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Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

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Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#521

Post by opportune »

busterarm wrote: post #498
IIAOPSW wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

De Jure nationhood is a stupid game that ignores facts on the ground in favor of politicians vision. It is predicated on a fallacy that "legitimacy" is a vital resource and that those already in the nation club have a monopoly on it. At this point calling groups "countries" and calling other groups "terrorists" is better understood as the geopolitical equivalent of a curse word and/or a propaganda trope. -Order of Ma…

-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer. That's playing…

Saudi Arabia also does all of the things you listed, except perhaps desecration of cultural sites. Just because a country does things you don’t like doesn’t make it not a country

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#522

Post by Aeolun »

vkou wrote: post #452
AWildC182 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN is a political organization and, importantly, highly leveraged by China for political gain. The objective reality is that Taiwan is an independent country that sets its own laws and is free to conduct its own foreign relations.

The objective reality is that most of the world, including the United States, does not actually recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. It recognizes that it exists as... Something. I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that the Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Japan[1], etc, etc, etc, have been 'highly leveraged by China for political g…

> Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil and Japan

Anyone in these departments of state is aware that Taiwan is a separate country. They’re just not able to say it.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#523

Post by Aeolun »

vkou wrote: post #485
AWildC182 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coun·try /ˈkəntrē/ noun 1. a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory. Does the Peoples Republic of China currently occupy and govern the island of Taiwan?

1. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with your claim that PROC is improperly coercing the world into saying that black is white, by putting a gun to their heads. (And I still don't understand how it squares with the reality that the ROC is trying its best to do the same thing.) 2. Is Taiwan a distinct nation, or is it part of the Chinese Nation? Both the PROC and the ROC currently seem to think that it is the…

In regards to 1. I’m a bit confused. Are you claiming China is landlord to the entire world?

Or that if they were, coercing all the population to say white is black would be the normal state of affairs?

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#525

Post by harimau777 »

busterarm wrote: post #510
IIAOPSW wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the Roman Empire a country?

Thankfully many international treaties have been made in the last few thousand years and civilized nations wage war differently now. I was expressly disputing the parent poster's claim that ISIS did not use terrorist tactics, which is a statement I find difficult for anyone to really take issue with.

While I think it's clear that ISIS was/is evil, I'm not sure that its as clear that those actions (or at least all of them) were terrorism.

I'd define terrorism as something along the lines of "using guerrilla tactics against civilian targets in order to achieve political ends". I would differentiate that from atrocities committed against a state's own people in order to keep them in line (for example Stalin's purges), human rights violations (e.g. witch trials or killing homosexuals), ethnic/religious cleansing, or guerrilla attacks against targets with legitimate strategic value.

My understanding, although I am definitely not super informed on this, is that ISIS's atrocities were mostly keeping people in line, human rights abuse, and religious cleansing. Therefore I would not consider those acts to be terrorism. However, that doesn't make them any less evil.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#526

Post by Aeolun »

alasdair_ wrote: post #456
hawkice wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them.

>I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them. The question of whether or not ISIS is therefore a country is left as an exercise for the reader.

I assume they were, but since most of the world was intent on squashing the country flat as a bug I doubt formal recognition would have done anything for them.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#527

Post by Aeolun »

incompatible wrote: post #463
thewholeview wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nonsense, and "everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is a flawed statement. The UN does not recognize Taiwan. Taiwan is recognized as a sovereignty by 19 UN member states. It has formal diplomatic relationships with ~50 UN member states. UN has 193 member states in total. Please refrain from using subjective unprovable ideology to represent the mass.

You are technically right in that most states recognize Taiwan as a province of the PRC. However, describing Taiwan as a distinct country is ambiguous, since "country" doesn't have a strict definition. E.g., it's normal to consider the parts of the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark to be countries, although they are not independent. It's not much of a stretch to consider Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, or Catalonia, to b…

The parts of the Netherlands are called provinces, and are not sovereign nations.

The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#528

Post by opportune »

kortilla wrote: post #484
lonelappde wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free economics promote colonialism too.

That makes no sense. Colonialism effectively stopped before free economics was a thing.

Colonialism (imperialism, more accurately) didn’t slow down much until WWII. Even in the 70s Portugal still controlled its African colonies and fought them in wars of independence.

What the gp is referencing is the argument that the concept of free trade has only obfuscated colonialism. Rather than colonialism by France or UK it’s colonialism by Nestle or De Beers. To someone harvesting cacao for $2/day nothing is materially different from living under colonialism, except their landowner might be some well-connected member of the regime rather than a European.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#529

Post by CydeWeys »

busterarm wrote: post #510
IIAOPSW wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the Roman Empire a country?

Thankfully many international treaties have been made in the last few thousand years and civilized nations wage war differently now. I was expressly disputing the parent poster's claim that ISIS did not use terrorist tactics, which is a statement I find difficult for anyone to really take issue with.

Whether a state uses terrorist tactics is orthogonal to the issue of it being a state. Was the Russian shooting down of MH-17 not a terrorist act undertaken by a state? How about the bombing of the Beirut barracks? How about any number of acts by Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, or Imperial Japan?

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#530

Post by thelittleone »

jiggliemon wrote: post #430
peterkelly wrote: post #40

This reminds me of the story about how the first release of Windows 95 was banned in India because 8 pixels of the map shown in the timezone selection control panel were colored in such a way that suggested parts of Kashmir were part of Pakistan. https://www.cnet.com/news/how-eight-pixels-cost-microsoft-mi... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

It’s one thing for India to censor something for a stupid reason. It makes me uncomfortable to have China be able to influence all these other global countries into global (or in this case localized) censorship. Hollywood, News Companies, anything else that China invests heavily has no choice but to fall in line with the censorship.

Agree completely. PRC comes across a lot like a spoiled, entitled brat. Such behavior should never go unchecked otherwise we are enabling it.

On another note, it was refreshing to see South Park creators giving some love to Chinese censorship.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2019-10-...

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