China continues to force the world to bend to its totalitarian demands: changes to Hollywood movie plots and editing, arbitrary keyword bans and FAANG helping to "accommodate" their platforms to facilitate censorship.
China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
251–260 of 283 posts
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but China shows no sign of reducing emissions: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/22/blogs/dotglobcarb... Also, have you been to Beijing? The smog is so dense that sometimes you don't see 50m ahead ... The only thing they're doing is trying to build cheaper electric vehicles.
I’m in Beijing right now and it’s nowhere as bad as you describe (which is how it was ten years ago). Electric cars and scooters are everywhere. China really seems to be trying to get their environmental shit together, it’s just a big project that takes time
I was there yesterday for a few hours and the air looked terrible. didn’t check the actual numbers, but wow was the air ugly.
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tolerance and diversity normally stops at "it's cool we're doing things differently, as long as nobody gets hurt". Why would you be tolerant of people being abused?
That's a good question to ask police and local government officials in places like Rotherham.
Blowing that dog whistle hard aren’t you.
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
>> what percentage of US students would recognize the Tuskegee experiments continued until 1972 Literally everyone who has ever had to take a medical or scientific ethics course knows this, since the IRB process was born specifically from this horrific abuse of science. I'm guessing most high schools cover it in US History and/or World History, also, as mine did.
I went to a rather nice semi-private high school (graduated 15 years ago) and Tuskegee was not covered
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#255So 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, sci…
> making politically heated ads is a bad idea
Which is why I strongly suspect ad agency creatives did this on their own. Being in Brazil may have made them feel free from client scrutiny.
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#256In 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
"Self-censorship" is much scarier to me than the "traditional" censorship. It's terrible when a government takes away your voice. But it's so much worse when people do it voluntarily to avoid the consequences. (in this case, of course Leica is a business that doesn't want to lose a market with billions of people, but still... Leicas have been used for a hundred years to expose this type of nonsense, and now they're d…
“The Empire's got something worse than whips all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.”
From Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's true but most of the people who have lived have been relatively poor and ignorant. Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable and I've actually forgotten exactly what the level was but China will be past it soon if it isn't already. I really have to re-read Wars, Guns, and Votes .
> Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable
Even if that was the case for now (lets say e.g. reading or education made the masses harder to oppress), this doesn't mean other developments cannot outperform those effects in a different direction. Especially social media is a recent invention that seems to put a lot of power into the hands of very few. So far they don't seem to wield that power to drastically shape politics of our societies. At least not intentionally. But keeping it this way will be hard, since they either do something to prevent headlines like "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military" or have them attract the wrong kind of investor. Actually, the latter is probably impossible to avoid long-term, if the US broadcasting industry is something to go by.
The rising political divide in the US is an interesting upcoming case study. I don't see a lot that could revert course, so it will probably end as an anecdote for "less stable". The current US existing for that long is still a remarkable achievement. But we better use the knowledge we gain, since technological progress has made it unacceptable to have our societal systems become unstable every once in a while and needing to be reset violently.
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#258I have a question that maybe Chinese people here can answer. How patriotic are chinese people? How critical are they about the government and how many people (especially outside of China) approve of them?
Chinese people are critical of the government but when speaking to Westerners, they are tired of being lectured. It’s like, when you want to go wash the dishes, and then someone nags you to wash them and “explains” the importance of keeping things clean. Almost every interaction with Westerners about the government isn’t because they genuinely care about Chinese people, but rather to feel superior, like they are savi…
I mean, let's just imagine a hypothetical situation where the totalitarian system breaks down, riots happen and 1+ billion people are starving in China. I do not expect the West to sit and wait it out while it happens.
The West will surely only get to hear all the "sorry sorry sorrys" when it's too late.
Unless the many of us who believe that modern democracies ARE better are wrong, in which case China can continue taking IP, threatening foreign companies and claiming oceans while the rest of the world waits for it all to go tits up.
Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Current Spain is still francoist Spain. There has been no breach of legal continuity since the Spanish republic was defeated by fascism in 1939.