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Censured for Censorship in China
Dwarg writes "On Aug. 10, [Human Rights Watch], headquartered in New York, came out with a report criticizing the three companies for their role helping to censor the Internet in China. The report is particularly damning of Yahoo, which Human Rights Watch says censors its Chinese site far more vigorously than either Google or Microsoft."
What's better, censored information or no information? If you want to do business in China, or any other country, you do so at the whim of the government. It's not like you can have an uncensored site. You either have a censored site, or no site at all.
I feel that free speech should be an absolute, even when it's harmful. To use the old saw I think that the damage of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre is far less than the damage of allowing any kind of restrictions on free speech.
That being said, why berate Google, who's voluntarily filtering their own information, and not berate Cisco, who's designed and built a great deal of the routing equipment used by the PDRC government to filter and monitor internet traffic... the so called 'Great Firewall of China'?
I certainly don't care for Google's actions, but I think that Cisco's are just as heinous, if not worse than Yahoo's dissident incrimination.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Same deal with the Cambodians under Pol Pot. I mean, if they didn't like having their skulls stacked in neat piles, they should have left! Same deal with the Burmese. Am I right here or what? If they don't feel like overthrowing their yoke of oppression, I don't see why we should go out of our way to help them.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
That would only work in a completely free world. In actuality, many Chinese cannot freely leave China even if they wanted to. Only the top percentile of society is truly mobile and can leave if they so choose. Everyone else would be hard pressed to be granted a visa, much less residency, to countries which human rights groups give positive feedback A+++++ would visit again.
Don't you people get it? You looney libbies don't know when to stop biting the hand that feeds you, do you?
The only reason China is able to provide us with cheap goods and cheap labor is because of their ARM policies - analog rights management.
Look at American labor. It has become too expensive for our economy to keep growing. Do you want the Chinese people to have more freedoms and then lose their jobs like you lazy Americans do?
[free trade parody off]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"What if some small European country put out a scathing report on how limiting
American speech is?"
Actually, we are a bit concerned (to say the least) about the freedom of speech in America. You are not doing too well on the freedom of press index, and having a state-run agency fine or censor nipples on TV is certainly not going to change that.
But America is America, the self-proclaimed moral leader of the world, the country in which 60% "don't believe" in evolution and where religion is as strong as ever in Iran or other countries currently on the shit list. Therefore, it might come to no one's surprise that America will try to set the standards in both directions, for instance when they pressed Japan to have stricter laws on pornography.
Putting a blogger in jail is not really helping the case either. Or having nearly 1% of your population in jail altogether (similar number for China is 0.2% btw).
Sorry for bashing a fundamentally good country, I am just concerned that if America doesn't get, that if America continues on this neo-religious, neo-moralistic, neo-fascist road, we will all be fucked in the end.
Wow. What crack smoking mod gave this Insightful?
Your argument boils down to: The US System isn't perfect -> We have no right to judge any human rights situation. Logically, that doesn't follow. It's a question of degree: of course the US system is not perfect, and we have a record of human rights abuses in our past and present. However, the American concept of free speech is immeasurably more "correct" than China's.
Their limits may be more restrictive than ours, but we *do* have restrictions.
Agreed, we do have restrictions. But you're taking the whole beam/mote debate to a new level entirely. If a parent lies on occasion, does he no longer have the "right" to tell his children not to lie? Do we expect perfection out of every moral goalpost.
Bottom line: We're never going to get perfection. We're (hopefully) going to to develop greater and greater respect for human rights. In the same way that perfect is the enemy of good, your relativistic judgment of the United States stands in the way of human rights progress in China. Just because I can't publish the DeCSS code in a newspaper doesn't imply that my country is on the same footing with one where reporters fear for their lives.
We should not assume the American system is best and that we should force our political
systems on others, that's how things like Iraq happen.
It may not be the best. But we must adopt a philosophy which holds "more human rights" to be better than "less human rights," and "more free speech" to be better than "less free speech."
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Who are we to say that China shouldn't chop up its ethnic minorities and use their corpses as mulch for agriculture? Who are we to say that Germany didn't have a right to slaughter all of those Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc?
Oh, is the "right to life" more universal than the right to not be imprisoned or executed for speaking your mind?
Freedom is fundamentally the right to be left alone if you are not abandoning your spouse and children and are living in peace with others' life, liberty and property. It's not any more complicated than that.
Man is not an island, but a healthy, free man is a peninsula.
Don't diss corporations.
It's OK to do bad things as long as you promise to give most of your money to charity when you die, so that you go to heaven. The more money they obtain, the more they can give back and therefore the more good they are. Good-hearted corporationists (of which there are many) keep just a mere $5 or 10 million of their loot after their death, so that their kids who are less well of than them can feed their kids and get a roof over their heads. Very thoughtful of them.
The problem is poor people. If each poor person would give as much to charity as rich people usually do, this world would be a nicer place to live.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
For all the people dis-ing the three search companies I have these questions:
Where was you motherboard made?
Your computer case?
Your clothing?
Your furniture?
TV?
TiVo box?
HD?
WAP?
Yes, China is an oppressive government. They're occupying foreign countries just like the U.S.. You can be jailed without trial and tortured, just like the U.S. They spy on their own citizens, just like the U.S. Their politicians are corrupt, just like everyone else. Their businessmen are greedy bastards, just like everyone else. Their government lies, supresses information, engages in disinformation, forces censorship down everyone's throat. Just like the U.S. (Howard Stern, anyone?)
They get all their money from people in foreign countries buying tons of consumer crap manufactured by cheap exploited laborers. Just like the U.S.
I guess the Chinese people were never oppressed until Yahoo, Google, and MS came along. Prior to that is was a shining beacon of freedom.
I'm waiting for the U.S. to try to force *anything* on China. Try saying "no" to someone you owe money to...
The US System isn't perfect -> We have no right to judge any human rights situation. Logically, that doesn't follow.
Absolutely correct. Hypocrisy doesn't make you wrong, it just makes you a hypocrite.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yahoo has not only censored information on its China-based web site but has also, actively, helped Beijing to arrest, imprison, and torture people who commit "thought crimes".
Yahoo's actions are understandable even if they cannot be condoned. Half of the team that established Yahoo is a Chinese from Taiwan. His name is Jerry Yang.
In Chinese society, people are mostly indifferent to human rights.
Yang simply steered his company along similar lines. He enthusiastically set up a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company, long before Yahoo's competitors entered China.
The working atmosphere inside Yahoo reflects, to a certain extent, Chinese values. We Slashdotters may be concerned about human rights, but most employees within the walls of Yahoo just do not care. To them, Yahoo = 8 hours of daily work = paycheck. Whether a victim of Chinese brutality rots in a Beijing prison matters not a wit to the Yahoo employees.