I continue to be shocked that, for instance, China openly runs a prison complex to brainwash and torture Uighurs, and the world couldn't care as long as the products that they import from China are inexpensive.
More recently, the news that tRump offered a deal to Xi that he would not say anything about the Hong Kong protests should not shock me given that we are talking about tRump and China--yet, I am shocked that this is the state of the world.
One relatively unknown American with a wee-bit of a prominence said something about the protests in Hong Kong, and from across the ocean came China's thundering response to fuck off.
Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet supporting protesters in Hong Kong, upsetting the Chinese Basketball Association led by the Hall of Famer Yao Ming.Or, as tRump and his toadies like to tell ball players--"shut up and dribble."
In addition to Chinese sponsors such as the shoe company Li Ning and the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Card Center, which both announced that they were pausing their partnerships with the Rockets, team officials faced an immediate backlash from the Chinese Basketball Association and the Chinese consulate in Houston. The basketball association announcement Sunday that it was suspending cooperation with the Rockets was particularly jarring, since the federation president is the Hall of Fame center Yao Ming, who starred from the Rockets from 2002 to 2011.
It is always shocking to me that when it comes to a choice between money and morals, the business folks and politicians always tend to run away from morals into the welcoming slimy arms of money!
China has one hell of a choke hold on its people. How awful that there are supporters of the China model all over the world!
China is also the most successful in controlling the internet in its territory. But that is not any standalone thing; it is a part of the complete control the government has:
But their stranglehold on society is also the result of their largely successful push in the past decade to ban nearly all bookstores, books, authors and academics that do not adhere to the Communist Party’s line. Even before the current Hong Kong protests, there was a crackdown on Hong Kong publishers. In the fall of 2015, associates of the Causeway Bay Books store disappeared, later discovered to have been detained on the mainland, accused of trafficking in “illegal” books critiquing leading members of the Communist Party. In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.
Fucking authoritarians!!!
These authoritarian bastards are particularly focused on books and print. Why?
Regimes are expending so much energy attacking books because their supposed limitations have begun to look like strengths: With online surveillance, digital reading carries with it great risks and semi-permanent footprints; a physical book, however, cannot monitor what you are reading and when, cannot track which words you mark or highlight, does not secretly scan your face, and cannot know when you are sharing it with others.
They want to know what you read, when you read, and with whom you share what you read. "The ghostly absence of books, and the freethinking they seed, is the nightmare."
And, yes, shut up and dribble the damn ball!
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