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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

#191
post #77
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 la…

What happens if you show them a photo of a Llama, and ask about the Grass Mud Horse?

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

#192
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…

Adding some personal anecdata, Singapore has been having a large influx of Chinese students for the past couple of decades and I have spoken with a few who are adamant that Tiananmen is made up because they ‘don’t know anyone who has actually been through it’.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide examples.

Off the top of my head, Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Chile (and Canada and Australia, if you want to cheat). Do you really think that every liberal Western European democracy had their own version of the French Revolution, or that they've been democracies since time immemorial?

> Britain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War ended with the execution of the Monarch, a brief military dictatorship, and established the principle that the Monarch cannot rule without the consent of Parliament.

Not exactly the French revolution, but hardly a smooth transition either.

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

#194
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leica, a foreign company, is now apologizing about the ad (and has deleted it from their YouTube account) Joining Mercedes Benz in that particular hall of shame: https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/07/technology/mercedes-benz-ti...

MB sales on Western markets didn't drop because of that, so could we say that was a rational business decision by MB.

Shame refers to morality and as such to the personal responsibility of individuals.

> There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to betrustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says,'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

[..]

> It is fortunate and wise that no law exists for sins of omission and no human court is called up onto sit in judgment over them. But it is equally fortunate that there exists still one institution in society in which it is well-nigh impossible to evade issues of personal responsibility, where all justifications of a nonspecific, abstract nature - from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex - break down, where not systems or trends or original sin are judged, but men of flesh and blood like you and me, whose deeds are of course still human deeds but who appear before a tribunal because they have broken some law whose maintenance we regard as essential for the integrity of our common humanity. Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the power of judgment.

[..]

> What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

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

#195
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally happy to write walls of text to debate ideas, but I'm not very inclined to do it for people who just drop links. I will however drop a link of my own: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... TL; DR: Everyone hates their outgroup, and everybody has one, including you and me. Isn't it rather convenient to convince yourself that everyone in your outgroup is intolerant totalitarians,…

> Isn't it rather convenient to convince yourself that everyone in your outgroup is intolerant totalitarians That's a pretty extreme strawman. I disagree with lots of outgroups, and I only call a couple of them totalitarians. If someone hates all of the outgroup, they are almost certainly hypocritical and lying to themselves about being tolerant. If someone hates none of the outgroup, we can agree they're virtuous an…

I think we have a disagreement on the definition of the term "outgroup". The article I linked goes into more detail, but I'd say that an outgroup is defined by being the group that you hate, not necessarily just those who are different from you in some way. It doesn't make sense to talk about what percentage of them you hate when it's defined as being the people that you hate. There's no test to determine exactly what it is, but you can sometimes tell by people's behavior. Tolerance, then, is determined by behaving respectfully and with consideration to those you hate.

And perhaps that statement was an oversimplification, but as I understand it, that's essentially the point of the Paradox of Tolerance. If you had to sum that up in a sentence or two, how else would you do it?

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

#196
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

In case that goes offline, in the interest of combating censorship, I've mirrored that copy of the ad to IPFS. Here's the hash:

QmZkfyxfhT89qT8LHEqaKdz3ixke8wXJehWAfHUb5RcKSU

If you don't have your own IPFS node, you can watch it through any of the public gateways like this:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZkfyxfhT89qT8LHEqaKdz3ixke8wXJehWAfHU...

> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -John Gilmore

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

#197
post #105

Powerful ad. My gut feeling is that there will be a day in the future where everything in China is going to boil-over just like any other totalitarian regimes in the past. It could be 20 years from now when Xi dies or some type of student uprising again, or could be from the HK/Taiwan situation. The behavior of the Chinese government and as they call it "the hand of Beijing" has a self-propelling streisand effect, th…

The West is the outlier here. Most of the world has lived under dictatorships for most of history. China is a millenia-old civilization that has never been a democracy. The current regime may fall, but it is not written in the universe that it will progress towards anything resembling a Western democracy. If I were playing the odds, I'd put money on democracy failing in the west rather than it rising in China in the…

Also, fwiw, the west is the one that can't stop it's out-of-control careening toward climate catastrophe. China's handling it much better.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a comparison to how US students would react to mentions of Kent State or Rodney King or OWS would be enlightening. There's obviously a big difference in severity, but given student opposition to some of the fubdamentals of freedom of speech in recent years, maybe we can learn what cultural differences and commonalities drive state- and self-censorship and thus better address the root problems.

What would you expect an overseas US college student to say or not say about Rodney King?

Whatever the individual US student themselves actually thought about Rodney King and all of the social impacts and causation surrounding those terrible events in Los Angeles.

This is in fact the critical difference between totalitarian society and free society.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't get the point when Karl Popper explained it, I doubt I'll be any more effective at conveying it here.

Including myself, there's probably many other people reading this who have not read it and would like one or two of its salient points.

This is a good read for the notion. I found it a good starting point when I dug into this a little while ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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

#200
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…

I'm curious as to what percentage of the US vs Chinese populations know about their own governments horrors? I mean, what percentage of US students would recognize the Tuskegee experiments continued until 1972? I've had many people straight up tell me that is a lie, or a 'conspiracy theory'. In fact, I think this post will get down voted, despite asking a perfectly valid question and having concrete factual examples.…

How has Tuskegee been “soft” censored by the U.S. government?
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