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China To Photograph All Internet Cafe Customers
Gwaihir the Windlord writes "Not only is the Great Firewall of China back up and running, but now if you visit an Internet cafe, your photo will be taken and your identity card scanned. And the friendly officers of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce make those details, entered into a city-wide database, available at any other cafe. So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in."
This is not very far from the current push for mass surveillance in the post-9/11 western world. The only difference is that China is a bit ahead of us. We'll get there in time, also. Remember, people, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
What an asshole! Somebody asks for information, and you respond with a huge rant about how clueless Americans are. Maybe people would take you more seriously if you weren't such an elitist jerk.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Yet in the US (and anywhere else where you get high speed to your home), they already know who you are, and corporate interests can even get hold of that information to pursue bogus lawsuits.
...Americans have a greater taste for freedom than most.
Americans have a greater taste for McDonalds fast food and 20th Century Fox entertainment. Freedom, not so much.
"Safety at any cost" -- that attitude is what Americans have embraced and must now disavow.
s/Americans have/everyone has/ - there, fixed that for you. People are getting too risk-averse in the UK, too.
Let me clear it up for you--try not running tanks over your citizens when they're peacefully protesting. That should help.
How does clear anything up? It only muddies the waters further by implying that Western powers never crush people with tanks, etc.
How about the ones from the last fifty years or so. Does that clear it up?
Not at all, because that might include the Second World War, and would certainly include the wars against Vietnam and Iraq.
That AC brought up past colonisation because it is such an excellent example in itself, but I was talking about current policies.
World War II ended in 1945--check your math. Wars in Vietnam and Iraq were and are wars against aggression and terrorism, respectively. There's no valid comparison between defending one's country and running tanks over one's own citizens, though I'm sure apologists for the criminal PRC government would like to think there is.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
There isn't much point talking to you, because we're not discussing the same world. I'm referring to the millions of civilians slaughtered by America in those recent wars, and you are talking about your militaristic fantasies.
As it happens, I am going to move to China next year, as it is a fantastic place, despite its awful government.
The usual estimates (see Wikipedia) of Vietnamese civilian casualties following the American attack on their country is 4.5 million. You can add another million or two if you count Cambodian civilians, soldiers in various forces, etc. The Iraq war is not over yet, but the excess deaths are generally estimated at over a million so far. Even the individually-documented deaths due to violence approach 100,000 (real deaths are typically 5-50 times more than individually-documented ones).
Even the number of dead Americans resulting from Bush sending them abroad far exceeds the numbers killed in, for example, the Twin Towers. The savage love-affair with death is very apparent in certain sectors of our Western society.
How about cites of powers running over their own unarmed left-handed citizens with green tanks no more than three metres long on a Sunday after a rainy Friday, but not on a leap year?
Demanding very specific forms of abuse before you'll accept that there's abuse is dishonest and comical. "--Hitler killed 6M Jews! --Ah, but did he do it with the guillotine? --Um, no... --In that case he's nothing compared to the evil of the French revolution!"
I also think there's something screwy in the insistence on the victims being "their own". It is normal to assume that a state has greater rights over its own citizens than over others. Thus, we accept police offers imprisoning (sometimes with eventual executions) "their own" citizens, and would consider it quite objectionable for police acting outside their jurisdiction to do the same. And yet, when it suits them, people like you like to turn that on its head.
A weird consequence of this is that, in your book, an abuse against a person living in the territory of your state is less extreme if that person is unjustly denied citizenship as well. A case in point is the West Bank Palestinians, quite a few of whom have been crushed by tanks or bulldozers, and who live on land militarily controlled by Israel, slowly colonised by Israel, and claimed as part of Israel by fringes of Israeli society, and yet not granted Israeli citizenship.
Well, if we're going for pure conciseness, I suppose I should give you kudos for admitting, in one line, that you don't have any cites for the example that I gave.
Vietnam is one country. During the period in question, two governments were fighting it out for control of that country, one doing well in the North and one doing well in the South. Each was keen on re-establishing normality (full control over the whole territory). You are picking out one of those factions and calling it the legitimate one.
Either you recognise US action as external aggression (a war crime), or you claim it as an out-sourced South Vietnamese internal-repression campaign (which in your book is bombing/gassing/crushing one's "own" people, and therefore intolerable by that very fact).
I'll ignore further comments about China, as they are straw men (no one has said the government isn't repressive).
A "pass for Tiananmen"? Comments like that just show how divorced from reality you are. How can anyone be expected to discuss with you? Perhaps you are just joking, as I first thought.
What WAS the IOC granting the Olympics to Beijing but a pass for Tiananmen?
In the context of your sentence, you were clearly referring to the idea of me giving them a pass, not the IOC giving them a pass. Since there's no hint of me excusing any particular government act, that was nonsensical.
It still doesn't make sense even if the IOC is the subject, because the IOC makes no particular judgements about specific political events many years in the past. It just deals with the Olympics, which is a time for countries to put aside their very real and serious differences to compete with each other in a civilised fashion, and have a chance to see each other as human beings.
I understand the pressure on the IOC to be partisan, but they rejected that, and chose to give China no special treatment. This is what I am applauding, because I would not like to see the Olympics end. Make no mistake: that is the choice to be made. Either we have an Olympic tradition of peace and brotherhood, or we decide that since only unbloodstained countries may compete, the Games must end. There is no other moral option. To clarify further: allowing Oceania to choose to compete only with Eurasia and to exclude Eastasia because today Eastasia is evil, is simply not a moral option.
OK, perhaps that last bit won't clarify anything unless you have read and understood a certain book. But someone else reading this might have.