June 12, 2006
Spare us
Yesterday’s Capital had a strongly-worded comment piece about online censorship.
Let there be a free cyberspace!Dear internet gods, spare us the relentless advertising, the vulgar chatrooms and child pornography sites. Spare us the deviant lies and half-truths by racists and tribalists who use cyberspace to say things that they do not have the guts to say in public. Spare us also from governments like China’s, which lulls its people with shallow economic gains but clamps down on dissidents even on the internet.
Most importantly, we can do without the hypocrisy of Google and Yahoo who have effectively compromised the sovereignty of the internet by cutting a censorship deal with the Chinese.
All that is missing is a reference to blogs and link-spam.
Posted by aheavens at June 12, 2006 2:50 PM
Comments
The capital needs to stop suffocating self-censorship before it opposes censorship generally.Should the paper bring the Chinese experience to oppose cyber-censorship while there are plenty of examples closer to home? The great critiques of censorship like Cato and Zekarias Chaffee embarked on their crusade speaking against what was happening at their country.
"Spare us from governments like ours which lulls its people with ludicrous claims of economic development but clamps down on dissidents everywhere; even on the internet." That, I suppose,would have been the right statement for the capital.
Posted by: ethio-zagol at June 13, 2006 3:19 PM
The capital needs to stop suffocating self-censorship before it opposes censorship generally.Should the paper bring the Chinese experience to oppose cyber-censorship while there are plenty of examples closer to home? The great critiques of censorship like Cato and Zekarias Chaffee embarked on their crusade speaking against what was happening at their country.
"Spare us from governments like ours which lulls its people with ludicrous claims of economic development but clamps down on dissidents everywhere; even on the internet." That, I suppose,would have been the right statement for the capital.
Posted by: ethio-zagol at June 13, 2006 3:25 PM
Is the happy, dancing African any less of a cliche than the starving child soldier?
Posted by: gio at June 15, 2006 1:59 AM