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China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

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Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#111

Post by Nullabillity »

ufmace wrote: post #55
HNthrow22 wrote: post #38

Why are discussions surrounding Chinese Politics permitted but no other political discussions? Seems like a double standard. Just quickly looking at the removals here's a 4 hour old Mueller report thread instantly removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712217 .

This is more about how politics affects the tech world, not politics for its own sake. Mueller investigation drama doesn't really have anything to do with tech.

From the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

So even that take doesn't make much sense.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#112

Post by abc-xyz »

HNthrow22 wrote: post #38

Why are discussions surrounding Chinese Politics permitted but no other political discussions? Seems like a double standard. Just quickly looking at the removals here's a 4 hour old Mueller report thread instantly removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712217 .

Why does every thread about China have to mention USA as well? The Mueller report was on the frontpage for quite a while, here's a thread with 310 points and 150 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19691512), and, surprise surprise, not a single mention of China.

Chinese articles get flagged/removed from the frontpage all the time as well, and you'll see articles critical of the US and other governments/countries on the frontpage every day. There's no greater conspiracy, the only difference is that almost all Chinese articles mention USA, whereas almost no US/European articles mention China..

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#113

Post by HAL9000Ti »

dx87 wrote: post #77
apo wrote: post #40

The Chinese are innovating totalitarianism faster than any other country. Take this, for example: > ... When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph [of Tank Man] 16 years afterwards, they were "genuinely mystified." One of the students said that the image was "artwork." It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that…

That reminds me of an interview with a Chinese esports team I saw at a tournament a few months ago. The interviewer was doing a light-hearted game where they showed twitch emotes to the Chinese team and asked what they thought the emotes meant. One of the emotes was a frog (the creator of the game goes by IceFrog), and the Chinese translator said that the players weren't allowed to say anything about the emote. We la…

Fasinating, I never heard about that one before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_worship_(Chinese_internet...

searching "膜蛤" on baidu.com yields zero results.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#114

Post by whoevercares »

baby wrote: post #80

I have a question that maybe Chinese people here can answer. How patriotic are chinese people? How critical are they about the government and how many people (especially outside of China) approve of them?

We make fun of the leaders and the systems all the times. Most private comments in my close circle are pretty critical(“wtf is this brainwashing Xuexiqiangguo app”). And I think overseas Chineses could show up as more patriotic than they were in China, because most of us had never been discriminated even slightly before or ever heard so many bad news for their motherland. Chineses overseas are also pretty self-proud, we probably don’t like hear some meme too many times.

Though, it’s not quite likely your Chinese friends/colleagues will ever talk with you about that unless you guys are super close.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#115

Post by rgbrenner »

throw2016 wrote: post #90
apo wrote: post #40

The Chinese are innovating totalitarianism faster than any other country. Take this, for example: > ... When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph [of Tank Man] 16 years afterwards, they were "genuinely mystified." One of the students said that the image was "artwork." It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that…

China is a totalitarian country. Its not a democracy so there is no point criticizing them for the lack of democracy but its democracies that must be held accountable, yet we do not see that right from Snowden, Assange and Manning to a culture of surveillance, torture, war crimes, secret courts and processes and border agents demanding to go through your personal papers. You can't claim to be a democracy and do these…

To be clear, there's the Chinese government and then the Chinese people. The Chinese government is criticized when it abuses the Chinese people. The idea that the Chinese government cannot or should not be criticized, is to say that it is acceptable to abuse the Chinese people.

While they may live in another country, they still deserve all of the rights and liberties that all human beings deserve.

The Chinese government should be criticized when they do things that infringe on the natural human rights of the Chinese people... just as any other person or government should also be criticized.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#116

Post by 0815test »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #103
0815test wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "genuinely mystified." ... "artwork." It's all about plausible deniability. Funnily enough, that's exactly why censorship doesn't actually work - these things are precisely what people would say if they knew about the picture and its significance, but wanted to make an outer impression that they don't. I think it's quite possible that the Chinese nationalists "protesting" Leica's shameful, anti-Chinese campaign are…

Oh, it works. The objective is to dissolve the bonds between people is dissolved that would allow them to collectively organize and resist. If everybody pretends they don't know, even if everybody else knows they do know, for all practical purposes, the objective of censorship is accomplished. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-...

"Collectively organize and resist"? That's really not what Chinese politics looks like, either today or in the foreseeable future. It's not just that the vast majority of Chinese are quite apathetic about politics (though they definitely are) - most of them nowadays think the government is actually doing a pretty good job, all things considered. And they're even less inclined to think that rocking the boat in any way would be a good idea. Now, these overtly-expressed positions might change, and even quite suddenly (that's just about the only difference censorship makes - you're not going to see any gradual shifts or impending warning signs), but only if there's some sort of crisis that prompts such a change; they're not going to change on their own.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#117

Post by tanilama »

jononor wrote: post #46
spectramax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a very compelling argument - "They're different from us, therefore we are not in a position to comment." There is a tremendous understanding, analysis and comprehension of totalitarianism in the west. Even in popular culture, say 1984 by George Orwell.

The argument was not that they are different, but that they are more collectively minded and put less value in "individual freedom". Totalitarianism seems an obviously bad thing wrt to individual freedom, but if that is not so important, it may not matter as much as we westerners think it should.

> but that they are more collectively minded and put less value in "individual freedom"

Chinese people aren't drones. They don't have a hivemind to tell them what is good for them. Sacrifice for the country might be a thing during Mao's period, but I am not seeing it in nowadays' young generation.

On the contrary, I think Chinese people believe less in the collective good. If the problem isn't your own problem, then it is everyone's problem, then it is no one's problem. That is why in so many situations, government becomes that last resort to figure stuff out.

'The mountains are tall, and the emperor is afar', as the old Chinese sayings goes. The ruthless authoritarianism and primitive freedom co-exist in China's case.

There is pressure to conform, but only because not doing so, there will be pain. 'The bird who extends out its head most gets shot first', as they always say.

Confucianism might be what the world, even China itself thinks about itself, how it is ruled upon. But Fajia (Legalism) is what actually gets executed in real life.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#118

Post by i_am_nomad »

throw2016 wrote: post #104
devoply wrote: post #3

Would it not be better for these idiots to simply apologize for Tienanmen Square and promise not to do it again? And also stop all their asshole human right violations?

Tienanmen happened in 1989. Would it not be better to apologize to Iraq, Libya and Syria and promise the world not to destroy entire countries, kill hundreds of thousands of people and put millions of families in disarray for those who genuinely care about human rights and lives? Instead millions more are threatened in Venezeula and Iran with the exact same warmongering playbook and propaganda while 'human rights lov…

Man, that was a hard-earned fifty cents. Nice work, comrade!

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#119

Post by scarmig »

ufmace wrote: post #62
maehwasu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyzing widely differing cultures and peoples under the unitary framework of “totalitarianism” isn’t terribly compelling either. The Chinese government has shown remarkable staying power, and it’s important to analyze the ways/reasons it might continue to hold power, since that seems to be a quite likely outcome. The intuition that western liberal democracy is some sort of inevitable wave is very possibly just an a…

It seems like an ironic blind spot to me. Western liberals claim to be all about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism, yet seem to have difficulty conceiving of the idea that maybe some other cultures genuinely don't want to turn into Western Liberal Democracies.

What does it even mean for a culture to want something?

Only individuals can want something. Societies can't want something; the Earth can't want something; a company or government can't want something.

It's clear that there are individuals in China who do want tolerance. And it's even clearer that there are government officials who are scared of what individuals might start wanting if exposed to ideas of tolerance and democracy.

Re: China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media

#120

Post by [deleted] »

HAL9000Ti wrote: post #113
dx87 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of an interview with a Chinese esports team I saw at a tournament a few months ago. The interviewer was doing a light-hearted game where they showed twitch emotes to the Chinese team and asked what they thought the emotes meant. One of the emotes was a frog (the creator of the game goes by IceFrog), and the Chinese translator said that the players weren't allowed to say anything about the emote. We la…

Fasinating, I never heard about that one before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_worship_(Chinese_internet... searching "膜蛤" on baidu.com yields zero results.

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