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China Makes Arrests To Stop Internet Porn
thefickler writes "The Chinese Government is expanding a crackdown on Internet pornography. Xinhua news agency, which is owned by the government and can safely be used for reporting in China, says the campaign to scrub the country's Internet of 'vulgar' content has so far resulted in 29 criminal cases. Police have ordered the removal of 46,000 pornographic and other 'harmful' items from websites. The latest crackdown comes after official warnings of rising social unrest as the economy slows. It's no coincidence that this year is the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, or, to use the acceptable nomenclature, 'the June 4th incident.'"
OK, I understand why they would want to choke civil unrest by censoring dissidents online, but porn? How's that helping them?
You just got troll'd!
No, it really _is_ a coincident that China started targeting porn sites on the twentieth anniversary of 'the June 4th incident'.
You think they looked at the calendar and realized... OMG, this is the year we must start censoring internet porn!
- These characters were randomly selected.
Imagine if they did that in our countries? You would feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Slashdotters cried out in anger and considered stepping outside of their home to do something about it.
You just got troll'd!
"28 suspects arrested in the campaign included 4 men in their twenties who ran the Midnight Prostitute Call website from eastern China. They also included two men accused of using a video chat service to defraud customers."
What I don't understand is that if there are so many damn people in China why they don't just overthrow their government... it wouldn't be difficult.
Well, a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on, at least enough to put up with it. I'm sure a lot of people around the world were probably wondering why Americans didn't overthrow Bush. I personally hated the guy from before day one, but I wouldn't want to overthrow the government even if we were facing 8 more years of Bush. Probably similar in China, they don't agree with everything, but the government does reflect a lot of their values, an overthrow would be damaging, and they don't see a lot of other people willing to rise up.
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Safe for use by second and third parties to redistribute published news, in that if you republish or distribute a Xinhua article in the PRC, you probably won't get arrested, because the article's already been vetted. It doesn't mean "safe to take for granted, without scepticism".
Countries that censor news often don't explicitly define what is acceptable, and the standards can change often, hence why internal political commentators need to rely on such gauges to see what the current acceptable topics are.
Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies. Nobody, however, has ever been able to 'enforce' these things, which is what the Chinese don't get. If you are in a Free(TM) country, consider yourself lucky.
The Devil finds work for idle hands.
Masturbation *is* sexual conservatism. It doesn't take a billion Chinese to figure this out.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Well, i don't know what you classify as "sexual conservatism", but i sure don't think that we have that now - neither in the US nor here in Europe.
Porn is everywhere and completely legal, prostitution is legal in most places in Europe and some places in the US.
12 year olds that want to dress up as whores as the idols on TV also dress like that isn't my idea of "sexual conservatism".
However, sex is often a somewhat "taboo" topic, which leads to problems like teenage pregnancies, transmission of STDs, etc.
Id like to see that in a porn film, the girl yelling out, "freedom to all, death to taxes, no riaa, get rid of older 50yos in govt!!!, release all aliens info"
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Maybe they do. I've never watched a porn film through to the end.
a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on
Quite right. This is anecdotal, but the Chinese people I've spoken with about this simply do not see the problems that I try to ask them about. They largely agree with what the Chinese government is doing. They see government as their protector, and mostly agree/assume that "the government knows best." They point to the remarkable progress and advancement in China (in terms of tech, economy, society, etc.) to prove their point.
At worst, I've gotten some of them to begrudgingly admit that some things the government is doing may be "necessary compromises" in order for the country as a whole to grow.
Those that I've met are among the more educated and traveled/worldly of the Chinese population. I'm not sure which way that biases the sample. I'm well-aware that there are dissidents in China trying to stop things like censorship; but doing so must be exceedingly difficult when the average person (and even the "intellectual elite" if you will) support the government.
The same reason system administrators are reluctant to reboot their production servers in order to apply a kernel patch that fixes serious performance issues. Government downtime is costly. And in this case we have a fairly invasive patch involving a new algorithm, and although the algorithm itself is well researched, the specific implementation needs extensive testing for which good spare hardware is unavailable.
If only we had a good simulator to test political ideas on...
I'm not buying it, chief. Read a comedy by Aristophanes and tell me that the Athenian Greeks were much into "modesty and sexual conservatism." Read the poems of Martial, Juvenal, and Catullus, and look at the architecture and decorations preserved at Pompeii, and tell me that the Romans were.
Some of the ancient and beautiful temples in India happen to have bas-reliefs depicting bestiality. Illustrated sex manuals were a popular form of literature at one point in China's history. Japan has had tentacle porn since at least the 18th century.
Sure, every culture has its sexual mores. But that's not exactly the same thing.
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
In the past, the government had done many gang/crime enforces during certain month of year before, they call it "Yan Da" which basically mean strict enforcement.
But everyone in china knows that It doesn't solve anything permanently and the people who are involve with such act just keep low profile and wait for it finish.
As for the porn busting thing.. my coworkers are making jokes about it and pulling out any thing vaguely sexual. such as, you can't mention "Mei Nv"(beatiful girl) in the game description.
Bottom line, Everything will be business as usual in a month or two.
Only if you get off on credits
The Chinese government has managed to rocket China from an impoverished post-WWII and post civil-war famine-plagued disaster into the modern China of today in under sixty years.
That's absolutely amazing.
To expect our idea of freedom and democracy to work in China is to ignore its situation and culture. The US and Europe haven't had serious famines in living memory. China has.
Order and prosperity are more important than freedom.
People don't generally revolt because they aren't free, they revolt because freedom is seen as the path to prosperity they do not have.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
I don't know what's scarier - his wanking practices being marked "informative" or the fact that his name is "SQuiRT".
Do you have ESP?
The Chinese government has managed to rocket China from an impoverished post-WWII and post civil-war famine-plagued disaster into the modern China of today in under sixty years.
Also notice that all that rocketing happened in the last half of that time frame. The first half was spent wasting staggering amounts of human life.
So, after holding back China for a few decades, they're back to the single-party capitalist system of Republic they overthrew -- while proclaiming the new model was actually "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" (ie, not Socialism). Given their past history and what they've done to the nation, I absolutely refuse to give them any credit for their belated accomplishments, which they came upon by making every single wrong decision first.
It was a lot of American students that were pushing the Chinese students to fight the government.
No, it was not. That is a little conspiracy theory that the most patriotic of Chinese will peddle as a catalyst for the Tiananmen Square protests. Blame the Americans rather than their own people. It has no basis in fact.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
I always thought it was mainly the puritan/protestant/western religious values that drove our (i.e. Western) governments and institutions to not like porno.
Recently I've discovered India "outlaws" (according the book I read) porn and now China is cracking down. If anything, I'd think they wouldn't care. What is it in these Eastern cultures that makes them not like porn? I didn't think they were uptight like that.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
(Why do people get so excited about anniversaries anyway?!)
You're asking the wrong crowd. Ask your wife.