Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Official Vows to "Purify" the Net
Sleeping Kirby writes to tell us China's Communist party leader, Hu Jintao today announced the intent to leverage the economic potential of the web while seeking to "purify the internet environment". He proposes to do this by maintaining "the initiative in opinion" on the internet and to "'raise the level guidance on the internet," thus civilizing and purifying the internet environment.
Don't they mean purify humanity?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Anyone who confuses the Web and the Internet isn't qualified to report about either.
And anyone who puts a ® at the end of an entire article as if it was a copyright symbol isn't qualified to copyright or register as a trademark anything.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
And this is unique to "Bolshevism" how? Controlling the media to present a picture of fair and rational government has been the aim of almost every government/state/ruler in history and it continues to the present day. You need to hit the books if you think fascists (or democrats - small "d") don't practice this too...
I think it's obvious the entire slashdot community is going to be 'against' this initiative. We all have experience using 'more than average' time on the internet and particularly the world wide web ; it is completely impossible to 'guide' people on the internet.
China would have to have a ginormous amount of 'censors' constantly surfing and updating their own database of acceptable internet sites to have anything close to a 'guidance initiative'. This is just a media spin on what china has been doing all along, blocking major portions of the internet off completely from it's own citizens.
You can see the ridiculous tracert douginadress.com takes to reach chinese citizens right now ; another comment on China's inability to even provide standard censorship
Ace
I hate to put it this way, but that's nowhere near true. If you look at the wikipedia entry on Nazi Propaganda, it will be a great enlightenment to you. Fascism always included extensive information management. Democracy shouldn't, and isn't designed to, but the last fifty years have had backsliding induced by fearmongers.
Bolshevism and Fascism are both comparatively bad forms of government by certain standards. Government rooted in non-militia military power generally is.
My little site.
If you didn't buy "Made in China", the Chinese economy would suck. Nobody would be able to afford computers and they won't have access to any sort of information. Only the information printed on the local propaganda newpaper or the (propaganda) radio. With an advanced economy people have computers which they can use to educate themselves and get past the Chinese petty little "censorship" efforts. Do you really think the Chinese govt. can even have mediocre success in censoring? It's all talk. .. because there physically aren't enough workers. So that would benefit both countries and other countries in the world. This will continue until automation helps reduce the number of hours people need to work (and people will be paid more as they work less because the amount of work needed to afford a good lifestyle would be reduced).
Also by buying Made In China you build a nation of consumers who need services from the US (airplanes, farm equipment, high tech stuff). Even China wouldn't have the needed workers to sustain an developed modern economy
Or, he tries harder to make the 'great firewall of China' even more efficient so that the stuff that he can't directly control, he can supress. If his little corner of the world seems to have been purified, and his own citizens can't see anything to refute it, his plan must have worked.
I suspect that's a more likely strategy.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For all the bitching about the United States you see on Slashdot, at least our government actually has to try to subvert the Constitution, and we have ways of fighting back. The US Constitution doesn't have an "Oh, and everything we promised you you have, you don't have." escape hatch built in. Technically, we have the exact opposite, whatever our dear Attorney General may think. (The closest thing to an all-purpose escape hatch is the Commerce Clause, and that's not without controversy, nor is it total; the Supreme Court has interpreted it more broadly than I'd like but they have rejected some uses of it.)
All that Commmie ignorance and the Russians still managed to put a man into space before anyone else.
People seemingly nostalgic for the Red Bear seem to love to belabor the "man in space" point, but also seem to avoid noting that the Soviet Union failed the ultimate intelligence test, when it neglected to ensure its own survival.
If the system was that good, obviously it should have easily managed to hang on -- obviously that would have been the prime national priority. And yet it did not. Perhaps the take-away lesson is that while the system worked admirably on concentrating a lot of resources on a few key problems, it was unable to manage the delegation of a lot of resources, to a lot of smaller problems. (This isn't particularly astute or surprising; control centralization allows for concentration, but at the expense of flexibility.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Every time there's this knee-jerk, robotic reaction I totally don't get. Believe in what you WANT TO believe in. In this case, there's no FA to read.
I'm thankfull for countries like China. Every time I get disgusted with how the US is run I can look at China and gain some perspective. It could be better but it could also be a lot worse.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Are you talking about the Soviet Union and Communism? Or Athens and Democracy?
People seemingly nostalgic for the Red Bear seem to love to belabor the "man in space" point, but also seem to avoid noting that the Soviet Union failed the ultimate intelligence test, when it neglected to ensure its own survival.
Every civilization falls, eventually.
Where have you been? Here in the good ole US of A we have hundreds perhaps thousands of laws that are blatantly unConstitutional. Virtually all the forfeiture laws related to drug possession and sale are illegal. Many parts of the Homeland Security Act were obviously unConstitutional. The Supreme Court excuses them as being for our own good but the founding fathers made no such exceptions. Rationalizing exceptions to Constitutional Law are very scary in any society. The Supreme Court should not be allowed to change the Constitution through interpretation only the States have the power to change the Constitution.
Article 1. The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
Article 28. The state maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter- revolutionary activities; it penalizes actions that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals.
Article 53. Citizens of the People's Republic of China must abide by the constitution and the law, keep state secrets, protect public property and observe labour discipline and public order and respect social ethics.
I'll leave it to you to decide what constitutes "sabotage of the socialist system", "other counter-revolutionary activities", and observing "labour discipline and public order" means.
Considering how few females there are in china, I'd say he's better off leaving the internet full of porn.
Star Pirates
Choosing between extreme right and left wing politics, i.e. Stalinism and Fascism is choosing between bad and worse. Id say that Fascism is still worse although thanks to North Korea the margin is getting rather slim.
with the united states constitution tenth amendment.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
perhaps the best way to compare the two constitutions is to say that according to the united states constitution, all rights and powers belong to the people except those specifically reserved for the state while the chinese constitution says that all rights and powers belong to the state except those that are extended to the people.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Wow there is a lot of anti-China rhetoric out here. Sure I hate the great firewall as much as the next /.ter but...
.xxx domains, Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA, banning online gambling...
How is this any different than local efforts to purify the internet like segregating the dirty pics into
You can find out all about international efforts to purify the net here. And its already outdated.
Every politician will talk about purifying the internet, making it safe for you and your children because most people have a knee jerk reaction, and it distracts from real issues.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
And coming from China. Think of that.... Maybe he's on to something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The last fifty years of what? If you're talking about the US, it isn't a democracy; it's a limited republic with some facist elements. Democracy is where every "person" being governed has an equal say in the governing of society. Needless to say, it doesn't scale well.
A pure democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. As a form of governance, it is only effective for highly homogenous societies.
The Internet is made by people.
From Teenagers to Big Business, the best and the worst of human behavior is digitally displayed for all the world.
Don't blame the system, it shows life as it is,
not some idealist utopia.
Perhaps researchers of human behavior can learn more about how people really behave
in our modern world.
There are those who do try to purify the human race,
but they are known as war criminals,
the worst of all crimes,
destroying humanity and free will, in the name of government or religion.
Shouldn't the Olympics of 2008 be boycotted just like the Olympics of 1980? China has done far worse things to the people and environment than Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
And if you step ALL the way back to Marx's day, it's fairly clear that he was right.
Clear to who? A sheltered, pampered useful idiot?
Marx viewed economics as a zero-sum game. That fundamental problem makes all his theories as utterly worthless as tits on a bull. Or posts from an ignorant college twerp who has never been responsible for anything his entire worthless life and worships Castro's executioner.
Care to tally up how many millions of people have been murdered in the name of Marx in the past 150 years or so?
To quote Ronald Reagan: "A Communist is someone who reads Marx. An anti-Communist is one who understands Marx."
So how would you define the UK, in your system? I define it as a democracy, as we vote for MPs to represent us, and parliment is soverign. Most people would call that form of decision making representative democracy. Our form of government however is that of a constitutional monarchy, as the head of state is not elected but born into the role. I repeat, being a democracy does not exclude you from being a republic or a constitunial mornarchy.
However it's perfectly possible to have republics or monarchies that are undemocratic, see current day China or WWII Japan. What you have to remember is that a democracy is a form of decision making, not a form of government in itself; unless you are takling about direct democracy, and the nearest we have to that are the Swiss.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me