China's Limited Internets

I just saw this article while at work yesterday, and as usual with online editorials from major news outlets, there isn't a whole lot of detail. I can sum up what's said in the entire article in only a few words: the Chinese government is going to filter online video websites (though the article, again, didn't specify whether they mean download-only 'sites or streaming .flv websites) for pornography, anti-China messages, and anything they happen to think is icky. Taken from the article,

Video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography will be banned. Providers must delete and report such content.

In other words, if someone disagrees with a Chinese policy, whether it be local, national, or international, and displays their opinions in a video blog or a comedic satire, they will be banned from the 'net. Alas, there will be no Chinese Daily Show! What's worse, this limits what the Chinese people hear or see, and their ability to learn the truth about their world. In fact, most Chinese nationals will probably hate the Japanese for their war crimes, but few of the Chinese people know of their apologies; these have been rejected unilaterally by the Chinese government before the people could hear them. Thus, the Chinese people believe the Japanese have never apologized, and hatred still brews between the two nations. But, that's the problem when you have state controlled media. The populace can only know what they are shown, and when people are not skeptical, they will believe anything they see. Thus, the Chinese government is entirely self-serving; they can do whatever they want so long as they do not lose control of the media or the army.

But then, the internet threatened to change this "balance" of power (about the same balance as a three year old on one side of a seesaw and a grizzly bear on the other). The Chinese people were exposed to the untamed wilderness of the web, and free information was at their fingertips. New opinions, not certified by their government, could be read and seen and heard by the Chinese people. If they learned just how oppressive their government is, they could start an uprising. Of course, the amount of internet users in China (about 164 million according to the first article cited) is only a small fraction of the population of the (truthfully) impoverished nation. Only about sixteen percent of the Chiense populace uses the internet, compared to the the United States, where the number of internet users is around 182 million, which is about two-thirds our population. So it will be easier to see a national ripple effect in the United States due to the internet than in China, where small communities that are isolated from the world and rely on state-run media only, are spread throughout the nation.

I also take issue with the Chinese government's fear of pornography and other threats to "social stability". Progress is not made within a socially stable nation. For instance, slavery in colonial and early United States history was socially stable and economically powerful. However, you could hardly call that a progressive society that would further develop the human race. Instability breeds progress. And pornography? People are hard-wired to be interested in sex. We almost all want it, almost all of us will have it, and almost all of us will enjoy it. So why are we so prudish about it? Religion, for one, teaches us to be ashamed of natural functions (like sex) and leads to very terrible situations when our natural urges build up as frustrations due to our continual denial (see child abuse in Colorado City, or read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer). I can't tell you why the Chinese government hates sex, but they do.

Another huge problem I see with this issue, is whether or not the companies that run online video websites (I'm thinking mostly of Google here, one of my favorite corporations of all time!) will cave to the Chinese government. Let me rephrase that, to show some of the absurdity. Why should an AMERICAN company founded in a land in which one of the central tenets is FREE SPEECH cave to DEMANDS from a FOREIGN government to LIMIT FREE SPEECH? Furthermore, China would require that any Chinese citizen who posts something really "obscene" be reported! The government wants to hunt down its own citizens who speak up against them, or post a video of a naked woman! And they want American corporations to help them! If Google really is a non-evil corporation (which I believe) they will not bow to the will of the Chinese government. If they do, well, that is significantly evil. It may be a loss of revenue, but it's a stand for human rights and it will show the Chinese government that American corporations are not afraid, that we can be a strong beacon of free speech and free information.

The internet is this generation's wild frontier, a sometimes harsh and untamed land where people can make it big, make it small, or lose everything. More and more, government regulation is coming to the internet. This is not bad, however, so long as it does not trample on the basic rights of free speech and free transfer of information, and there will always be areas of the 'net that are dangerous and difficult to regulate, but as soon as governments clamp down on what we can and cannot say, the advantages of a global information exchange come to a very sudden and painful halt. So much for working together, for sharing experiences, for teaching a person in one corner of the globe that they feel the same things, share the same interests, as a person in another... The internet is the best, most interesting, and most dangerous sociological invention to come about since the printing press, let's do our best not to lose it to corrupt politicians, eh?

Waterboarding... And I Don't Mean the Fun Kind!

Sorry for my delay in getting this posted, but I've been quite busy over the past couple of days, and I wanted to try to make this the best post possible, given the controversial nature of torture. This forum post was first brought to my attention by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who saw the link from PZ Meyers of Pharyngula. Alright, so, on to the meat of this post.

First things first, read that link. There it is again. No really, go read it, I'll wait. This post won't make any sense unless you do! ... Ok, now that you're done reading the post and maybe some of the responses, I can really get started. First things first, a small anatomical note: Just because one's head is below the "water line" does not mean that one cannot draw water up into their lungs! With a small hole for air in the saran wrap as he described, and only water going through the hole, your lungs create a suction. So if you continue breathing in as water is entering the hole, you have the potential to draw water into your lungs, which causes all kinds of nasty spasms, and death. The technical term is laryngospasm, and it can causes the throat to close up. What makes this dangerous is if you are already low on oxygen, panicking (which increases oxygen consumption because of a stressful increased breathing rate), and inhaling water, you could suffocate because of water going up your throat. In actual drowning, the reaction can be more complicated, but cardiac arrest is another big risk, as stated in the article. For more on the reaction of the body to drowning, Wikipedia has an entire article on the subject.

Now we know Waterboarding is highly effective at breaking people down to a primal emotional state, and it is most likely psychologically damaging if done repeatedly, over long periods of time. So now I have to ask, what kind of person do you have to be to intentionally damage another human being psychologically, with a risk of death, let alone torture them, no matter what they have done? What sort of mental state does the torturer have to be in to conduct an act like waterboarding, while the victim is struggling below them?

The torturer would most likely be emotionally unstable themselves (especially if they enjoy the act of torturing), suffer something akin to PTSD and immense guilt if they were forced into the act of torturing without having any way of dealing with it at the time, or, and this is what I postulate is the case with most torturers from the United States acting on terrorists, is to view the victim as sub-human in some way. Why would I say this is the most likely mental state of the torturer? These people would probably be subject to lots of political rhetoric and lies from neo-conservative leaders, and possibly enraged over the deaths of Americans caused "entirely" by terrorists.

The torturer's mental state would be to view anyone who is a "terrorist" as less than human, and below even the most basic human rights. This is no different from how a Nazi-supporter would view a Jewish person. The view of one human being superior to another is often the progenitor of genocides, whether they be in Africa, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, or the United States (Here I refer to our treatment of the Native Americans), and slavery (From Rome to Britain to again, the United States). With media outlets often blurring the lines between terrorist and follower of Islam, much of the public is too close to desiring a similar genocide of Islamics. They are tempted to make a connection between Islamic and terroist, a fallacy of logic that is very dangerous not only for people in the Middle East, but us, as well. But I shall get into the dangers to ourselves later in this post. This view can be summed up in a blog post I found while doing some reasearch for this post, which can be found here. I quote,

A better use of freedom would be to defend its continued existence at home rather than arguing for the non-existent rights of an implacable, murderous foe whose core values demand the complete extermination of the freedoms that allow articles such as ours to be written free of fear.

Why should any human's rights be deemed non-existant? Certainly, if someone wants to kill you, then you have the right to self-defense, as do they, but because of their methodology and tactics, we must remove their basic human rights? How will this do anything but spawn more hatred, on both sides of the issue? If our soldiers were captured and tortured, we would be in a complete uproar, and demand vengeance. What makes terrorists any different? If, however, we captured these terrorists and obtained information in a different manner, they would most likely have less support from their local populace, which brings me to a different topic.

Torture is not an effective means of information gathering. Want a professional article on this subject? Here you go. I'll sum up the important parts, but first, I'll want to state that it's important that we, as a public, be skeptics. We should not take any statements, by the government, by our friends, our parents, our children, or others, without some kind of evidence backing it, especially when human lives are at stake. If someone in the government or on Fox News says "torture works!" then we should demand evidence. We cannot take someone at their word in such important issues, it is far too dangerous. On to summing up the article. Even the author of the article agrees,

I've heard it said that the Syrians and the Egyptians "really know how to get these things done." I've heard the Israelis mentioned, without proof. I've heard Algeria mentioned, too, but Darius Rejali, an academic who recently trolled through French archives, found no clear examples of how torture helped the French in Algeria -- and they lost that war anyway. "Liberals," argued an article in the liberal online magazine Slate a few months ago, "have a tendency to accept, all too eagerly, the argument that torture is ineffective." But it's also true that "realists," whether liberal or conservative, have a tendency to accept, all too eagerly, fictitious accounts of effective torture carried out by someone else.

She goes on to cite a direct source on the issue of torture.

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

Torture also endangers our troops, and I daresay, our civilians as well.

Worse, you'll have the other side effects of torture. It "endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity." It does "damage to our country's image" and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit. Herrington's confidential Pentagon report, which he won't discuss but which was leaked to The Post a month ago, goes farther. In that document, he warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees in Iraq, that their activities could be "making gratuitous enemies" and that prisoner abuse "is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry." Far from rescuing Americans, in other words, the use of "special methods" might help explain why the war is going so badly.

Imagine, now, if we were a nation that did not have a large part of a large continent to ourselves, with only two countries bordering our own. Imagine we were a smaller nation sharing this continent with a few other, smaller nations, one of whom had decided to go to war with us. We would now be at war with a standing army. If we tortured their troops, or even their civilians, what would their reaction be? They would redouble their efforts, maybe even torture our own troops and civilians, and the whole situation would escalate, brining far more danger than necessary to ourselves. Now picture the real situation. We are such a large nation that it is difficult to screen all of our citizens for whether or not they would be a terrorist. We are torturing their comrades, and not gaining information about those within our nation (because torture doesn't work). What would be the outcome? We would be strengthening the resolve of those within our nation against us (reciprocity). And with our soldiers in a foreign land fighting these people, on more or less their own turf? Well, that's practically suicide, and the high death tolls of the War in Iraq would seem to back this.

I may be an atheist, but I'm most certainly a humanist. If there's one thing I believe in, it's Humanity, and the future we could have if we cooperate. Wars are inevitable, but they are a waste of human lives, and if we could cooperate, our future as a race is endless. If it weren't for conservative shows like 24, glamorizing torture and lying about its results, people wouldn't be so ready to accept that it is an "effective" method. We must, as a people, a nation, and a planet, learn to work together, or we are doomed.

A big thanks goes out to River from Psygeek for reviewing this post for me!