121–130 of 280 posts
On the plus side, I just visited China last month and never felt safer. Before you would wear your backpack on the front of your chest when taking public transportation for fear of thieves. Now, with surveillance everywhere (and random ID checks at subways), you can freely wear your backpack on your back where it belongs without fear of theft.
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Because keeping a large diverse country stable and safe is very difficult, and a failure causes enormous tragedy. The approach that works to keep the US stable does not always work well in other countries. To keep the billion people who live in China safe from civil war and rampant terrorism is already a great achievement -- even it comes at the expense of some nice things such as human rights. In fact, China manages…
1.) Chinese government did this to itself, with the 1.3B population. China only had 500M in 1950, but the communist government condemned birth control and banned imports of contraceptives. 2.) At some point, you can't keep using the excuse "but 1 Billion people" for doing disgusting things. When you harvest prisoners' organs. When you imprison 120,000 minorities in camps. When you build an artificial island to the ho…
2) You can always use the excuse "I don't want a billion people that I care about to go through the hell that is Syria."
3) I don't rule out that possibility at all. I'm just saying the risk that it won't work seems too high given how bad the outcome would be if it doesn't work.
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Because keeping a large diverse country stable and safe is very difficult, and a failure causes enormous tragedy. The approach that works to keep the US stable does not always work well in other countries. To keep the billion people who live in China safe from civil war and rampant terrorism is already a great achievement -- even it comes at the expense of some nice things such as human rights. In fact, China manages…
> A push for human rights increases the chance of a government collapse. That's what happened in the Soviet Russia during Gorbachev Strictly, no. That was the USSR. Soviet Russia (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) didn't experience government collapse, though it did change its name to the Russian Federation.
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Because keeping a large diverse country stable and safe is very difficult, and a failure causes enormous tragedy. The approach that works to keep the US stable does not always work well in other countries. To keep the billion people who live in China safe from civil war and rampant terrorism is already a great achievement -- even it comes at the expense of some nice things such as human rights. In fact, China manages…
The ruling ethnic elite (and fully 91.51% of the population as of 2010) are Han Chinese, and you could say they enforce somewhat of an ethnostate. Foreigners cannot become citizens even if they marry a native Chinese and contribute to their economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
Mobile ANPR is becoming a significant component of municipal predictive policing strategies and intelligence gathering, as well as for recovery of stolen vehicles, identification of wanted felons, and revenue collection from individuals who are delinquent on city or state taxes or fines, or monitoring for "Amber Alerts". With the widespread implementation of this technology, many U.S. states now issue misdemeanor citations of up to $500 when a license plate is identified as expired or on the incorrect vehicle. Successfully recognized plates may be matched against databases including "wanted person", "protection order", missing person, gang member, known and suspected terrorist, supervised release, immigration violator, and National Sex Offender lists. In addition to the real-time processing of license plate numbers, ANPR systems in the US collect (and can indefinitely store) data from each license plate capture. Images, dates, times and GPS coordinates can be stockpiled and can help place a suspect at a scene, aid in witness identification, pattern recognition or the tracking of individuals.
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On a meta-note, this seems to apply to every aspect of Chinese surveillance/repression. Every time someone here reports that a website is blocked in China, someone else will reply that it works for them.
Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners. Then you hear about bloggers being imprisoned for pointing out corruption according to the government’s own definitions. China’s authoritarianism looks attractive when it’s about infrastructure and efficiency, but the underside of it, the collective silencing and destruction of debate, the “blank spots” i…
I don't understand. Can you explain that more? How does AI or other tech create something that cannot be controlled or censored? I can only see, say, facial recognition, being bad for freedom of the Chinese citizens.
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There are plenty of western “free countries” with little-to-no street crime. It’s not an either-or situation.
I have been thinking lately about the purpose of crime. Obviously people get robbed and bad things happen, but what would happen in a society without crime? is it possible that crime has a larger purpose?
"Crime" is a very loose term. Things like robbery and assault are obvious but there are a lot of laws out there that have no real "victim", or are enforced only when the powers that be have an inclination to.
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There are plenty of western “free countries” with little-to-no street crime. It’s not an either-or situation.
I have been thinking lately about the purpose of crime. Obviously people get robbed and bad things happen, but what would happen in a society without crime? is it possible that crime has a larger purpose?
Standard theory says that crime just happens. Every human society has its share of deviants and antisocial types. These people will test the boundaries and break the rules whenever they think they can get away with it. And given that law enforcement is never 100% perfect, yes, it means some of these deviants will hurt other people in order to get something they want without putting any kind of effort to actually earn it.
Now, what kind of twisted Lawful!Deviant would want to enable and help the lesser deviants in order to achieve her own selfish goals, and what goals should that be????
On the plus side, I just visited China last month and never felt safer. Before you would wear your backpack on the front of your chest when taking public transportation for fear of thieves. Now, with surveillance everywhere (and random ID checks at subways), you can freely wear your backpack on your back where it belongs without fear of theft.
You're not wrong, article looks at it from a Western viewpoint. This surveillance is actually not new. Its a throwback to imperial China, with technology added to it. I can imagine a lot of Chinese prefer it to lawlessness. It does cost vast amounts of money though. China spends more on surveillance and the police than the entire military budget.
But would they prefer even more to have a choice in the matter?
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At least a few years ago, de Toqueville's 'On the Old Regime and the Revolution' was on the Communist Party's reading list [1]. The Chinese Civil War of '49 and then the Cultural Revolution (where most of the then-current Party leadership suffered) is still within living memory of the ruling class. Of course they understand that there is an implicit contract between themselves and the rest of society, even if it the…
> The question is not whether China will eventually devolve more political power to the populace——that is almost a given This idea was popular in 2013 when this article was written, but Xi's regime has indeed shown that greater prosperity can be had with increased repression. Turmoil in America only underlines this.
As a Chinese-American, I see both sides of this issue, but China's own long political development sees the role of the state explicitly as a paternal protector. The state represents and protects the people's interests, without their explicit participation.
This is obviously alien to a modern Western mindset that sees political legitimacy as only deriving from elections, but that means that even early modern states (e.g. 19th century Britain or the US) is politically illegitimate since the franchise was restricted to a very small slice of property owners.