Well, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.
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China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
61–70 of 131 posts
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having several friends and relatives who are either attending or alumni... no, AFAIK it's pretty isolated for students without a car. Not that you can't get away, just that for most people leaving the campus isn't a daily activity. Also, I would be surprised if many of the nearby businesses had public wifi, unless there's a Starbucks I've missed.
You don't even need to move a centimeter. All you need is an iPhone with 3G. Or is that not allowed for students of the university? Sorry, I didn't read the full article.
Well, similarly, every Chinese person annoyed at the censorship just needs a short-wave radio to pick up global broadcasts. (unless they're jamming that frequency somehow) That doesn't make it any less bad. Personally, I have yet to own a phone with internet access.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#63The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…
An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is…
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Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera. One of the most conservative people I know, a PoliSci major, gets a large portion of his news from AlJ. If you took that away from him he'd hoist the black flag and start slitting throats the next morning.
>That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera. Lets be realistic. Only a small portion of Americans follow AlJ. Just like I'm sure there are small proportion of Chinese that follow western news stories about china closely. The parent post was talking about average citizens not political engaged people.
Yeah, but here's the thing about the US. It's a large enough number of people, to the point where somebody would be making noise until it was remedied. Also, I'd like to think that the US is culturally diverse enough, that there are large communities and groups of people outside the standard "white male" category who are reading AlJ, and would complain loudly if said paper was fire-walled. Lastly, hopefully there would be trusted academics and professors who would yell and howl and moan about the ethics of it. Then the stereotypical American would get involved, over the simple facts that his is America, and he loves freedom.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they could go down the road to the local coffee shop/home/mobile network and browse the internet, unblocked. No? They have options. I'm not sure the Chinese population have (such an easy) option to get around it.
Having several friends and relatives who are either attending or alumni... no, AFAIK it's pretty isolated for students without a car. Not that you can't get away, just that for most people leaving the campus isn't a daily activity. Also, I would be surprised if many of the nearby businesses had public wifi, unless there's a Starbucks I've missed.
The thing is, attendance at Liberty is non-compulsory. I'm sure it does feel like China to the more worldly of its student body, but there is no law compelling them to attend there. (Maybe family is, but that's different story ;)
I think it is very inaccurate to portray the environment and "conditions" at Liberty as a microcosm of the US, let alone as an apt comparison to the people of China being kept in the dark by their government.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#66Well, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.
That's a completely illogical conclusion to make. Whether it is true or not, blocking a page does not imply admission of guilt. If the article was complete bullshit, they still would have blocked it. B (Admission of guilt) -> A (Truth) is not the same as A -> B.
No, it is not a logically sound argument, and is not proof. But in this world of imperfect information, sometimes you have to infer certain facts simply based on action and reaction. Also, truth (or fact) in such articles is very seldom a 1 or 0, there are many shades of it, many sides of the story. it's like there are a million other little letters between A -> B, sometimes its a guestimate where is falls on the scale. Another thing to remember, even articles appearing in the NYT are written by humans, who aware of it or not, write with some pre-bias, or with an intent.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Liberty is a private university, and its students choose to attend knowing full-well its policies. (And it blocks a lot more than WaPo.) FIRE and the Virginia ACLU both agree with Liberty's right to do so: http://thefire.org/article/10717.html You are, of course, free to criticize LU for its policies.
The point is that they used their control over the information available to their "population" to retaliate against and block journalism that revealed information unfavorable to their internal narrative. I'd say that's the exact same tactic.
I block Hacker News in my hosts file at work to maintain productivity, so I guess I'm no better than China either.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just in China, I'm sure if this was AlJazeera being blocked in the US the majority of Americans wouldn't care as well.
If the Obama Administration started regularly deleting tweets and removing things from Google search results, a pretty big chunk of the American people would be really pissed off about that - including the Supreme Court and most Attorneys General. And people would vigorously hunt down the information that was being hidden from them. Generally speaking, this is not the case in China. The people know this is being done…
They already do it with torrent websites and nobody cares, how much of a stretch is other politically inconvenient sites being unilaterally blocked?
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#69The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…
An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is…
That's interesting. I wonder how Japan scores on those scales as they share many cultural values with China, but have vary different governments.
Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
#70The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…
An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is…
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