Senior Chinese official Lu Wei has made news this week by assuring the world that there is no censorship in China. He should know, Lu is the chief censor in China. If you cannot believe a government censor, who can you believe?
What is most striking about the interview with Lu is the Orwellian doublespeak that he used with absolute comfort and no apparent evidence of embarrassment or self-awareness. Lu insisted (in response to a CNN reporter) that “It is a misuse of words if you say ‘content censorship.’ But no censorship does not mean there is no management. The Chinese government learnt how to manage the internet from Western developed countries, we have not learnt enough yet.”
That “management” however concerns blocking those that Lu and his censors consider unfriendly because he insists that China “has the right to choose friends.” So it is not censorship just de-friending on a global scale. Lu said “As for who comes to my home, indeed I have to choose [to make sure] those who come are friends. We don’t welcome those who earn China’s money, take China’s market, and then slander China.” Of course, he is choosing for all Chinese people not his own computer in maintaining the Great Firewall of China.
Lu is the smiling face of Chinese authoritarian rule. This utter nonsense is the foundation for his system of repression and yet he is wined and dined through the world by countries and businesses eager to enter the Chinese market on his terms.
The greatest danger however is the growing calls for regulation and censorship in the West to address extremist sites and messages. As discussed earlier on PBS, those proposals can resonate with many of us but they often leave the question of definition dangerously undefined in asking for greater government intervention.
SOURCE: HongKongFP
One of the purposes of free speech in the US is control. We now know that a) the NSA is keeping leviathanesque records of all keystrokes uploaded to the internet, and b) that they have dossiers about American citizens. Not just our metadata from phone calls, but you name it. They know where we stand also in part because they can track what we say across the internet.
They designed TOR but I’ll bet they can crack it too, which is why they developed it in the first place.
The US is a soft-power totalitarian regime. Most of the control here is covert psychological enculturation rather than gulag enforced submission. More Brave New World than 1984. So the hard power regimes like China are more honest.
China has a lot of problems but censorship is probably one of their wisest policies. They are a different nation and a different culture. Liberals want us to respect that unless it means they run their country a different way. But history is clear that liberal values are socially disruptive and serve to advance capitalist interests often at the sake of the common good. If they want to continue their national autonomy, they will take liberal platitudes with a grain of salt. The bottom line for them is nationalism not individualism. They laugh at us.
We should tame our imperialistic arrogance. They have been busy forearming themselves against it.
http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/china-tests-new-missile-capable-of-hitting-entire-united-states/
Beldar;
“750,000 Chinese die prematurely each year, primarily because of air pollution in large cities.”
“From 1954 to 2006 a large increase in the lung cancer incidence rate was seen, despite the drop in the overall smoking rate.”
From: The Diplomat, Yanzhong Huang.
BarkinDog
“John: The phenomena was termed “convergence”.”
Not to put too fine a point on it but the word is TREASON, with a pinch of subversion and a dash of insurrection thrown in for good measure.
You and your collectivist-cum-socialist-cum-communist ilk might be interested to learn that, in the 17th century, the penalty for treason in Britain was Drawing and Quartering.
Although it is ubiquitous, it is mortally unconstitutional, the Communist Manifesto that is, its driving, anathematic, antithetical and unconstitutional principles being:
Central Planning
Control of the Means of Production
Social Engineering
Redistribution of Wealth
Each of these heinous aberrations of mankind’s natural state of freedom is untenable under the American founding documents, which limit governance to security and infrastructure, while providing the new Sovereign, the People, with freedom and free enterprise without interference by government and private property rights (possession and disposition). Redistribution, social engineering, control of industry and central planning CANNOT and SHALL NOT exist in America under the Preamble, Constitution and Bill of Rights, 1789 (subsequent amendments being null and void – carrying no force of law consequent to their unconstitutionality).
That list of communist principles describes contemporary America. The architects and administrators, presumably, would then be traitors.
I, for one, would not like to be Drawn and Quartered, or suffer a contemporary rendition.
Darren Smith, the preceding mysteriously posted here.
Darren Smith,
Comments won’t post on the “Gambia” article. If censorship has not been imposed,
would you please post this on your “Gambia” article:
__________
**************
“this action would serve to break from the nations “colonial past.”
_____
Funny, Obama’s father was a radical extremist anti-Colonialist, anti-American activist who apparently died in his third automobile “accident” after a “day of drinking in Nairobi.”
Funnier still, the Jay/Washington letter of 1786, raised the requirement for president from “citizen” to “natural born citizen” to place a “strong check” to foreign allegiances by the commander-in-chief.
Anybody know who the current commander-in-chief is?
He wouldn’t be in the “pursuit of [foreign allegiance] happiness” by way of the “Dreams from My Father,” would he?
__________
Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw:
ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.
BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.
ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.
BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.
__________
For example, is Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the population through foreign immigration a “foreign allegiance,” even treason – anti-colonialism?
Alexander Hamilton on immigration:
“In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
_____
P.S.
You’d think the American post-colonialists would object to the “fundamental transformation,” AKA conquest, of their nation. Oh, oh. That might be politically incorrect. We should call the commissar from the presidium – the local political officer – and make sure we’re aligned with the manifesto.
Obama’s Press Secretary Cannot Explain How More Gun Control Would Stop Shootings
Reporter calls out White House on executive push
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y06ED18qxbY
My personal take on this is that they WANT to show that background checks won’t stop these shootings so they can escalate to gun registration and gun confiscation.
There are too many humans in China. Not enough tea.
Respiratory failure in China is because they all smoke. You can put the air pollution in front of the smoking of tobacco as the cause of death if you want to but that is like putting trigger finger as the cause and not the bullet.
(music)
We went to the animal fair. The birds and beasts were there. The old baboon by the light of the moon was combing his auburn hair. The monkey he got drunk and fell on the elephant’s trunk. The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees and that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk.
Who then is the monkey’s uncle?
The story of Chinese deceit will be told in time.
China has more money now to spend on there military. Most of this budget is secret.
China is behind most of the theft of US intellectual property, according to the FBI.
Animal torture in China still goes on. Skinning dogs alive, breeding Tigers and starving them in small cages then skinning them alive for their fur and bones. Tiger bone is used in Chinese medicine.
China’s climate is deteriorating with thousands of Chinese are dying from respiratory failure because of their climate.
All in all, China is a despicable country and getting more so.
John: The phenomena was termed “convergence”. We will become more dictatorial and they will become more capitalist. Never the Twain shall meet. Maybe it was John Maynard Keynes who coined that word and the theory behind it. And all the tea is no longer in China. And neither is all the pea.
BarkinDog
“Almost everyone in America has forgotten that China is a Communist State. Yeah, they embrace Capitalism when it suits them.”
Seriously? You just said that.
Take a good look and tell me what you see in America.
Welfare, food stamps, affirmative action, social services, Obamacare, striking teachers union thugs, “comparable pay” for union government workers, “Fair Housing,” “Anti-Discrimination” law, forced busing, “hate crime” law, WIC, HUD, HHS, HAMP, HARP, Education, Labor, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, extended unemployment insurance, Central Planning FED/TREASURY/MILITARY/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX (AKA “dictatorship of the proletariat”), unconstitutional 13th, 14th, 15th amendments (“property,” like horses and cars, has no standing, govt. must set and control borders and immigration) denial of innate right to secession invoked by Catalonia, Scotland, West Virginia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the entire USSR, etc.
“The land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Ben Franklin’s restricted-vote republic, distinctly NOT one man, one vote “democracy,” 1789: Male, European, 21 with 50lbs. Sterling or 50 acres. Representative republican government began at home with the undiluted man’s vote representing the family and precluding the vote by “undesirables.”
Ben Franklin, 1789, we gave you “…a republic, if you can keep it.”
Ben Franklin, 2015, we gave you “…a republic, if you can take it back.”
“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness…. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
PLATO, The Republic
I would not be surprised to find this feckless foreign policy is not merely to give cause for more security (less liberty) at home but to generate a demand for a “global” force, perhaps through the UN that will be given powers over all member nations.
There was a political philospher or yak talker back in the 70s who talked of “convergience”. That meant that the East and the West would converge.
Ok, bloggers: who said that?
The No Fly List is completely inappropriate to use as a basis for denying firearms. It’s rife with errors without any remedy for corrections. There have even been stories about pilots erroneously getting on the No Fly List. Problems with people with common names.
I think it’s going to be quite difficult for the FBI and CIA and the Department of Homeland Security to prevent all future terrorist attacks. In order for them to have caught Tafsheen before she came to the US on a finance visa (which is very unusual for a Pakistani woman to travel like that. They usually get married in Pakistan and then travel here.), they would have had to go over all her emails, find any computers she may have used, like at a friend’s house, and go over her digital and physical relationships with a fine tooth comb.
We get hundreds of thousands of immigrants here annually. Our FBI has the capability of tailing maybe 70 people 24/7, tops. We don’t have the resources to ferret out all this information beforehand. it’s after a tragedy, when they go all in on resources, that they can uncover the proof of radicalization.
The mere mention that certain rules, regulations and safeguards are, at times, unreliable or flawed, is no excuse for the wholesale disregard of those same rules, regulations and safeguards. Obviously, that is lost on certain limited people. A prudent, wise and thoughtful remark would be that the flaws and irregularities, which have surfaced and been revealed through various blatant and obvious systematic fails, should work to assist in identifying and clarifying the changes which are needed to rectify the problems. A thoughtless and unwise person, on the other hand, is wiling to throw the baby out with the bathwater in that he fails to grasp what is useful and meaningful despite some obvious failures. Toss the system, arm yourself to the hilt and down terrorists, on your own, on trains. Yeah, that’s the ticket.