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China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

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Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#71

Post by abc-xyz »

ralph84 wrote: post #37
spectramax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why the rest of the world needs to speak up.

To what end? It was 30 years ago. The Eight Elders are all dead. You really think a bunch of westerners tutting at China about lowlights in their history will do anything other than galvanize Chinese nationalism?

It's important to speak up for as long as they seek to censor and imprison any person who dare to mention it, and use their economy to force foregn companies to help them censor/rewrite history.

Staying silent, or defending their tantrums, is what allows the Chinese to make it impossible for Macs sold in China to display Taiwan's national flag, to justify Mariott firing an employee for liking a tweet thanking the company for listing certain countries on their website, to force Leica to remove their ad and issue an apology over nothing, etc.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#72

Post by pmlnr »

So many angles.

Leica is an iconic brand and making politically heated ads is a bad idea: showing up with a Leica following ads like this will put it's own customers in a situation where they will be associated with the company's stand, and that is dangerous; both for them (the customer) and the brand.

Banning the name of an important technology company which is actively present in it current smartphones, lenses, science, etc, will makes things way too complicated.

Youtube(r) removing the ad, besides being a coward act, will only trigger the Streisand effect.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#73

Post by abecedarius »

efoto wrote: post #7

In an unfortunate act of self-censorship, the video has been now removed from YouTube. Update: while the video linked by the article has been removed, here it is: https://youtu.be/dQpKcw-n330

After 1989 there was some debate about how the free world should deal with the Chinese state, and basically "free trade will lead to change" won. We should've been more specific about which side was going to change.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#74

Post by NicoJuicy »

devoply wrote: post #36
tjalfi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute power doesn't mean that you can act with impunity. Xi must retain the support of the heads of the army, secret police, and such or he will be replaced. The Dictator's Handbook[0] discusses this topic in detail. The Rules for Rulers[1] is an 18 minute video that summarizes some of the principles of the book. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7n…

Winnie the Pooh changed all sorts of things for the worse that his predecessor had made progress on. He's an idiot. He should be replaced by someone more wise.

Xi seems to be pretty smart though, but his ideals don't align with ours

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#75

Post by pmlnr »

HNthrow22 wrote: post #38

Why are discussions surrounding Chinese Politics permitted but no other political discussions? Seems like a double standard. Just quickly looking at the removals here's a 4 hour old Mueller report thread instantly removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712217 .

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704347

Mueller report vs copyright filters - this was on for a while.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#76

Post by CamperBob2 »

ufmace wrote: post #62
maehwasu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyzing widely differing cultures and peoples under the unitary framework of “totalitarianism” isn’t terribly compelling either. The Chinese government has shown remarkable staying power, and it’s important to analyze the ways/reasons it might continue to hold power, since that seems to be a quite likely outcome. The intuition that western liberal democracy is some sort of inevitable wave is very possibly just an a…

It seems like an ironic blind spot to me. Western liberals claim to be all about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism, yet seem to have difficulty conceiving of the idea that maybe some other cultures genuinely don't want to turn into Western Liberal Democracies.

Google "The Paradox of Tolerance," if you're allowed to.

Some truths really are self-evident.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#77

Post by dx87 »

apo wrote: post #40

The Chinese are innovating totalitarianism faster than any other country. Take this, for example: > ... When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph [of Tank Man] 16 years afterwards, they were "genuinely mystified." One of the students said that the image was "artwork." It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that…

That reminds me of an interview with a Chinese esports team I saw at a tournament a few months ago. The interviewer was doing a light-hearted game where they showed twitch emotes to the Chinese team and asked what they thought the emotes meant. One of the emotes was a frog (the creator of the game goes by IceFrog), and the Chinese translator said that the players weren't allowed to say anything about the emote. We later found out that they were afraid to say anything because the nickname of the former president of China was "Toad King", and the players were worried that they'd get in trouble if they said anything about the frog emote.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#78

Post by joe_the_user »

chongli wrote: post #14
0815test wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The playbook of all dictatorships is the same: squeeze tighter and tighter until you can no longer hold on, then collapse. While a common-enough failure mode, this is by no means universal. Many successful monarchies began as the equivalent of dictatorships, and then opened up further and further over time.

The monarchies of old changed hands and flipped over due to war (civil and otherwise) so often that they're not really comparable to a modern state dictatorship. Tons of monarchs had extremely short reigns, far less stable than the Chinese Communist party.

Also, monarchies began in an era when the state generally was far less developed than it is now. The number of state functionaries and the control they exert was far less.

Louis the 14th of France was one of the first Western kings to have something like dictatorial control of a country rather than being quite dependent on the nobles formally under him (as those nobles were in turn dependent on their vassals).

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#79

Post by ufmace »

stonogo wrote: post #60
ufmace wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more about how politics affects the tech world, not politics for its own sake. Mueller investigation drama doesn't really have anything to do with tech.

That's a weird take, since huge sections of the report deal with Wikileaks, email server administration, and social media manipulation.

Do you think a thread like the one linked above would have a rational discussion of those tech-related topics that are kind of connected, or rapidly devolve into a OrangeManGood/OrangeManBad flamewar and moderation nightmare?
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