标签：rights

Freedom of Speech and Social Media

Culture & Public Commentary2021.01.11
Freedom of Speech and Social Media
This article was written spontaneously, as a stream-of-consciousness piece prompted by my own feelings; it is shared only on Suixuan, and please do not reprint it. Trump’s social media accounts being banned set off a discussion about freedom of speech. Aside from the arguments that have never reached consensus, today’s discussions of freedom of speech do in fact involve some new conditions that have only emerged in the past decade or so. This is the rise of large social media websites. They have carved out an autonomous space in the network world, and in many cases have replaced what used to be understood as public space. Whether, and how, the…
culture freedom media commentary
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2021年1月11日
Who Can Sell Black Hole Photos? Visual China Can, but So Can You

Culture & Public Commentary2019.04.12
Who Can Sell Black Hole Photos? Visual China Can, but So Can You
This piece was also commissioned by Jiemian, but fittingly it was released under CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License) permission: as long as the author information (Hu Yilin / Jiemian Commentary) is clearly credited, it may be used free of charge. [caption id="attachment_7573" align="alignnone" width="900"] Credit:ESO/C. Malin[/caption] On April 10, 2019, the first “black hole” photograph ever taken by humankind was released in a high-profile manner, attracting the world’s attention. However, in China, beyond sparking people’s interest in black holes, this photo also detonated another topic. People noticed that the image had been included on a website called “Visual China,” and a copyright notice had been attached to…
science freedom commentary internet
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2019年4月12日
Equality or Freedom: On the Question of Attending School Outside One’s Hometown

Culture & Public Commentary2012.12.17
Equality or Freedom: On the Question of Attending School Outside One’s Hometown
Recently, the case of the non-Shanghai girl Zhan Haiter has drawn a lot of attention, especially because it happened in Shanghai, so I can’t help but offer a few comments as well. Of course, I support Zhan Haiter’s struggle, and I support every citizen’s open expression of his or her demands; but as for the content of those demands, I do not support it. This matter involves too many questions, all tangled together, making an already complicated issue even more complicated. So first we need to break down the questions involved. There are two big issues: one is education, the other is regionality. It should be noted that the problem…
culture China freedom commentary
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2012年12月17日
Do the People Have the Right to Be Ignorant? — With a Discussion of Enlightenment and Unconcealment

Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom2012.05.14
Do the People Have the Right to Be Ignorant? — With a Discussion of Enlightenment and Unconcealment
People have the right to stupidity—this is Tian Song’s claim: “The people have the right to stupidity; if they are deprived of the right to stupidity, they will only have the right to be made stupid. The key question is: who has the authority to draw the line between civilization and stupidity?” Back then (almost six years ago now—terrifying), I already had reservations about this, though I did not discuss it in detail. Yesterday Jing Qi raised this claim again, and recently I have also been paying attention to pedagogical questions, so this is a good moment to talk through my thoughts. First of all, Teacher Tian, including Teacher Liu,…
China science freedom education
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2012年5月14日
What Is Democracy? Livelihood? Equality? Democracy Is Article 35 of the Constitution

Culture & Public Commentary2011.03.02
What Is Democracy? Livelihood? Equality? Democracy Is Article 35 of the Constitution
This article had been planned before winter vacation, but in a moment of inattention it has dragged on until now. Let me finish a section first: I previously posted a status update, and although it seemed to get stuck on follow5 for quite a while, it finally synced successfully: “In my view, democracy is neither universal suffrage nor some kind of equality. Democracy is Article 35 of the Constitution. Freedom of speech and freedom of association. That is the core of democracy. Electoral systems and distributive systems are separate issues. Democracy is a matter of power, not of rights.” There were a few replies on the school intranet, but…
culture freedom democracy trust
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2011年3月2日
Sense of Responsibility

Culture & Public Commentary2008.01.25
Sense of Responsibility
I remember that when I first entered the preparatory class in junior high school (sixth grade in elementary school), in the first “weekly journal” assigned by our homeroom teacher (the politics teacher) — that is, a way of “snitching” (though I always talked only about “problems,” never about any specific person) — I emphasized two concepts: “the sense of right and wrong” and “responsibility.” I thought teachers should focus on cultivating these two things in students. All along, my indignation toward my peers has been far greater than my indignation toward teachers. I thought that my classmates only knew how to mock and resist teachers’ discipline, that they were self-righteous,…
culture freedom responsibility power
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2008年1月25日
[Repost] Related Discussion on “Zhang Tiankan: For Maglev, We Must Persuade the Public with Scientific Evidence zz”

History of Science & Scholarship2008.01.21
[Repost] Related Discussion on “Zhang Tiankan: For Maglev, We Must Persuade the Public with Scientific Evidence zz”
http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=316&fpage=1&toread=1 It is obvious that the discussion in this thread is mainly aimed at Teacher Tian (the Lean Knight). Schopenhauer’s swagger is long gone; what is being displayed now is basically my own swagger. Personally, I find this sort of dispute quite interesting. Although such arguments are hard to develop into something profound, they can still expose problems fairly well. Many of the ways I now phrase things first emerged in similar disputes—in the past on Teacher Liu’s and Teacher Jiang’s blogs, and now with BBS as an even better venue. I’ve been eagerly hoping that someone would come to my blog too and “provoke” me. How interesting that would…
science discussion sociology scientism
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2008年1月21日
A Brief Discussion of the Question of Euthanasia

History of Science & Scholarship2007.06.08
A Brief Discussion of the Question of Euthanasia
One piece counts as two pieces… though that is not right, I really can’t make it in time… A Brief Talk on the Issue of Euthanasia The Basic Definition of Euthanasia Euthanasia refers to “the act or practice of, out of mercy, killing patients or injured persons who have no hope of recovery by a relatively painless method, or allowing them to die.”[①] The above is only a dictionary definition, and in academic discussion there are naturally many imprecisions in it. However, I do not intend to offer a new definition. In what follows, I will mainly discuss euthanasia in relation to issues of life and death. “Euthanasia can be…
philosophy freedom paper death
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2007年6月8日
In the discussion on the teachers’ blogs: On “the freedom to engage in pseudoscience”

History of Science & Scholarship2007.04.07
In the discussion on the teachers’ blogs: On “the freedom to engage in pseudoscience”
http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/485ea8790100063v On “the freedom to do pseudoscience” 2006-12-07 07:42:42 Sima Nan said on TOM: “The real intention behind these people’s demand to delete those three characters from the Science Popularization Law is actually that they want to strive for the freedom to falsify things, the freedom to do pseudoscience.” (December 6, 2006, TOM Technology) Sima Nan’s wording is “the freedom to do pseudoscience”; we can change it a bit and make it “the freedom to do pseudoscience” for discussion, because we know that any freedom is also subject to constraints, and there is no freedom of freedom. What Sima Nan said touches on a very crucial question: do the masses…
science philosophy of science Liu Huajie law
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2007年4月7日