China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by AlexCoventry » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:42 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #173

jononor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument was not that they are different, but that they are more collectively minded and put less value in "individual freedom". Totalitarianism seems an obviously bad thing wrt to individual freedom, but if that is not so important, it may not matter as much as we westerners think it should.

What do you expect to happen when their economy has its version of the great depression or the Japanese lost decades?

That's unlikely to happen unless the PRC loses a major war or becomes much more corrupt. They're ideologically and politically quite capable of re-engineering their financial system so it continues to allocate resources as they see fit, and they're not beholden to a great power with misaligned interests, the way Japan is.

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

#232

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

spaced-out wrote: post #97

nitrogen wrote: post #83

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.

The key difference is whether or not people in the society are allowed to discuss the incident, or if doing so is heavily censored.

You know, it's funny. I originally planned to post that comment under a throwaway, but I thought it was ironic that I was afraid of censorship on an American forum. I decided HN readers would be mature enough to handle honest conversation about how to handle a problem that affects all of us in every country. Guess I was wrong

Censorship in America is vast and pernicious. It takes many forms: taboos, shunning, algorithms, downvotes, shadowbans, no-platforming, heckling, harassment, must-show news segments, advertiser demands, textbook authoring committees, etc.

There are ongoing movements on US college campuses and ongoing development in US tech companies that will undo every bit of progress that was fought for in the free speech movement.

This very thread shows a video on an American site being removed because of Chinese complaints.

I am not trying to detract from the importance of Chinese censorship by muddying the waters. This is not whataboutism. We are standing on a sinking ship ourselves, and if we don't start fixing the damage to our own freedoms, we will sink right along with the rest of the world. We must solve our own problems if we are to have any hope of helping others with theirs.

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

#233

Post by AlexCoventry » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:53 AM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #79

stonogo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

OTOH, this thread is also a shitshow by HN's explicit standards.

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

#234

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

Gigablah wrote: post #210

walrus01 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That means you’re intentionally trying to get them in trouble? This is as asinine as getting someone to say “bomb” at airport security.

Right, I got it, here in the free world we should totally avoid Winnie the Pooh, Llamas, frogs, river crabs, or other things that are seen as anti-central-authority/anti-government by the powers in Beijing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-win...

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

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

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

#235

Post by geomark » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

hopler wrote: post #179

duxup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've even got totalitarian apps: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/world/asia/china-xi-jinpi... >Schools are shaming students with low app scores. Government offices are holding study sessions and forcing workers who fall behind to write reports criticizing themselves. Private companies, hoping to curry favor with party officials, are ranking employees based on their use of the app and awarding top performers the…

In the US we have diversity trainings, where employees are asked to write essays about what they learned, and fired if they voice an unapproved opinion of the latest trends in the company's view of psycho-sociology.

Perhaps you are exaggerating a little. As a middle manager, I had to go to some of those trainings. We did not have to write essays but we did have to answer multiple choice tests with questions that were so loaded we couldn't help but laugh. Nobody got fired, but there was a note put in our files about how compliant we were with the training.

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

#236

Post by helloindia » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:34 AM UTC

dx87 wrote: post #77

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 la…

Similar to how "Winnie the Pooh" is censored in Chinese social media. Because, a meme became popular comparing Xi Jinping to the character. https://www.businessinsider.in/Pictures-of-Winnie-the-Pooh-a...

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

#237

Post by eridius » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

spectramax wrote: post #20

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…

*great people

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

#238

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:42 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #30

wutbrodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

None of those places functioned as modern nation states prior to the Peace of Westphalia. Monarchies were in constant flux, collapsing all the time as brother invaded cousin and so on. How exactly does this refute my point?

Uh,ok, if you're going to be intellectually dishonest and move the goalposts "here is the single path that dictatorships take (demonstrably not the case in whatever the final dictatorship that transitioned to democracy for each given non-revolutionary countries)...Spain, Portugal, and Chile were all examples from the last half century. How do both this and the general case I described _not_ refute your point?

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

#239

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

stordoff wrote: post #193

wutbrodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent comment is an exceedingly narrow description: totalitarians always tighten their hold until they collapse. I wasn't making a correspondingly strong counterclaim that the transition was smooth and bloodless for every/most polities. We can quibble about whether Post-Civil War Britain qualifies as having sufficiently transitioned to democracy (and if not, then Post-CW Britain is the polity in question that transitioned without collapse). But it's easy to refute the ludicrous original claim that polities under totalitarians only ever follow a single path.

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

#240

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:49 AM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #141

wutbrodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I lol'd really hard at your mention of "Spain", here.

Not sure I get the joke. Is the claim that Francoist Spain was never totalitarian or that post-Franco Spain still is?