171–180 of 333 posts
The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.
The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.
That's worse IMO. I can (and would) opt out of taking my phone to China. I can't easily dodge US' requirements. These two bully super-powers really give me a bad feeling about the future...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, nobody is going to ruin their entire vacation by stonewalling the border security. This is why my friend let a border agent view her Tinder messages to ensure that "she wasn't coming for sex work," and then endured his parting words: "well, it seems that you're a good girl ;)."
Looks like the US is implementing the same policy Israel had for years. Make people feel like shit for coming into the country. I've been hearing these stories from tourists who visited Israel for years - and I honestly have no idea what the reason is.
Take the anecdote of the person to whom you replied. Lots of people will tell that person's friend, "oh, just let it go, the border agent didn't really mean anything." And if the person complains to a higher authority, the complaint is staggeringly likely to get brushed off, if not used in exactly the opposite way the person intended when filing it.
At a previous job of mine, I worked for the phone-based customer service while another team in the same group operated service windows for in-person assistance. No authority here at all, just answering questions. More often than not, if someone filed a complaint about how one of our window clerks had treated them, the supervisor delivering the complaint to the clerk treated it as a joke. "Well, it says here you told the woman she should smile more. I pulled the security tape and she was pretty cute. Sure would have looked nicer if she had smiled, yeah?" Yeah boss, sure would have! "Darn right, can't fault you there, so we'll just toss this one as unwarranted, yeah?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US ... This style of argument is deflection, and it gets us nowhere. It's very effective in redirecting the focus away from one bad actor and onto another bad actor, though.
To add to your comment: We should be critical of our own government. Panarky clearly agrees with this (me too). The difference is that the conversation is about China. We can also have a conversation about the US or and how they are not respecting people's freedom. But this conversation is about China. It's also a conversation that needs to be had. Plus this redirection is similar to "Bob shot a guy 30 times." "Oh ye…
I don't know. It seems kind of weird to want to restrict the conversation like that, but I guess I kind of see your point.
> Plus this redirection is similar to "Bob shot a guy 30 times." "Oh yeah? Bill punched a guy".
The way I saw it, the neighborhood is turning kind of bad. Someone comments "Bob shot a guy 30 times", and another adds "Bill punched a guy". Neither of these people have met Bob nor Bill and don't really care about them in particular, but their interest lies in the neighborhood as a whole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call it what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Can you explain what's wrong with whataboutism?
It is basically changing the topic when you have no effective rebuttal to an argument/issue.
It also creates a false equivalence between the real issue and the "whatabout" issue.
In this case, GP has no answer to China going FAR beyond any reasonable measure by requiring any tourist to install spyware on their phone so they can access all private conversations, so GP wants to ignore that and talk about public info the US requires visitors disclose at the border.
The false equivalence is created by treating as parallel and roughly equivalent govt actions the requirement to install spyware vs divulging of SocMed accts.
I'm NOT saying that divulging SocMed accts could be a definite threat to a variety of classes of people, especially journalists writing undercover. But even for that specific example, which is worse, enumerating your public SocMed accounts, or installing spyware on your phone, which will divulge far more? Not even in the same ballpark.
In sum, Whataboutism is not only damaging the conversation, it can often also be a method of disingenuous argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US ... This style of argument is deflection, and it gets us nowhere. It's very effective in redirecting the focus away from one bad actor and onto another bad actor, though.
To clarify, in China, one could get "disappeared" for the rest of his/her life, just because of befriending CCP's "enemies", or speaking up against the official rhetoric. I don't think the two countries are even remotely comparable on this front.
The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.
> The US ... This style of argument is deflection, and it gets us nowhere. It's very effective in redirecting the focus away from one bad actor and onto another bad actor, though.
A big part of the 50-cent party's job [1] is to promote negative western news stories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it "obviously impossible"? Most of the developed countries went through rocket growth phases at some point.
Yeah, for example Japan had crazy rate of growth for quite a while after WW2.
China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.