Out of the approximately 3,000 monthly international visitors who come to this blog, only a small handful are from China. Many days pass with no visitors from China at all, but with many visitors from other countries in Asia - and not just Japan and Singapore. Some weeks, there are even more visitors from Vietnam than there are from China.
These are current soldiers in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which was the center of youth protests against the Chinese government on this day twenty years ago, in 1989. On that day, more than a thousand student protestors were massacred by tanks and solders, an incident memorialized to all young people in the West today thanks to Serj and System of a Down - "Hypnotize." Numerous popular Chinese websites are "down for maintenance" today, including the Chinese version of Twitter, Fanfou, and other music sharing or chat sites.
Official Chinese government sites refer to Tiananmen Square as "The Gate of Heavenly Peace."
One of the bitterest things to me about loudmouthed lip-service liberals is their utter blindness to true human suffering, and nearly all my friends know how much I loathe hippies (the loudmouthed liberal type anyway - if you just want to smoke dope, pick flowers and listen to the Dead you are cool with me). They are the first to blare for censorship of those with whom they disagree.
The type of thinking YOU PEOPLE advocate doesn't protect others. You're just using an "audience" by gathering individuals who are of oppressed or minority groups and giving them lip service. You are not many steps away from the Chinese government right now, that is doing everything possible to destroy the memory of the bid for freedom in China that occurred 20 years ago today - and which ended in death, dismay and destruction. Because it's not American Internet Maintenance Day - yet - we can sit here in relative freedom and safety, and really cannot imagine what is gone through by so many hundreds of millions of people in our world's most populous nation, the oldest culture in our world - a mainstay of humanity - China. This is a country that will murder kids who are protesting because they want to wear blue jeans without being punished. This is a country where ahuge gender imbalance has arisen due to the abortion of millions of unwanted baby girls - an unintended consequence of the one-child policy. But by all means - blog about the "outrage" of some guy wearing a dunce hat and underwear on his head at Abu Ghraib, while more than a billion people live in a kind of oppression that you cannot even imagine, every aspect of their lives controlled and proscribed - even to the children they may give birth to.
And here? Hey - Octomom. She gets a TV show and millions of dollars in endorsements.
