The point of this article isnt to disagree with their insular close mindedness & lack of ability to process criticism or satire.
The point is that because of economics we keep letting their conservative close minded views dictate what happens in the Western Democratic world. These conservative authoritarian approaches should have no quarter here, go against the values & rights the creators & owners of these sites arose from & should be supporting.
It's a sad development & China should be the one having to eat tough shit.
Well unfortunately, the people power (and many regular citizens for that matter) have decided that China's money is much more important than Western values.
Economics is all that matters in this world. It feels even silly to have to spell it out when we are on a website funded by the pinnacle of capitalism, where money overrides principles day and night.
China will not have to eat any tough shit while the economics is on their side.
And before you object, I ask you to consider the device you are using to reply to me. I know where mine came from.
I doubt it, the sources of materials and stages of manufacturing for most advanced electronics are spread all over the world. I know my motherboard was made in Taiwan, my processor from Malaysia/Germany, but that's just the start.
> I have no interest of arguing geopolitics with a moron that approaches this kind of discussion in bad faith.
Ha! So this is why you defend authoritarian regimes. Like them, you have no tolerance for valid criticism. Like them, you can't admit you're wrong. Like them, dishonesty is all you've got.
You mean the proxy war that the US is funding through NATO to make Europe stop buying Russian gas and buy American LNG instead? That very much sounds like economics to me!
Edit: now that was an ambiguous use of '«they»'. For <State>, hence "rule", one would have used 'it'. But 'they' suggests at least the possibility of plural, hence "the people". And that the people share the same view of the rule is not a given.
laughable assertion. I can find people equally dissatisfied with the US. in the aggregate the Chinese people approve of their government at a level westerners literally cannot comprehend. These include studies from western institutions like Harvard, and are so readily available that if you claim to not have heard of them you are either 1. arguing in bad faith or 2. completely unqualified to comment on the Chinese people.
> in the aggregate the Chinese people approve of their government at a level westerners literally cannot comprehend
It's easy to comprehend that the Chinese people have such a warped understanding of the situation. It's a combination of both ignorance and a lack of self respect.
Let's have a look at the results of one of your surveys:
It says, "In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either 'relatively satisfied' or 'highly satisfied' with Beijing."
But when we get to the level of local government, the level of government people have direct contact with day to day and can see up close, what are the results? The survey says, "At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were 'very satisfied.'"
And why the disparity? Because Chinese convince themselves that the efforts of the "good" central government is being thwarted by the evils of "bad" local government.
In reality it's all bad, top to bottom. All authoritarian regimes are. The fish does rot from the head.
Xi Jinping is so weak that he couldn't do two terms and quit. He's such a poor leader that he's convinced himself that he's the one special boy to lead China and he must stay in power.
That's the corrupting influence of authoritarianism.
First we're talking about open versus closed societies, not tribes. The repression of spirit closed societies impose on their members is a humanitarian concern, imperils the soul, eats away at becoming ourselves. Open society all the way. Society has to be allowed to consider itself.
Second, this isn't laws of the land. It's the internet, the unplace where different places can meet & connect. Your suggestion proposes that it's the pro-speech folk forcing themselves upon the world. Not so. What's actually happening in this story is the small authoritarian lowest-common-denominators of the world are imposing their views on all interconnectivity, on everyone else. They are constraining everyone else.
And tech bosses keep letting it happen, keep letting ourselves be bullied. And the governments of open societies are not stepping up to illuminate & push these issues as the threats to open society that they are.
Two absurd inconsistencies. Human rights are amazing. The suppression of humanity is dreadful. That's the "tribe" you are defending.
These are all your opinions and personal values. I agree with all of them on a personal level. Where I think we disagree is that this is some kind of "pro speech" vs. "anti speech" battle. I see it more as a global US led Imperium attempting to impose their opinions and personal values on people throughout the world regardless of what those citizens or governments think. I'm in the US, me and my countrypeople shouldn't get a say in what happens in Hong Kong. Just like China shouldn't get a say in what happens in the US. Why isn't that enough?
And it continues the filter of seeing this as open society being an imposition. If you have a closed society & the open society of the internet doesn't fit your society, you shouldnt be on the internet. Your closed society doesn't want to participate, then fine, if it must: go elsewhere.
I don't want anyone in a closed society and I'd go through great lengths to help people trapped in close societies have access to open connectivities like the internet.
If a society wants to be closed though, your society has the onus of responsibility to enforce closing. Your society can't impose that position on everyone. Hence me saying the society probably shouldnt be on the most open connected free connectivity on the planet, one created by open society & which enables open social values.
> You've decided...
It looks like you have decided here friend. I never openly said that, although heck the words I use build a pretty lopsided case. I think everyone should decide for themselves though, and come to their conclusions. To me the choice seems obvious & it's hard to see what is to respect about closed, but I'm open. I'm open to learning.
The title of this post is "Tech Bosses Are Letting Dictators Censor What Americans See", the article is about China getting a say in what happens in the US.
We don't know what Chinese citizens think because it's impossible to conduct independent opinion polls on political topics. So, how do you know that the majority of Chinese don't agree with our opinions and personal values on freedom of expression?
Countries always seek to extend their influence. The USA and China play the same game, just with different tactics. There will never be "enough".
We don't get a say in what happens in Washington either. Frankly, in the present day USA, it's a minor miracle when the county road commissioner will fill a pothole in a timely fashion.
Definitely not the people who say that a non-believer of Islam cannot depict the prophet Muhammad. That's both a trample on my rights as an individual to do what I want, and a trampling of my rights to not participate in religion.
Do you think that the customs of China's tribe and island are the laws of nature?
For that matter, in the era of nearlight communication around the planet, how important even are things like "island" anymore, and how is "tribe" defined?
>No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine
Isn't that the point? The problem is that the customs of others is infringing on the customs of others. If some places insist on a policy for their people, that is fine for their people. But what we have here is an insistence that those people can control how other people outside of their place and people can see and access technology.
Should your tribe & China tribe have say over what every company online does? Should they have sway over what US companies do? Seems like you are saying no, that you seem to agree with the frustration shared by the article.
China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better."
It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. We Westerners have a philosophical concept inherited from our ancestors that describes that attitude: "hubris."
> China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better."
The CCP has no continuity with the previous imperial government. They love to make that claim when it's convenient but it's bullshit. It would be like the US claiming they have a national continuity with Britain going back millennia.
The US does have a national continuity with Britain going back millenia.
Half of jurisprudence is grounded not in writings that came after the Revolution, but English Common Law. We lean on the First Amendment for issues of free speech, but we lean on the Magna Carta for questions of whether you've produced the right magic slip of paper to prove you own the land your outhouse sits on.
... hell, many of the states have a right to grant exclusive ownership of that land that's fundamentally rooted in a king having granted them that right.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can't ignore that we're mostly speaking English for some reason...
Basing laws off laws of another country isn't national continuity. The British didn't just accept the Declaration of Independence and remove their agents from the US. The CCP wasn't formally recognized by the imperial government as the new government of China. There's no continuity of government in either case.
"Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States." ~ (guess the source)
With respect, between the work of a Cornell professor and an internet rando, I'm going to defer to the professor on the topic the professor wrote on.
China's got a better rail network than the US, more industrial capacity, and produces the world's electronics now. The gap in tech is measured in decades at most, and by that metric the world was behind England (until it wasn't) because England had the accident of thirst for coal and the use for automated, sustained drainage and pumping that allowed them the critical mass of tech and need to build and refine the steam engine.
In terms of world history, the era of European / American tech ascendancy is a blip on the radar.
Who cares? America's progress came from Anglicization. The Brits invented the steam engine, the locomotive, and the electric generator. Then the Americans took those ideas and ran with them.
... now, China's running with the generation of ideas America pioneered and refined, and America's mostly playing catchup because they're off the rails (tragically literally, if you live in East Palestine, OH).
I do. The Western model is superior. Your Chinese model is inferior.
You can live under the boot of an authoritarian regime if you lack the self respect to stand up for yourself. Liberal democracy and the rule of law do take work, and you do sound lazy.
Maybe you do need to be told what to do.
> tragically literally, if you live in East Palestine, OH
I don't know, I would consider it lazy to write off the political structure coordinating over a billion people as "inferior" when it seems to be working for them. I have no disagreement that authoritarians tend to massage and hide data more (as opposed to liberal democracies, where we just classify it and throw people in jail for dumping those databases, right?), but I observe the way the world works and conclude the jury is currently out on which solution leads to a more stable society in the long term. China's communist experiment is young, but it's grounded in political philosophy and theories of social structure dating back thousands of years... I'll let America get a couple more hundred under its belt before I conclude this Democratic experiment is working.
History suggests previous attempts at democracies were unstable. Maybe the alchemy was right this go around. But I'm watching this one allow itself to be spun up into division and polarization that has resulted in a civil war in the past, so we'll see how it goes. The house has a tendency to win, especially when the house is time herself.
> I would consider it lazy to write off the political structure coordinating over a billion people
You're not considering anything. You're only desperately trying to hold on to a losing proposition you've arrived at through a lack of principle, a profound laziness, and a basic nihilism.
> I'll let America get a couple more hundred under its belt before I conclude this Democratic experiment is working.
Such sloppy thinking. You really do need to broaden your horizons.
England is considered to have a continuous culture going back to Londinium and huge numbers of their kings and queens weren't even born in the country.
I also agree they're better (probably coincidence that I was raised in a society and education system praising them nonstop). But to what lengths are you willing to go to impose them on people who don't want them?
edit: If we're comparing china, i'm not sure you want to use length of time the society was built as a metric demonstrating chinese inferiority lol
It's pretty funny that you equate the oppressive actions of an authoritarian regime with what the people want. It's even funnier that you've failed to understand that the whole point of the article is that an authoritarian regime is imposing itself on others.
You contradict yourself but convince yourself you're being rational.
That's the problem with being an unprincipled apologist. You end up compromised.
a place with 1/3rd of the population has a hard on for one specific theoretical form of expression that they don't even use that much? easy ignore.
Midjourney also retrains from all prompts free or paid, making it easier to get better results from simpler prompts. Access to that population of human nodes is definitely more important than placating some ideological position of a smaller group.
Pretty funny reading the differences between this thread and the one from yesterday where Canada fined Google for not censoring information. In that one, people were all "Tough shit, Google has to follow the laws of countries they serve in! Not everyone is American, stupid Americans!"
Turns out, countries will have laws you disapprove of too!
There is a difference between Canada requiring Google follow the laws in Canada while operating in Canada, and China requiring stuff be censored globally to operate in China. If you are unable to see that difference, that's on you.
it turns out "it's just memes, bro" is a poor defense against Conspiracy Against Rights charges.
> Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that.
If you are aware of an instance of someone being convicted by a jury of their peers of Conspiracy Against Rights for sharing "vote early, vote often," be sure to let us know.
It's possible that Popehat's Law of Goats applies here. Even if Mackey was totally joking about what he was doing, he was still engaged in voter suppression.
Then apply it equally and lock up anyone that has ever tweeted "vote early, vote often" or "Party X votes Tuesday, Party Y votes Wednesday" (when the election is on Tuesday). Of course, with all these politically motivated prosecutions it only goes one way.
Just in case your not already aware this account you are responding to is very “out there” and hard to take in good faith. It’s just one thing after another of absolutely nonsense points like this.
The takes you have posted in this thread aren't moored to reality, and have nothing to do with left vs right wing. I hope these comments influence you to reevaluate things, but I am done engaging with you.
It has everything to do with it. I have posted from a pretty standard right wing perspective. Apparently you have so few people in your life that disagree with you politically that you can't even recognise this.
Tough shit. China will just have to grow up.
> He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”
No, it isn't.