Internet Censorship in China

I haven't posted for a while as I was on a business trip to mainland China. The trip was very interesting and I was more impressed with the place than I expected. One pretty interesting thing was to see what internet sites worked there. I had internet access, but couldn't access certain sites. The sites that were blocked just gave error messages or never loaded, there was no explicit message saying blocked.

Here's what I couldn't access:
Blogger.com (for this blog)
Blogspot.com blogs
Wordpress.com blogs
Youtube
Facebook
Twitter

Curiously, I could load the Democratic Underground main page but none of the links there worked and I couldn't open any other page on the site.

Here are sites that worked (not necessarily a complete list):
Any mainstream news site (NY Times, BBC, LA Times)
Talking Points Memo
Rawstory
Google
Blogs such as Balloon-Juice that didn't have blogspot or Wordpress
Infowars.com
911blogger
Wonkette
Hotmail
GlobalResearch
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Basically, the pattern I could see was that any site that let ordinary people freely express themselves, was blocked. Conspiracy stuff was ok. I guess their main goal was not to let the Chinese people have a place where they could open complain about the govt or organize, best I can figure.

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And obviously, while I was away, full-on fascism blossomed in America.

A Children’s Treasury of American Cops Brutally Attacking Citizens

How did America’s heavily militarized security guards for the 1% spend the work week? Oh, just pepper-spraying sitting students in the face, macing old ladies, stomping peaceful protesters, yanking women around by their ponytails, destroying libraries and bloodying the faces of America’s citizens. You know, what they’ve dreamed of doing for decades.

Remember the fat, smug face under that helmet and behind that ridiculous mustache in the picture above. This happened yesterday at UC Davis, a California college in a delightful, sustainable little town between San Francisco and Sacramento — the kind of place earnest liberals move to, when they have kids, so they can all ride around on the town’s famous network of bike paths. It’s a well-off town, mostly, and it takes quite a lot of tax money to keep a bunch of vicious thugs overfed and dressed like junior Darth Vaders with their portable hard-ons, on the off-chance some college kids might one day peacefully sit outside to protest this nation’s revolting descent.

One scene, one town. How many of these scenes have slipped by during these very busy weeks of protests and cop attacks? Up the I-5 in Portland, the stereotypical Brooklyn of the Pacific Northwest is apparently home to an absolutely insane paramilitary gang of thugs who cannot contain their glee at finally being able to go batshit on the people of Portland, with truncheons.