Afghanistan. Without external intervention, the Afghans willingly choose a brutal theocracy that kills people who want to convert from Islam to Christianity.
As the original poster suggested, we should respect the Eastern Europeans.
I support financially the campaigns of candidates I like, and write my Senators and Representatives frequently to give them my opinion on issues which are important to me.
Whether they listen or not is another matter.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
*Whoosh*
http://outcampaign.org/