Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

globalvoices.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#71

Post by alphaalpha101 »

jordanb wrote: post #52
Retric wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

The Holodomor wasn't an attempt to enforce power, it was a genuine attempt to modernise agriculture by forcing the change to happen.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#72

Post by alphaalpha101 »

Chiba-City wrote: post #37

Their 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…

>"Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Keep on rocking in the free world while it lasts.

Right to be forgotten isn't peculiar and neither is it at all related to "makeover" TV programmes or freedom.

Right to be forgotten is about have a right to your own information. Collecting information doesn't give you a right to it. Something being publicly available doesn't make it actually public.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#74

Post by alphaalpha101 »

EGreg wrote: post #20

Makes me so happy to live in what is probably the country with the most freedom of speech. The USA may be behind other countries in some things but not freedom of speech! If you live in a country with such draconian (and increasing) measures, there is only one thing to do: Use encryption. If only a few people use it, then they are targeted. If merely 10% of people use an encrypted protocol, it may be blocked. But if…

The USA doesn't have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense. You only have to look at the way peaceful protestors are treated to see that. The Occupy Wall Street protesters were treated horrifically.

As more and more formerly public places are privatised and the veneration of private property as an ideal above all others continues, the USA is simply running out of places where you're even allowed to protest. And that's not even considering so-called 'free speech zones', as if free speech is limited to a fucking place.

This is free speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikoi#/media/File:Hikoi_FS.JPG

In the USA these people would be arrested for blocking a road.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#75

Post by userbinator »

EGreg wrote: post #20

Makes me so happy to live in what is probably the country with the most freedom of speech. The USA may be behind other countries in some things but not freedom of speech! If you live in a country with such draconian (and increasing) measures, there is only one thing to do: Use encryption. If only a few people use it, then they are targeted. If merely 10% of people use an encrypted protocol, it may be blocked. But if…

lawful means must be taken to defend what is left of freedom of speech

...and some may argue, even unlawful means; including one of the founders of the USA:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

It's surprising how extremist that quote sounds today --- ask a random US citizen what they think of it, without revealing its author, and you'd probably receive some pretty disappointing answers.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#76

Post by alphaalpha101 »

CrystalLangUser wrote: post #35
stevenwoo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at a confirmation hearing is not protected speech. Though the article says what happened after she laughed is why she got convicted. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/code-pink-sessions-lau... I think even in the UK parliament the opposition makes fun of and laughs at each other without fear of prosecution.

It's not about laughing, it's about being disorderly. Has little to do with "free speech", stop click baiting.

It has everything to do with free speech. It wasn't about being 'disorderly', it was about laughing at a confirmation hearing being considered disorderly.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#77

Post by alphaalpha101 »

etplayer wrote: post #50
meric wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The land distribution and collectivisation I think we're communistic - you're right it's very early on. I think the Khmer Rouge were communistic too - everyone became a farmer. The city people can't farm properly and died.

That said, there are modern Communist projects which rely not at all on agrarian population; they believe that education should be tailored to fit the current mode of production; for a view on this, you may be interested in Paul W. Cockshott's Towards a New Socialism in which he elaborates what a society might look like under lower-stage Communism and what methods can be used to get there, and how an economy might be…

And of course it makes sense in context. ('It' being changing an agrarian capitalist society to an agrarian communist society - clearly the natural progression.)

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#78

Post by yarg »

oculusthrift wrote: post #36
mirimir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this can't be stressed or repeated enough! The Soviet Communist Party was/is rather like Scientology. At the noob level, in the Pioneers (a lot like US Boy Scouts) it was all about ideals/ideology and honor. At some point, you realized that members got nice perks. More money. Access to stores that carried better food and stuff. And eventually, as you got into higher-level leadership, you started to get that it w…

did you ever stop to wonder why every communist state ends up the same? is it possible they misunderstand human motivations and psychology and will always devolve to authoritarianism?

I think that a fundamental aspect of that we are yet as individuals within our societies to understand the implications of Nash equilibria (and other significant economic theories).

In any functional communistic society I think that it would need to be taught from a young age in order to provide the populace with a near inate understanding of just how damaging selfish individual motivations can be (when applied on a global scale).

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#79

Post by Dylan16807 »

CrystalLangUser wrote: post #35
stevenwoo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at a confirmation hearing is not protected speech. Though the article says what happened after she laughed is why she got convicted. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/code-pink-sessions-lau... I think even in the UK parliament the opposition makes fun of and laughs at each other without fear of prosecution.

It's not about laughing, it's about being disorderly. Has little to do with "free speech", stop click baiting.

But the laugh didn't actually interrupt anything. It wasn't disorderly.

Re: China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

#80

Post by nickrio »

Chiba-City wrote: post #37

Their 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…

Ha! That's wrong.

You see, even if "young utility focused entrepreneurs" don't like what CCP says, they can pretend they likes it and help spread it. It's called Lying, but people do it all the time. After that, when those entrepreneurs made enough money, they can live outside China and become a citizen of a country they like.

And lying is enough for CCP (or any government I assume) as long as that lie can keep most people loyal to them.

Also, "Young" is just a nature status, it's mean nothing about people's ideology. Lot's of young people joined Nazi in the old days, don't forget that.

Post reply on HN