Bill Gates Quotes
Access to the outside world is preventing more censorship. I do think information flow is happening in China. .. There's no doubt in my mind that it's been a huge plus.
Gates, Bill. Remarks at the World Economic Forum. 26 Jan. 2006, Davos, Switzerland.
Wales was the founder of Wikipedia, the greatest source of information yet in world history. He mande this statement in reaction to the Erdogon Authoritarian President blocking Wikipedia from the Turkish Internet. The Oresident had objected to an article on The Turkish Armenian Genocide in 1915. Even a century later Erdogan did not want his people to lean the hidotry of what Turkey had done.
This seemingly logical inconsistency is actually typical of many nations and cultures that practice censorship. Freedom in this is a concept of a limited freedom—limited to what is reasonable, not harmful, not offensive. So all are free to behave within a circumscribed set of norms. By this logic, freedom is not being curtailed if the state acts to stop activity beyond those norms. Every nation accepts this principle to some extent. In America one “cannot should fire in a crowded theater” but there are very few other restrictions. But in Germany, Israel and other modern Industrial democracies there is censorship of material that promotes ethnic hatred whereas in the U. S. that is protected from censorship. In China many sites on the Internet have material that is regarded as inflammatory, or slanders the government and this is bad because people might lose confidence in their government. So freedom of speech and censorship issues are matters of degree with the United State being at one end of the scale and North Korea and Saudi Arabia being at the other end. China has been moving from the North Korean end of the scale towards the middle.
While many people hold that view today, in the 17th century this was truly a radical notion. There were NO democracies at the time and this philosopher argued that the citizens had a need to know that might supersede the need for the state to maintain secrets from enemies. Spinoza was one of the most feared intellectuals in human history-feared that is by the established power structures. He is the only known person who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims-all were forbidden to read his works. He was the enemy of authority and advocated personal reason as the guide for men.
The Senator was referring to the difficulty that governments have in censoring and controlling information on the Internet.
Wikileaks needs whistleblowers to send it confidential and secret material in order to have something that people might be interested in. And then, it needs continuous money donations to keep the website going. This statement refuted critics who claimed that Assange and his colleagues were just criminal activists who had no public support or interest in what they were doing.
William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is considered one of the best known entrepreneurs of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Gates is also co-founder and chairman of TerraPower that is developing next generation traveling-wave reactor nuclear power plants, in an effort to tackle climate change.
