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John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

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Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#101

Post by alazoral »

simonh wrote: post #36
SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All states must inevitably collapse.

There’s no law of the universe about this, other than the sun exploding and heat death. One of the plausible catastrophic end states for humanity is an ultra-stable technocratic totalitarian global state, enabled by pervasive super high tech surveillance and censorship. It’s one of the ‘great filter’ possibilities for why sentient beings never colonise the galaxy - they’re all trapped in bureaucratic self serving ver…

I would disagree with your assertion there that bureaucracies are terminal. Historically, military dictatorships tend to overthrow bureaucracies, while democracies overthrow military dictatorships and bureaucracies subsume democracies. Each of these transitions can be understood thermodynamically; each transition results in a lower energy state for the problems facing them at the time:

Bureaucracies lack military response time. Dictatorships lack economic stability. Democracies lack efficiency. Each of these are actually each model's strength, but over time becomes fatal.

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#102

Post by jrs95 »

amerine wrote: post #37
coliveira wrote: post #32

I don't agree with the censorship decision, but I completely get why other countries don't like Oliver's show. He likes to denounce other countries' politics from the point of view of liberal, first world policy, which may not be in the best interest of other nations. Even though he is doing comedy for the first world market, it comes off clearly as another attempt of propaganda directed at these countries. The way C…

If I squint and ignore the fact that personalities like Oliver have been doing their ideological-driven (rightly so IMO) comedy perspective bits for years I can see how how you could naively call that “propaganda”. However, the logical side of me can’t fathom how the reported events are anything remotely “propaganda”. They are legitimate things that free-press nations can discuss how they like, including laughing at…

I completely agree except for the part about what John Oliver does being comedy. It's just not funny. IMO this whole genre has devolved into being mostly not actually comedy anymore. Stewart and Colbert were both hilarious, but I feel like that was a primary goal of their content. Now it seems like it's gone from comedic and satirical opiniomated news/talk show to just a comedian doing an opinionated news/talk show.

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#103

Post by jrs95 »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #92
coliveira wrote: post #32

I don't agree with the censorship decision, but I completely get why other countries don't like Oliver's show. He likes to denounce other countries' politics from the point of view of liberal, first world policy, which may not be in the best interest of other nations. Even though he is doing comedy for the first world market, it comes off clearly as another attempt of propaganda directed at these countries. The way C…

I can watch John Oliver a lot more easily than Stephen Colbert. Oliver at least does his homework, presents facts, and produces episodes on issues that actually matter to him. Colbert just seems like the democrat equivalent of Fox News... putting a leftish spin on whatever issue crosses his desk without any regard for journalism. Even when he speaks on lefty issues that I care about, he seems disingenuous. Like he’s…

I loved him while he was in character on The Colbert Report. Now...not so much. FWIW I can't sit through Trevor Noah or John Oliver either though. And I'm a liberal. It reminds me of being forced to sit through church as a child.

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#104

Post by StanislavPetrov »

bb88 wrote: post #70
ctrl-j wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... under that definition isn't all media propaganda? At that point does it just depend on whether or not you choose to use the term in a pejorative manner? If any biased claim can be called propaganda - then it seems the word loses it's meaning. Perhaps the word propaganda is losing it's weight over time? Do we need a specific word for state sanctioned biased media? Or perhaps one specifically for attacks on p…

The 20th century changed the meaning of the word to be more about manipulation, where as the original definition was neutral. [1] The manipulation suggested deceitfulness on the part of the party creating and distributing it. So it's one of these things where OP can use a politically charged word, and then claim it was used in the neutral voice. Personally, rather than have an argument about what amounts to "propagan…

I agree with most of your statement, but Oliver is most certainly deceitful, while also being biased. His deceit may not be deliberate (and we could come up with yet another term to denote deliberate deceitfulness), but it is often evident. His deceit is most evident on foreign affairs, which is not surprising given his devotion to orthodox, bi-partisan DC establishment foreign policy. His clips about Venezuela and Syria could easily have been produced in-house at Langley or Foggy Bottom production studios (if they had better writing). In many ways the evolution of John Oliver mirrors the evolution of Howard Dean, who began as a rational, reasonably moderate progressive voice for change but got captured by the neo-liberal establishment that gave him millions of dollars and a position of "respectability".

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#105

Post by nojvek »

oelmekki wrote: post #39
drogorbrn wrote: post #3

Did they remove him from hacker news too?

I think it's safe until we mention Winnie the Pooh. Woops. Context: in his China segment, Oliver asserts that China has banned Winnie the Pooh from the internet because it was used to mock the president. And then he (Oliver) used tons of Winnie the Pooh references. We already are seeing a lot of partisan arguments in this thread (as one could have expected, I guess). For my part, I don't care about the politics on th…

China is the world’s Factory. It also has a huge middle class population now. Basically the country is so rich, important and large, it doesn’t need to care about what the rest of the world thinks about it.

Kind of like US. We have an idiot running the country, but we have a strong economy so anything goes.

Chinese censorship is working so well, I bet a 100%, western nations will want to adopt its ideas.

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#107

Post by vfulco2 »

toyg wrote: post #7

The "ephemeralness" of the internet is still a huge, huge problem. We've only started to scratch the surface of the issue, and between censorship, "right to be forgotten" and linkrot, it's already a complete shitshow. We need a distributed and censorship-resistant conservancy system, because the Wayback Machine can only do so much (and it can trivially be censored). Unfortunately, it's not a money-making enterprise.

the faster decentralized, zero-trust, encrypted happens the better. Technology will always defeat the dark side

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#108

Post by [deleted] »

amerine wrote: post #37
coliveira wrote: post #32

I don't agree with the censorship decision, but I completely get why other countries don't like Oliver's show. He likes to denounce other countries' politics from the point of view of liberal, first world policy, which may not be in the best interest of other nations. Even though he is doing comedy for the first world market, it comes off clearly as another attempt of propaganda directed at these countries. The way C…

If I squint and ignore the fact that personalities like Oliver have been doing their ideological-driven (rightly so IMO) comedy perspective bits for years I can see how how you could naively call that “propaganda”. However, the logical side of me can’t fathom how the reported events are anything remotely “propaganda”. They are legitimate things that free-press nations can discuss how they like, including laughing at…

[deleted]

Re: John Oliver is erased from Chinese internet following segment on China

#109

Post by reallydude »

394549 wrote: post #75
EpicEng wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can’t call things that rustle your jimmies propaganda just like you can’t call news you don’t like fake. I don't think that's a great analogy. Oliver is biased and he has never pretended to be a journalist. He presents stories he cares about from a specific viewpoint. The definition of propaganda is: >information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political ca…

> Oliver is biased and he has never pretended to be a journalist. He presents stories he cares about from a specific viewpoint. The definition of propaganda is: >> information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. I think the key word there is misleading . Having a genuinely-held viewpoint and expressing it through media isn't propaga…

> Oliver's segment was not misleading and it was not dishonest,

The number of times he has been misleading and intentionally dishonest has turned me off for good. It was funny and all with friendly jabs at Obama and eviscerating lesser Obama officials, but the agenda in interpreting or even leading the discussions into uncomfortable ground (re: Trump) broke into propaganda before the election was over. e.g. Trump's speaking tactics are dangerous.

Oliver will sacrifice his professed values or even critical thinking to steer a narrative for a laugh (or no laugh). It just stopped being funny.

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