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We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

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Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#471

Post by chasd00 »

saghm wrote: post #351
hax0ron3 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference. Just imagine the difference in the level of fear that you would feel about 1) getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power, vs. 2) getting up in a public square in Russia and yelling that Putin is a terrible person who should be removed from power.

> getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with dif…

> I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now.

don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#472

Post by prewett »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #92

The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life. Of course the…

I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.

You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.

Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.

So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#473

Post by FirmwareBurner »

mrweasel wrote: post #311
FrancisMoodie wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? They don't check your credit score where I live (west-eu). They check your pay slip to see how much you make monthly and if it your rent is less than half your paycheck they can decide to let you rent. After that is a two or three month downpayment that is locked in a seperate bank account specifically for this use and is released at the end of the lease. If there is no damage to the rental unit you get back yo…

What? They are in no way entitled to see your pay slip, or know how much you make. Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU). You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.

>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).

This doesn't sound right. In which "North EU" country sis this BTW?

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#474

Post by chasd00 »

treyd wrote: post #242
hax0ron3 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions, and I would have very little to no fear about going to Washington DC right now, standing up on a podium, and yelling that Trump sucks while there are 100 National Guardsmen across the street from me. This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.

See Mahmoud Khalil's case. They're trying to and would continue to have done so if they weren't blocked. What is there stopping them from changing the rules and doing it again?

> See Mahmoud Khalil's case

they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#475

Post by Jensson »

inglor_cz wrote: post #391
Jensson wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.

I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron. Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.) At this moment, if you wan…

> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution

McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.

Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.

I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#477

Post by jajko »

specproc wrote: post #335
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #92

The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life. Of course the…

Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them. You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes. The way non-OECD, "non-democra…

> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum

Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.

I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.

Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).

Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.

Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.

And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#478

Post by Jensson »

chasd00 wrote: post #470
Jensson wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him. That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.

> Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?

Democracy? Yes. Liberal democracy? No.

A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#479

Post by gspencley »

timeon wrote: post #239
gspencley wrote: post #147

> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior. Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT. If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiat…

> individuals (businesses or people) I think here is the difference between your and authors optics. You count businesses (does this include large corporations/organizations?) as individuals.

You misinterpreted my language. What I meant, for clarity, was "individual entities." Be that individual persons or individual businesses.

It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#480

Post by pbhjpbhj »

chasd00 wrote: post #468
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sliding in? Your head of state declared themselves to be a dictator, declared the end of the rule of law, and ignores the constitution. They openly take bribes without consequences. They, or their handlers, unilaterally decide on the application of justice and the progress of investigations. They unilaterally control international relations (eg tariffs) without oversight. They put armed military on the streets. They…

if mid-term elections and the next presidential election are cancelled then i'll call it authoritarian. Until then you're just trolling.

So Putin isn't authoritarian because he stages elections. And you require two _cancelled_ elections before declaring someone authoritarian?

Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjev2j70v19o

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