Large evils corps (LEC) are already running amok. My point was that if the law provided support and incentive to fight such frivolous lawsuits, the LEC's would take a huge financial risk by doing so, something that they currently don't need to worry about. Of course, defendants should be provided with adequate legal defense by the state should they need it, but under the proposed model (with the potentially massive damages at stake) there mightn't be shortage of lawyers willing to work for the defendant in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds. Of course, the courts would also need to look at ways to rein in the typical draining and stalling tactics used by corporations against less wealthy individuals and competitors.
The "downside" of such a drastic change in USA's litigatious legal system would be the growing unemployment rate among litigation experts...
Teh U.S.A, the undisputed World Leader in ridiculous lawsuits, needs a new legal arrangement whereas the plaintiff of any lawsuit which can be deemed frivolous would be required to pay large damages, e.g. a not insignificant percentage of his/her/its income or wealth, to the victim(s) of such lawsuit. If a large percentage of any such penalties went to the government coffers, perhaps that would inspire the legislators to enact such a safety precaution and as a side effect make the U.S.A a better place for its citizens.
Perhaps such laws already exist in some more enlightened part of the world; I can't really say since my only "brush" with the "law" (and I use the term "law" in its loosest possible sense here) has been in China (actually in "Qinghai" which was part of Tibet proper before the Chinese invaded and chopped the country up) where the Party's paramilitary police forced me to write "self-criticism" and to turn back for the "crime" of attempting to buy a bus ticket to central Tibet. It turned out that the Chinese occupying force was dealing with Tibetan self-determination campaign by having declared a martial law and no outsider could be allowed to witness what horrors were to take place...
IIRC the Tibetan uprising was at least partially inspired by the US Senate which in 1991 bestowed Tibet the honor of being known in the US as "an occupied territory".
Of course an actual injunction to delay the release of £onghorn/vi$ta would an interesting development, but in terms of revenue or profit, MS would hardly suffer since by "virtue" of being a multi-level monopoly they already control the market (channels, OEMs, ISVs, crucial protocols and file formats etc.) which has been "engineered" to play by microsoft's rules. The MS-subservient market would simply continue pushing microsoft's existing bundle of crack. Despite the long delays in the arrival of £onghorn/vi$ta, MS profits have continued to rise to ever more obscene levels.
Most damage from an additional long delay would actually be taken by the most blindly pro-MS ISVs which might have bet their shop on whatever £onghorn/vi$ta-only code. Sometimes MS is even able to take advantage of their own delays, like when they bribed and bullied the once pro-Linux Corel into giving up all direct competition and committing into a disastrous bet into dotNyet before couple of years later manipulating their 25% investment in Corel by having a band of ex-microserfs hijack the company into private hands at rock-bottom price using MS co-founder Paul Allen's money.
In fact the Corel kneecapping story has various similarities to the SCO/Baystar/MS manipulation. MS has "industry sycophants" (an old boys' network) in all parts of the industry doing lucrative insider favors under the table. Investment banks in particular are infested by these types, and they just luuuv to handle microsoft's business.
In short, any further delay to £onghorn/vi$ta would not noticeably affect microsoft's government-granted permission to print money, but if IBM is able to put microsoft's shady financial dealings aimed at maintaining their monopolies under serious investigation, that would potentially strike some serious fear into the MS old boys' network which really runs the machinations behind the scenes.
Irony? Why don't you correct me if your googling for "hitler popularity" provided more accurate information. So what was wrong in my correction to your "people elected Nazis to power... apparently by a wide margin" claim? Please be specific.
The previous poster asked if you'd be fine with Google collaborating with the Nazi Germany (and by extention with its criminal agenda). The term "Nazi Germany" is used specifically to refer to the post-democratic Germany when the Nazis had already seized complete power from constitutional bodies like the parliament of elected representatives. The Nazi German policies of annexation of German-speaking lands and other later "pre-emptive wars", and anti-semititic laws and later the Holocaust, those were never policies approved by the German electorate through democratic means but imposed by a small band of bitter and violent ideologues. Germany's pre-war tragedy was therefore that the silent majority didn't do enough (in the admittedly chaotic and thuggish circumstances of that time) to prevent the hijacking of legitimate rule of law when Hitler grabbed power in January 1933.
See, it only took the large majority to stand by and do nothing/not enough to enable Hitler to run amok with Germany's resources and to eventually establish his network of concentration camps...
You more than implied that collaboration with the Nazis was alright "because they were elected, apparently by a wide margin". I'm sorry but I cannot agree with you. Even if the Nazis had been elected to power, there would have been no moral grounds for collaboration, particularly after they had invaded their neighbors and began exterminating the Jews.
Likewise China has been holding its neighboring Tibetan, Uighur and (southern) Mongolian peoples under brutal military rule reminiscent of what Stalin and Hitler did in the countries they invaded, although only China is using the tactic of mass migration of its own ethnic Han population to overwhelm the occupied countries demographically. Interestingly, China's modus operandi has shifted from Stalinist communism towards Hitlerian fascism (i.e. dictatorial national socialism) since they introduced controlled capitalism as part of Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms in the late seventies, but the policies remain nearly identical. It is just that through fascism China can now co-opt the global "free markets" for its own purposes by siphoning industrial manufacturing away from the democratic West and by manipulating the currency markets (the massive US trade deficits will give the Chinese regime control over the US currency and by extention the US economy already in the near future!).
Based on your description of Walmart, I presume that you aren't altogether pleased with the current state of affairs in terms of US policy of collaboration with the Chinese regime.
But this is not just about a dictatorship (with the predominantly US-based multinationals in tow) abusing free markets. This particular dictatorship is actively and systematically wiping its neighbors off the map! In 1991, under Bush Sr., the US Senate officially named Tibet as an "occupied territory" but in the last fifteen years the volume of American business with the perpetrators of that genocidal occupation have simply exploded. You're absolutely right, it is not just Google collaborating with the dictatorship in Beijing, but their line of business (distributing information, or in this case agreeing to only distribute the regime's approved propaganda) and their self-proclaimed moral backbone has just made them a prominent lightning rod, and rightly so.
The US politicians and multi-national businesses still control the world's policies and the rest of the world simply must follow, even if it means collaborating with the dictators in Beijing. However this collaboration is what keeps the CCP dictators in power. Remove the regime's status as bringers of stability (of the evil status quo) and prosperity and then let the Chinese population choose between the current expansionist fascism or rehabilitation with the free world principles. The "public trial of Google" is merely a first small step by the US political elite as they must evaluate their approach and the level of collaboration with China's dictatorship.
Uh, try learning some history before showing off your ignorance. Hitler's National Socialist Party got around 30% of the popular vote at their peak thanks to campaigning against the rather real threat from the Stalinist Soviet Union, and against the "unfair" Versailles Peace Treaty of WWI which was still causing widespread chaos and destitution in Germany... When no coalition gov't could be built, President Hindenburg (iirc) appointed Hitler to put one together and in no time he had declared a state of emergency (after the burning of the Reichstag building, allegedly by a small-time communist stooge) and himself as a dictator. No more elections for Germans until after WWII.
"just as it is not our right to decide for china how to run their nation"
That is arguably a matter of opinion; whether to help people under repressive governments and in what way. If you were under such regime, would you like others to help you or at minimum show some sympathy? If your unelected regime was systematically wiping out your peaceful neighbors and you were powerless to stop it, shouldn't other nations and individuals have some level of moral duty to interfere and try to stop those crimes?
The Chinese regime isn't simply bullying their own people. They are actively committing genocide in Tibet which the communist troops occupied soon after Mao took power in 1949. No human being equipped with facts and a conscience will find China's brutal and criminals act against the Tibetans acceptable. I suggest you learn about the horrors Tibetans have been subjected to by the ongoing Chinese military occupation and sinocization campaigns.
Under the circumstances it should be the responsibility of all decent nations and individuals (including the enlightened Chinese, especially overseas) to help both the Tibetans and the Chinese peoples to regain their freedom and human rights, but unfortunately the US-lead global business sector doesn't give a damn about peoples' freedoms, only short-term profits. Many thought Google would be different with their "do no evil" guideline.
When even the rare Western corporation which claims to possess a moral backbone agrees to collaborate with such a criminal regime in selectively blocking information (and Tibet is under even stricter news blockade than the actual Han-populated China!) while validating the regime's desperate propaganda, what kind of a signal does that send?
What do you remain unconvinced about? That Tibet isn't facing a Chinese "Final Solution" which started as fanatical Marxist internationalism (imitation of Stalinism) but soon changed into sinister Han chauvinism and sinicization of all aspects of Tibetan (and Uighur and Mongolian...) life through brute force?
The Chinese concept of privacy has not only been molded (or rather disfigured) by the communist era of thought control but the very legacy of confucianism has left a strong impression. In certain ways, Chinese families are extremely protective about their internal affairs (aka privacy), while other cultural mores dictate that one shouldn't "bother" others with one's personal issues. There's a great level of "privacy" built into the traditional code of conduct.
As it happens, part of the problem of this Chinese concept of privacy through "minding one's own business" is that it allows the ruling regime to engage in massive crimes against humanity and people are only likely to take some action if their own interests are being violated, thus the record number of uprisings in China, with 87,000 incidents in 2005 alone. In China, "privacy" trumps solidarity.
This approach to privacy has historical similarities in other Far-Eastern countries but exposure to modern ways of life, smaller family sizes and not insignificantly democracy have shaped the concept greatly.
In China, the parents of today's youth either lived through, died or actively participated in the horrifying excesses of the "Cultural Revolution" ('66~'76) where everyone was systematically stripped of any external vestiges of personal privacy. People suspected of having independent thoughts were considered a threat to the state order and were therefore treated very harshly indeed. Mao and later the Gang of Four tried their damnest to break the family unit and children were encouraged to snitch on their parents and siblings or even murder them! Today people welcome all the privacy they can have, within the confines of the Confucian concept (skillfully manipulated by the ruling regime) of the "greater good of the state".
you have displayed an appalling lack of knowledge and logic
Right. Every criminal regime has its sycophants and apologists. You certainly aren't in the apologetic camp, but seeing how you choose to believe the Mao era make-believe justifications for the communist army's invasion of Tibet and the consequent killing of some 1.500.00 Tibetans and the total destrustion (after thorough looting) of all but a handful of Tibet's 6 thousand monasteries, the logic-defying claims of some vague past anachronistic "control" over Tibet etc. etc., why would you respect the sovereignty of your peaceful neighbors.
You have some nerve to claim outrage, but that's nothing new coming from the Chinese regime supporters.
Sure, the Chinese god-emperors have "claimed" to rule over all known world. That didn't make it so in reality. And especially in the reality of the modern concept of national self-determination. To suggest the the Chinese god-emperors had even imposed actual rule over their Tibetan neighbors is an absolute myth created by Mao to justify the invasion in the name of those very dynasties Mao himself overthrew as illegimate. Huh?
Remember before the Tibetans chose to give up their warrior past and adopted buddhist monastic culture, they actually invaded China's then capital which the Chinese emperor had fled. At that point the Tibetan and Chinese governments struck a peace treaty agreeing to respect each others' borders for eternity. It only took Mao's communist army to violate that agreement.
The 17-point Agreement you're referring to was forced upon the Tibetan government hoping to alleviate the increasingly dangerous situation when Tibet was already under the Chinese communist army's occupation. The Chinese, of course, didn't even respect their own "agreement" which was forced upon the occupied Tibetans and the resulting Tibetan uprising was brutally suppressed, forcing tens of thousands of Tibetans to leave their own motherland into exile which continues to this day!
Not an invasion!?? Then what do you call the "visit" to parts of China by the Imperial Japanese Army which ended already more than 70 years ago? A justified holiday excursion??
Tibetan "education" system? Even according to Chinese communist party's own latest figures more than half of Tibetans are illiterate! But even worse, thanks to the systemic and sinister sinicization drive by the Chinese, Tibetan language is only allowed in some primary schools and even fewer secondary schools while the official Chinese Peking dialect and script is forced upon Tibetans at every level of "education" and "government". There is no higher education, even for the usual Han-Chinese propaganda, in Tibetan language. I don't know where you pull out your "facts" since even the communist party doesn't bother to claim otherwise.
Officially the Party policy of 1-child per family was relaxed in poor areas both in China and occupied Tibet some time ago, but you probably aren't interested in the horror stories of forced abortions and forced sterilizations specifically targetting Tibetans.
As the previous poster mentioned there is a law in both Germany and France outlawing the denial of the Holocaust; not that many people would actually deny the horrors but to prevent criminals from abusing such claims to glorify the systematic destruction of Jewish people under totalitarian systems. It is absolutely horrific that under the Chinese regime such systematic destruction of Tibet and its people is still not just being glorified but being carried out every single day, for more than 65 years already and counting.
That's "free speech" Chinese style. But think for a moment, if you can: What if the Japanese were doing to the Chinese nation what the Chinese are doing to Tibet? Instead of parroting the communist party's sad propaganda, why don't you try instead changing the regime for the benefit of Chinese people and especially for the benefit of your neighbors in Tibet.
While the major western powers have plenty of warts, hypocrisy and suspect agendas, you are rather misguided in trying to compare them to the regime in China.
"in what sense is our protection of free speech in the West categorically superior to the prevailing Chinese attitude that censorship may sometimes be necessary in order to preserve culture and maintain social order(?)"
Are you not aware that the Chinese regime has, since their invasion of Tibet in 1950, systematically destroyed all aspects of Tibetan life: Tibetan national identity, unique Tibetan language and script, unique Tibetan buddhism... not to mention turning Tibet into a giant Chinese nuclear missile site and nuclear dumping ground, ripping off Tibetan natural resources and promoting Chinese migration into Tibet, turning Tibetans into a rightless and stateless minority in their own country!? Preserving culture?? Maintaining social order??
While a large number of ethnic Chinese may find the CCP's dictatorship and the accompanying censorship as an acceptable tradeoff for being finally able to engage in "bourgeouis" activities, at least their party-approved mainstream culture hasn't been under systematic eradication since the end of the "Cultural Revolution" around 1976. If the majority is willing to remain under dictatorial rule and not care about the rights of others or the imprisonment and torture of innocent freedom-caring people at the hands of their regime, even that could be argued to be their right. Chinese accepting to live under Chinese mob rule.
However their regime nor the Chinese as a nation have absolutely no right to hold their neighboring Tibetan and Uigur nations under brutal Chinese military occupation with the "Final Solution" looming close to those oppressed non-Chinese peoples.
... laws against publishing even the most transparent, ridiculous falsehoods regarding Holocaust denial...
OK. Think for moment about the French, and then spare a moment for the Tibetans who are guaranteed to face imprisonment and quite likely torture as well for simply speaking against the ongoing Holocaust in Tibet, or just saying "Tibet should be free again"! In China, the regime has "laws" (and plain all-pervasive and ruthless paramilitary machine) that severely punish people for challenging in any way the regime's most transparent and ridiculous falsehoods denying the ongoing Holocaust...!
Should cultures which allow such things to take place be respected?
Are we obligated to "liberate" China's citizens from their cultural taboos against desiring privacy?
I'm curious, but what "cultural taboos" do the Chinese people have against desiring privacy?
I'd mod you up if I had points. Not only was the linked cartoon witty and relevant but this time it was you who got modded down by someone with apparent jingoistic mindset.
My earlier post about China's genocide in Tibet which Google is helping the regime keep filtered out from the Chinese conscience was heavily modded overrated or troll by people whose only motivation can be to brush China's crimes under the carpet.
While your post was about the worrying trend in the USA towards secrecy instead of open democracy and legality, I would like to point out that the "internet democracy", like the moderation system used here at Slashdot, easily lends itself to mob rule.
In the field of mass media (and the increasingly important internet search field) the Chinese regime is free to spread its propaganda around the world without any institutional blocks, but the rest of the world is systematically kept out from the Chinese "media market". With the media being such a high value global business it is rather strange that the WTO has no provisions for protecting non-Chinese media businesses from the near total trade blocks set up by the Chinese Communist Party.
But more close to home this one-sided arrangement hits the democratic moderation systems here in the "internet land of the free" where the pro-regime (in China) types are encouraged to "vote"/SHOUT DOWN views opposing or exposing their regime's policies. With a population of over one billion the Chinese regime is able to deploy a great number of blindly loyal sycophants even if their actual percentage of the population is relatively small.
Same goes with the relatively large number of Bush apologists (either from extreme right or religious fundamentalists) who were recently estimated to be numbered at some 40-50% of the Republican Party base.
In both cases there is a large number of single-minded fanatics who do not welcome open discourse but instead wish that their opponents be drowned out of the public debate altogether to avoid facing difficult questions.
In its ideal, and proper functioning form, democracy incorporates various legal and moral safety mechanisms intended to protect both open public debate and the minorities from mob rule. Over here in Slashdot-land factual and hard-hittings facts can easily be modded down to oblivion where "out of sight" is truly "out of mind".
What's with the puck-passing? Every Chinese net user already knows that their media is being censored by the Big Brother even without Google telling them that they're making illegal queries. How does that absolve Google from collaboration in that propaganda effort? They're there lending the criminal regime an air of legitimacy without actually allowing their users to learn what is really happening outside the Party's media controls.
Another thing, the Chinese can afford to wait for decades or even generations for better times, but the Tibetans don't have such luxury lest they are willing to face extinction as people, nation, language and culture. Would you also have approved of Google collaborating with the Nazi regime to provide the German and occupied populations Nazi-vetted propaganda while the extermination camps were already operating? If Google gave a note that the information they were providing had to comply with the "government regulations"?
Do you have some particular reason for liking Google?
How many times can you give up your mod points under one subject?:-)
Anyway, if your point was to show how "google.cn" will proudly display honest search results for queries forbidden by the Chinese regime, you'd be better off (well actually worse off but hey...) trying that search from the other side of the Chinese Communist Party's fancy censorship filters, built with the courteous help by certain Cisco Corp.
Not only would do you fail to get uncensored results but the Party's own "Public Security" paramilitary police would be likely to learn where such "illegal" queries originated from. The small number of anti-dictatorship activists who are not only brave enough but also capable of finding and using outside proxies and tunnels but who have no way of communicating to the wider masses are currently not the primary worry for the regime which has itself admitted to "policing" a record 70 thousand uprisings, most of them against corruption and official abuse within the party itself, only last year alone.
Naturally most search results in Beijing's simplified Chinese tend to parrot the pro-regime party line even outside Chinese controlled territories. Very few Chinese within or outside China are able or willing to recognize the brutal reality about their powerful masters.
For many people Google's increasingly shameless behavior only means that they're now aware that their privacy is being compromised by this profit-oriented entity which was formerly known for its "Do No Evil" marketing slogan.
It is easy to forget that by agreeing to censor its search engine in cahoots with the Chinese dictatorship, Google is now also helping repress millions of Tibetans who have suffered under harsh military occupation by the Chinese since 1950.
Since people tend to be more familiar with the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust or Stalin's invasions and gulags, what if Google had made a business pact with the Nazis or Stalin providing their ignorant populations with entertainment and "harmless legitimate-looking facts" while suppressing all knowledge of the horrors those regimes caused to the people they oppressed?
This is what Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) are doing in China today. All knowledge of the Chinese crimes against the Tibetan nation or the Tibetan people's struggle to regain their independence are systematically wiped out from their search results as if none of it ever happened, at the behest of the ruling Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.
What is the point of having an "information service" which covers up the most crucial information relating to massive human rights violations? A glorified pacifier to placate the ignorant masses while their ruling regime is busy carrying out genocide to its horrible conclusion?
An estimated 1,500,000 Tibetans (!!) have already perished under the Chinese occupation (nearly a fifth of total population), Tibetan language, buddhist religion, identity and history are systematically suppressed while the CCP is promoting Chinese settlers to overrun Tibet demographically. Not to mention Tibetan natural resources being stolen, nuclear waste dumped there and more nuclear missile sites being built to threaten all democracies south of the Himalayas. Or the brutality of the CCP's paramilitary police against the large number of Tibetan political prisoners being held in secret camps across Tibet. The Chinese population should be allowed to compare these facts to the current feed of Communist Party-driven anti-Japanese propaganda over that brutal, if partial invasion that ceased to take place over sixty years ago. Which invasion is supposed to be less evil and why?
Google's Chinese (dis)service will compliantly keep any of this information from reaching the Chinese or the Tibetans under Chinese occupation because an unelected and expansionist regime wanted them to collaborate.
This shouldn't be only about self-centered westerners worrying about their god-given personal privacy, although privacy is of course extremely important even in democracies with other safety mechanisms against abuse. No, it is far more sinister when corporations from the "democratic world" are helping cover up a holocaust or genocide being committed by their business partners!
What we need is search, webmail etc. services which are guaranteed to remain neutral and safe without turning evil at the first profit-motive. Or which are not subject to American "shareholders uber alles" mentality which corrupted Google. Could/should such services be based in Switzerland or Sweden, both historically neutral territories without track record of collaborating with dictatorial regimes? Would they need massive financing, thereby potentially subjecting them to the whims of the moral-free financial markets, or could enough of their functions (CPU load, distributed and encrypted storage) be offloaded, a la bittorrent, to contributing users and neutral, respectable institutions?
How could the OSS communities help build safe alternatives to Google's morality and privacy-compromised offerings?
Firstly, I don't condone doing business with a nazional-sozialist regime which invades and oppresses its peaceful neighbors, like the Tibetans or the turkic Uighurs.
I don't believe it is necessary for companies from the democratic world to aid and abet the rule of such dictatorships.
However, if a company like the formerly 'do-"no"-evil' (now where's strikethrough when one needs it!?) Google feel it is morally justified to help the CCP in China to keep its own Chinese population and its occupied peoples under a massive censorship and propaganda machinery, it should at least use that opportunity to highlight the dire situation it's in by prominently displaying a notice on each served page:
"All information through Google has been subjected to the strict censorship laws of the People's Republic of China as decreed by the Chinese Communist Party. We apologise for any misinformation, inaccuracies and/or general lack of access to outside information caused by this arrangement."
Did IBM know that they were aiding the genocide of the jews by collaborating with the unelected Nazi regime in Germany? Would IBM do it the same way all over again?
Today anyone doing business in China under the nazi regime there must be aware that China is brutally occupying its neighbors with a Lebensraum policy of wiping out their neighbors as separate nations and peoples. Too bad that today's multinationals and their political cronies have such selective and short memories. What the largest post- and neo-colonial "democratic" powers do, even the smaller democracies must follow thanks to the inter-connectedness of the new global economy. So thanks USA, UK, France, Japan etc. for your "moral leadership" in this neo-colonial game of wink-nudge. (The Russian Federation is of course among the biggest backers of the regime in China, but Russia's neither western nor a democracy...)
And thanks Nixon for your Cold War policy move intending to isolate the Soviet Union by befriending another murderous dictator in Mao Zedong. The policy of economic isolation of the Soviet Union seems to have given some positive results (at least if you ask the Baltic States and the now-free Eastern European countries) so why is the West now helping the remaining expansionist super-dictatorship through massive investments and the relocation of "democratic jobs" there?
If the West really holds Freedom and Democracy as dear as it claims, why not direct that investment to struggling but democratic developing countries instead? Help the Chinese choose: either it's the current genocidal dictatorship and no outside business, or it's the end of the genocidal dictatorship and friendly trade and cultural relationship with the rest of the world will follow. Including with their free Tibetan and Uighur neighbors who would rather trade their national natural resources instead of watching in fear while the Chinese continue ripping them off.
Too bad that the Chinese populace won't learn about their regime's crimes through Google though. If Google wishes to be seen even as merely semi-evil, they should support other efforts aimed at bypassing the censorship machinery they're now part of in China.
So instead of at least trying to do the right thing and cut the money flow to the criminal gang which can not be apprehended, it is better to take the convenient road and collaborate with them in the hope that they aren't actually just plotting to overtake you as the most powerful top dog around? Forget about the genocides they're committing to their neighbors and the human rights violations against their own billion-odd population. Just give them more cash to grow even more powerful? Your Chamberlainian approach failed to address the slight problem with western ideals of freedom and democracy, which we (apart from the ruling classes, that is) would kind of expect to remain as the foundation of the West's decision-making.
It's not like the economic embargo didn't work with the USSR, right? Now almost all of the Soviet-invaded countries and territories are free from occupation and Russia is at least partially free, and generally a far lesser threat to the world than the Soviet empire was before its economic collapse.
Apart from the growing nuke arsenal and massive military modernizing and buildup drive, the Chinese regime has *currently* little chance of creating chaos in the West through political and economic means, but look at their policies and you'll see that they're working furiously to get there. At this pace in a decade or two at most we'll have an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship controlling the majority of the world's energy and raw material markets (through state-subsidized free-market means, compatible with their national socialistic doctrines), and they'll be exporting their decicedly un-free and un-democratic ideals alongside their new trading muscle. USA will be the biggest loser since their current economic might is so largely based on underhanded manipulation of world's resources and market policies which they will lose control of (having made a number of enemies worldwide while they were at it).
If you think that the ruling regime is voluntarily reforming, apart from the their fascist, proven efficient economic policies, you'll be sorely disappointed. They're counting on the democratic world to be too soft and too greedy to do anything about it until it's too late. If anything, I'd expect the waning, chaotic and perhaps fundamentalist-lead USA to be the one resorting to nuclear strikes (and bible; chapter armageddon) when they realize that China's got them by their economic balls.
Either you stand behind your principles and swallow the modest pain while economic activity is shifted from China to more peaceful and democratic countries, or you keep rewarding the power-mad dragon until it's strong enough to call the shots. Eventually the declining democracies will find out whether freedom can co-exist in the shadow of the Chinese empire.
Btw, the Chinese state-controlled firms have already proliferated their nuclear and missile knowhow to various islamic states via Pakistan.
I've seen happiness in China. I've seen happiness in Tibet. I've seen happiness in Xinjiang. I've seen happiness in Yunnan.
And had you been there to visit Stalin's gulags and Hitler's concentration camps, you'd had found happiness there as well. The occupants probably had good reasons to smile at every outside visitor.
What comes to the Chinese-occupied Tibet and "Xinjiang" (Peking dialect for "western frontier"), the Chinese are certainly happy to be there exploiting their neighbors' natural resources and settling hordes of Chinese migrants into those occupied lands.
Yes, China is in a similar position to "pre-war" Germany, kind of.
Annexation of some neighboring territories. Check
All-encompassing propaganda and censorship machine. Check.
Ultra-nationalist populism playing upon past wrongs by foreign countries. Check.
Xenophobia and hatred of certain other nationalities. Check.
Ideology based on ethnic supremacy. Check.
Dependency on foreign sources of energy. Check.
Fascist/national-socialist economic and political system. Check.
Some differences:
China territorial lebensraum expansion is more advanced than pre-1939 Germany's or USSR's (Tibet, East Turkestan, southern Mongolia etc.) and is aimed at conquest of neighbors whereas initally Germany annexed areas with historical German population (Austria, Sudetenland). China's policy is to overwhelm the occupied territories with a massive Chinese migrant population.
German militarism arose as a response to the clear and present threat by the already-mad and expansionist (since early 1920s) Stalinist USSR during the late era of Western colonialism, while Chinese militarism arose after the threat of the Imperial Japan had already been extinguished.
China's dictatorship absolutely depends on the massive foreign investment and trade and the wealth it creates to prevent a nationwide uprising.
As you can see, the regime in China could be overthrown and the people in China and the neighboring peoples under its oppressive occupation liberated through coordinated economic action. Unfortunately the (currently) most powerful democratic economies have chosen a path of collusion and cooperation with the Chinese dictatorship instead of standing up for the values they claim to hold dear, i.e. freedom from oppression, democracy and peoples' right of self-determination. Instead, the West is targetting non-expansionist countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea for punishment while the regime in China, which is in an advanced state of militaristic expansionism, is given royal red-carpet welcomes by western leaders and their sycophantic industrialist backers.
The Nazi regime in Germany embarked on their Holocaust rampage in earnest around 1941-1942 onwards, without Britain or the USA even knowing about it when they declared war on Germany. The Chinese nazi regime is well known to be committing ethnic and cultural cleansing in the neighboring countries it has invaded and the democratic world is expected to do... nothing but collaborate with that regime?
If the Chinese were only committing crimes against their own people, that would already be bad enough, but they're committing genocide against their peaceful neighbors they've kept under brutal occupation for decades.
Chamberlain and especially Churchill were products of the British supremacist/colonial/imperial school of ideology and their actions, including the pact with fellow imperialist Stalin, reflected not the modern values of freedom the West (at least nominally) shares today, but their need was solely to protect the British Empire and its foreign dominions like their predecessors had been doing for centuries.
The United Nations was founded by the victors of the WWII to perpetuate the post-war status quo and to protect the superpowers' interests and spheres of influence in a more coordinated manner instead of the past messy dealings and wheelings between individual empires. Western values have in the past been only used selectively within that UN framework to protect the victims of oppression and occupation when it suits the economic and political interests of a Western superpower but since we now know that this particular emperor has no clothes, why can't the West finally start acting according to the moral ideals it claims to uphold as the foundation of its whole civilization?
It would be so simple in the case of China: just transfer the foreign investments to democratic and non-aggressive developing countries whi
Filevault migrates your home directory onto an encrypted image using a 128-bit AES key which, AFAIK is pretty secure, at least the NSA sponsored OS.X security guide I read recently recommended using it.
Yep. Terrorists flew airplanes into buildings killing 3,000+ US civilians.
Just a slight correction: Just under 3000 people died in those terrorist attacks and quite a few of them were either foreigners or working for the US military-industrial complex, i.e. not US civilians.
The "laws" are always superceded by the Chinese Communist Party at will. Foreign companies choosing to cooperate with the CCP through their investments in today's China know this fully well, as do the corrupt Party officials whose palms need to be greased.
Investing in China under its current regime is immoral in so many ways it isn't even funny, with the possible exception of investments that promote China's peoples' ability to communicate independent of the Party censorship.
Nice job once again. Surely it is off topic to mention what the Mao's Little Red Book helped the communist dictatorship and its indoctrinated followers to perpetrate against the victims of China's ongoing occupation of its neighbours...
Unfortunately there are still plenty of chinese, including some with Slashdot mod points, who are simply too indoctrinated to face the extent of their regime's crimes.
Do you think that China loses less face if fewer people know about those crimes? Does the little red opus of communist slogans represent harmless fun to you, perhaps even something glorious? Even China's own historical heritage, not to mention the ethnic chinese populace, suffered from the brutality and excesses of the fervent book-waving masses.
Knowledge is power, more power than any firearm or bomb can give you.
Well the Tibetans, and anyone with access and interest in non-CCP-revised history books, know that Tibet is only "inalienable part of Chinese empire" because certain Mao Zedong sent his battle-hardened communist party army to invade it in 1950. Tibet had decided to give up militarism in favour of buddhist studies centuries earlier (they even invaded China's imperial capital once, but that was settled for an eternal peace and respect for each others' sovereign borders...) so they were easy prey for their indoctrinated and military-expansionist neighbour.
A few years later it took a massive UN-backed military expedition to save South Korea from being overran by the Maoist China-backed North. Tibet fell and remains under brutal occupation and genocidal policies by China, while in South Korea people are free.
If there is no cost involved in destroying one's neighbour (Tibet is actually being ripped off of its natural wealth), be it a trade blockade or military action, knowledge alone provides no protection to the victims.
Of course, in Tibet the occupying chinese are doing everything to distort and suppress information and communications to prevent the people from organizing uprisings, but even when they do rise up there are people like Hu Jintao (China's current Party supremo aka Butcher of Tibet for his brutality as the chief chinese CCP head in Tibet) who have no qualms about using military firepower against unarmed people.
It is extremely tragic that the Tibetans' non-violent struggle for freedom is being doomed by the indifference (and preference to do business with their occupiers instead) of the West. What would you do if you were a Tibetan under the dire circumstances? Knowledge hasn't helped and even if they had guns the chinese have a massive military superiority at every imaginable level.
It ain't easy being a freedom fighter these days. I mean terrorist of course...
Supporting occupied peoples in regaining their freedom is clearly a hindrance to trade when politicians and their corporate cronies have manufacturing bases to export and bucks to be made.
It is interesting how the empires of Mao and Lenin, both of whom remain on display full of preservatives, have turned to imperialist fascism (made infamous by their past opponents Japan and Germany respectively, although e.g. the British Empire certainly had such tendencies as well) in order to "earn their rehabilitation" in the eyes of the West.
Western leaders are full of love and affection for dictators like Putin and Hu Jintao (aka the Butcher of Tibet after his brutal crackdown on Tibetans during his reign as the supreme chinese party chief in occupied Tibet) while the non-expansionist socialist dictators of smaller countries, like Cuba's Castro and Zimbabwe's Mugabe, are still being treated like pariahs.
If the western democracies actually asked their electorate which is worse, a small non-expansionist socialist state like Cuba or a genocidally expansionist one-party dictatorship like China, would the western leaders have to act surprised by the answer?
The Chinese have a slight issue with Islamic separatists in Xinjiang, if memory serves.
How can the turkic Uighur people be called "separatists" by anyone but the reality-distorted chinese dictatorship when Uighurs have nothing to do with the chinese people ethnically, linguistically, culturally or historically??
Also, while being predominantly muslim, the Uighurs haven't historically had anything to do with islamic extremism; only when China's totalitarian regime began cracking down on their traditional way of life and shipping horders of China's communist army settlers to their homeland using the time-tested Chinese strategy of outnumbering the native people in newly-occupied lands, only then did the Uighurs realize the extent of the coming tragedy.
Religion is often the last solace in the face of brutality and hopelessness and with the "civilized free world" intent on looking away, the Uighurs' only supporters are found in the increasingly oppressive post-Soviet Central Asian states where the regimes are backed by Soviet Russia and China in order to keep the "islamic insurgents" under control. For some reason in today's world muslims can not be considered freedom fighters even when under foreign occupation or under foreign-backed dictatorship...
While India which is extending its domestic transport network to aid its peaceful development and quality of life of its own citizens, the non-democratic behemoth in the north is finalizing its own centrally-planned super-project: a railway connecting China with Tibet, the buddhist, armyless country which the communist army of Mao Zedong invaded 1950 and have been brutally occupying for decades.
The new rail link will not only speed up China's environmentally disastrous exploitation of Tibet's national resources but also hasten the systematically executed demographic disaster which is intended to turn Tibetans into a disenfrancised and sinociziced minority in their own country, not unlike Mongolians after the chinese communists took over "Inner Mongolia" and extended China's railway network there.
China is already using occupied Tibet, historically a neutral buffer state between India and China, as a military and nuclear missile base overlooking South Asia. Part of the Indian planners' realization of the need for an improved road network to complement the existing railways has undoubtably been China's communist-era expansionism towards India (including China's still unresolved invasion of north Indian territories soon after Tibet had been occupied), and Chinese military's ability to easily disable India's railway network with a sneak missile attack from their bases in Tibet.
In ideal world the democratic nations would have a common policy of supporting the economic development of democratic developing countries like India while refusing to prop up expansionist dictatorships like China through trade and investment.
Unfortunately for democratic principles, the special interest groups behind the leaders of the currently rich democratic nations are finding it more lucrative to do just the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
The "downside" of such a drastic change in USA's litigatious legal system would be the growing unemployment rate among litigation experts...
Perhaps such laws already exist in some more enlightened part of the world; I can't really say since my only "brush" with the "law" (and I use the term "law" in its loosest possible sense here) has been in China (actually in "Qinghai" which was part of Tibet proper before the Chinese invaded and chopped the country up) where the Party's paramilitary police forced me to write "self-criticism" and to turn back for the "crime" of attempting to buy a bus ticket to central Tibet. It turned out that the Chinese occupying force was dealing with Tibetan self-determination campaign by having declared a martial law and no outsider could be allowed to witness what horrors were to take place...
IIRC the Tibetan uprising was at least partially inspired by the US Senate which in 1991 bestowed Tibet the honor of being known in the US as "an occupied territory".
Most damage from an additional long delay would actually be taken by the most blindly pro-MS ISVs which might have bet their shop on whatever £onghorn/vi$ta-only code. Sometimes MS is even able to take advantage of their own delays, like when they bribed and bullied the once pro-Linux Corel into giving up all direct competition and committing into a disastrous bet into dotNyet before couple of years later manipulating their 25% investment in Corel by having a band of ex-microserfs hijack the company into private hands at rock-bottom price using MS co-founder Paul Allen's money.
In fact the Corel kneecapping story has various similarities to the SCO/Baystar/MS manipulation. MS has "industry sycophants" (an old boys' network) in all parts of the industry doing lucrative insider favors under the table. Investment banks in particular are infested by these types, and they just luuuv to handle microsoft's business.
In short, any further delay to £onghorn/vi$ta would not noticeably affect microsoft's government-granted permission to print money, but if IBM is able to put microsoft's shady financial dealings aimed at maintaining their monopolies under serious investigation, that would potentially strike some serious fear into the MS old boys' network which really runs the machinations behind the scenes.
The previous poster asked if you'd be fine with Google collaborating with the Nazi Germany (and by extention with its criminal agenda). The term "Nazi Germany" is used specifically to refer to the post-democratic Germany when the Nazis had already seized complete power from constitutional bodies like the parliament of elected representatives. The Nazi German policies of annexation of German-speaking lands and other later "pre-emptive wars", and anti-semititic laws and later the Holocaust, those were never policies approved by the German electorate through democratic means but imposed by a small band of bitter and violent ideologues. Germany's pre-war tragedy was therefore that the silent majority didn't do enough (in the admittedly chaotic and thuggish circumstances of that time) to prevent the hijacking of legitimate rule of law when Hitler grabbed power in January 1933.
See, it only took the large majority to stand by and do nothing/not enough to enable Hitler to run amok with Germany's resources and to eventually establish his network of concentration camps...
You more than implied that collaboration with the Nazis was alright "because they were elected, apparently by a wide margin". I'm sorry but I cannot agree with you. Even if the Nazis had been elected to power, there would have been no moral grounds for collaboration, particularly after they had invaded their neighbors and began exterminating the Jews.
Likewise China has been holding its neighboring Tibetan, Uighur and (southern) Mongolian peoples under brutal military rule reminiscent of what Stalin and Hitler did in the countries they invaded, although only China is using the tactic of mass migration of its own ethnic Han population to overwhelm the occupied countries demographically. Interestingly, China's modus operandi has shifted from Stalinist communism towards Hitlerian fascism (i.e. dictatorial national socialism) since they introduced controlled capitalism as part of Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms in the late seventies, but the policies remain nearly identical. It is just that through fascism China can now co-opt the global "free markets" for its own purposes by siphoning industrial manufacturing away from the democratic West and by manipulating the currency markets (the massive US trade deficits will give the Chinese regime control over the US currency and by extention the US economy already in the near future!).
Based on your description of Walmart, I presume that you aren't altogether pleased with the current state of affairs in terms of US policy of collaboration with the Chinese regime.
But this is not just about a dictatorship (with the predominantly US-based multinationals in tow) abusing free markets. This particular dictatorship is actively and systematically wiping its neighbors off the map! In 1991, under Bush Sr., the US Senate officially named Tibet as an "occupied territory" but in the last fifteen years the volume of American business with the perpetrators of that genocidal occupation have simply exploded. You're absolutely right, it is not just Google collaborating with the dictatorship in Beijing, but their line of business (distributing information, or in this case agreeing to only distribute the regime's approved propaganda) and their self-proclaimed moral backbone has just made them a prominent lightning rod, and rightly so.
The US politicians and multi-national businesses still control the world's policies and the rest of the world simply must follow, even if it means collaborating with the dictators in Beijing. However this collaboration is what keeps the CCP dictators in power. Remove the regime's status as bringers of stability (of the evil status quo) and prosperity and then let the Chinese population choose between the current expansionist fascism or rehabilitation with the free world principles. The "public trial of Google" is merely a first small step by the US political elite as they must evaluate their approach and the level of collaboration with China's dictatorship.
"just as it is not our right to decide for china how to run their nation"
That is arguably a matter of opinion; whether to help people under repressive governments and in what way. If you were under such regime, would you like others to help you or at minimum show some sympathy? If your unelected regime was systematically wiping out your peaceful neighbors and you were powerless to stop it, shouldn't other nations and individuals have some level of moral duty to interfere and try to stop those crimes?
The Chinese regime isn't simply bullying their own people. They are actively committing genocide in Tibet which the communist troops occupied soon after Mao took power in 1949. No human being equipped with facts and a conscience will find China's brutal and criminals act against the Tibetans acceptable. I suggest you learn about the horrors Tibetans have been subjected to by the ongoing Chinese military occupation and sinocization campaigns.
Under the circumstances it should be the responsibility of all decent nations and individuals (including the enlightened Chinese, especially overseas) to help both the Tibetans and the Chinese peoples to regain their freedom and human rights, but unfortunately the US-lead global business sector doesn't give a damn about peoples' freedoms, only short-term profits. Many thought Google would be different with their "do no evil" guideline.
When even the rare Western corporation which claims to possess a moral backbone agrees to collaborate with such a criminal regime in selectively blocking information (and Tibet is under even stricter news blockade than the actual Han-populated China!) while validating the regime's desperate propaganda, what kind of a signal does that send?
The Chinese concept of privacy has not only been molded (or rather disfigured) by the communist era of thought control but the very legacy of confucianism has left a strong impression. In certain ways, Chinese families are extremely protective about their internal affairs (aka privacy), while other cultural mores dictate that one shouldn't "bother" others with one's personal issues. There's a great level of "privacy" built into the traditional code of conduct.
As it happens, part of the problem of this Chinese concept of privacy through "minding one's own business" is that it allows the ruling regime to engage in massive crimes against humanity and people are only likely to take some action if their own interests are being violated, thus the record number of uprisings in China, with 87,000 incidents in 2005 alone. In China, "privacy" trumps solidarity.
This approach to privacy has historical similarities in other Far-Eastern countries but exposure to modern ways of life, smaller family sizes and not insignificantly democracy have shaped the concept greatly.
In China, the parents of today's youth either lived through, died or actively participated in the horrifying excesses of the "Cultural Revolution" ('66~'76) where everyone was systematically stripped of any external vestiges of personal privacy. People suspected of having independent thoughts were considered a threat to the state order and were therefore treated very harshly indeed. Mao and later the Gang of Four tried their damnest to break the family unit and children were encouraged to snitch on their parents and siblings or even murder them! Today people welcome all the privacy they can have, within the confines of the Confucian concept (skillfully manipulated by the ruling regime) of the "greater good of the state".
Right. Every criminal regime has its sycophants and apologists. You certainly aren't in the apologetic camp, but seeing how you choose to believe the Mao era make-believe justifications for the communist army's invasion of Tibet and the consequent killing of some 1.500.00 Tibetans and the total destrustion (after thorough looting) of all but a handful of Tibet's 6 thousand monasteries, the logic-defying claims of some vague past anachronistic "control" over Tibet etc. etc., why would you respect the sovereignty of your peaceful neighbors.
You have some nerve to claim outrage, but that's nothing new coming from the Chinese regime supporters.
Sure, the Chinese god-emperors have "claimed" to rule over all known world. That didn't make it so in reality. And especially in the reality of the modern concept of national self-determination. To suggest the the Chinese god-emperors had even imposed actual rule over their Tibetan neighbors is an absolute myth created by Mao to justify the invasion in the name of those very dynasties Mao himself overthrew as illegimate. Huh?
Remember before the Tibetans chose to give up their warrior past and adopted buddhist monastic culture, they actually invaded China's then capital which the Chinese emperor had fled. At that point the Tibetan and Chinese governments struck a peace treaty agreeing to respect each others' borders for eternity. It only took Mao's communist army to violate that agreement.
The 17-point Agreement you're referring to was forced upon the Tibetan government hoping to alleviate the increasingly dangerous situation when Tibet was already under the Chinese communist army's occupation. The Chinese, of course, didn't even respect their own "agreement" which was forced upon the occupied Tibetans and the resulting Tibetan uprising was brutally suppressed, forcing tens of thousands of Tibetans to leave their own motherland into exile which continues to this day!
Not an invasion!?? Then what do you call the "visit" to parts of China by the Imperial Japanese Army which ended already more than 70 years ago? A justified holiday excursion??
Tibetan "education" system? Even according to Chinese communist party's own latest figures more than half of Tibetans are illiterate! But even worse, thanks to the systemic and sinister sinicization drive by the Chinese, Tibetan language is only allowed in some primary schools and even fewer secondary schools while the official Chinese Peking dialect and script is forced upon Tibetans at every level of "education" and "government". There is no higher education, even for the usual Han-Chinese propaganda, in Tibetan language. I don't know where you pull out your "facts" since even the communist party doesn't bother to claim otherwise. Officially the Party policy of 1-child per family was relaxed in poor areas both in China and occupied Tibet some time ago, but you probably aren't interested in the horror stories of forced abortions and forced sterilizations specifically targetting Tibetans.
As the previous poster mentioned there is a law in both Germany and France outlawing the denial of the Holocaust; not that many people would actually deny the horrors but to prevent criminals from abusing such claims to glorify the systematic destruction of Jewish people under totalitarian systems. It is absolutely horrific that under the Chinese regime such systematic destruction of Tibet and its people is still not just being glorified but being carried out every single day, for more than 65 years already and counting.
That's "free speech" Chinese style. But think for a moment, if you can: What if the Japanese were doing to the Chinese nation what the Chinese are doing to Tibet? Instead of parroting the communist party's sad propaganda, why don't you try instead changing the regime for the benefit of Chinese people and especially for the benefit of your neighbors in Tibet.
"in what sense is our protection of free speech in the West categorically superior to the prevailing Chinese attitude that censorship may sometimes be necessary in order to preserve culture and maintain social order(?)"
Are you not aware that the Chinese regime has, since their invasion of Tibet in 1950, systematically destroyed all aspects of Tibetan life: Tibetan national identity, unique Tibetan language and script, unique Tibetan buddhism... not to mention turning Tibet into a giant Chinese nuclear missile site and nuclear dumping ground, ripping off Tibetan natural resources and promoting Chinese migration into Tibet, turning Tibetans into a rightless and stateless minority in their own country!? Preserving culture?? Maintaining social order?? While a large number of ethnic Chinese may find the CCP's dictatorship and the accompanying censorship as an acceptable tradeoff for being finally able to engage in "bourgeouis" activities, at least their party-approved mainstream culture hasn't been under systematic eradication since the end of the "Cultural Revolution" around 1976. If the majority is willing to remain under dictatorial rule and not care about the rights of others or the imprisonment and torture of innocent freedom-caring people at the hands of their regime, even that could be argued to be their right. Chinese accepting to live under Chinese mob rule.
However their regime nor the Chinese as a nation have absolutely no right to hold their neighboring Tibetan and Uigur nations under brutal Chinese military occupation with the "Final Solution" looming close to those oppressed non-Chinese peoples.
OK. Think for moment about the French, and then spare a moment for the Tibetans who are guaranteed to face imprisonment and quite likely torture as well for simply speaking against the ongoing Holocaust in Tibet, or just saying "Tibet should be free again"! In China, the regime has "laws" (and plain all-pervasive and ruthless paramilitary machine) that severely punish people for challenging in any way the regime's most transparent and ridiculous falsehoods denying the ongoing Holocaust...!
Should cultures which allow such things to take place be respected?
Are we obligated to "liberate" China's citizens from their cultural taboos against desiring privacy?
I'm curious, but what "cultural taboos" do the Chinese people have against desiring privacy?
My earlier post about China's genocide in Tibet which Google is helping the regime keep filtered out from the Chinese conscience was heavily modded overrated or troll by people whose only motivation can be to brush China's crimes under the carpet.
While your post was about the worrying trend in the USA towards secrecy instead of open democracy and legality, I would like to point out that the "internet democracy", like the moderation system used here at Slashdot, easily lends itself to mob rule.
In the field of mass media (and the increasingly important internet search field) the Chinese regime is free to spread its propaganda around the world without any institutional blocks, but the rest of the world is systematically kept out from the Chinese "media market". With the media being such a high value global business it is rather strange that the WTO has no provisions for protecting non-Chinese media businesses from the near total trade blocks set up by the Chinese Communist Party.
But more close to home this one-sided arrangement hits the democratic moderation systems here in the "internet land of the free" where the pro-regime (in China) types are encouraged to "vote"/SHOUT DOWN views opposing or exposing their regime's policies. With a population of over one billion the Chinese regime is able to deploy a great number of blindly loyal sycophants even if their actual percentage of the population is relatively small.
Same goes with the relatively large number of Bush apologists (either from extreme right or religious fundamentalists) who were recently estimated to be numbered at some 40-50% of the Republican Party base.
In both cases there is a large number of single-minded fanatics who do not welcome open discourse but instead wish that their opponents be drowned out of the public debate altogether to avoid facing difficult questions.
In its ideal, and proper functioning form, democracy incorporates various legal and moral safety mechanisms intended to protect both open public debate and the minorities from mob rule. Over here in Slashdot-land factual and hard-hittings facts can easily be modded down to oblivion where "out of sight" is truly "out of mind".
Another thing, the Chinese can afford to wait for decades or even generations for better times, but the Tibetans don't have such luxury lest they are willing to face extinction as people, nation, language and culture. Would you also have approved of Google collaborating with the Nazi regime to provide the German and occupied populations Nazi-vetted propaganda while the extermination camps were already operating? If Google gave a note that the information they were providing had to comply with the "government regulations"?
Do you have some particular reason for liking Google?
Anyway, if your point was to show how "google.cn" will proudly display honest search results for queries forbidden by the Chinese regime, you'd be better off (well actually worse off but hey...) trying that search from the other side of the Chinese Communist Party's fancy censorship filters, built with the courteous help by certain Cisco Corp.
Not only would do you fail to get uncensored results but the Party's own "Public Security" paramilitary police would be likely to learn where such "illegal" queries originated from. The small number of anti-dictatorship activists who are not only brave enough but also capable of finding and using outside proxies and tunnels but who have no way of communicating to the wider masses are currently not the primary worry for the regime which has itself admitted to "policing" a record 70 thousand uprisings, most of them against corruption and official abuse within the party itself, only last year alone.
Naturally most search results in Beijing's simplified Chinese tend to parrot the pro-regime party line even outside Chinese controlled territories. Very few Chinese within or outside China are able or willing to recognize the brutal reality about their powerful masters.
It is easy to forget that by agreeing to censor its search engine in cahoots with the Chinese dictatorship, Google is now also helping repress millions of Tibetans who have suffered under harsh military occupation by the Chinese since 1950.
Since people tend to be more familiar with the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust or Stalin's invasions and gulags, what if Google had made a business pact with the Nazis or Stalin providing their ignorant populations with entertainment and "harmless legitimate-looking facts" while suppressing all knowledge of the horrors those regimes caused to the people they oppressed?
This is what Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) are doing in China today. All knowledge of the Chinese crimes against the Tibetan nation or the Tibetan people's struggle to regain their independence are systematically wiped out from their search results as if none of it ever happened, at the behest of the ruling Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.
What is the point of having an "information service" which covers up the most crucial information relating to massive human rights violations? A glorified pacifier to placate the ignorant masses while their ruling regime is busy carrying out genocide to its horrible conclusion?
An estimated 1,500,000 Tibetans (!!) have already perished under the Chinese occupation (nearly a fifth of total population), Tibetan language, buddhist religion, identity and history are systematically suppressed while the CCP is promoting Chinese settlers to overrun Tibet demographically. Not to mention Tibetan natural resources being stolen, nuclear waste dumped there and more nuclear missile sites being built to threaten all democracies south of the Himalayas. Or the brutality of the CCP's paramilitary police against the large number of Tibetan political prisoners being held in secret camps across Tibet. The Chinese population should be allowed to compare these facts to the current feed of Communist Party-driven anti-Japanese propaganda over that brutal, if partial invasion that ceased to take place over sixty years ago. Which invasion is supposed to be less evil and why?
Google's Chinese (dis)service will compliantly keep any of this information from reaching the Chinese or the Tibetans under Chinese occupation because an unelected and expansionist regime wanted them to collaborate.
This shouldn't be only about self-centered westerners worrying about their god-given personal privacy, although privacy is of course extremely important even in democracies with other safety mechanisms against abuse. No, it is far more sinister when corporations from the "democratic world" are helping cover up a holocaust or genocide being committed by their business partners!
What we need is search, webmail etc. services which are guaranteed to remain neutral and safe without turning evil at the first profit-motive. Or which are not subject to American "shareholders uber alles" mentality which corrupted Google. Could/should such services be based in Switzerland or Sweden, both historically neutral territories without track record of collaborating with dictatorial regimes? Would they need massive financing, thereby potentially subjecting them to the whims of the moral-free financial markets, or could enough of their functions (CPU load, distributed and encrypted storage) be offloaded, a la bittorrent, to contributing users and neutral, respectable institutions?
How could the OSS communities help build safe alternatives to Google's morality and privacy-compromised offerings?
In the meanwhile some Tibetan support groups are promoting
I don't believe it is necessary for companies from the democratic world to aid and abet the rule of such dictatorships.
However, if a company like the formerly 'do-"no"-evil' (now where's strikethrough when one needs it!?) Google feel it is morally justified to help the CCP in China to keep its own Chinese population and its occupied peoples under a massive censorship and propaganda machinery, it should at least use that opportunity to highlight the dire situation it's in by prominently displaying a notice on each served page:
Did IBM know that they were aiding the genocide of the jews by collaborating with the unelected Nazi regime in Germany? Would IBM do it the same way all over again?
Today anyone doing business in China under the nazi regime there must be aware that China is brutally occupying its neighbors with a Lebensraum policy of wiping out their neighbors as separate nations and peoples. Too bad that today's multinationals and their political cronies have such selective and short memories. What the largest post- and neo-colonial "democratic" powers do, even the smaller democracies must follow thanks to the inter-connectedness of the new global economy. So thanks USA, UK, France, Japan etc. for your "moral leadership" in this neo-colonial game of wink-nudge. (The Russian Federation is of course among the biggest backers of the regime in China, but Russia's neither western nor a democracy...)
And thanks Nixon for your Cold War policy move intending to isolate the Soviet Union by befriending another murderous dictator in Mao Zedong. The policy of economic isolation of the Soviet Union seems to have given some positive results (at least if you ask the Baltic States and the now-free Eastern European countries) so why is the West now helping the remaining expansionist super-dictatorship through massive investments and the relocation of "democratic jobs" there?
If the West really holds Freedom and Democracy as dear as it claims, why not direct that investment to struggling but democratic developing countries instead? Help the Chinese choose: either it's the current genocidal dictatorship and no outside business, or it's the end of the genocidal dictatorship and friendly trade and cultural relationship with the rest of the world will follow. Including with their free Tibetan and Uighur neighbors who would rather trade their national natural resources instead of watching in fear while the Chinese continue ripping them off.
Too bad that the Chinese populace won't learn about their regime's crimes through Google though. If Google wishes to be seen even as merely semi-evil, they should support other efforts aimed at bypassing the censorship machinery they're now part of in China.
It's not like the economic embargo didn't work with the USSR, right? Now almost all of the Soviet-invaded countries and territories are free from occupation and Russia is at least partially free, and generally a far lesser threat to the world than the Soviet empire was before its economic collapse.
Apart from the growing nuke arsenal and massive military modernizing and buildup drive, the Chinese regime has *currently* little chance of creating chaos in the West through political and economic means, but look at their policies and you'll see that they're working furiously to get there. At this pace in a decade or two at most we'll have an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship controlling the majority of the world's energy and raw material markets (through state-subsidized free-market means, compatible with their national socialistic doctrines), and they'll be exporting their decicedly un-free and un-democratic ideals alongside their new trading muscle. USA will be the biggest loser since their current economic might is so largely based on underhanded manipulation of world's resources and market policies which they will lose control of (having made a number of enemies worldwide while they were at it).
If you think that the ruling regime is voluntarily reforming, apart from the their fascist, proven efficient economic policies, you'll be sorely disappointed. They're counting on the democratic world to be too soft and too greedy to do anything about it until it's too late. If anything, I'd expect the waning, chaotic and perhaps fundamentalist-lead USA to be the one resorting to nuclear strikes (and bible; chapter armageddon) when they realize that China's got them by their economic balls.
Either you stand behind your principles and swallow the modest pain while economic activity is shifted from China to more peaceful and democratic countries, or you keep rewarding the power-mad dragon until it's strong enough to call the shots. Eventually the declining democracies will find out whether freedom can co-exist in the shadow of the Chinese empire.
Btw, the Chinese state-controlled firms have already proliferated their nuclear and missile knowhow to various islamic states via Pakistan.
And had you been there to visit Stalin's gulags and Hitler's concentration camps, you'd had found happiness there as well. The occupants probably had good reasons to smile at every outside visitor.
What comes to the Chinese-occupied Tibet and "Xinjiang" (Peking dialect for "western frontier"), the Chinese are certainly happy to be there exploiting their neighbors' natural resources and settling hordes of Chinese migrants into those occupied lands.
Some differences:
As you can see, the regime in China could be overthrown and the people in China and the neighboring peoples under its oppressive occupation liberated through coordinated economic action. Unfortunately the (currently) most powerful democratic economies have chosen a path of collusion and cooperation with the Chinese dictatorship instead of standing up for the values they claim to hold dear, i.e. freedom from oppression, democracy and peoples' right of self-determination. Instead, the West is targetting non-expansionist countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea for punishment while the regime in China, which is in an advanced state of militaristic expansionism, is given royal red-carpet welcomes by western leaders and their sycophantic industrialist backers.
The Nazi regime in Germany embarked on their Holocaust rampage in earnest around 1941-1942 onwards, without Britain or the USA even knowing about it when they declared war on Germany. The Chinese nazi regime is well known to be committing ethnic and cultural cleansing in the neighboring countries it has invaded and the democratic world is expected to do... nothing but collaborate with that regime?
If the Chinese were only committing crimes against their own people, that would already be bad enough, but they're committing genocide against their peaceful neighbors they've kept under brutal occupation for decades.
Chamberlain and especially Churchill were products of the British supremacist/colonial/imperial school of ideology and their actions, including the pact with fellow imperialist Stalin, reflected not the modern values of freedom the West (at least nominally) shares today, but their need was solely to protect the British Empire and its foreign dominions like their predecessors had been doing for centuries.
The United Nations was founded by the victors of the WWII to perpetuate the post-war status quo and to protect the superpowers' interests and spheres of influence in a more coordinated manner instead of the past messy dealings and wheelings between individual empires. Western values have in the past been only used selectively within that UN framework to protect the victims of oppression and occupation when it suits the economic and political interests of a Western superpower but since we now know that this particular emperor has no clothes, why can't the West finally start acting according to the moral ideals it claims to uphold as the foundation of its whole civilization?
It would be so simple in the case of China: just transfer the foreign investments to democratic and non-aggressive developing countries whi
Wonder why... ;-)
Just a slight correction: Just under 3000 people died in those terrorist attacks and quite a few of them were either foreigners or working for the US military-industrial complex, i.e. not US civilians.
Investing in China under its current regime is immoral in so many ways it isn't even funny, with the possible exception of investments that promote China's peoples' ability to communicate independent of the Party censorship.
Unfortunately there are still plenty of chinese, including some with Slashdot mod points, who are simply too indoctrinated to face the extent of their regime's crimes.
Do you think that China loses less face if fewer people know about those crimes? Does the little red opus of communist slogans represent harmless fun to you, perhaps even something glorious? Even China's own historical heritage, not to mention the ethnic chinese populace, suffered from the brutality and excesses of the fervent book-waving masses.
Well the Tibetans, and anyone with access and interest in non-CCP-revised history books, know that Tibet is only "inalienable part of Chinese empire" because certain Mao Zedong sent his battle-hardened communist party army to invade it in 1950. Tibet had decided to give up militarism in favour of buddhist studies centuries earlier (they even invaded China's imperial capital once, but that was settled for an eternal peace and respect for each others' sovereign borders...) so they were easy prey for their indoctrinated and military-expansionist neighbour.
A few years later it took a massive UN-backed military expedition to save South Korea from being overran by the Maoist China-backed North. Tibet fell and remains under brutal occupation and genocidal policies by China, while in South Korea people are free.
If there is no cost involved in destroying one's neighbour (Tibet is actually being ripped off of its natural wealth), be it a trade blockade or military action, knowledge alone provides no protection to the victims.
Of course, in Tibet the occupying chinese are doing everything to distort and suppress information and communications to prevent the people from organizing uprisings, but even when they do rise up there are people like Hu Jintao (China's current Party supremo aka Butcher of Tibet for his brutality as the chief chinese CCP head in Tibet) who have no qualms about using military firepower against unarmed people.
It is extremely tragic that the Tibetans' non-violent struggle for freedom is being doomed by the indifference (and preference to do business with their occupiers instead) of the West. What would you do if you were a Tibetan under the dire circumstances? Knowledge hasn't helped and even if they had guns the chinese have a massive military superiority at every imaginable level.
It ain't easy being a freedom fighter these days. I mean terrorist of course...
Supporting occupied peoples in regaining their freedom is clearly a hindrance to trade when politicians and their corporate cronies have manufacturing bases to export and bucks to be made. It is interesting how the empires of Mao and Lenin, both of whom remain on display full of preservatives, have turned to imperialist fascism (made infamous by their past opponents Japan and Germany respectively, although e.g. the British Empire certainly had such tendencies as well) in order to "earn their rehabilitation" in the eyes of the West.
Western leaders are full of love and affection for dictators like Putin and Hu Jintao (aka the Butcher of Tibet after his brutal crackdown on Tibetans during his reign as the supreme chinese party chief in occupied Tibet) while the non-expansionist socialist dictators of smaller countries, like Cuba's Castro and Zimbabwe's Mugabe, are still being treated like pariahs.
If the western democracies actually asked their electorate which is worse, a small non-expansionist socialist state like Cuba or a genocidally expansionist one-party dictatorship like China, would the western leaders have to act surprised by the answer?
How can the turkic Uighur people be called "separatists" by anyone but the reality-distorted chinese dictatorship when Uighurs have nothing to do with the chinese people ethnically, linguistically, culturally or historically??
Also, while being predominantly muslim, the Uighurs haven't historically had anything to do with islamic extremism; only when China's totalitarian regime began cracking down on their traditional way of life and shipping horders of China's communist army settlers to their homeland using the time-tested Chinese strategy of outnumbering the native people in newly-occupied lands, only then did the Uighurs realize the extent of the coming tragedy.
Religion is often the last solace in the face of brutality and hopelessness and with the "civilized free world" intent on looking away, the Uighurs' only supporters are found in the increasingly oppressive post-Soviet Central Asian states where the regimes are backed by Soviet Russia and China in order to keep the "islamic insurgents" under control. For some reason in today's world muslims can not be considered freedom fighters even when under foreign occupation or under foreign-backed dictatorship...
Be careful or your conservative christian wife will use the rhythm method against you!
The new rail link will not only speed up China's environmentally disastrous exploitation of Tibet's national resources but also hasten the systematically executed demographic disaster which is intended to turn Tibetans into a disenfrancised and sinociziced minority in their own country, not unlike Mongolians after the chinese communists took over "Inner Mongolia" and extended China's railway network there.
China is already using occupied Tibet, historically a neutral buffer state between India and China, as a military and nuclear missile base overlooking South Asia. Part of the Indian planners' realization of the need for an improved road network to complement the existing railways has undoubtably been China's communist-era expansionism towards India (including China's still unresolved invasion of north Indian territories soon after Tibet had been occupied), and Chinese military's ability to easily disable India's railway network with a sneak missile attack from their bases in Tibet.
In ideal world the democratic nations would have a common policy of supporting the economic development of democratic developing countries like India while refusing to prop up expansionist dictatorships like China through trade and investment.
Unfortunately for democratic principles, the special interest groups behind the leaders of the currently rich democratic nations are finding it more lucrative to do just the opposite.