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.
Purification of the web != removal of pron.
Silly slant-eyed man, goatse is not going away.
(siwy sant-eyed man, go say nah goin way.)
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The Garden of Eden a Myth? I think not...that is the story of your direct ancestors...unless of course you are from another planet.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"
The idea that government did not grant people rights but merely recognised the fact that they were innate to being human was a fairly radical notion in a day and age when kings ruled by divine right. Plenty of people were willing to die for it.
Just the other day, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was arguing for yet another more restrictive interpretation of the Constitution, using the same insidious line of argument that the founding fathers feared we would fall to the temptation of. He argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that since the Constitution only says that the right habeas corpus can only be suspended under certain circumstances, the Constitution doesn't actually grant the right to habeas corpus in the first place. Insidious!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
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.
The Communist USSR took what was a relative backwater country, without a single warm-water port, large tracts of which are nearly inhospitable, and went toe-to-toe and dollar-for-dollar against a country that had to entire coasts of ports, a transcontinental rail system, and the lion's share of scientists scavenged from Germany.
If Stalin had decided to "out produce" rather than "outgun" the west, we might very well be speaking Russian as the international language of trade right now. Instead, he decided to embark on a cult-of-personality crusade, and set the USSR on a hostile stance that took more than fifty years to finally break down.
Politically speaking, the USSR was a joke -- but that's what Democracy is for, to keep revolutions and coups from tearing the country apart. Economically speaking, well, it's either a triumph of the Russian people or some solid evidence that socialism can do more than just feed and clothe people.
(And if you step ALL the way back to Marx's day, it's fairly clear that he was right. If the United States hadn't grabbed a middle path with the "New Deal", the world would uniformly be socialist right now.)