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Yahoo Settles With Imprisoned Chinese Journalists
Terms of the deal are secret, but Yahoo has reached settlements with two Chinese journalists who were arrested based on information the company provided to the ruling Communist government. "[...] a source at Yahoo said the company has been 'working with the families, and we're working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance.' Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide 'humanitarian relief' to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out."
For the good of the people.
What I would like to know: have they reached a "deal" to stop cooperating with totalitarian censors in suppressing freedom of speech and political opposition?
Read Pynchon.
Has one of your loved ones been shot for treason? Disappeared for thoughtcrime? Or just had one of those spur-of-the-moment fits of altruism and volunteered to donate any and all needed organs to help a wealthy Party official?
Well, Yahoo! is here to help! Yahoo! has set up a humanitarian relief fund that to fund the families' share of the burden. For every family member shot, Yahoo! will supply your family with two cents to cover the cost of the bullet, and for every organ harvested, Yahoo! will reimburse your family for the costs of the surgery.
It's all in this Little Red "Y". Yahoooooooooo!
This is rich. Yahoo gets dissenters thrown in prison. Yahoo then generates PR by funding these organizations. Somewhat like MS spending so much time/money in Africa helping with medical problems...that are tied to the chemical plants that the Gates Foundation invests in. Generate your own PR opportunities. Genius!
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Original article (instead of Tomcat error)
In any case, the real judge is how they decide to act next time something like this happens...
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Why does China deserve a big Fuck You, as you so eloquently put it? China is a sovereign nation
:D
Mod parent funny!
Really? Please define "hooliganism" for us, if you would.
No, really - you said they knew up-front what the laws were. So please define for us, exactly, what a law based on a subjective and ever-changing term would be. Incidentally, China has thousands of such laws, its citizens have no real right to a decent trial, and "subversives" can be detained for the rest of their natural lives without so much as being read anything approaching a Miranda statement, let alone get a trial.
Idiot.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
how about when the DOJ arrests a UK citizen, off an in-transit plane (outside customs entry into the USA) at a US airport on layover, that runs an online gambling site legal in the UK but not in the USA, using data the airline supplied under homeland security? Isn't that EXACTLY the same thing. Airline Companies not of US origin allowing the USA govt to arrest their passengers when they are still on that companies property via international travel should not get a free pass either.
If China wishes to continue the suppression of its poeple, that is their choice, but for Western companies to be helping them in this oppression is beyond the pale.
Your argument is rather like Burma's military junta defending their crackdown as simply a legalistic maneuver, and after all, Burma's a sovereign country, so why should we care? Say the same for Kosovo, for Darfur, for Apartheid-era South Africa? I mean, can any abuse of human beings be justified because "It's local law and custom"?
The US already goes after companies doing business in other parts of the world over activities like bribery, even when such activities are deemed as acceptable in the place the American companies are doing business. There's a key notion here that just because you head abroad doesn't suddenly mean you no longer can be scrutinized by the US government.
And besides, when did something being a law mean that it was unassailable? Heck, laws banning interracial marriage were found in a number of states. Would you have been going up to Mildred and Richard Loving and scolding them for violating local laws?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The loser = the guy in jail and Yahoo with the bad reputation.
The winner = US government who continue to tax Yahoo. And the politician who insulted the CEO in public.
This is more like US government vs US corporation. China has had the same law since the founding of the communist government.
is to be respected, if that nation does not respect the will of it's people
therefore, if the country is not democratic, anything goes: you as a citizen should not respect any law of your country
authority is not to be respected if authority is not accountable to the common citizen
if a government is accountable to theocrats, royals, despots, autocrats, or technocrats, that government is not to be respected, by its citizens, or the international community
because those governments certainly don't respect their citizens
only in a democracy are the will of the citizens respected, via the vote, so only in a democracy is the government accountable to its citizens, and only democratically elected governments are to be respected by its citizens and the international community
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The fact is that laws have always been incidental to the Communist regime in China. The notion of the "rule of law" has little meaning for the leadership. Essentially, how it works, is you have a practically meaningless legislature; the National Peoples' Congress, and you have the real power brokers, the President, the Premier of the State Council and the Peoples Liberation Army. For all intents in purposes, they do as they please, the only checks being each other. To imagine that one need actually have violated a law in China to be arrested in detained is hopelessly naive. There are any number of laws which can be made to apply, and if you piss of the Chinese government, you'll be hauled in, go through a show trial and then sent off to prison.
The very idea that you can equate breaking Chinese laws, particularly those designed to shield the leadership and the organs of state from any kind of oversight by the people they claim to serve, with breaking the laws in a liberal democracy is just daft. The Chinese leadership simply has an entirely different view which isn't by any means the statutory view that you'll find in Western nations.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What don't you get? Anything is illegal in China that threatens the state. Anything. The notion that these people were breaking laws is nothing more than a pure formality. They were threats, in their own small ways, to the autocratic governing structure in China, and they were delivered like lambs to the slaughter by Yahoo.
As I've said, if China wishes to continue suppressing basic human freedoms, and the people of China want or have no choice but to go along with it, then that's fine. But I don't think an American company has any business helping them, whether it's Yahoo, Google and Microsoft selling out dissidents and journalists, or it's Cisco providing the hardware and support for the Great Firewall. Let China do its own dirty work.
Oh, and I thought "We were just following orders" had been dispensed with as a defense for violation of human rights and dignity some sixty years ago.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Dear sir or madam,
We apologize sincerely for aiding in your arrest and torture. We at yahoo do not agree with reasons given for your arrest but they offered us a lot of money. Please accept this Yahoo branded T-shirt, coffee mug, nose plug, cyanide pill and Testicle NumCream TM. I hope they will make your incarceration more bearable. We have also made a small donation in your name to Amnesty International. We know you would appreciate that.
Regards
Jerry Yang
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I couldn't find that video, but here is another.. http://youtube.com/watch?v=kxUZIG0Eea4
Or perhaps we should look at how China kills more people a year then every other country in the world combined. Especially their treatment of Falun Gong worshippers. They beat them to death and tell people they committed suicide. Then they take the dead body to the hospital for organ harvesting.
I found a video on that here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fkf2u1Umzi4 It's got nothing to do with hating china and when you use that line you sound like you're working for the Chinese government, because that is EXACTLY what their defence is to any allegations of abuse against its citizens.
Although America is a crap country in my opinion that I'd never want to visit, at least they don't bulldoze down people's houses and give them almost nothing in return. They don't round up the religious people they don't like, beat them to death, tell the families they killed themselves and then take their heart, lungs, liver and then cremate the body to hide any evidence.
Heck, even the dimmest rural Chinese citizen knows well the failings of the system (probably from bitter personal experience).
That requires them to have a basis for comparison (ie, what it's like elsewhere). Additionally, not knowing all of the things happening to other people across the country also helps the establishment.
The Chinese have historically done a very good job of censorship. When I was an undergrad I worked in a research group that was 80% Chinese, including a number of visiting scholars who were educated entirely in China. A bunch of us started talking about our respective countries once, and Tienman (sp?) Square came up. One of the Chinese scholars had never heard of it, and didn't believe it could have possibly occurred (understandably). A few of us found some articles on it, which he read. He was visibly shaken as he realized the things his country did while lying to the people. So believe me, they're very good propagandists.