I dont like to aegue blablabla, but to give evidence. Chinese travel abroad to so called freendom countries 100M per year, 99.9999%(I dont know how many 9) return to China. Vote by feet. If Young Chinese now are sitll decieved by so simple and naive words, our next generation will curse us.
WeChat and the Surveillance State
251–260 of 275 posts
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could not fantastic education provide an intelligent enough population to handle democracy within a single generation? I.e.... exactly what happened in Taiwan upon the removal of martial law? The USA managed it swaths of the country spread across a frontier.
But you have to admit there are risks for the switching, i.e. there are countries that become worse after the switching. Personally, I dont think democracy is the cure to the current problems. Education probably is. And I haven't been presented with enough evidence to think otherwise. Like, did Taiwan become drastic better after removal of martial laws? Or is Taiwan at a better position today mainly because of the he…
How would education help under the current regime? Xi jinping isn't going anywhere until he dies, and Party members aren't elected (well some kinda are).
What good does education do if it doesn't drive government changes? What changes would the PRC allow at all?
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a competent Chinese Trump today in the form of xi jinping - the difference being instead of being limited to merely separating children the children of Other from their Parents and throwing them in jail, Jinping is directing the wholesale imprisonment and "reeducation" of entire religions, and occasionally just taking their organs from them. I'll take a democratically elected trump that is gone in at most 8 y…
have you talked to any Chinese people and how many of them oppose this reeducation of entire religions? I'm just curious whether that will still happen in your planned democratic China.
In a democratic China the Uighurs will have representatives. If they don't, it's not democratic yet.
Ask other democratic nations if they can get away with voting for systematic oppression of a people via a vote.
Historically, decentralizing power (i.e. via democracy) leads to less shittiness for more people.
In any case, what possible reason would the average Chinese person have to systematically oppress the Uighurs or falun gong? They're only oppressed now because their religion poses a threat to the cultural control the Party exerts over the people. In a democracy, that control vanishes.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
taking a big step back I don't know if democracy is a more stable system than others. Or even better in terms of long-term results I wonder what sort of education you've had? I can easily and quickly think of dictatorships that killed or enslaved millions of their own citizens - it's practically a requirement to be a really good dictatorship, it seems. It's a struggle to think of any democracies which do that. Perhap…
:) Please note the bit about my father. But yours a very good point! So what do I mean? It depends on the word 'better' and 'stable'. 'stable' is easily covered - chinese society has existed in a stable form for thousands of years. There's no evidence that any democracy has, because democracy as I know it is a relatively recent thing. Yeah, greeks and democracy, but they also kept slaves so no. 'better'? Well, what d…
> chinese society has existed in a stable form for thousands of years.
This is a patently false myth that the PRC promotes to legitimize its government. Never mind that the PRC is only 70 years old and radically different than the government that came before it, or the one 30 years before that, or 300 before that, or 200 before that...
Chinese language and culture has existed as long as all the others have. And furthermore, it has gone through just as many regime changes. Unless you're pretending each dynasty was a single government?
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
taking a big step back I don't know if democracy is a more stable system than others. Or even better in terms of long-term results I wonder what sort of education you've had? I can easily and quickly think of dictatorships that killed or enslaved millions of their own citizens - it's practically a requirement to be a really good dictatorship, it seems. It's a struggle to think of any democracies which do that. Perhap…
:) Please note the bit about my father. But yours a very good point! So what do I mean? It depends on the word 'better' and 'stable'. 'stable' is easily covered - chinese society has existed in a stable form for thousands of years. There's no evidence that any democracy has, because democracy as I know it is a relatively recent thing. Yeah, greeks and democracy, but they also kept slaves so no. 'better'? Well, what d…
> chinese society has existed in a stable form for thousands of years.
There is no definition of “stable" for which this is even approximately true.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had no objection to that fine. I had an objection to the an automatic mechanism to do it, or to perfectly enforce any law, no matter how trivial, Simply because these kinds of things don't happen in a vacuum; the mechanisms built toward these ends will not be limited to being used toward that one end. For example maybe there's cameras everywhere to enforce this law. But then there's cameras everywhere. I highly rec…
What if someone were to devise a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without indicating, with the following properties? - perfect accuracy (no FP; no FN) - automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator (just assume it's possible; I know it's hard) - no potential for the device or underlying technology to be used or repurposed for any other form of surveillance o…
> Would such a system (and automated enforcement) be OK?
Yes. But as you pointed out, `automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator` is hard.
And as others have pointed out, Point 1 and Point 3 are also difficult to accomplish.
Question for you is, are you okay for the government to roll out a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without giving you any guarantee of respecting the 3 points you mentioned above?
If your answer is no, you are not okay with it, then we are all on the same side.
If your answer is yes, then you should read the article above by moxie (very interesting article)
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about unique circumstances? Say a child or an animal ran out in the road and you changed lanes to avoid them but didn't have time to signal. Or any one of a hundred of these unique but not uncommon situations. Would there be a mechanism in place to remove your fines and points? Would that system be automated? Would it be susceptible to lying? How long would it take to get the record corrected? Would the effort c…
With perfect enforcement, the fine could be small enough (e.g. $2) to be insignificant for most of us (maybe I need to swerve around an animal once per year) but significant enough to deter persistent offenders (who would rack up $20 in fines per journey).
what about someone making $50 / day? Lets imagine you are making just enough to get by and now government wants to roll out an automatic way to take money from your account for minor infractions. How unhappy would you be?
Also on a side note: "...the fine could be small enough (e.g. $2) to be insignificant for most of us..." -> I once said something like that to someone and he pointed out that statements like that was very hurtful to hear, especially coming from someone who does not understand his financial struggles.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|
Mostly, not only, but in any case I'm not disputing that. I'm just expressing that despite the fact that I use WeChat a lot, and need to use WeChat a lot, I still don't actually like the thing. I just like my friends enough that I will grudgingly use WeChat because "everyone" (in my circle) does.
I feel that someone who really respects their privacy should not hang out with friends who don't respect their own privacy. Because inevitably, their friends will post enough material to compromise the privacy of everyone in the circle.
A year after I stopped using Facebook actively, all of my friends have stopped hanging out with me. It's just me, my family, and my coworkers.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
By no measure is China a freer society today than it was 10 years ago.
China is big, so it ebbs and flows depending on who's in power. Two steps forward one step back. In the last ten years, more people have travelled, studied, or learned about the world than ever before. The people running the show will die one day, that's not representative of what will happen. It's what the people think that determines what will happen. What the younger generations have experienced in their personal…
Unless, of course, they are Muslim or falun gong.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno. We're not anywhere near the level of China (here in the USA). To achieve that, we'd need 1. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally) 2. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of 3. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc 4. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian con…
I agree there's a long way between the USA and China for the reasons you mention. Still, something nags at me. The USA has all those things in some less government-oriented sense, not organised by a totalitarian party but by a vaguely defined group of powerful people who all live in the same few cities, who all share the same worldview, who all work extraordinarily hard to keep people they disagree with away from the…
> As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times.
This is news to me - do you have examples? I'd be very interested in learning more.
>activists in its employee and management
Those are citizens, not government officials. And right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desires align very little with that of the federal executive branch of the USA, so this point doesn't work for me.
> Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines.
And witness not only how you haven't been sent to xinjiang and reeducated for disagreeing with their values, but they weren't sent to xinjiang for producing media that's explicitly against the ruling executive and Senate party in America's value system.
The promotion of equality for men and women, besides, is a far shout to what is happening to activists in China.