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?
The Big [Censored] Theory
791–800 of 891 posts
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#792Earlier 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.
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
#793Earlier 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.
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#794Earlier 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.
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#795Earlier 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.
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#796Earlier 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.
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#797I 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.
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
#798Earlier 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…
Re: The Big [Censored] Theory
#799Earlier 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.
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
#800Earlier 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.
"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.