> Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
More than 1 in 15 Chinese people are not part of the Han ethnic group. When somebody makes big “mostly” generalisations about people, I don't expect “you could have half the clubs in a school composed of these people and still have some left over, assuming uniform distribution” to be true.
You do know that saying bad things about $CountryX doesn't prove good things about $CountryY, and vice versa, right?
Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
Stop giving him such a hard time! China's execution rate is a state secret, so no one really knows how high it is, but it's estimated to be significantly lower than that of peer countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran :)
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
First, stop moving the goal posts and the whataboutism. Now you are bringing things like political assassinations. Can you go the part where almost we talk about how almost 50 million people starved to death due to the ideology of the Great Leader, or how the country has 300 million excess men because of the one-child policy which led to sex-selective abortions and plain brutal infanticide?
Second, you seem to be the under the impression that I defend the things done by the US State. I do not. It is precisely because I do not like the US State that I do not want to give it more power than it already has. In fact, it has been quite a bit amusing to see your cognitive dissonance of talking about all the horrible things that the US Government has done and yet you want me and everyone else to "Trust the State" with social media. It's almost as amusing as the cognitive dissonance you show when you say you want to take things out of control of "private entities" and put them to the control of the state that you so clearly (and justifiably) loathe.
> Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
Take just the million Uighur in "re-education centers" and call the thing by what it really is - a concentration camp - and suddenly this number already goes up quite a bit.
However, what you are failing to understand is that there is no point in comparing a country that has established (however flawed) democratic institutions with a country whose authoritarian rulers have unchecked powers. The numbers are meaningless if the masses are subjected to tyranny and indoctrinated to never question the authority of the leaders.
> First, stop moving the goal posts and the whataboutism. Now you are bringing things like political assassinations
Can you tell me who wrote this and brought up political assassination?
Because I'm sure it wasn't me.
> Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
> effects of the Gulf War and over a decade of economic sanctions have resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children due to malnutrition, diarrhea, and other preventable diseases.
(The gulf war was started on a lie, fabricated by the US government)
I ask to stop with the whataboutism and you respond with more of it.
I get it, you don't like the US State. Me neither.
You don't like Facebook. Guess what? Neither do I.
The point of our disagreement is that you seem to believe that people do only bad things because Big Bad American companies are manipulating them. And your solution is to destroy them by executive order and give all this power to... the US State!
The cognitive dissonance is so strong you simply refuse to acknowledge this point every time I mentioned, and you prefer to distill more diatribes against the US.
I am not interested in more diatribes against the US government. I dislike it and distrust it already to know that I don't want it to have more power. What I want to understand is what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias.
> Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
Regarding media: "playing the insecurities of people to sell them ads" is actually something that every marketer does. No exceptions. Fabricate demand. From news channels that are considered infotainment to product placement spots on movies, from teen magazines that promote utterly wrong role models and lead girls to bulimia, anorexia and all sorts of psychosis to any property from Arianna Huffington that mastered the exploitation of outrage culture to sell to Millennials. Rest assured that every single media outlet that depends on ads to make money has no interest in elevated public discourse and thrives on public anxiety.
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
China gets more propaganda, but average Chinese knows they're being fed propaganda, whereas free citizens with their free 5th estate are rarely aware of when their consent is being manufactured. More highinfo/curious Chinese are informed about the world simply because there's a fuckload of bilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
What good is it to be aware of the propaganda if no one gets to act and defend the values they seem worthy of protection?
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.
I hope you realize that you so into getting into a shouting match that you are not making any sense whatsoever.
I don't know where you are from, but as someone who grew up in Brazil, lived in the US for ~5 years and now has 7 years in both Northern and Southern Europe and close relationships in the Middle East: globalization is real. Someone autistic like you may not notice due to subtle differences to adapt to local cultures and local flavors, but the message everywhere is to get people to measure themselves by what they consume and to stimulate consumption by creating needs where there are none.
It might surprise you but being in the spectrum doesn't mean being autistic as in the cliché.
It's, as the same implies, a spectrum.
I've lived in the US, New York, Los Angeles and Columbus Ohio for a brief period.
(I also lived in Berlin and Barcelona, but that doesn't really count as a radically different experience for an European)
I have strong northern African looks, but am still white and loved every moment in the US.
But the devil is in the details, I could not ignore that when my friends there told me that some neighborhood was dangerous it really was dangerous, not dangerous as we usually mean it when we say it in Italy.
I could not ignore the staggering amount of homicides reported in the news.
This year LA will surpass 300 homicides in a year, Italy has 12 times the population of LA and there were "only" 270 homicides last year.
I could not ignore that the police is scary there and you should not talk to them or engage in any way.
I swear I notice a difference when I see one.
Having said that.
Globalization is real, but the media here are not trying to exploit my weaknesses to sell me ads, they are putting ads on their products, generic ads, not "I know who you are and I know you're gonna like this" ads.
I'm ok with the first kind, not so much with the latter.
The point of decentralised web is a misguiding one.
The decentralised web is the web!
Everyone can build their own website and host it at home on a raspberry PI on their connection.
That's what made the web a novelty that could (hopefully) spread culture and knowledge.
The dicotomy between centralised and decentralised web was born because the web has been taken away from people and transformed in a targeted ads delivery machine by the same companies that sell ads (FB, Twitter, Instagram and most of all Google, they sell ads as a primary business)
They are fighting to get screen attention so that they can deliver even more ads to the people.
And when we say ads we are not simply talking about product advertisement, we are talking about political ads used to radicalise the debate, that the same companies selling ads control, thanks to the network effect.
And since the majority of companies doing it are American, I blame the USA that let them do it
As paradoxical as it might sound China doesn't need to sell ads to people to convince the people to support this or that position, because there is no alternative position.
They rely on good old State propaganda, which existed for centuries ans has been studied for decades and is a well understood topic.
