Is free speech dead in China?
CH156378
Posts: 1,539
CH156378
Posts: 1,539
CH156378
Posts: 1,539
Comments
gonna say, was it ever alive.
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Oh well, looks like the U.S is doing it's best to catch up. Intimidation and humiliation are powerful tools. Just ask the fella who praised Castro and was then made to backtrack like an obedient little puppy , or ask Roseanne Barr how it felt to receive death threats after singing of the National anthem at a baseball game. Maybe ask the Dixie Chicks how they felt about getting death threats after criticizing George W Bush?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... al-control
A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls. Similar legislation is being pushed forward in the UK.
With that Big Brother eye in place, working alongside these strip-search laws, – between the all-seeing data-mining technology and the terrifying police powers to sexually abuse and humiliate you at will – no one will need a formal coup to have a cowed and compliant citizenry. If you say anything controversial online or on the phone, will you face arrest and sexual humiliation?
Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. I was told by an NYPD sergeant that "safety" issues allow the NYPD to make arrests at will. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters – if there will be any left after these laws start to bite – from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.
Listen, we may have our issues here in the U.S. but we give everyone the chance to speak unlike in your country. We have the freedom to believe or not to believe what we want. We don’t have to bow down to anyone. As for the “fella who praised Castro”, his name is Ozzie Guillen and he happens to manage my hometown baseball team. And in case you haven’t figured it out with that statement, I am a Cuban American. Castro took my grandparents home and business away. My mother was forced to a an indoctrination school and my grandfather was sent to prison because he spoke out against the government. He would eventually die in prison in 1978. There is nothing good about the Chinese system of government. It is no better than Cuba. You might come on to the board and talk all the trash you want but I have seen what Communism does first hand. The last time I checked there aren’t Americans being smuggled out of the United States into China. If Communism is paradise then why are so many Cubans risking their lives to make to South Florida.
As for the sources of your information about our country I suggest you pick another site to get your news. By the way on March 31, 2010, a federal court in California found that any NSA wiretap without a search warrant was illegal. See buddy in this county we have a Constitution that protects the citizens and it’s above anything the government can do.
Tell that to the Occupy protestors who were ridiculed on mainstream t.v and whose views were repeatedly distorted, before they were clubbed by the pigs and thrown in jail.
Though fortunately the direct use of violence and detention is rarely required in the U.S, except when those in power feel genuinely threatened, as the system of coercion and intimidation is alive and well.
In the meantime, unpopular opinion is successfully marginalized, when it isn't completely muffled.
The difference between the U.S and China, is that in the U.S you have the illusion of freedom.
So what? Was he forced to make a public retraction of his statement or wasn't he? Where's the free speech in that?
I said nothing about Communism being paradise. Anyway, do you think there would still be as much poverty in Cuba in the absence of the U.S's 50 year illegal embargo?
Such as?
Your constitution is being eroded in the name of the war on terror.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... al-control
A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls.
how's this?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... nter/all/1
'The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
and given how they rewrote the free speech zone stuff i'd say no, we really don't have the freedom to speak any more
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
And people thought phone tapping was a bad thing?
So much for a constitution that protects the citizens.
For now anyway...
For starters the there were parts of the OWS movement that I thought made great points. Especially the ones against that spoke about the bailouts. Anyhow OWS got the opportunity to speak. I also think the majority of those in the OWS movement were peaceful but there were some that showed up to just look for trouble.
Onto the second point, the Cuban embargo is a joke. If a Cuban citizen on the island has dollars they can purchase anything they please. It’s the government run stores that are low on supplies. The U.S. should lift the embargo and it will rid the Cuban government the excuse that it uses.
There is free speech in the U.S. The issue with the statement that Guillen made is that the that the customers the Marlins are trying to attract are the people hurt the most. When Guillen worked in Chicago he praised Hugo Chavez and nothing happened. But once in South Florida, praising Castro not only hurts Cubans, but Nicaragua and Venezuelans as well.
I didn't realize they were having it so good in Cuba, and that the 50 year embargo has had no effect on people's well-being. Thanks for setting me straight.