You do not have to be a Democrat to agree with Hillary Clinton when she says that countries that cannot freely access the internet will be left behind. I suspect that not only will these countries be left behind, their citizens will die in disproportionate numbers.
Take the issue of large number of deaths of miners in China. This blog, I THINK MINING, was banned, blocked, made inaccessible (call it what you will) more than a year ago by the Chinese. I posted an opinion on the conditions in Chinese mines and the high death rate. A day or two later, this site was blocked. I am not sure how the folk who do the “computer-posting” part of this blog notice or knew the site was blocked, but they assured me it was.
As a result, this site was moved off the servers of InfoMine of which it is a part, least the whole of InfoMine be blocked in China.
Blocking one blog like this one cannot conceivably be said to have caused one more or less death of a miner in China. We cannot say that if this blog had not been block even one more Chinese miner would still be alive. That is not the point. Rather the point is that for the Chinese it was easier to block this site than it was to act proactively to address the underlying conditions. Censorship rather than action is the standard response of strong men too lazy or scared to improve things.
I saw this same response in South Africa many years ago at the height of apartheid. Censor the critic; don’t change. People died as a result then, and they still die today in places where the attitude prevails.
There is nothing an individual blogger can do. Change has to be lead by those in a position of power. All we bloggers can do is constantly remind the powerful of the implication of their actions or inaction. Meanwhile we continue to think of the miners who died and who will die because of a lack of information, action, and access to the truth.
