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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

#591

Post by cogman10 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #528
californical wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a couple Reddit threads recently where someone says something like “my neighbor has been doing [insert major nuisance here], I think they might not be citizens. I’m not in favor of ICE taking people away, but should I report them since it might solve [nuisance]?” The couple I’ve seen, the people aren’t that direct in their comments. And I’ve seen reports of citizens being arrested for a day or two while the…

OK but that's something that's beginning to happen in the US versus the default of authoritarian regimes - my point is that is not "pretty much the same" as OP put it. You might get physically attacked by some neanderthal if you're openly gay in public in the west, and in some middle eastern countries you get stoned on a public square - but hey we all unwind and have some fun when we can, so it's pretty much the same…

I believe the OP's point was that if you are in the ingroup, you can expect life to be pretty much equivalent to what you'd experience in the US. It's only if you are in the outgroup (like being gay) that you start to see state violence.

This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime".

To Godwin this, life for a non-jewish, non-communist, non-disabled citizen in 1940s germany was typical, even pleasant. I mean, heck, the german government at the time was taking the Jewish citizens property and giving it to favored classes.

The deceptive part of an authoritarian regime is that the outgroup is almost always a minority. The number of people that experience outgroup treatment is almost always a small portion of the general population.

Even in the strictest and most brutal governments like north korea, so long as you abide by state rules things are just fine. You can even go on vacations out of the country if you are obedient enough.

A measure of government is how it treats internal state enemies. Crime exists everywhere, so the question is what's criminalized and how are criminals punished. Also importantly, what crimes does the state look away from if they hit political enemies.

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

#592

Post by egman_ekki »

don_esteban wrote: post #584
jajko wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 str…

Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory? I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours. You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a doze…

I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.

There was even a joke about this:

⸻

In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.

Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.

On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.

The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.

And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”

⸻

Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU

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

#593

Post by ManlyBread »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #155
ManlyBread wrote: post #142

>credit score Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason. >Linkedin, Amazon There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life. >Instagram LOL >Uber, Airbnb There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your ow…

This is a predominantly American website with American users. Your experience is of little relevance here.

If nationality would matter here I would be geoblocked and yet I am not.

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

#594

Post by Levitz »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #540
Levitz wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The left has… vastly less power than the right, especially the christian right, because the right has money.

Money? More money than Hollywood? California? Both of which lean left pretty hard? It's not 1980 anymore.

"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?

The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.

Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?

Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.

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

#595

Post by crazygringo »

astura wrote: post #509
bluedevilzn wrote: post #226

I moved from Canada to California for a new job with a mid six figure salary. I had a very difficult time finding a place to rent as I had no credit score. Only places that were available without credit score was a room to share. That was not an option with a cat, wife and kids. Finally, I found a place that was willing to accept the entire year's rent up front. Moving such a large amount of money from Canada to US h…

>Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and C…

It's more complicated than that. If the transaction is over $10,000 it needs to be reported to the IRS. Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system. So because of the financing, some of these "know your customer" rules apply, and they automatically get applied to everyone as universal policy -- employees aren't allowed to use judgement to make personal exceptions. And physical IDs can be forged, whereas the existence of a Social Security number in a database can't be.

SSN's aren't perfect, you can still commit identity fraud. But high value financial transactions get safer the more you can verify about someone.

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

#596

Post by inglor_cz »

Jensson wrote: post #475
inglor_cz wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disapprov…

Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.

Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?

If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.

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

#597

Post by cyanydeez »

Levitz wrote: post #529
cyanydeez wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant. This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring. The point being…

[flagged]

Yeah sure, but todays market is monopolized by the right.

The bogeyman of authoritarian left is just amusing.

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

#598

Post by ElevenLathe »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #564
saghm wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace. I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades. And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say wh…

A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.

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

#599

Post by ElevenLathe »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #236
pharrington wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of what ICE has been doing for the last six months? And that Trump has militarized Washington DC?

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.

Go do it then. See if you can get a permit in DC right now to have a rally and shout that Trump sucks. If you can, try actually doing it. You will not be doing it for very long until some excuse is made to stop you and punish you.

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

#600

Post by astura »

crazygringo wrote: post #595
astura wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and C…

It's more complicated than that. If the transaction is over $10,000 it needs to be reported to the IRS. Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system. So because of the financing, some of these "know your customer" rules apply, and they automatically get applied to everyone as universal policy -- employe…

>It's more complicated than that.

No, It's absolutely not. Like i said, I've bought multiple cars with personal checks, all over $10,000, never gave SSN or had credit check. Unless it's some sort of local law, it's a ridiculous policy. Find another dealer.

>Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system.

This seems totally made up and doesn't match my experience at all.

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