But wtf? Censorship isn’t when someone prevents unhinged personal attacks? Why is “free speech” not the ability to report on corruption, but now about being able to use hate speech and shit? It’s never been the case and not hard to differentiate between them
It’s false equivalence though, although with the election of shadow president Musk it’s getting a bit more hazy.
Even so, one is an (admittedly hugely influential) private company and the other is the actual single-party government dictating what speech is allowed.
one is an (admittedly hugely influential) private company and the other is the actual single-party government
The US has been governed by public-private partnerships for centuries. Trying to draw a line between the industry administrators that get promoted into every crevice of public sector bureaucracy and the elected politicians who depart office to serve as lobbyists and board members of private firms is a fool’s errand.
Do we celebrate Chris Dodd the Senator and denounce Chris Dodd the chairman of and chief lobbyist for the MPAA? Do we applaud Hank Paulson the Treasury Secretary and denounce Hank Paulson the CEO of Goldman Sachs?
Americans seem to have no trouble drawing a straight line between Singapore-incorporated ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party. Why can’t they see the connection between Howard Lutnick or Linda McMahon or Betsy DeVos or Elaine Chao and the businesses they own and operate?
Hey you’ll get no argument from me. I’m on Lemmy for a reason. But it’s still not the same as just straight up “the government decides what is thoughtcrime”
I’m not defending the bad things our government does. But do we see mass arrests of people wearing Luigi shirts? Will you be denied a passport as a result of posting some critical message on social media? I had friends, very average unimportant people, who were detained for days at a Chinese airport for having a social media history showing support for Taiwan. It’s not the same thing.
We have several prisoners at Guantanamo with absolutely no tangible connection to terrorist organizations. They have been there for 20 years in some cases and have no release or court date scheduled.
Again I’m not trying to defend that bad things our governments do. And Guantanamo is an especially egregious example, I agree. But Guantanamo is something exceptional, not the norm. How many inmates does Guantanamo have? You can look it up, it’s public information. You can protest it, you can vote for politicians that agree it should be closed. And yes it’s not as easy as that but it can be done.
But now try to stage a public protest against the treatments of Uygurs in Beijing. Try to get details about the people imprisoned there or the conditions they live under. Hell try to find out what happened to your disappeared relatives.
The difference is one is at least paying lip service to ideas like rule of law and democracy, even though at times it breaks its own rules. The other says rule of law is irrelevant.
Yeah oppression is universal to some extent. But there’s a big difference between a government that says “everyone is equal before the law” but which sometimes breaks those rules and a country that says “the law is what we say it is”
Which one functions better as a whole, given our current social problems, I don’t know. But from a personal point of view I’m very happy to live and have grown up somewhere relatively free.
But from a personal point of view I’m very happy to live and have grown up somewhere relatively free.
Everyone says this until their targeted…
This is essentially the logic first they came for the communists… I was not a communist…
The modern regime know not to push it too far, generally that’s just bad business but they always need some marginalized group to oppress for the performative purposes to remind the plebs who got the monopoly on violence. And gen pop accepts it as “ohh well, they do it to black people etc, at least it won’t me, carry one”
At the core us and Chinese pedons behave the same with the same excuses for why their daddy is good, other daddy is bad.
I took it as “don’t pretend we don’t have censorship too”
Saying “there is censorship here” in no way implies “there is not censorship there”
But wtf? Censorship isn’t when someone prevents unhinged personal attacks? Why is “free speech” not the ability to report on corruption, but now about being able to use hate speech and shit? It’s never been the case and not hard to differentiate between them
It’s false equivalence though, although with the election of shadow president Musk it’s getting a bit more hazy.
Even so, one is an (admittedly hugely influential) private company and the other is the actual single-party government dictating what speech is allowed.
The US has been governed by public-private partnerships for centuries. Trying to draw a line between the industry administrators that get promoted into every crevice of public sector bureaucracy and the elected politicians who depart office to serve as lobbyists and board members of private firms is a fool’s errand.
Do we celebrate Chris Dodd the Senator and denounce Chris Dodd the chairman of and chief lobbyist for the MPAA? Do we applaud Hank Paulson the Treasury Secretary and denounce Hank Paulson the CEO of Goldman Sachs?
Americans seem to have no trouble drawing a straight line between Singapore-incorporated ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party. Why can’t they see the connection between Howard Lutnick or Linda McMahon or Betsy DeVos or Elaine Chao and the businesses they own and operate?
Hey you’ll get no argument from me. I’m on Lemmy for a reason. But it’s still not the same as just straight up “the government decides what is thoughtcrime”
When all of the companies do it and they do as they are told by daddy Sam… What is the difference.
The only difference I see is that they don’t send you to gulag in US unless you really make some dear leader life uncomfortable.
Americans still do a lot of self censorship. Anything Israel related gets modded into shot on normie socials.
Luigi is prolly best example… They are suppressing that across all media, fake news and social… How is this different from shepoohs bullshit?
I’m not defending the bad things our government does. But do we see mass arrests of people wearing Luigi shirts? Will you be denied a passport as a result of posting some critical message on social media? I had friends, very average unimportant people, who were detained for days at a Chinese airport for having a social media history showing support for Taiwan. It’s not the same thing.
We have several prisoners at Guantanamo with absolutely no tangible connection to terrorist organizations. They have been there for 20 years in some cases and have no release or court date scheduled.
Again I’m not trying to defend that bad things our governments do. And Guantanamo is an especially egregious example, I agree. But Guantanamo is something exceptional, not the norm. How many inmates does Guantanamo have? You can look it up, it’s public information. You can protest it, you can vote for politicians that agree it should be closed. And yes it’s not as easy as that but it can be done.
But now try to stage a public protest against the treatments of Uygurs in Beijing. Try to get details about the people imprisoned there or the conditions they live under. Hell try to find out what happened to your disappeared relatives.
The difference is one is at least paying lip service to ideas like rule of law and democracy, even though at times it breaks its own rules. The other says rule of law is irrelevant.
Us has largest prison population in the world?
Capitalist regimes targets people differently but the function of the oppression is the same.
Yeah oppression is universal to some extent. But there’s a big difference between a government that says “everyone is equal before the law” but which sometimes breaks those rules and a country that says “the law is what we say it is”
Which one functions better as a whole, given our current social problems, I don’t know. But from a personal point of view I’m very happy to live and have grown up somewhere relatively free.
Everyone says this until their targeted…
This is essentially the logic first they came for the communists… I was not a communist…
The modern regime know not to push it too far, generally that’s just bad business but they always need some marginalized group to oppress for the performative purposes to remind the plebs who got the monopoly on violence. And gen pop accepts it as “ohh well, they do it to black people etc, at least it won’t me, carry one”
At the core us and Chinese pedons behave the same with the same excuses for why their daddy is good, other daddy is bad.