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Comment by shakesbeard | Hacker News Reader

> Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".

What does that have to do with the story of the article? Either the story is true or not, this has nothing to do with the source.

> I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

False dichotomy. Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.

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That's not a false dichotomy. That's an appeal to worse problems.

He didn't rebut it or claim to. He merely said "it's a bit harsher".

That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new research shows that one part of the theory of evolution is wrong, therefore creationism is right". There's nothing like this here; his was a simple statement of the form "X is not bad, because Y is even worse". See the difference? False dichotomy means (falsely) asserting that when you disprove the factuality of one alternative, only one other alternative remains and therefore it's automatically true. (Whereas apeeal to worse problems is not about factual truths but about the weights of problems to be solved.)

> Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.

Well, if you believe the article, "personal blogs" will not be affected. The claim is that only "ten websites" are affected. So that means big media companies like Yahoo.

In reality this policy is nothing new. The Singapore government has for many years reacted harshly against stories they didn't like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Singapore They have required a S$200,000 (US $158,000) "security deposit" from foreign publications.

Why exactly do you feel obliged to defend those wanna-be tyrants?

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