91–100 of 271 posts
Wow, the top thing on my mind this morning was that the CIA was able to listen in on a phone call from the Saudi head of state. Now this. I have already been thinking about the possible necessity of a decentralized personas. If an employer wants to see my office persona, then I don't want those people to see my gaming persona. No reason to connect these things to a central identity. Decentralized personas are natural…
The way I understand this social credit system, it is trying to emulate at a scale of a one billion population the social control you had in a small XVIII century village. Basically what forces you to behave is not so much the law than the fear of contempt from your peers, which could impact every aspect of your life. And I can't help thinking that while it may be efficient at forcing people to not behave like a jerk…
It doesn't force people to not behave like a jerk, it could just as easily lead to a nation of jerks. It forces people to strictly act within a tiny zone at the center of the Overton window[0]. At scale, it means that natural ideological progress will significantly slow down.
Any ideas or actions outside the norm will be culled. It's a move to homogenise the masses and allow the party to more easily set the general direction of 'desired' behaviours. This is pretty clearly the goal first and foremost. Stopping people from being jerks is just the marketing label.
The set of measures used to determine social credit will change over the next two decades and will become an ever tighter definition of what the party wants its citizens to be. The current criteria are just the entrée that was determined to be palatable to the masses.
As a non-chinese 'westerner', to my understanding the important background to this culturally is that Chinese culture has been traditionally much more legalistic than western culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy) . It has lots of nuances but the most important difference, if compared to western view of the justice system and the rights of state, is that the most important thing in a lega…
Xi must be thinking "hey, it worked for millennia, why stop now?"
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Well, nonpersonhood is nothing new to China. Tenth of millions of people in China can't even get an ID because they don't have birth certificates, and without that you can't legally have a bank account, have a phone number, receive education, receive medical care, travel, own property, have family or even immigrate away from China. And the West has nevertheless kept quiet for long 28 years.
You make it sound like something Chinese government purposefully did, when in fact, those people were simply never registered by their parents -- to avoid the fee for having a child above quota. > The group was never officially registered on the country’s household registration record system, known as hukou, which is closely linked to a person’s legal identity. That means they didn’t officially exist—until recently.…
It is just this time, with the social credit, the state has finally got balls to go after high class bourgeois from megacities, and lower end elites.
It could be argued that the primary purpose of a government is to make things better for people (with deliberately broad/vague words used there). I'm not sure how this qualifies. There's certainly a lot of negative language in that article, and negative language has a habit of not making things better for people.
As I understand it, this notion only really came into vogue during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. For much of human history, government served as a way for monarchs, emperors, and the ruling elite to maintain -- and expand -- their hold on power, regardless of what was best for the governed. Indeed, we still see remnants of this in pretty much every government on the planet -- some just are less subtle than others. Arguably, we've spent the last 3 centuries trying to subvert this process and bend it toward, as you put it, making things "better" for all.
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Others ask themselves the same about the US, or Germany, or Russia. It's easy to paint a picture that makes one wonder why anyone would ever stay there. And the answer to why is revealed when you peek behind the canvas that portrays these horrible places.
Germany? It has the best reputation of all countries in the world right now ( https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/11/22/germany-best-re... ).
Why do people still live there (apart from those who cannot move)?
Because not all societies enshrine individual freedom as their primary value. China has historically valued orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice. This sucks from a Western perspective, but it also means that a great many of the problems the West faces will never manifest in China. There are very few absolute wrongs in the world and it's not clear that this would be one of them.
I don't know, most Chinese people I've met are at least as selfish as the average Westerner, often more (and let's not even begin about the stereotypical "I don't care about anything" 60 year old Chinese tourist). I'm no expert, but while surely many Chinese rulers have emphasized these values, I'm not convinced that the population ever cared much about them.
They're a splendid list of values to drum up, though, if you're the one whose boot indefinitely stamps on your subordinates' collective faces.
> People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished. > Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online. This reminds me a lot of that Black Mirror episode where everyone upvotes and downvotes each oth…
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The US does kill its citizens. There's a few terrorists who were US citizens when they were killed by drone strikes. https://www.aclu.org/video/aclu-ccr-lawsuit-american-boy-kil...
Uh, and the death penalty.