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Interesting Tidbit: The Great Firewall
Feb. 4th, 2008 08:47 amGreat Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels.
From the article:
Very interesting, considering my own experiences with blocking LiveJournal and others. You know what I think? I think people in China should be taught to read English, and handed a copy of The Rights of Man. They'll discover that they're not free. As Lee pointed out in his blog, in many ways, you are left alone to make your own choices: drink at any age, smoke, drive like bats out of hell. But there are two different rule books at work here -- one for the ex-pats, and one for the Chinese. For the Chinese, the restrictions don't seem to be physical ones as much as mental ones: Denying people the opportunity to develop the thought processes necessary to understand politics -- logic and reason -- as well as denying the opportunity to discuss topics, both political and mundane.
( Snipped for long-ish political theorizing. )
Wow. Okay. That went in a completely different direction than I planned...
From the article:
Li Xieheng, a blogger who wrote a program he named Gladder, meaning Great Ladder, [helps] users of the Firefox browser overcome Great Firewall restrictions. “It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the power of media control,”[he said].
Very interesting, considering my own experiences with blocking LiveJournal and others. You know what I think? I think people in China should be taught to read English, and handed a copy of The Rights of Man. They'll discover that they're not free. As Lee pointed out in his blog, in many ways, you are left alone to make your own choices: drink at any age, smoke, drive like bats out of hell. But there are two different rule books at work here -- one for the ex-pats, and one for the Chinese. For the Chinese, the restrictions don't seem to be physical ones as much as mental ones: Denying people the opportunity to develop the thought processes necessary to understand politics -- logic and reason -- as well as denying the opportunity to discuss topics, both political and mundane.
( Snipped for long-ish political theorizing. )
Wow. Okay. That went in a completely different direction than I planned...