If the palestinians were funding their own ticket, it would be a regrettable, but inevitable fact of life. Sometimes pro-war parties do get elected.
But palestinians are not paying for their war government on their own dime. 40% of their government funding comes from western taxpayer pockets. That makes us responsible. Israel is collecting most of palestinian customs fees and tarriffs which is a huge chunk of the rest of their funding so Israel is responsible for killing its own if it releases that money to a pro-war government.
Us paying for somebody else's war justifies our interest and intervention.
The french colonies of Morocco and Algeria had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. They still were the first US invasion site in the Western theater in WW II. They were geographically convenient and Vichy France was no friend of ours. Iraq was similarly convenient because we were already in a state of war with them since 1991, the place was run by a terrorist harboring (Abu Nidal for instance) and training (at Salman Pak for instance) nutball, who happened to be next door to three of the biggest problems facing us in this war, KSA, Iran, and Syria.
Iraq is not a war. Iraq is a campaign in a larger war.
The idea that if we don't go over there, they won't go after us should have died in 1993 with the 1st WTC bombing plot. It didn't and it took the actual downing of the Towers along with all the attacks in-between to finally get through to most people that they don't care if we're here or there. They'll kill us because it serves their purpose.
As to your statistical assertions, you're just spouting enemy propaganda. It's just not true.
As for the idea that we're installing a puppet government, you've got to be kidding me if Sadr is supposed to be a US puppet.
A real war against real armies is a figment of something called the Peace of Westphalia when Europe took the previous style of fighting to its ultimate bloody, insane conclusion. Read up on the Thirty Years War sometime. Al Queda is purposefully trying to overthrow the system because it would send the West back to a time when Islam wasn't so hopelessly behind, civilizationally.
Nobody's tried to do this before, nobody, ever. This is the first time in the history of the US that we've faced it and the scary challenge isn't ultimately physical from them. It's their attempt to give us a geopolitical autoimmune disease so we tear ourselves apart. To fight that, we absolutely need propaganda.
The people who believe in direct clerical rule (rule under the ayatollahs, I said earlier) are generally not the people who take liberal views of who gets dhimmi status. Sure, your average muslim may have a theology I don't like but I can get along with him just fine. He generally isn't out there protesting for direct clerical rule, though. He sees how badly it's turned out for the Iranians with women forced into prostitution under mullah protection and clerics taking a cut of the profits (among many other human tragedies).
I was talking about islamic governance whether under an Al-Queda style caliph or under a Khomeinist rule by cleric. That's the threat, thats the enemy, and most muslims probably don't want that either. That doesn't mean that there isn't an enemy, there isn't a threat, and that we shouldn't mobilize and neutralize that threat.
The US did not create Al Queda. Afghanistan was invaded and as usual, there was a resistence. The Carter administration wanted to feed the resistence enough to bleeed the Soviets dry but not win. Reagan upped the support so they would actually win. There were elements from all over the muslim world in that resistance and I'm proud that my tax dollars went to fund a liberation movement like that.
Some of the people who later went on to form Al Queda did take part in that movement to free Afghanistan but it would be more accurate to blame the US for the Soviet Gulag because we sent aid to the USSR in WW II than accuse the US of creating Al Queda.
That being said, there's plenty of documentary evidence of a differential between what is preached in western tongues and what is preached in arabic. Unlike the Protocols (a czarist secret police forgery), you can buy transcripts and tapes of these things directly from the muslim groups. The nature of these sorts of accusations is generally not "those muslims secretly plot" but that "Sheikh X, that the Bush administration claims is moderate, sayd XYZ in arabic in a speech in Cairo". In other words, if you have the linguistic skills, you can double check the claims and be famous for exposing lies if these claims were indeed false.
Are moderates preaching that those who preach in favor of suicide bombing are apostates and issuing fatwas against them? Are they naming names and mourning specific suicide bombers having been led astray by specific individuals and groups into going to Hell? This sort of attack is not open to christians, only muslims who recoil at the faux islamic culture of death the islamists are promoting.
There are plenty of actions that moderates can take to combat the islamists. They are, in fact, taking some of them and where they do so, I credit them and so do most other people. But oh are they slow to get their act together and some things that could be done are not being done to this day.
There are an awful lot of muslims who don't want ayatollah rule. There are an awful lot of christians who don't want to have governments run by priests, either. I don't think that clerical rule is a good idea. How many muslims do? I'm on the same side as Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq. Clerics should influence the moral tone of a nation but should not directly take power. Are you saying the Ayatollah (probably the preeminent living Shia scholar on the planet) is an anti-muslim bigot?
No, slashdot hasn't changed. Ignorance still rules the roost.
Running a propaganda operation during war time is neither revolting, nor even objectionable. Convincing people not to fight us by shooting people is not superior to convincing them not to fight us through a propaganda compaign.
Hamas Leader Mahmoud Zahar on Al-Manar TV: Why should we recognize Condoleezza Rice... or Israel's right to exist?
Good question.
The tool who said this either doesn't understand or feels like risking his government because without recognizing both Rice and Israel, Hamas can't make payroll. Governments that can't make payroll dissolve, and fast.
How would you feel about a political leader who was playing with fire and the stakes were whether you have police and fire protection next month? Does it still sound like a good question?
Under the ayatollahs, you're muslim, christian, jewish, or dead. They fudged and let the hindus in the "protected" status (called dhimmi) because of practical military difficulties but islamic nukes take care of those just fine.
If you think that freedom is a possibility under the ayatollahs, you have no sense of history or a very strange definition of freedom.
In case you've forgotten the US is a federalist system. This means that Governors are, within limits, sovereign. Barring insurrection or a total breakdown in order, the US President has no right to send 1 single soldier across a state line or even out of their barracks without the permission of a Governor. There are very good reasons for this, lately because for at least the last four presidencies there have been moonbats who seriously think that the other party is preparing a coup. If you don't believe me, look at the Daily Kos today or Free Republic during the Clinton years.
The city didn't prep the buses so the poor people couldn't get out. That's just a fact and not an excuse. The Governor delayed permission to let federal troops in for fear of losing control. That's been pretty well established The President could have kicked ass and taken the political consequences and stayed his hand. That's pretty hard to deny.
These aren't excuses but observations of what happened and judgments. Katrina was not our finest hour. Part of the reason for that is that the US isn't the PRC. It's the longest running, biggest multistate political Union in the history of the planet. Allowing that to go forward does create special conditions. But special conditions don't include cultural genocide (nor the other kind either), they don't include banning religions because they're organized enough to create a mass flash mob to do deep breathing exercises right where the bureaucrats live. The PRC is alone in certain kinds of censorship and we can and should call them on it. They can do better. If they're to survive they *must* do better.
Now the BS comment isn't directed at you or your brother. In the US, a 92 year old grabs their chest and has a heart attack during an evacuation and that's put down as an evacuation death. Several million people in the general population do anything for 6 hours and somebody's going to die. That's just a statistical reality. International stats are a great bag of fun regarding differing standards of counting things but labeling them the same.
Marx, not Lenin, invented the idea of class logic, that proletarians could have a logic all their own which was impervious to criticism from outside their class. Once you let that meme out, Lenin, Stalin, and all the rest of the red butchers were inevitable.
If you have a street corner vendor license, I assure you that you can sell adult sexual content (commonly called porn) in the US. Depending on the city it'll be behind the kiosk counter, in a sealed bag, or have some sort of barrier so that the prepubescent can't readily breach but that common sense hurdle is hardly censorship. The obscene (as opposed to porn) is not permitted but that changes from place to place depending on "community standards".
The PRC is currently repressing Falun Gong. They do it by arresting its adherents, torturing them into renouncing the faith and use every possible form of public propaganda against the group. There is no Western analogue. The closest is Germany's problems with Scientology. It really isn't the same.
The PRC suppresses non-han cultural expression especially in areas that might secede. You can argue that there are analogues in the case of seperatist ethnic movements in the West but the cultural suppression really doesn't have any modern analogue to the Dalai Lama being kept out of Tibet. Nor is there any sort of analogue to the ban on the Roman Catholic Church (though that one seems to be getting better).
There are certain forms of repression in the PRC that do have analogues in the West. There are others that are unique to the PRC and they tend to be the most pernicious of their censorship efforts.
When the PRC violently represses the people's natural desire for freedom, the survivors often escape or are exiled abroad. The US, in fact the entire West, restricts these exiles' ability to continue the fight for freedom. We do this for good reason. If we did not, we would constantly be having foreign hit squads traipsing through and killing these exiles who just won't quit. Every once in awhile things would go really wrong and the US would find itself in a war due to exile agitation.
This makes us partners in the repression of foreign despots. How else can we make amends but to raise our own voice and attempt to push for reforms in a way that will not lead to war?
Communism, as an economic system, has the same performance goal as every other economic system. The basic problem is that desires are infinite while resources are finite. Rationing has to occur somehow and this is done in modern societies by setting prices on the various resources so you can tell whether a particular project is worth doing or not.
No communist system in any variant, real or theoretical, has ever succeeded in being able to set a price on resources. They just can't do it. For decades, they haven't even tried. When you raise the subject with modern communists they deny the problem's importance because everybody who is at least somewhat knowledgeable about economics knows that communism has nothing useful to say about price setting.
Communism is a failure both theoretically and practically and when people realize it a few months into the nth "experiment" to try and make it work and want to back out of it the system quickly turns evil by stopping the disintegration of the experiment by force.
This is the real contribution of Marx. Prior to him, plenty of communist experiments happened. They all fizzled and dissolved themselves peacefully. Post Marx, the peaceful dissolution of failed communist experiments were a rarity. Mostly they fell by force.
Actually, the US hosts most of the Al Queda sites up there because of our difficult take down rules. In fact, the US Government works hard (but very quietly) against the guys trying to take down the sites. They're much more useful for intelligence gathering if they stay up and are stable than if they keep moving quickly as they get taken down.
I'll leave the readership to figure out whether I'm telling the truth or spreading pro-US disinformation. Hey, maybe both!
I googled up the UN convention on the child and was surprised to find advocacy organizations insisting that circumcision is a human rights violation. The Convention also apparently says that spanking is to be banned.
Now there is certainly child abuse out there and parents can abuse their children but when a UN committee says that Canada should ban all physical punishment, no matter how slight, something about this particular convention is just strange.
Here's the quote: The conventions "explicitly prohibit all forms of violence against children, however light, within the family, in schools and in other institutions where children might be placed." Canada's existing legislation allowing parents to use reasonable force to discipline their children is apparently a violation of the rules.
In practice, a child who insists on running out and playing in traffic is going to be physically disciplined. It might be forceful restraint, a shake, a jerk, or a swat on the bottom. To do otherwise is child abuse. Other countries are comfortable in having laws criminalizing parents for doing their job. I'm glad the US is not such a country.
In Bucharest, 1990, thugs were wandering around with rebar looking to put a beating on any democracy protesters (I know because I was there). Today, Romania has a multi-party democracy and has done three separate party changes without violence. Read Federalist #10, the defining US document on handling political faction in a republic. Here's the kicker, free republics have a reverse scaling problem. They fail if they are too small, they have too few factions. We've been living by that document's politics for two centuries and are one of the longest lived governing systems on the planet and that includes the vast majority of Europe.
So if little Romania can manage to figure out faction why can't an easier case like the PRC manage to do it?
If you haven't looked it up, New Orleans had an evacuation plan. It's available on the 'net. The buses that were supposed to be manned by city workers were left in their parking lots and flooded out. The pictures of that are on the 'net too. New Orleans has known since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 that they needed to have an evacuation plan ready. They couldn't get their act together in 40 years.
Now corrupt government officials who don't do their job are no stranger in the PRC. several million evacuated and zero casualties? I call BS. This is the same government system that tried to cover up SARS, probably has been covering up bird flu, and most certainly covers up day-in day-out disasters over a number of things from environmental spills to mining disasters.
The PRC is not a normal country. It's not just a little behind the curve. It's a country coming out of a truly evil system and it's not quite sure whether it wants to quit that evil or not.
Do the basque have more freedom on the net than the tibetans for cultural expression? Does the Church of Scientology get restricted in the FRG anywhere near what Falun Gong gets, or even the Roman Catholic Church do in the PRC? Try setting up an alternate party in the PRC. Is there any Western country that is similar in reaction?
David Duke no doubt has a driver's license. Does that make every driver's license holder a KKK symp? The PRC has both differences in degree and kind from Western censorship, even those parts of the West that are somewhat on the fringe of the Western consensus.
Short of armed insurrection or crooked elections George Bush can't remove local officials. My understanding of PRC federalism is that it's nowhere near as free of central control as that.
The West, in general, does not shutter press outlets, certainly not for printing items critical of the government of the day. The West, in general, does not have general interest topics like Tibet, Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution or Falun Gong, that need to be treated with extraordinary sensitivity in order to avoid prison or worse. In the West, Leet speak is an affectation. In the PRC it is a serious attempt to avoid the attention of censor alogrithms.
To say that the PRC is just like the West is objectively not true and not even close to true.
It would be a fairly simple database for Google, MSN, et al to publish all their takedowns by jurisdiction, reason, and who issued the order with special bonus points for including the appeal process for the takedown. Since the PRC is just modeling its content restriction regime (censorship to you and me) on the West, it should have very similar statistical profiles.
The data is out there because these companies have to coordinate takedowns so that the evening shift doesn't put back what the day shift took off. So why aren't they publishing? Wouldn't the PRC love to have independent validation that its model is only minimally different than any western country?
Sometimes, the best riposte is to take a statement absolutely seriously as if it were completely honest. This is one of those times.
We believe you PRC and we're going to document it.
Slashdot Mirror
If the palestinians were funding their own ticket, it would be a regrettable, but inevitable fact of life. Sometimes pro-war parties do get elected.
But palestinians are not paying for their war government on their own dime. 40% of their government funding comes from western taxpayer pockets. That makes us responsible. Israel is collecting most of palestinian customs fees and tarriffs which is a huge chunk of the rest of their funding so Israel is responsible for killing its own if it releases that money to a pro-war government.
Us paying for somebody else's war justifies our interest and intervention.
The french colonies of Morocco and Algeria had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. They still were the first US invasion site in the Western theater in WW II. They were geographically convenient and Vichy France was no friend of ours. Iraq was similarly convenient because we were already in a state of war with them since 1991, the place was run by a terrorist harboring (Abu Nidal for instance) and training (at Salman Pak for instance) nutball, who happened to be next door to three of the biggest problems facing us in this war, KSA, Iran, and Syria.
Iraq is not a war. Iraq is a campaign in a larger war.
The idea that if we don't go over there, they won't go after us should have died in 1993 with the 1st WTC bombing plot. It didn't and it took the actual downing of the Towers along with all the attacks in-between to finally get through to most people that they don't care if we're here or there. They'll kill us because it serves their purpose.
As to your statistical assertions, you're just spouting enemy propaganda. It's just not true.
As for the idea that we're installing a puppet government, you've got to be kidding me if Sadr is supposed to be a US puppet.
A real war against real armies is a figment of something called the Peace of Westphalia when Europe took the previous style of fighting to its ultimate bloody, insane conclusion. Read up on the Thirty Years War sometime. Al Queda is purposefully trying to overthrow the system because it would send the West back to a time when Islam wasn't so hopelessly behind, civilizationally.
Nobody's tried to do this before, nobody, ever. This is the first time in the history of the US that we've faced it and the scary challenge isn't ultimately physical from them. It's their attempt to give us a geopolitical autoimmune disease so we tear ourselves apart. To fight that, we absolutely need propaganda.
Yeah, you're out of luck in an islamic government unless you're willing to live a lie and pretend to faith. Homosexuals are not doing so good either.
The people who believe in direct clerical rule (rule under the ayatollahs, I said earlier) are generally not the people who take liberal views of who gets dhimmi status. Sure, your average muslim may have a theology I don't like but I can get along with him just fine. He generally isn't out there protesting for direct clerical rule, though. He sees how badly it's turned out for the Iranians with women forced into prostitution under mullah protection and clerics taking a cut of the profits (among many other human tragedies).
I was talking about islamic governance whether under an Al-Queda style caliph or under a Khomeinist rule by cleric. That's the threat, thats the enemy, and most muslims probably don't want that either. That doesn't mean that there isn't an enemy, there isn't a threat, and that we shouldn't mobilize and neutralize that threat.
The US did not create Al Queda. Afghanistan was invaded and as usual, there was a resistence. The Carter administration wanted to feed the resistence enough to bleeed the Soviets dry but not win. Reagan upped the support so they would actually win. There were elements from all over the muslim world in that resistance and I'm proud that my tax dollars went to fund a liberation movement like that.
Some of the people who later went on to form Al Queda did take part in that movement to free Afghanistan but it would be more accurate to blame the US for the Soviet Gulag because we sent aid to the USSR in WW II than accuse the US of creating Al Queda.
That being said, there's plenty of documentary evidence of a differential between what is preached in western tongues and what is preached in arabic. Unlike the Protocols (a czarist secret police forgery), you can buy transcripts and tapes of these things directly from the muslim groups. The nature of these sorts of accusations is generally not "those muslims secretly plot" but that "Sheikh X, that the Bush administration claims is moderate, sayd XYZ in arabic in a speech in Cairo". In other words, if you have the linguistic skills, you can double check the claims and be famous for exposing lies if these claims were indeed false.
Are moderates preaching that those who preach in favor of suicide bombing are apostates and issuing fatwas against them? Are they naming names and mourning specific suicide bombers having been led astray by specific individuals and groups into going to Hell? This sort of attack is not open to christians, only muslims who recoil at the faux islamic culture of death the islamists are promoting.
There are plenty of actions that moderates can take to combat the islamists. They are, in fact, taking some of them and where they do so, I credit them and so do most other people. But oh are they slow to get their act together and some things that could be done are not being done to this day.
There are an awful lot of muslims who don't want ayatollah rule. There are an awful lot of christians who don't want to have governments run by priests, either. I don't think that clerical rule is a good idea. How many muslims do? I'm on the same side as Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq. Clerics should influence the moral tone of a nation but should not directly take power. Are you saying the Ayatollah (probably the preeminent living Shia scholar on the planet) is an anti-muslim bigot?
No, slashdot hasn't changed. Ignorance still rules the roost.
Running a propaganda operation during war time is neither revolting, nor even objectionable. Convincing people not to fight us by shooting people is not superior to convincing them not to fight us through a propaganda compaign.
The tool who said this either doesn't understand or feels like risking his government because without recognizing both Rice and Israel, Hamas can't make payroll. Governments that can't make payroll dissolve, and fast.
How would you feel about a political leader who was playing with fire and the stakes were whether you have police and fire protection next month? Does it still sound like a good question?
Under the ayatollahs, you're muslim, christian, jewish, or dead. They fudged and let the hindus in the "protected" status (called dhimmi) because of practical military difficulties but islamic nukes take care of those just fine.
If you think that freedom is a possibility under the ayatollahs, you have no sense of history or a very strange definition of freedom.
Your comment is just as relevant to the anti-bush grandparent as the parent attempting to defend bush. Neither of them are relevant.
In case you've forgotten the US is a federalist system. This means that Governors are, within limits, sovereign. Barring insurrection or a total breakdown in order, the US President has no right to send 1 single soldier across a state line or even out of their barracks without the permission of a Governor. There are very good reasons for this, lately because for at least the last four presidencies there have been moonbats who seriously think that the other party is preparing a coup. If you don't believe me, look at the Daily Kos today or Free Republic during the Clinton years.
The city didn't prep the buses so the poor people couldn't get out. That's just a fact and not an excuse.
The Governor delayed permission to let federal troops in for fear of losing control. That's been pretty well established
The President could have kicked ass and taken the political consequences and stayed his hand. That's pretty hard to deny.
These aren't excuses but observations of what happened and judgments. Katrina was not our finest hour. Part of the reason for that is that the US isn't the PRC. It's the longest running, biggest multistate political Union in the history of the planet. Allowing that to go forward does create special conditions. But special conditions don't include cultural genocide (nor the other kind either), they don't include banning religions because they're organized enough to create a mass flash mob to do deep breathing exercises right where the bureaucrats live. The PRC is alone in certain kinds of censorship and we can and should call them on it. They can do better. If they're to survive they *must* do better.
Now the BS comment isn't directed at you or your brother. In the US, a 92 year old grabs their chest and has a heart attack during an evacuation and that's put down as an evacuation death. Several million people in the general population do anything for 6 hours and somebody's going to die. That's just a statistical reality. International stats are a great bag of fun regarding differing standards of counting things but labeling them the same.
Marx, not Lenin, invented the idea of class logic, that proletarians could have a logic all their own which was impervious to criticism from outside their class. Once you let that meme out, Lenin, Stalin, and all the rest of the red butchers were inevitable.
If you have a street corner vendor license, I assure you that you can sell adult sexual content (commonly called porn) in the US. Depending on the city it'll be behind the kiosk counter, in a sealed bag, or have some sort of barrier so that the prepubescent can't readily breach but that common sense hurdle is hardly censorship. The obscene (as opposed to porn) is not permitted but that changes from place to place depending on "community standards".
The PRC is currently repressing Falun Gong. They do it by arresting its adherents, torturing them into renouncing the faith and use every possible form of public propaganda against the group. There is no Western analogue. The closest is Germany's problems with Scientology. It really isn't the same.
The PRC suppresses non-han cultural expression especially in areas that might secede. You can argue that there are analogues in the case of seperatist ethnic movements in the West but the cultural suppression really doesn't have any modern analogue to the Dalai Lama being kept out of Tibet. Nor is there any sort of analogue to the ban on the Roman Catholic Church (though that one seems to be getting better).
There are certain forms of repression in the PRC that do have analogues in the West. There are others that are unique to the PRC and they tend to be the most pernicious of their censorship efforts.
When the PRC violently represses the people's natural desire for freedom, the survivors often escape or are exiled abroad. The US, in fact the entire West, restricts these exiles' ability to continue the fight for freedom. We do this for good reason. If we did not, we would constantly be having foreign hit squads traipsing through and killing these exiles who just won't quit. Every once in awhile things would go really wrong and the US would find itself in a war due to exile agitation.
This makes us partners in the repression of foreign despots. How else can we make amends but to raise our own voice and attempt to push for reforms in a way that will not lead to war?
Communism, as an economic system, has the same performance goal as every other economic system. The basic problem is that desires are infinite while resources are finite. Rationing has to occur somehow and this is done in modern societies by setting prices on the various resources so you can tell whether a particular project is worth doing or not.
No communist system in any variant, real or theoretical, has ever succeeded in being able to set a price on resources. They just can't do it. For decades, they haven't even tried. When you raise the subject with modern communists they deny the problem's importance because everybody who is at least somewhat knowledgeable about economics knows that communism has nothing useful to say about price setting.
Communism is a failure both theoretically and practically and when people realize it a few months into the nth "experiment" to try and make it work and want to back out of it the system quickly turns evil by stopping the disintegration of the experiment by force.
This is the real contribution of Marx. Prior to him, plenty of communist experiments happened. They all fizzled and dissolved themselves peacefully. Post Marx, the peaceful dissolution of failed communist experiments were a rarity. Mostly they fell by force.
Actually, the US hosts most of the Al Queda sites up there because of our difficult take down rules. In fact, the US Government works hard (but very quietly) against the guys trying to take down the sites. They're much more useful for intelligence gathering if they stay up and are stable than if they keep moving quickly as they get taken down.
I'll leave the readership to figure out whether I'm telling the truth or spreading pro-US disinformation. Hey, maybe both!
I googled up the UN convention on the child and was surprised to find advocacy organizations insisting that circumcision is a human rights violation. The Convention also apparently says that spanking is to be banned.
Now there is certainly child abuse out there and parents can abuse their children but when a UN committee says that Canada should ban all physical punishment, no matter how slight, something about this particular convention is just strange.
Here's the quote:
The conventions "explicitly prohibit all forms of violence against children, however light, within the family, in schools and in other institutions where children might be placed." Canada's existing legislation allowing parents to use reasonable force to discipline their children is apparently a violation of the rules.
In practice, a child who insists on running out and playing in traffic is going to be physically disciplined. It might be forceful restraint, a shake, a jerk, or a swat on the bottom. To do otherwise is child abuse. Other countries are comfortable in having laws criminalizing parents for doing their job. I'm glad the US is not such a country.
In Bucharest, 1990, thugs were wandering around with rebar looking to put a beating on any democracy protesters (I know because I was there). Today, Romania has a multi-party democracy and has done three separate party changes without violence. Read Federalist #10, the defining US document on handling political faction in a republic. Here's the kicker, free republics have a reverse scaling problem. They fail if they are too small, they have too few factions. We've been living by that document's politics for two centuries and are one of the longest lived governing systems on the planet and that includes the vast majority of Europe.
So if little Romania can manage to figure out faction why can't an easier case like the PRC manage to do it?
If you haven't looked it up, New Orleans had an evacuation plan. It's available on the 'net. The buses that were supposed to be manned by city workers were left in their parking lots and flooded out. The pictures of that are on the 'net too. New Orleans has known since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 that they needed to have an evacuation plan ready. They couldn't get their act together in 40 years.
Now corrupt government officials who don't do their job are no stranger in the PRC. several million evacuated and zero casualties? I call BS. This is the same government system that tried to cover up SARS, probably has been covering up bird flu, and most certainly covers up day-in day-out disasters over a number of things from environmental spills to mining disasters.
The PRC is not a normal country. It's not just a little behind the curve. It's a country coming out of a truly evil system and it's not quite sure whether it wants to quit that evil or not.
Do the basque have more freedom on the net than the tibetans for cultural expression? Does the Church of Scientology get restricted in the FRG anywhere near what Falun Gong gets, or even the Roman Catholic Church do in the PRC? Try setting up an alternate party in the PRC. Is there any Western country that is similar in reaction?
David Duke no doubt has a driver's license. Does that make every driver's license holder a KKK symp? The PRC has both differences in degree and kind from Western censorship, even those parts of the West that are somewhat on the fringe of the Western consensus.
Short of armed insurrection or crooked elections George Bush can't remove local officials. My understanding of PRC federalism is that it's nowhere near as free of central control as that.
The West, in general, does not shutter press outlets, certainly not for printing items critical of the government of the day. The West, in general, does not have general interest topics like Tibet, Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution or Falun Gong, that need to be treated with extraordinary sensitivity in order to avoid prison or worse. In the West, Leet speak is an affectation. In the PRC it is a serious attempt to avoid the attention of censor alogrithms.
To say that the PRC is just like the West is objectively not true and not even close to true.
It would be a fairly simple database for Google, MSN, et al to publish all their takedowns by jurisdiction, reason, and who issued the order with special bonus points for including the appeal process for the takedown. Since the PRC is just modeling its content restriction regime (censorship to you and me) on the West, it should have very similar statistical profiles.
The data is out there because these companies have to coordinate takedowns so that the evening shift doesn't put back what the day shift took off. So why aren't they publishing? Wouldn't the PRC love to have independent validation that its model is only minimally different than any western country?
Sometimes, the best riposte is to take a statement absolutely seriously as if it were completely honest. This is one of those times.
We believe you PRC and we're going to document it.