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The Big [Censored] Theory

pudding.cool

791–800 of 891 posts

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. An individual's rights should have nothing to do with the people who happen to surround them and what they happen to think. If different countries allow different things, that would mean that what a person is allowed to do would depend on where they happen to live, which is usually close to where they happened to be born. That doesn't make any sense to me- the lottery of birth should have no im…

Possibly true, but can we at least agree that a democratic majority deciding to censor something is significantly better than a dictatorship deciding to censor something?

ideally no one should be allowed to censor anything (using state power)

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> milk/toast FYI the word I believe you're looking for is "milquetoast" :)

Milk/toast somehow also captures the essence of it.

After I was corrected, I looked up the origin of the word. It first appeared as the name of a character in a comic strip, "Caspar Milqutoast" who the author described as "speaks quietly and gets hit with a big stick." He named it after the food which is the most meek of meals.

The Wikipedia says this: "The character's name is derived from a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast, which, light and easy to digest, is an appropriate food for someone with a weak or "nervous" stomach"

I never knew that this comic was a thing, but now I want to read it

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly true, but can we at least agree that a democratic majority deciding to censor something is significantly better than a dictatorship deciding to censor something?

I disagree. The majority is never informed enough to make a good decision on something as nuanced as censorship. At least a dictatorship could, theoretically, be benevolent and act on the advice of experts.

A democracy can act on the advice of experts too via representative democracy with representatives (or appointees of representatives) that rely on experts.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one's saying that online rental should be banned. Instead, the solution that the USA's current legal system is going with is "You _can_ run an online rental service, as long as you have the copyright owner's permission (e.g., you have a contract with them in which you give them money and they give you their permission)"

That's a ban on the normal mechanism via which rentals work. Sorry for shortening it. It's a bad solution. It should require no cooperation to build an online version of DVD rental.

For better or worse, the US legal system and media publishers disagree, and they’ve established the rules that do require cooperation with the copyrights holders to build online streaming services. But as I’m sure you know, it’s at best problematic to call online streaming a “DVD rental”. It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“misinformation” is a term used to discredit and dismiss. It’s often used by the government in an attempt to censor people on social media heres an example where the White House admits it: https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for... That is censorship, because social media then bans (censors) those users and the discussion. Which was my exact point. What do they do in China: “hey this snippet here…

Fantastic word salad you have there, managing to avoid the entire question posed to you. Shows that you have no cogent argument, just a bunch of grievances. I’m sorry to hear of your problems.

I don’t think you know what word salad is. If you do, way to use sly accusations of mental illness to discredit, supporting their point that you can’t win an argument without cheating.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#796
post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your average voter never managed to land somewhere on breitbart and see the 82 point headlines about the hunter biden laptop? https://web.archive.org/web/20201014171957/http://breitbart.... Look, I’m just on my phone so I’m not going to dig up archive links showing the post article all over the web at the time, but really - what do you want? The emergency broadcast system activated to push the story…

I'm not even sure what your point is here. I'm telling you that the FBI ordered two major social media platforms to suppress sharing of a truthful news story for political reasons. It's also a fact that most media outlets did the same. This is state censorship, and the fact that you could go to Breitbart or whatever fringe news site, or that you personally did so, doesn't change absolutely anything about that.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#797

I don't really agree with this, but consider this argument : Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed? If the whole world had the same system of governance, that could be dangerous too.

> Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed?

Categorically yes, if your understanding of what's allowed doesn't allow your understanding of what's allowed. Not being able to discuss different politics isn't cultural diversity.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such a bland, un-subversive show ... is so heavily censored American censorship is honestly no better, it's just that the show was written with the specifics of American censorship in mind.

Bullshit. Sorry, this "we're the same" retort is exhausting. The United States government does not employ censors to remove portions of shows before allowing them to air (or stream, whatever). The closest thing I can think of is DoD not giving access to a movie unless it paints Navy pilots in a certain light. Okay, fine. Not nearly the same as what this site is showing us. Yes, we have cultural taboos, like any cultu…

"Whataboutism" is so reliable in discussions of China that it may as well be the only card in the Wumao's deck. It's also a pretty defeatist attitude, were they to actually believe it, since it amounts to "Everyone is awful and there's no point in trying to be better".

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totalitarian governments seem to be naturally disposed towards controlling people’s sexual behaviours, sometimes with downright absurd results. (The early Soviet Union moved from abolishing marriage in favour of cohabitation to actively promoting it; the official stance on abortion, IIRC, flipped several times; and while the equilibrium was extremely prudish—“there is no sex in the USSR”—the adult literacy campaign o…

> But the fixation on sex, in particular, seems to go beyond that, and yet it’s fairly universal among them. Sex is how workers create workers, a means of production. So of course they try to seize control of it.

Meh. Even setting aside non-(nominally-)Communist totalitarian regimes, the USSR experience seems to be that after the Party collectively becomes God-Emperor, any philosophy that was supposed to motivate that status is set aside like so much trash (possibly next to shot corpses of its authors). Ever noticed how the state in 1984 was supposed to be all ideological, yet had little actual ideology aside from the state being supreme and eternal? Orwell was not wrong on that one.

Sure, you’re supposed to read the foundational documents, think the old state was evil, say the dictatorship of the proletariat is coming, etc., but more often than not you’re paying lip service to the person who is apathetically droning out a butchered retelling of the whole thing. Occasionally they are actual starry-eyed devotees of the idea, but just what that idea is is somehow less important than uttering The Idea in hushed and reverent tones. (I promise I was not going for this Arendtian twist, it just came out.) More often than not, though, a position of ideological enforcer is more indicative of skill in navigating a slime pit of backstabbing bureaucrats than anything else. (There’s a reason why career man is one of the vilest late-Soviet curses—now extinct, funnily enough.) Hell, the very name of the state is a sad joke—the eponymous sovjets (literally, councils [of workers and farmers], but supposed to be local governments rather than advisory councils) were all but neutered by the end of the first decade if not earlier.

So, no. I don’t expect that the proclaimed ideology has much to do with it.

(None of this is to be taken as a defense of 19th-century German political philosophy as a viable economic strategy, mind you.)

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the scale of the demographic collapse in China -- the over-reporting of girls by 100M, the situation where 20M men have no chance of the possibility of having a stable heterosexual relationship due to the lack of women, the rapidly aging population (highest in the world) that is post child bearing age -- doesn't it begin to seem reasonable the steps that the government is taking to curtail and shape public opin…

The main propagator in the US of the Chinese demographic collapse is Peter Zeihan, who may not be the best source here. Even if some of his predictions have been right wrt Europe, he tends to have and present unsourced information for anything Asia/China related.

I've read some of his material, and have tried to find some independent sources regarding their demographics, agriculture, and imports. Those sources (via naive online search, filtered by bias) seem to line up pretty well: China's population is rapidly aging and their pyramid has inverted, China subsists on grains and pork but they must import corn to feed the hogs and struggle with outbreaks of ASF. Extreme weather (drought, rain) is ravaging their harvest. The war in Ukraine and the Russian sanctions have pushed up global fertilizer costs to which China -- the top producer -- has responded by implementing strict quotas on phosphate exports, a strange choice.

"As the top-producing country, China puts out 90 million MT annually for 30 percent of global supply." -- https://investingnews.com/phosphate-outlook-2022/

So, I'll give you that Peter Zeihan might be trying to sell his books, but it's not like there's zero corroborating sources.

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