151–160 of 182 posts
I can't be the only one thinking we've passed 1984 already?
Is there a telestrator in your living room that will cause you to go to jail if you mutter something negative about the government?
Today, people have to agree with things (or at least not speak out against them) or risk losing job opportunities or being 'cancelled'.
Corporate jobs, social media, etc. Only those who have nothing to lose are able to truly speak their mind.
In the not too distant past, comedy could be free. Comedians would offend everybody just a little bit. Now, comedians are terrified to speak out. Most of the older generation of comics has said so.
Orwell is definitely possible.
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I personally believe we crossed that Rubicon once we granted the play store our vaccination status, contact tracing strangers etc. That was the undeniable shift towards hard totalitarianism.
Um, clearly it's not undeniable, because I deny it. What precisely scares you so much about vaccination status being somewhat public? There's precisely zero threat to any real liberties there. And it's laughable to call this "hard totalitarianism". As an aside, this didn't even happen, of course; we didn't "grant the play store our vaccination status". Never happened.
You are literally denying objective reality. Google nor any other private non-health corporation has any right to that information.
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> I would never trust any kind of technology to keep medical or legal secrets Paper too, is in a sense, technology.
It is, but paper cannot be compromised in large volumes by remote actors.
Your medical records may be a ream or two of paper. They don't get stored at your doctor's office, your doctor's office requests the records it needs on a daily basis. Medical couriers exist to handle emergency requests. Your data is stored in a warehouse with perhaps hundreds of employees. The threat model is different, not absent -- everybody from your doctor's receptionist to the warehouse workers have access, and can read or modify your data.
It seems that some tech executives, having more money than any person could spend, often seek what they see as the next level of accomplishment, which is proximity to power and decisions over life and death. That shows up as this sort of militaristic nationalism along lines that conveniently happen to align with their claimed expertise. Of course neither of the executives interviewed in this article really knows that…
That is SUCH a good point. This is exactly why I get all my news from HN. (not a good idea) Possibly related Noam Chimpsky paraphrased superaccuratequote - "Look at all the conflicts China is involved in, they're regional. They don't venture anywhere close to our territory. It's all posturing to coerce the obedience of their own population. Ultimately they represent no real threat and are being cast as a boogieman po…
The notion that China's conflicts are only regional is nonsense.
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Vaccine status may grant more freedoms to more people, but can only happen with some degree of controlling the masses. You have to at some point, see beyond your nose tip.
Nobody is being given anything. We already have freedom of movement, association and equal access to education and employment. Now through this passport they will be taking freedom from those without. And of course it will be scanned and forever noted on entry every where its asked for.
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At some level you always need a way to filter out noise, so quality have to improve to get signal.
Begging the question. There are highly qualified people like Sucharit Bhakdi who are being declared conspiracy theorists for no other reason than that they are going against officially sanctioned truth. Which is the high-quality signal, the NYT or Bhakdi? One is held up as authoritative by those in power, one is suppressed in the hopes that it will not even be considered. If delusion and propaganda gains prominence,…
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Nobody is being given anything. We already have freedom of movement, association and equal access to education and employment. Now through this passport they will be taking freedom from those without. And of course it will be scanned and forever noted on entry every where its asked for.
Laws during medical/health crisis take away your freedoms, and provide governments with powers and levers to remedy the situation.
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Authoritarianism and democracy are not mutually exclusive.
Liberal democracy has that liberal part though, which means rights and freedom and is pretty clearly in opposition to authoritarianism.
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Of course we can get into a post-modernist post-truth debate, but the facts bring one back to reality: Uighurs, suppression of speech, Hong Kong, military expansion, political influence, the Great Firewall, are all real points making it difficult to keep the discussion on the philosophical level.
It doesn't even need to be philosophical. Has China gotten more repressive over time, or less repressive? The first step in a discussion about "beating China at Not-Being-A-Repressive-Dystopia" would be determining which way China is trending , and if there was evidence that will continue or reverse (whether that means more or less repressive). The other half is which we "we" (whoever we are, there's an international…
Assuming charitably that you perhaps just didn't read some comments fully, "Has China gotten more repressive over time, or less repressive?" has fairly obvious answers involving "Uighurs, suppression of speech, Hong Kong, military expansion, political influence, the Great Firewall" that didn't exist before and that you've not addressed at all.
Thanks for reminding me that I can actually question things. One critical component of questioning things is that you look at available information and address questions to what we think we know, not dismiss available information and say we shouldn't trust everything we read. With that in mind, what questions do you have about available information about China's repressive dystopia?