https://twitter.com/cbeuwandy/status/713756214119763969

[cirosantilli]

Copy paste from: https://www.zhihu.com/question/34775392/answer/87045074 archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160219094646/https://www.zhihu.com/question/34775392

It was not the party hurt your family, but your family violated the law. FLG was regarded as illegal purely because its damage to the society. Freedom has a limit, telling people to suicide or avoid medicine when having cancer are not parts of freedom, at least not in China, since Chinese people are not as anti-intellectual as people in another country.

Laws can be bad, and I think this is a bad law.

I do understand your motivation, the opposition to censorship and GFW is quite common in China, especially in the developer community. But what I don't understand is your method of opposition. You said that you are trying to "increase the cost of censorship", but putting some "sensitive keywords" on your Stack Overflow username cannot really grab attention of the government since they don't really care about people knowing the keywords. And even if you do grab their attention and they decided to block SO, it will only harm the Chinese developers but not affect anything to the government since blocking SO is as easy as any other websites. No cost increment in any form at all.

If SO is banned, there will be less good programmers, and China will be poorer. I know blocking itself is easy.

And the worst thing that you did is to use FLG as a "weapon" of opposition. Clearly you wanted to increase the attention of religious freedom in China, but the only result of using FLG is hurting your own image. It shows that you are very very unfamiliar with the public opinion that Chinese people hold. Because of the word limit I don't want to elaborate this too much but basically FLG is something that everybody hates, whether for government or not. You can focus on things like GFW, censorship, corruption etc., and you will get support (at least not opposition) from "pro-liberal" people (such as developers). But as this answer said, "轮子功在中国，那是老鼠过街，人人喊打。". It means "FLG in China is just like mouse on the street that everybody wants to kill", which is very true. People, including both pro-liberal and pro-government people, do not like FLG. If you are interested in more specific details, you can message me.

I know most Chinese hate FLG, and that it is a politically bad move to support it.

But I really believe it is not bad enough to be banned, and that we must accept others. Same goes for democracy.

[cbeuw]

If SO is banned, there will be less good programmers, and China will be poorer

This does not make sense because:

1. I don't think most of the Chinese developers can read the English on Stack Overflow, blocking it won't affect them.
2. China will not be poorer if there are less good programmers, and there weren't many "good" programmers in China anyway, if you compare that with Google.
3. Blocking Stack Overflow dose not mean it is totally inaccessible. VPN is common in China.
   And the government did (presumably) block Git Hub for a short period. SO is clearly not as important as Git Hub.

I know most Chinese hate FLG, and that it is a politically bad move to support it.

Politically correctness is not a clear standard, it varies from place to place. In China, people don't consider telling people to harm themselves as a part of religious freedom, thus banning FLG is politically correct. Another question is: should Islamic Extremism be banned?

[cirosantilli]

I know that I am just one person, and anything I do is unlikely to have no effect in comparison to a country.

Islamic extremism promotes harm of others.

And I'm not convinced that FLG promotes self harm, I think it is just Gov propaganda.

If you have links to research not done by the Chinese government nor FLG members that says so / otherwise, please give them to me.

[cbeuw]

It is quite easy to find many articles providing evidence of FLG promoting self harm but you may say it is the propaganda from the government, and the biggest problem is that most of the documents are in Chinese and I am not bothered to translate them.
Here are some articles saying that Li Hongzhi promoting not to take medicine:
http://www.kaiwind.com/flgct/201004/21/t20100421_827737.htm
http://www.kaiwind.com/flgct/201003/t107796.htm
and self burning:
http://jilin.kaiwind.com/kfpl/201601/23/t20160123_3403439.shtml

There are many FLG supporters believe that this website is for government propaganda, but in those articles you can find references from Li Hongzhi himself, and if you search for those references, they are true.

[cirosantilli]

I know that Li has said not to take medicine.

But that is not enough. The bible also says to kill non believers, but people don't do it (too much anymore?) in practice.

What we need as statistics that compare health of FLG vs non FLG.

kaiwind is clearly an anti FLG site, I wouldn't accept evidence from them.

And also consider that prohibiting FLG has horrible health effects for those who believe.

[cirosantilli]

Let's move all medicine discussion to: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27529/have-many-falun-gong-practitioners-forgone-medical-treatment-and-died-of-treatab