151–160 of 170 posts
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So much said in so few words.
Even in democracies, the law is abused by those in power. I distinctly remember one party here in germany, slowing down criminal processes of member of the oppossing parties, so that there trials could be held during the election campaigns.
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Even in democracies, the law is abused by those in power. I distinctly remember one party here in germany, slowing down criminal processes of member of the oppossing parties, so that there trials could be held during the election campaigns.
Everyone has an agenda. People in power will generally (ab)use it at some point, e.g. to help a friend.
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Milenia of failure. None of their dinasty's lasted even 1,000 years and many where very short. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHkY3XYHKA
Millenia of continuity- as in there always where citys, there always where villages, there always where fields. No civil war destroyed all records. No civil war spanning more then three generations. No locked in against foreigners syndrom.
It got pretty damned close in the Cultural Revolution.
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"In a sense, it doesn't really matter whether it's the government or a big corporation that performs automated censorship." It does matter. If it's a company doing this, you still are free to run your own servers and say anything you want. If it's the government, you don't have that freedom. You can be jailed, fined, executed, exiled...
> If it's a company doing this, you still are free to run your own servers and say anything you want The Daily Stormer recently had a different experience. Besides, when your entire life's infrastructure depends on an ecosystem of data services, being suddenly disconnected from that ecosystem is tantamount to banishment. That's definitely the kind of punishment that can discourage speech.
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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 19…
It is very, very easy to get people to do terrible things. I'm sure you are familiar with the Milgram experiments.
EX: Cambodian genocide (adjusted for population) was far worse than any similar time period in recorded Chinese or Russian history and it did not help.
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The net does route around censorship; why do you think China keeps passing laws to outlaw VPNs that are already illegal? What the net doesn't handle as well are the armies of paid commentators the state uses to inflate it's preferred opinions. If you really want to know what happened at Tiananmen in 1989, you can find a way to "jump the wall" and find out. It's just that most users aren't actively looking for alterna…
I think that's a semantic defense of the original "routes around censorship" concept. When that statement gained currency it was about being free to finally be outside of the cage that governments and large organizations made. Today the old guard have built new tools - mass online commenting - to combat the signal itself. So while the network may well reroute around censorship - the good censors just use the network…
Now you can get any information if you want it and the problem is that propaganda still exists and some people still believe it.
It's not perfect but it's better.
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>On the other, in the US a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, never spent a day in jail. That is incorrect. He spent 13 months in prison and is now a registered sex offender.
No, he did not spend 13 months in prison. For 13 months he was required to sleep in a special cell, weeknights only. He was free to leave during the day and weekends.
According to federal prosecutors, only one of the girls would agree tontesitfy against him and that wasn't enough to get a conviction.
If you read about the case in sources that aren't determined to link the whole thing to a Bill Clinton conspiracy, you'll see it wasn't an open and shut case. It's pretty likely prosecutors agreed to a deal because they thoght he'd walk otherwise.
The local DA convened a grand jury and they thought there was only enough evidence to support fairly minor charges. Maybe he was paying off witnesses, but you need evidence of that.
Regardless he still spent time in jail.
The 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…
There are activists basically asking for this in the US and western countries.
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> They have about 4K years of institutional memory So does Greece. That doesn't appear to be doing Greece much good in the modern era though. Also, large swaths of China's institutional memory were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
Don't mistake institutional and cultural memory, which are not the same thing! A memory in the intellectual elite sense, and a political cultural memory, and a widespread low-cultural set of norms and understandings are also different things. All apart from the institutions of state, or religion, or bureaucracy, or commerce, and so on, which may have traditions and functional memory going back decades or millennia, d…
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I wish I knew more about Chinese history. They have about 4K years of institutional memory to draw on and they likely are more aware of their history than we are of ours in the West.
The CCP is largely defined by rejection, destruction, and denial of the majority of that institutional memory.
The Cultural Revolution is the one aspect of Maoism that everyone in China today, including the government, will admit was a terrible idea.