661–670 of 727 posts
"Social Credit" doesn't exist in China the way it's portrayed in Western media. It's really just a way of enforcing civil judgments, so you aren't living high on the hog after telling your creditors that you're broke. Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
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What do you think credit is? Anytime someone gives you something and you pay later on, that's on credit. They have to trust you to some extent. If every vendor had to perform due diligence of every potential client I would expect things to get even more expensive or just altogether deny service to people outright.
Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.
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>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way. this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet. This is why China makes the claim tha…
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. That absolutely is propaganda. The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic. However hard China tries to change the definition of "democracy", won't change that fact.
Of course it is, and so is the opposite claim.
But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda"
"merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.
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>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way. this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet. This is why China makes the claim tha…
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. That absolutely is propaganda. The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic. However hard China tries to change the definition of "democracy", won't change that fact.
That is only undemocratic if it is against the will of the population. If the population is choosing to only allow selecting employees from one party, then that is perfectly in line with democracy. A "political party" is just a labor union by another name, after all.
Western countries by and large value free and fair elections, but that isn't what defines democracy. Hosting free and fair elections to select the autocrat of your choosing would not make a democracy. What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control. How they choose to use that control is up to them.
There are plenty of good indicators revealing why China isn't democratic, but that statement in isolation isn't telling. Keep in mind, though, that the claim wasn't being strictly democratic — rather, it claims that on the spectrum it is more democratic than the alternatives in use.
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…
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> Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed. Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and def…
My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge. We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiti…
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It sure is good being a foreigner in an autocratic country. You are most likely there there for business. You don’t really care about anything because you will leave anyway. Most of my coworkers in Singapore were all like that. Who cares about the mass deportation of bus drivers after their strikes for better working condition? Why look at what’s behind the curtain when you can enjoy the pool? I have met people who h…
Precisely. It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not. For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped…
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How is US being a good place to be at if you are in legal trouble? It is super expensive, trial penalty is huge so you are severely motivated to sign plea deal and not push it. The punishments are huge and incarceration rates among highest in the world. Protections seems to be largely theoretical - technically you have them, practically they do not do much but make you pay more money.
"It's super expensive" is still different from "you disappear". Yes, the US system is flawed, but the difference really matters.
And the incidence of 'being in legal trouble in USA' vs 'being disappeared in BAD COUNTRY XXX' is quite different, for almost all bad countries.
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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.
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.