361–370 of 397 posts
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Call it whatever you want, I'll take the imperialist country that doesn't censor activists' accounts.
I too have forgotten about Snowden and Manning, the latter of which has undergone extensive psychological torture at the hands of the US military government.
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And which country would that be? Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc. Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.
ahem Julian Assange cough America is no better than China when it comes to repressing dissent. American military industrial pharmaceutical organisations are better at usurping insurrection and revolutionary movements, however.
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People at tiannamem square protested. Tanks turned up and refused to run them over People in nyc protests, police officers ran them over Maybe China is worse than the US, but there doesn’t seem to be as much in it as there was 30 years ago.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tiananmen-square... > On June 4, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to mili…
I hate to make this point, because it sounds like whataboutism, but perhaps the relative population size of China and the US is worth taking into account.
Let's assume that the 300 figure is the most accurate, since these (Western?) reporters and Western diplomats may have had some incentive in the Cold War to over-estimate the number of deaths. In 1989, China's total population was apparently 1,110,000,000 while the 1990 US census counted 248,709,873 people. That's a scale factor of about 4.5 times.
An interesting comparison then is the 82 people killed by the US government in the 1993 Waco siege, which is equivalent to 366 people if scaled up. Obviously the circumstances are different, but in terms of the magnitude of the number of lives lost, we should probably think of the two tragedies as similar.
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Eh, but in the US we now have people being banned or censored for political dissent. We’re not heading in a good direction either.
The U.S. has high standards for itself. Chinese policies are openly racist, speech is literally criminal, reproductive rights do not exist, government openly censors its citizens, and the list goes on.
“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…
> authoritarian leaders will they comply? Apologies for the seemingly seagull-ish comment/rant, but it is 100% true: "money talks, bullshit walks". Zoom is not going to miss out a 1bn ppl market because of ethics. Apple will not miss out a 1bn market because of ethics. Blackberry handed the keys to the kingdom so fast the heads of the tortured people were spinning, and the tale goes on and on. Autocratic regimes play…
It's no wonder companies don't bother doing the right thing. People just ignore that massive sacrifice and pull out some other reason to not like Google.
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Would you please give me an example of something that the US government is currently censoring based on morality?
I think he's talking about the conversation going on about FB, Youtube, Twitter removing posts that are hate speech, inciting violence, spreading misinformation, etc.
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The big downside to going too-far down that road too-quickly is that it might put China in a corner financially. I don't think anyone wants it to get to that point because isolating them quickly will definitely escalate tensions and maybe even war. Rather: Determined and solid pressure should be put on any expansionist and growth policies that China may have. Reduce and starve them of critical imports, slowly make th…
The whole point of an attack is that it hurts the other guy. If you're afraid to hurt China's economy, or worse if you fear that China will counterattack, then you have already lost. The trade relationship between China and the USA is not a symmetrical one. The USA is the customer; it should take its business elsewhere. Apple spent $100B on stock buybacks last year, and has allocated another $50B for this year. How m…
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> authoritarian leaders will they comply? Apologies for the seemingly seagull-ish comment/rant, but it is 100% true: "money talks, bullshit walks". Zoom is not going to miss out a 1bn ppl market because of ethics. Apple will not miss out a 1bn market because of ethics. Blackberry handed the keys to the kingdom so fast the heads of the tortured people were spinning, and the tale goes on and on. Autocratic regimes play…
Google is the one company that did walk away from a billion person market - and a strong, established position in it - when asked to censor, and you want to boycott then too? It's no wonder companies don't bother doing the right thing. People just ignore that massive sacrifice and pull out some other reason to not like Google.
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Though frustrating, the rest of the world has had to deal with the extra-territoriality of US laws for decades now, particularly in finance. I don't think it's good. But at least it is recriprocal.
For Europe: see GDPR It’s entirely common for countries to have codes that affect those outside their borders - especially ones that were agreed upon in treaty or trade deal. What is unique here is a country demanding that a non local company engage in censorship outside its territory. These two things are nothing alike
The extraterritorial application of US economic sanctions goes way beyond anything any other country is doing to impose its laws abroad.
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For Europe: see GDPR It’s entirely common for countries to have codes that affect those outside their borders - especially ones that were agreed upon in treaty or trade deal. What is unique here is a country demanding that a non local company engage in censorship outside its territory. These two things are nothing alike
Forcing the entire world to stop trading with a country is way more serious than forcing a nonlocal video conferencing company to suspend an account. The extraterritorial application of US economic sanctions goes way beyond anything any other country is doing to impose its laws abroad.