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China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos
Screaming Cactus writes "Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the site. 'Chinese leaders encourage Internet use for education and business but use online filters to block access to material considered subversive or pornographic. Foreign Web sites run by news organizations and human rights groups are regularly blocked if they carry sensitive information. Operators of China-based online bulletin boards are required to monitor their content and enforce censorship.' The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule."
If you want to see something crazy, check out the political spam in the comments of these videos. It is unbelievable the ratio of how many people are calling Tibetans liars and cheering on the Chinese. These are recent posts calling the Dalai Lama a terrorist ringleader. It confuses me that so many people outside the great firewall are posting this stuff.
Anyone want to help me mod these comments down, and rate these videos up?
Can it be argued that chinese actions in Tibet and their language with regards to Taiwan is a model of enlightened society? What a joke.
Ok then, can it be argued that the way the US treats Cuba is in any way still appropriate? How much have the people of Cuba suffered because the US won't relax its embargo?
I mean, yes, they fucked up... IN THE SIXTIES!!!111one.
Seriously, shouldn't we be able to move on?
If you ask me, that's what's kept Castro and his friends in power for so long.
The point is, China isn't alone in acting stupidly towards other countries. It doesn't excuse them, but lets keep a sense of proportion about this.
Fox News is just one of many TV networks in the US, and offers a unique -and different- perspective on things compared to the other 90% of media out there.
You may consider it propaganda, but nobody is forcing you to watch it, and nobody goes around shutting down liberal stations, arresting liberal TV sponsors, or shooting liberal journalists. If anything, Fox is against the kind of socialist media controls and regulations that would allow the Russia-type abuses in America.
How you think Fox News resembles anything in Russia is beyond me.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
It's really rather simple.
The Tibetans have a charismatic, articulate and eloquent spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Here in the US he's probably the most venerated spiritual leader in the US outside of the Pope or the conservative protestant movement. He's almost the chief rabbi for large swath of American intellectuals who think of themselves as "spiritual" but not aligned with a conservative religious movement and who eschew formal theological dogma.
So, in a way the Chinese leadership is right on the mark when they talk about a "Dalai Clique".
The thing that makes him a tough opponent in this game is that he's so darned reasonable and mild mannered. He's not calling for armed uprising. He's not even insisting on national sovereignty. He refuses to act angry, or even wronged. He just insists that the Chinese leadership should talk, and listen with an open mind.
The thing is, there's a lot about the old Tibetan system that is ugly and bad -- along with much that is admirable and good. The Chinese would love people to think about the abuses of the old monastic system when they think of Tibet. But can't oppose somebody like the Dalai Lama without being nakedly blunt about their own unreasonableness and brutality, which makes everything they do an international embarrassment to their country. And that makes this news.
You're absolutely right, we should be concerned with other places where minorities are oppressed for their religious, cultural, racial or linguistic characteristics. But you can't focus on all the tyrants in the world at once. You focus on the ones that can be made representative of tyranny, in the hope that they some day they will become representative of the futility of tyranny.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.
I've lived in both China and Taiwan. I was also a Chinese major, speak, read and write Chinese, and have a fair amount of friends from mainland China (both peasants and city dwellers) and Taiwan. I also have a number of friends that are members of the CCP. Does this qualify me to comment?
> As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC.
Have you lived in Taiwan before?
Taiwan is nothing like the PRC. In the PRC, corruption permeates to even the most petty of bureaucrats, who must be bribed for simple things like marriage licenses and being allowed to continue to farm your own meager plot of land. Seeing the money wasted by mid-level party officials at their 3 hour "liquid lunches" in Beijing (and hearing about it from my friends in the party) was stomach-turning, knowing what the families of my friends were going through as peasants. (My friend's younger sister -- 13 years old -- worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week in a windowless factory to help support her family, and made herself sick in the process.)
Taiwan does not assert ownership over the mainland -- what sloppy thinking! The Nationalist Party asserts that it is the rightful ruling party of all of China, and so desires unification. Other parties' desires and opinions vary.
When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they massacred quite a large number of people they feared were leftists. This was probably Taiwan's greatest human-rights tragedy. But that has been acknowledged and apologized for, for what little it's worth. Don't expect that kind of acknowledgment in the PRC, though, where Tibet has always been a part of China, China never invaded Vietnam, the Korean war started when the US invaded North Korea, and serious human rights violations never happen.