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GreenCloudCLF
01-07-2006, 09:32 AM
The point i was making is that this line of debate (above) is getting really old.
Every time an attribute of the USA is trampled upon because of what everyone assumes to be universal here, i am driven ****her to the right. I started out completely anti corporation and greed thus what they call here (Anti-American) but the continuous barrage of hey You Americans think your the greatest so we all hate you has eroded what used to be a passive man.

I stole this quote from Sifu Darkfist from another thread...Not for it's theme, but for it's content.

Is the word "fa rt" banned? I am assuming that his quote said "i am being driven ****her to the right"?

If fa rt is indeed banned how come? Is it that offensive? But remember ass isn't banned...no no no...ass is ok...just not what comes out.

Samurai Jack
01-07-2006, 02:15 PM
Gene hates gas. He's pretty anal about it. That's the bottom line.

David Jamieson
01-09-2006, 12:37 PM
when one is speaking of themselves being driven outward in a direction, I believe teh word "further" is to be used as in "I am being driven further to the right".

although f@rther is not wholly incorrect, further is a viable alternative to the broken wind.

break like the wind!

GeneChing
01-09-2006, 02:52 PM
We've been through this before, but it bears repeating. The forum comes pre-set with a lot of terms that are automatically censored. We can adjust them, but why bother? The selection is rather humorous. Anyone who *really* wants to can get around our rather simplistic censors so if you feel the urge to cuss here, it's not like it takes that much effort. We leave it up as a minor deterent and a reminder - this is a family show, or at least we try to keep it so.

GeneChing
05-09-2016, 08:15 AM
I'm hijacking this thread to start discussing PRC censorship. And there's still no ****ing allowed on this forum. But feel free to eat a banana. ;)


Sad News: You Can No Longer Eat a Banana on Camera in China (http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/05/banana-cam-ban-china.html)
By Jenni Miller

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/daily/2016/05/06/06-china-banana-eating-ban.w529.h352.jpg
Nom, nom, nope. Photo: Jon Edwards /Getty Images

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that just about anything you can dream up turns someone's crank.

From fantasizing about being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey to sitting on pies or rubbing bread on your face, if you can imagine it, someone will probably jerk off to it. It's a brave new world, this internet of ours!

Except in China. If you live in China and your particular fetish involves babely young webcammers sensually eating bananas — or being watched sensually eating a banana yourself — you're out of luck. Regulations are cracking down on this socially harmful way of getting your daily potassium, according to China's CCTV News.

Commenters on CCTV's Facebook page are in a tizzy about the matter. One person wrote, "Seriously? Bananas? Summer is coming, and that means popsicles. Do you have any idea what you can do with popsicles that melt and slowly drip in the cleavage? That's way more intense than bananas! Your leaders are useless, their only job is to censor ****, and they can't even do it correctly." Another commenter, obviously a prodigious sexter, wrote, "Not only banana, sometimes I think dirty when I see an eggplant!" (You and me both, pal.) Others suggested that the government would come for hot dogs, cucumbers, and other phallic foods next.

So far the Chinese government hasn't issued any statements regarding the moral dubiousness of pimple-popping videos, which is a huge relief.

GeneChing
05-10-2016, 02:26 PM
Behind the Great Firewall, China is winning its war against internet freedom (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/behind-great-firewall-china-winning-its-war-against-internet-freedom-1558550)
By Orlando Crowcroft in Shanghai
May 9, 2016 13:49 BST 41

https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1513683/google-china.jpg?w=736
Google stopped censoring search results in mainland China in 2010. Six years later, the majority of its services are still blocked Reuters

When Google announced in 2010 that it would cease self-censorship of search results in China in response to a Chinese hacking attempt against itself and 20 other US tech companies, plenty thought it was a bluff. So big as to be synonymous with the internet itself, the world watched to see how China would respond – Beijing, in true stubborn fashion, called it.

Six years later and Google services are still blocked in China, along with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and some of the world's biggest news organisations, including the New York Times. Even on the search engines it allows, the Great Firewall (GFW) censors news stories that show China or its leaders in a bad light, as well as references to events such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Most recently it shut down coverage of the Panama Papers when it emerged that a number of Chinese leaders and their families were using offshore tax havens, including the family of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Although many Chinese were able to access news through virtual private networks (VPNs), for weeks all searches related to the country Panama – leak or otherwise – were blocked.

China has always censored the internet, but in many ways the spat with Google, which reached its nadir in 2014 when all Google services were blocked, was a watershed moment. Until then the situation had been a tug of war between tech companies and the government, but after the blocking of Google, Beijing made clear that it was its way or the (super) highway.

In the two years since, internet freedom in China since has gone from bad to worse. In March 2016, the government began blocking the VPNs on which thousands rely to bypass the firewall. Overnight businesses that had spent years developing ways around the firewall had to start again from scratch.


The internet is the Achilles heal for most professionals and businesses in China - expats and locals alike.
- Hisham Youssef, Shanghai resident

As such, while in London professionals may sit around trading small talk about football or the weather, in Shanghai it is about VPNs – which ones work, new products on the market, internet speeds and wifi. It is not just expatriates looking to get on Facebook either, Chinese citizens are equally hungry for new VPN products – indeed, some of the best programmes have been written by locals.

"The internet is the Achilles heal for most professionals and businesses in China - expats and locals alike. Many Chinese who have international businesses and tend to travel a lot, have also complained [...] so in a funny way the Chinese government is shooting itself in the foot by stifling the efforts of its own enterprises that are now going global," said a Hisham Youssef, an architect who has lived and worked in Shanghai for five years.

https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1513689/baidu.jpg?w=736
As Google has been shut out so its major Chinese rival, Baidu, has flourished Reuters

An entire industry has been built around avoiding the firewall. New VPN providers see surges in business as the government shuts down stalwarts. During IBTimesUK's visit to Shanghai one of the most popular proxies, Astrill, was targeted by the government and a new provider – which will remain nameless, to avoid it facing a similar fate – sprung up in its place.

The case illustrated two important facts: Firstly, that the Chinese government is aware that thousands of internet users in China are using VPNs to bypass the great firewall, but secondly – and more importantly – that if Beijing wanted to stop the use the VPNs it could. Indeed, most home internet connections are designed to reject traffic originating from outside of China, blocking almost all VPNs, while wifi cafes such as Starbucks often require customers have a Chinese mobile number to log in.

The reason the government doesn't, some believe, is because it knows that international firms rely on VPNs to survive. Beijing is therefore walking a tightrope between allowing enough freedom so that international business can still do what it needs to do, while maintaining its tight grip over information that its citizens – and those of other nations who reside in China – can access.


The Chinese public is frustrated and angry. There are hints that some high level officials also believe that the media and Internet censors have overdone it.
- Susan Shirk, 21st Century China programe

"Each new day is worse than the last," said Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire.org, which monitors Chinese internet freedom and promotes ways around the firewall. "It is rare that sites get unblocked or uncensored, new sites get added to the blocked list and new domestic sites face increased censorship. The opposite never really happens."

It is impossible to gauge the effect that the draconian restrictions imposed by Beijing has on the Chinese economy, but anecdotally, many senior business people that live and work in China report that patience is running out.

Unsurprisingly the Chinese authorities have little sympathy. In an editorial in April 2016 the state-controlled Global Times thundered: "Why does the Western media hate the GFW so much" before going to defend imposing restrictions on "a tiny number of foreign websites [so that] Western opinions cannot easily penetrate as ideological tools".

'Western media have published major political reports that concern China in recent years, trying to direct the attention of Chinese society and set the discourse agenda for us. The Great Firewall has snuffed out such intentions,' it said.

But there is a business case too: as China has blocked Google, so its own search engine, Baidu, has flourished. As China has blocked Facebook and WhatsApp, so its domestic messaging service – WeChat – has boomed. Meanwhile, Weibo has dominated the Chinese market since the banning of Twitter.

https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1491350/uber-losing-1-billion-year.jpg?w=736
Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick recently revealed the taxi app is losing a massive $1 billion a year in China. Reuters

It is not only direct competition either. Just take the case of Uber, which has spent millions if not billions trying to penetrate the Chinese market but faced a coalition of domestic, state-backed rivals that have left it grasping for business, so foreign firms operating in China have had to deal with substantial restrictions that have allowed their Chinese rivals to flourish.

In April, the US government first described Chinese internet censorship as a trade restriction in its National Trade Estimate Report arguing: "Over the past decade, China's filtering of cross-border internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers, hurting both internet sites themselves, and users who often depend on them for their businesses."

But while it may be a tantalising – if ultimately futile – prospect to see the US government making a business case for freedom of expression in China, GreatFire's Smith does not hold much stock in the argument. Plenty of international tech giants that have been willing to jump through hoops for Beijing – Apple, for example – have been allowed to flourish in China despite local rivals.

"If foreign companies are completely complicit with censorship and are willing to share sensitive data with the authorities, then they are welcome to do business in China - see Apple and LinkedIn. If the authorities wanted a domestic company to succeed they would have shut Apple out of China long ago, despite Apple's willingness to do whatever the authorities ask of them," he said.

With Xi – a far more hands-on and authoritarian figure than his predecessor, Hu Jintao – at the helm it is difficult to imagine that Beijing will do anything but tighten its grip on the internet in the coming years. GreatFire statistics show that China now blocks 25% of all internet sites compared to 14% since before Xi took power, and his reign has come alongside a huge crackdown on freedom of the press.

"Xi Jinping didn't build the Great Fire Wall but he has fortified it so that today it is harder for Chinese people to access information originating outside the country," said Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st Century China programme at University of California in San Diego.

Given that China has more than proven its stubbornness on the issue of internet freedom – snubbing the biggest global tech companies and potentially billions of dollars in investment they would have brought with them – few are optimistic that things will get better in the short term. But Shirk pointed to a growing anger on Chinese social media about the internet restrictions in 2016.

"Based on their online reaction to the tightening censorship under Xi, the Chinese public is frustrated and angry about it. There are hints that some high-level officials also believe that the media and internet censors have overdone it and caused more problems than they've solved," Shirk said.

In denying the Chinese people the internet access and freedom that all but a fraction of the world now possesses, China's leadership may have finally pushed its people too far.

Not as innerestin as banana bans, but more to the point. ;)

David Jamieson
05-11-2016, 12:40 PM
That sexy banana eating ban made me laugh.

I could see literally hundreds if not thousands of young sexy people sucking bananas suggestively in a bid to make a little money in the Chinese pseudo porn industry.

GeneChing
05-11-2016, 12:56 PM
But wait...there's more!!!


Man stages bizarre 'erotic banana eating' protest outside Chinese embassy in London (http://www.standard.co.uk/news/erotic-banana-eating-protest-filmed-outside-chinese-embassy-a3245551.html)
JAMIE MICKLETHWAITE 7 hours ago

A man has been filmed "erotically eating a banana" as part of a bizarre protest outside the Chinese Embassy in London.

Phil Watson, 35, staged the demonstration over China's ban on videos showing people seductively eating bananas.

The novelty underwear store owner was filmed making an apparently light-hearted attempt to "erotically" eat the fruit, which he covered in chocolate source.

Explaining the protest, he told the Standard: “I read about China banning the streaming of people eating bananas erotically and thought that it was a fun thing to do. I didn’t have anything better to do and the embassy is only a half-an-hour walk away."

http://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2016/05/11/12/banana.png
Phil Watson's protest outside the Chinese Embassy (Phil Watson/ Youtube)

“It was on a Sunday and there was just a bunch of dudes using drills there.

“I got a lot of people looking at me funny. I didn’t stick around for very long because it’s pretty humiliating, seductively eating a banana."

The Toronto native added that despite being labelled ‘ a western idiot’ on YouTube, he had enjoyed the comments.

“The online comments are pretty hilarious, a lot of people found it interesting and I didn’t think anybody would watch it.”

New regulations in China require live streaming sites to constantly look out for ‘erotic banana eating’ as it is deemed as inappropriate online content.

The Evening Standard have contacted the Chinese Embassy for comment about the incident in Marylebone on May 8.

There's video too, if you follow the link (but it's not really worth it, not at all sexy :(). Hopefully better protest videos emerge in the near future.

FREE THE BANANA!!!

:p

GeneChing
10-09-2019, 11:46 AM
...kill Kenny. :p

Honestly, I'm amazed that South Park even played in PRC to begin with...:confused:


OCTOBER 8, 2019 / 3:14 AM / UPDATED A DAY AGO
'South Park' creators offer mocking 'apology' to China over episode (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-television-south-park-china/south-park-creators-offer-mocking-apology-to-china-over-episode-idUSKBN1WN10B?utm_source=applenews)
3 MIN READ

LOS ANGELES/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The creators of satirical animated series “South Park” issued a mocking “apology” to China after media reports that episodes of the show were no longer available on some Chinese websites.

The “Band in China” episode released on Oct. 2 critiqued China’s policies on free speech as well as the efforts of Hollywood to shape its movie and television content in recent years to avoid angering censors in the vast Chinese market.

“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the irreverent Comedy Central show, wrote in a Twitter post titled “Official apology to China.”

“Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?,” Parker and Stone added.

A Reuters search online showed that iQiyi and Youku Tudou, two Chinese video streaming sites, both listed episodes of South Park available to view, but the actual episodes did not play when requested.

Searching for the show’s name on Baidu Tieba, a popular online forum, and on Douban, a popular movie ratings site, did not yield any results.

Spokespersons for Youku Tudou, iQiyi and Baidu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, which oversees internet governance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The South Park statement followed an uproar in China and the United States over a weekend tweet, which was quickly withdrawn, by the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team that backed democracy protests in Hong Kong.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has built a large following and burgeoning business in China.

Slideshow (3 Images)
The long-running “South Park” series is one of cable channel Comedy Central’s biggest and most controversial hits, built around the misadventures of four foul-mouthed fourth graders.

The episode at the center of the latest dispute saw character Randy Marsh being arrested after trying to smuggle marijuana into China.

In jail, he meets two Chinese prisoners called Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, and is subjected to slave labor and re-education.

China has in the past proved sensitive about the British children’s characters because Pooh is sometimes used as a nickname on social media for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Reporting by Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles and Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; Additial reporting by Shanghai newsroom; Editing by Neil Fullick

THREADS
Censorship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?39839-Censorship)
Hong Kong protests (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?23536-Hong-Kong-protests)

GeneChing
10-16-2019, 03:50 PM
Hollywood's New Self-Censorship Mess in China (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/south-park-lebron-hollywood-new-censorship-mess-1248149)
8:37 AM PDT 10/16/2019 by Tatiana Siegel

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2019/10/0.jpg

With pro-democracy marches gaining steam in Hong Kong and billions at stake in the country’s film market, studios may look to speak out just enough that it "doesn’t embarrass you so much that people say you’re a toady or kowtowing."
Two days after South Park was banned in China, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone served up Hollywood’s most defiant rebuke of the communist government in decades with their Oct. 9 episode. When the Comedy Central series’ geologist turned pot dealer Randy Marsh — voiced by Parker — shouted, “**** the Chinese government!” it marked the most incendiary words from an actor since Richard Gere dubbed China’s occupation of Tibet “horrendous” at the 1993 Oscars.

While South Park’s “Shots!!!” episode provided fodder for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters, who are battling mainland backed police forces, don’t expect many other high-profile entertainment figures to follow suit. When it comes to China and its vast moneymaking potential, the prevailing wisdom is: Get woke, go broke. The practice of self-censorship is common now, say top producers. “With China, nothing is transparent,” a producer who has released films there tells The Hollywood Reporter. “No one knows what the ground rules are. And that’s by design. It leaves everyone on edge.”

From Mulan actress Crystal Liu to the Lakers’ LeBron James, most top stars are taking no chances and are lining up to either side with the Chinese regime or denounce any criticism of its authoritarian tactics. Similarly, companies like ESPN (which used a controversial map on SportsCenter that indicated the self ruled island of Taiwan was part of China) and Apple (which removed from its online stores the so-called Hong Kong protest app and quietly dropped the Gere series *******s, despite picking it up straight to series late last year) appear to be toeing the party line.

All the while, observers say an overt self-censorship has begun to creep into the entertainment industry. Inside Hollywood, the film industry faces the greatest risk in rocking the China boat.

Consider that American movies earned $3.2 billion in China in 2018, with Disney accounting for nearly a quarter of that with $700 million. This year, the studio’s Avengers: Endgame pulled in $614 million from China alone. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Disney stayed silent in the wake of Liu posting on social media platform Weibo in August: “I support Hong Kong’s police, you can beat me up now,” adding the hashtag #IAlsoSupportTheHongKong Police.

“Disney has certainly enjoyed major success in China, but I’d hesitate to say that any single studio has the luxury of provoking China because it’s a very important relationship for the industry at large,” says Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice Media. “Virtually all of the majors have appealed to Chinese audiences with blockbuster tentpole releases and occasionally in a bigger way than some films played with domestic moviegoers.”

James’ courtship of Chinese consumers extends well beyond basketball and sneakers and into film thanks to his upcoming Warner Bros. tentpole Space Jam 2 (dated for July 16, 2021). But James drew outrage when he blasted Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey for tweeting his support for Hong Kong protesters, calling him “misinformed” (Morey had deleted the tweet). After all, James has been outspoken about police brutality in the U.S. as well as about President Trump’s so-called Muslim travel ban (in China, more than 1 million Uighur Muslims are said to be held in internment camps).

Disney-owned ESPN drew further criticism when Deadspin on Oct. 8 reported on a leaked email written by news editor Chuck Salituro that discouraged any political discussion about China and Hong Kong with regard to the Morey story. (An ESPN source noted that the network had reporters and cameras in Shanghai and broadcast video of a Chinese worker ripping down an NBA logo as well as video of the Lakers arriving to little fanfare.)

“In entertainment, these people have to look at the bottom line,” says Stan Rosen, a USC professor who specializes in China’s entertainment industry. “You want to address [the human rights abuses] in a way that keeps the China market but doesn’t embarrass you so much that people say you’re a toady or kowtowing to China. That’s why you’re seeing a pushback against the NBA and Disney to a certain extent.”

Some of the official explanations offered by corporate giants for their Chinese-friendly moves have been criticized as murky. With *******s, sources say Apple bristled at the vigilante justice tone of the show. As for the app removal, the tech and soon-to-be content giant said that HKMap.Live, used by Hong Kong protesters, had endangered law enforcement and residents.

The stakes continue to grow. This year, China’s Tencent signed a five-year, $1.5 billion deal to continue as the NBA’s exclusive digital partner in China. In the case of South Park, China’s move to scrub every clip, episode and online discussion of the series won’t hit Viacom’s bottom line. But the parent company, soon to merge with CBS, will have to contend with any Chinese retaliation for its other companies like Paramount, which fuels the country’s pipeline with such product as the Mission: Impossible and Transformers films.

A company like Netflix has more freedom to antagonize China given that its platform isn’t available in the Middle Kingdom, thus it acquired such incendiary documentaries as 2017’s Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower. But it will face a major test of China’s patience with the upcoming Meryl Streep starrer The Laundromat, which depicts adherents of outlawed spiritual practice Falun Gong as victims of the government’s organ harvesting program. South Park and Laundromat notwithstanding, the industry likely will continue to tiptoe around China and any other lucrative hotspots that contribute to the bottom line of studios, networks and streamers.

“That’s the world in which we live now. You’re pandering to the people that have the money and the power,” says Joker producer Jason Cloth of the industry’s increased self-censorship. “There are many films that fail in North America but do gangbuster business in major foreign markets. So if you have to be cognizant of offending somebody in a major foreign market, you’re going to stay away from that subject matter.

This story first appeared in the Oct. 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.


THREADS
DAngerous Riot Breaks out at Basketball game... (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?35283-DAngerous-Riot-Breaks-out-at-Basketball-game)
HK Protests (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?23536-Hong-Kong-protests)
Censorship (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?39839-Censorship)
Mulan Live-Action Disney project (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68640-Mulan-Live-Action-Disney-project)