Hu Jintao is in the WH today. Talking about $ and ¥, I am sure. Anyone else bored with pointing out that our God-Given Freedom with a capital F and Democracy with a capital D is not oppressed solely in Iran or Syria? I am not.
Today, Reporters sans frontières revealed that Yahoo! collaborated with the Chinese authorities to reveal the identity of yet another reporter - who is now in jail. Jiang Lijun, Shi Tao and Li Zhi are all in jail because of Yahoo!. And, nary a peep from the Chosen One.
Why would Yahoo! cooperate with Chinese authorities? ((Well, they are part of the objective violence that Zizek talked about last night)) Because they have signed the Public Pledge of Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry which stipulates: Refraining from producing, posting or disseminating pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability, contravene laws and regulations and spread superstition and obscenity. Monitor the information publicized by users on websites according to law and remove the harmful information promptly. Also, because they are evil bastards.
While we are on the subject, Hao Wu is still in some jail. I wonder if the Chosen One will speak about that. Or is it that as long as they are talking about "win-win China-U.S. economic cooperation", no one cares? Some people do. You should go read Rebecca MacKinnon's oped in WaPo today: Shattering the China Dream.
I, for one, am gonna do something meaningless and stop ever using Yahoo!. Not that Google is much better ...
COMMENTS
Rajesh | April 20, 2006
Then the solution for you is Altavista (for the searches, at least) or *shudder* MSN.
Sluggish Slug | April 21, 2006
I will stop using Yahoo mail, search and even Flickr. One can always use smaller services for the mail (say myway.com), photo hosting (zoto.com), but I am not sure how to kill the Google addiction. I suspect Google is of loose principles as well.
Zak | April 22, 2006
Rajesh you do realise the object it to punish yahoo not CM lol If I use flickr and not yahoo can i get away with it on a technicality?