India beat China in this. Since more than 1yr Whatsapp admins are responsible for posts in their groups.
"beat"? Is there a competition to become the most Orwellian state before the other?
China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
51–60 of 170 posts
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no expert on China, but this fits the pattern of them making extreme laws (ie death penalty for corruption) and then selectively enforcing them. Laws are tools for the party to use when it feels it might benefit, not universal rules.
What's really interesting about this is how unstable it makes the country. Clamp down and eventually you end up in a USSR situation where the government suddenly disintegrates with little real warning because there is no feedback loop to maintain stability. Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly…
Thing about it is, the USSR could have stayed in power if they had been willing to get bloody enough.
If Stalin had been in power (or even Khrushchev) the USSR would not have collapsed. There may have been another holodomor. There may have been another terror. But the government would have survived.
This is a lesson the CCP learned watching events unfold to the north, and they put it to work in 1989. The question is if they still are willing and able to do it. I suspect the answer is 'yes.'
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#53India beat China in this. Since more than 1yr Whatsapp admins are responsible for posts in their groups.
"beat"? Is there a competition to become the most Orwellian state before the other?
You're reading too much into how he phrased it. He just means that it happened in India first.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature. Attempts to force human nature to conform to the ideals of utopians in power leads to tyranny and misery. We should bear this experience in mind when looking at our own utopian projects. It's easy to mock China's defiance of human nature, but it's much harder to look in the mirror ask whether we've gone too far in our own pursuits of "justice".
>It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature This asks the question - what isn't at odds with human nature? Why do you think that utopian projects are necessarily at odds with human nature? Marx and Engels were sociologists, and in fact many modern sociologists are Marxists too. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's some indication that the "human nature" argument needs looking into. And it has be…
The Frankfurt School is fundamentally post-modernist in its approach, and I reject its ideas that the truth has more to do with domination and less to do with objective reality.
Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?
And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.
Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.
Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.
You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
> To "human nature" I say firmly: human society.
We are not blank slates.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#55The regulations also demand that all chat room users in mainland China verify their real identity... Effective 8 October, the following types of content will be prohibited in chat groups on China-based messaging platforms: 1. Sensitive political content 2. Rumors 3... Holy shit. What is this going to do to the Chinese tech scene? The liability being created here is crazy to consider. Lets all hope these practices are…
Politicians keep saying things like "China is the future", young people hate free speech, so there are no reasons to hope.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#56Their bottom up innovation will come to a screeching halt. They will export more young utility focused entrepreneurs fed up and not wanting in to that domineering state whacking their friends. We had a different colonial trajectory, but our own McCarthy era had disastrous cascading outcomes. "Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Ke…
Don't underestimate the nationalism of young Chinese. And I very much doubt the CP is going to go after administrators who on-the-whole moderate with a pro-Beijing slant because they took 5 minutes too many to delete a comment. Making assumptions that all young people hate the CP and would betray their country to the west at first opportunity sounds like one of those classic mistakes the West makes when it projects i…
Most outsiders probably do not realize the impact of 24/7 propaganda in every media channel there is. That's what OP is overlooking, and that's ultimately what this action is ultimately about...
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#57Ah yes. India has this law as well. I am part of a whatsapp group from my old school. They decided to make all members administrators. Nice solution except that the person who implemented it is the one who sends most of the crackpot controversial messages. Planning to leave the group, especially since I dont really interact on it.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's really interesting about this is how unstable it makes the country. Clamp down and eventually you end up in a USSR situation where the government suddenly disintegrates with little real warning because there is no feedback loop to maintain stability. Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly…
Thing about it is, the USSR could have stayed in power if they had been willing to get bloody enough. If Stalin had been in power (or even Khrushchev) the USSR would not have collapsed. There may have been another holodomor. There may have been another terror. But the government would have survived. This is a lesson the CCP learned watching events unfold to the north, and they put it to work in 1989. The question is…
Dictators can't wave a wand and cause such things they need people and institutions to enforce their rule. More importantly they need accurate information information about what is and is not working. So, sure in 1960 in theory they could have changed things and kept the system running, but that's not nessisarily true of say 1985. And I my expectation is they did not really grasp how close to failure they where in 1960.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's really interesting about this is how unstable it makes the country. Clamp down and eventually you end up in a USSR situation where the government suddenly disintegrates with little real warning because there is no feedback loop to maintain stability. Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly…
Eh. I think we'd like to believe that, mostly because we don't want to face the possibility that China's system might work out fine.
For the past 30 years, pundits have been saying China will fail. If they keep saying it, maybe they'll be right eventually.
Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages
#60The regulations also demand that all chat room users in mainland China verify their real identity... Effective 8 October, the following types of content will be prohibited in chat groups on China-based messaging platforms: 1. Sensitive political content 2. Rumors 3... Holy shit. What is this going to do to the Chinese tech scene? The liability being created here is crazy to consider. Lets all hope these practices are…
I'm no expert on China, but this fits the pattern of them making extreme laws (ie death penalty for corruption) and then selectively enforcing them. Laws are tools for the party to use when it feels it might benefit, not universal rules.
Exactly. Like how some people get away scot-free when drunk driving (even if they kill people) while others are locked up for a really long time.