Slashdot Mirror
China Blocks 'Egypt' On Twitter-Like Site
Suki I writes with this excerpt from news.com.au: "China has blocked the word 'Egypt' from the country's wildly popular Twitter-like service, while coverage of the political turmoil has been tightly restricted in state media. China's ruling Communist Party is sensitive to any potential source of social unrest. A search for 'Egypt'' on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, 'According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.' The service has more than 50 million users. News on the Egypt protests has been limited to a few paragraphs and photos buried inside major news websites, but China Central Television had a report on its midday broadcast. China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the events in Egypt."
To us Chinese, this is hardly news, considering that they block all kinds of stuff like "carrot"(contains a character which also occurs in the president's name) and "empty chair".
The Chinese govt gets nervous anytime any dictatorship is under attack.
Guilty conscience pricks the mind.
Pearl Harbor was a real threat. A nation that had already taken out a handful of allies and were on their way to occupying a large portion of the world attacked. It shocked us into standing up and helping our allies beat the snot out of the Axis powers which were a true existential threat to US and certainly its allies.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year. This shocked us into the most cowardly display Americans have ever managed. We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents, and then precoded to spend money as fast as humanly possibly, build new worthless bureaucracies, and implement countless asinine 'security' measures against a threat that ranks right up there with being struck by lightening. We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Pearl Harbor was a tragic catalyst that moved the US to action that it should have taken earlier. 9/11 was when we pissed ourself in the face of sheep herders armed with box cutters and ratcheted back our civil liberties and threw money in the air in terror of something that IS NOT GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. If you are an American, you are going to die a very boring death due to eating too much. If you are very lucky, you might die in a car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to get you. Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
I am living/working in China and the Egypt situation has been the lead story on CCTV English news for the last 2 days... complete with clips of the Egyptian protests and the mandatory "Talking Head" analysts (both Chinese and foreign). It's getting 6~10 minutes worth of air-time at the top of each hour... Even the CCTV web site at http://english.cntv.cn/01/index.shtml has many clips available. The Chinese channel newscasts tend to be leading with stories of arduous treks back home for Spring Festival [EG: Riding 600Km on a motorcycle, in winter)... but there are still items, with footage of the riots, running on those news shows.