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Mob Rule on China's Internet
Alien54 writes to mention an International Herald Tribune article about the growing phenomenon in China known as internet hunting; Using the web to track down individuals who have violated social more or broken the law. From the article: "In recent cases, people have scrutinized husbands suspected of cheating on their wives, fraud on Internet auction sites, the secret lives of celebrities and unsolved crimes. One case that drew a huge following involved the poisoning of a Tsinghua University student - an event that dates to 1994, but was revived by curious strangers after word spread on the Internet that the only suspect in the case had been questioned and released. Even a recent scandal involving a top Chinese computer scientist dismissed for copying an American processor design came to light in part because of Internet hunting, with scores of online commentators raising questions about the project and putting pressure on the scientist's sponsors to look into allegations about intellectual property theft."
Is this what happens when you keep people from looking at porn all day? Perhaps it represents the amount of time that intelligent people 'waste' discussing politics.\ Or has the Internet awoken community interest, and those discussions are just the first steps to a more open society.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I can just see it... "today, a man was sentenced to death after a jury of his p33rz found that he was 'fscked up.'"
What could possibly go wrong? Because you know, everything you read on the internet is true.
Where can we get one of those?
I read Usenet for the articles.
From the article, the husband's nick is Freezing Blade (I bet his 'blade' isn't getting any warmer, hehe), the cheating student goes by Bronze Mustache (Anyone else picturing a Chinese version of most 70's porn stars?) and the wife is Quiet Moon (Too... Many... Jokes...) . Sounds like the cast of an adult anime. ;-)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... vigilantism is a bad idea.
You hear calls for vigilante activity a lot, on the net and in the real world. And it's got lots of emotional appeal. But it always turns into mob rule, with absolutely no mechanism for protecting the innocent.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Being married to a Chinese national and having just come back from China I'll weigh in with a few observations. Social obligation is considered very high, but not in a legal sense. The cultural revolution of the seventies and even the Communist party of today placed/places a high value on public self recrimination as a means to redemption. Pointing out the flaws in others has been a way of deflecting unwanted attention to ones self in China for decades. I won't go into details about the personal lives of some of my wife's friends, but based on what she tells me adultery and divorce are becoming as common in China as they are in America. Violent crime may be much lower but all other forms of crime abound.
This new internet activism is probably a reaction to the commonly held belief that social mores are going to hell in a hand basket. My wife, an agnostic like myself, wonders if there is some value in most people having Religion in order to hold the more selfish, destructive behaviors in check. It would sadden me if this is the case, but as the Chinese government lessens its control of its citizenry and with the majority having no clear religion, there has been a corresponding rise in what most consider immoral behavior, and thus the current backlash.
Now whether the new behavior is truly immoral is a separate question, and as an agnostic one I have no firm answer for.
Letter To Iran