Or any of the countless of times cops perpetrated mass violence against black people during the civil war era and cracked down harshly on protests.
Or when the did the same to anti-war protestors during the vietnam war.
Or the numerous times they experimented on their own citezens such as MK ultra, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or any of the dozens upon dozens of radiation experimentation, like when almost 1000 pregnant mothers were injected with radioactive iron, causing many miscarriages and cancers(and thats not the only time they injected pregnant mothers with radioctive material to see if it fucked up the baby), or when inserting radium rods up the nostrils of school children and then observing how their health declined, or when they dosed hundreds of inuit with radioactive iodine to see its affects on the thyroid.
Like I dont think this makes China’s atrocities any more excusable, but the reverse is true to. The US really isnt much better than China.
The world ain’t just good or bad and there’s various degrees of “bad”. The fact that many US people can even talk about this stuff makes them already just ever so slightly better for many outsiders. This is how it is, neither country is “good” but they align more with western ideals than an authoritarian state which for many of us is bad by default…which it is of course. :)
As bad as those two linked incidents were, they weren’t exactly government sanctioned. Police sanctioned, sure, and the government should do more to reign that shit in, but comparing them to Tiennamen is disingenuous at best.
The Chinese government hates letting its citizens have a voice.
I gave plenty of other examples that were government sanctioned, and the treatment of black people during civil rights was government sanctioned. And going back further you have slavery and the genocide of natives that were government sanctioned. Ofc its not a 1:1 parallel with tiennamen.
Imagine thinking China is worse than the US when the US killed something like a million Iraqis, and that’s just one of the many war the US was waging in the last 30 years while China checks notes attacked nobody in that timeframe.
I think the distinction between China and the US is how they directly treat their own citizens. Arguments could be made that they’re both equally shitty in that regard, but in different ways.
In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing. In contrast to these findings, Gallup reported in January of this year that their latest polling on U.S. citizen satisfaction with the American federal government revealed only 38 percent of respondents were satisfied with the federal government.
Googling this took me a couple of seconds. Less time than writing a comment.
“Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, formerly known as the Ash Institute, was established in 2003 and is part of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.”
If you think a result where 95.5% of any population have their opinion aligned means there nothing wrong going on behind the scenes, you must be naive as hell.
A western study doesn’t make the participants any less pressured by their authoritative goverment to not give negative feedback. Regardless of who asks the questions, these people still live their lives under the goverment.
It would be one thing to have a majority of their citizen be satisfied with how a goverment is run, but 95.5% approval rating is just illogical. It could only happen if there is pressure to give a positive answer or they are living in a utopia, and we all know human nature rules out the possibility of the second from ever existing.
The panic that gripped the region a few years ago has subsided considerably, and a sense of normality is creeping back in.
Best bit:
Behind him, a drunk Uyghur man was yelling. Alcohol is forbidden for practicing Muslims, especially in the holy month of Ramadan.
“I’ve been drinking alcohol, I’m a little drunk, but that’s no problem. We can drink as we want now!” he shouted. “We can do what we want! Things are great now!”
Have… have you read the rest of the article? It’s fucking terrifying. It’s basically saying “this place went from a concentration camp to a prison”, and even then that’s what a random foreigner saw and has been told by the government. We don’t know if that’s the truth, and even if it was that’s still pretty fucking bad.
Uyghur activists abroad accuse the Chinese government of genocide, pointing to plunging birthrates and the mass detentions. The authorities say their goal is not to eliminate Uyghurs but to integrate them, and that harsh measures are necessary to curb extremism.
Regardless of intent […]
They’re actually doing the false balance thing. When was the last time the western press was fence sitting this much about this issue?
China eased up on their crackdown, which is good, but the western press went so far above what they could prove, they’re now walking back. Actually more like dropping the story: When was the last time you saw a new article about Xinjiang and not some social media echo?
The OHCHR Report isn’t even a year old. And if a country was actively committing genocide I’d guess they wouldn’t really make it easy to have constant news about it.
Two years ago, that shit used to be in German newspapers every month or so. Haven’t seen anything in like a year now. Also, pretty sure the UN report didn’t allege genocide, which is what the media here was claiming back then.
Heck I remember one of my friends was under the impression that there was ethnic cleansing and some major refugee movements, despite the media never actually alleging that. But when they hear the word “genocide” over and over, that’s what people imagine.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
The report details the second, third and fourth of those acts. It effectively qualifies as genocide.
I tend to lean into accepting that ‘the US government has done some pretty horrific shit too’ camp, but I don’t do it as a way to shill for China, because fuck that authoritarian place. But it is dumb not to recognize massacres like Kent State, Tulsa, or the systematic genocides of First Nations peoples.
Tiananmen Square really isn’t the best example to use as an example of how China isn’t like the US. There’s plenty of much more insidious dystopian shit happening in China every day to use than that.
this article isn’t about the US. I believe there is a reason so many in so many threads like that do what you’re doing and worse. THE TOPIC IS NOT THE US, STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT THAT WAY
Circling back to the article: it would be easier to name software that doesn’t collect your data and send/sell it to your respective government. The point being made in this thread is that it isn’t just a China problem. If you think you’re safe from government observation just because you don’t live in China, I have bad news for you.
If you think you’re safe from government observation just because you don’t live in China
I think you know without doubt that this is something NO ONE ever ever ever said. You know this. And yet still – you want to make this about the united states. Maybe you can explain a way that this got brought up without China shills infecting the thread?
Because the article is not about the US. It’s not.
The article makes it sound like it’s UNUSUAL that a phone app is spying on its users and sending user data to the government. It’s not an exception, it’s the rule. People pointing this out are doing you a favor, because the article’s framing would otherwise lead you to believe this is a China problem and not a tech problem.
no, people who do this are shilling for China and/or tiktok. we all know this.
and yes the raw keyboard data going directly from your fingers to the government is not something that likely happens in the US, so either way this is a false equivalence.
the raw keyboard data going directly from your fingers to the government is not something that likely happens in the US, so either way this is a false equivalence.
Again, I never mentioned the US.
What does it matter if the data is routed to the government server first or second? Blanket data collection is nefarious no matter who is doing it, but it landing in the hands of any government is dangerous. It isn’t somehow less dangerous just because it hits a private server first (although it’s harder to tell spying is happening, so in that respect it may be worse)
E2E encryption should be standard across all tech platforms in every country, full stop.
I think it’s a response to how there are so many CHINA BAD articles. You could take each article as isolated, but there is the idea of manufacturing consent and it’s how people develop negative feelings towards particular things after seeing so many negative articles about them.
It’s a lot more quick for me to point out that it’s not unique to China. The way you phrase the second part of your post is as if China is unique in this sort of corruption. The US is just as corrupt, plus it has a lot more influence around the world thanks to the sheer amount of resources it controls.
I’m not trying to change the subject from China to the US, I’m trying to point out that the example of Tiananmen Square is not the best example to use as a distinguishing factor for China vs the US when there are numerous examples of the US commuting similar atrocities throughout its history.
The current and active oppression and genicide of the Uyghurs.
The brutal silencing of political and ideological ‘dissidents’.
The openly dystopian social credit system being developed.
The suppression of free speech and self-expression.
There is a long list of examples to pull from that set China apart from the US.
Oh no, you insulted a genocidal dictator that I would fucking celebrate like it was fucking mardi gras if he was hung by his own intestines. However will I recover from this devastation.
I mean, ill always say that China is worse than the US. But you can find plenty of examples of the US doing awful things to its people too.
Like the MOVE bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
or The Tusla Massacre that involved law enforcement bombing black neighbourhoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
Or any of the countless of times cops perpetrated mass violence against black people during the civil war era and cracked down harshly on protests.
Or when the did the same to anti-war protestors during the vietnam war.
Or the numerous times they experimented on their own citezens such as MK ultra, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or any of the dozens upon dozens of radiation experimentation, like when almost 1000 pregnant mothers were injected with radioactive iron, causing many miscarriages and cancers(and thats not the only time they injected pregnant mothers with radioctive material to see if it fucked up the baby), or when inserting radium rods up the nostrils of school children and then observing how their health declined, or when they dosed hundreds of inuit with radioactive iodine to see its affects on the thyroid.
Like I dont think this makes China’s atrocities any more excusable, but the reverse is true to. The US really isnt much better than China.
The world ain’t just good or bad and there’s various degrees of “bad”. The fact that many US people can even talk about this stuff makes them already just ever so slightly better for many outsiders. This is how it is, neither country is “good” but they align more with western ideals than an authoritarian state which for many of us is bad by default…which it is of course. :)
Don’t forget operation sea spray! Next time you laugh at someone talking about chemtrails remember the us government actually did chemtrails!
As bad as those two linked incidents were, they weren’t exactly government sanctioned. Police sanctioned, sure, and the government should do more to reign that shit in, but comparing them to Tiennamen is disingenuous at best.
The Chinese government hates letting its citizens have a voice.
I gave plenty of other examples that were government sanctioned, and the treatment of black people during civil rights was government sanctioned. And going back further you have slavery and the genocide of natives that were government sanctioned. Ofc its not a 1:1 parallel with tiennamen.
Imagine thinking China is worse than the US when the US killed something like a million Iraqis, and that’s just one of the many war the US was waging in the last 30 years while China checks notes attacked nobody in that timeframe.
I think the distinction between China and the US is how they directly treat their own citizens. Arguments could be made that they’re both equally shitty in that regard, but in different ways.
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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
Googling this took me a couple of seconds. Less time than writing a comment.
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“Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, formerly known as the Ash Institute, was established in 2003 and is part of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.”
You were saying?
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If you think a result where 95.5% of any population have their opinion aligned means there nothing wrong going on behind the scenes, you must be naive as hell.
It’s a western study! Is Harvard part of a communist conspiracy or what’s your point?
A western study doesn’t make the participants any less pressured by their authoritative goverment to not give negative feedback. Regardless of who asks the questions, these people still live their lives under the goverment.
It would be one thing to have a majority of their citizen be satisfied with how a goverment is run, but 95.5% approval rating is just illogical. It could only happen if there is pressure to give a positive answer or they are living in a utopia, and we all know human nature rules out the possibility of the second from ever existing.
The US imprisons 4x more people per capita. And China lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years. How are they equally shitty?
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Yeah right, let me ask the Uyghurs how they’re doing real quick
Let’s see how the western press thinks things are going:
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9
Best bit:
Cheers!
Have… have you read the rest of the article? It’s fucking terrifying. It’s basically saying “this place went from a concentration camp to a prison”, and even then that’s what a random foreigner saw and has been told by the government. We don’t know if that’s the truth, and even if it was that’s still pretty fucking bad.
Yeah but have you seen what they used to write?
There’s this passage:
They’re actually doing the false balance thing. When was the last time the western press was fence sitting this much about this issue?
China eased up on their crackdown, which is good, but the western press went so far above what they could prove, they’re now walking back. Actually more like dropping the story: When was the last time you saw a new article about Xinjiang and not some social media echo?
When even the “false balance thing” includes relaying an admission of cultural genocide, you know the reality is really fucking bad.
The OHCHR Report isn’t even a year old. And if a country was actively committing genocide I’d guess they wouldn’t really make it easy to have constant news about it.
Two years ago, that shit used to be in German newspapers every month or so. Haven’t seen anything in like a year now. Also, pretty sure the UN report didn’t allege genocide, which is what the media here was claiming back then.
Heck I remember one of my friends was under the impression that there was ethnic cleansing and some major refugee movements, despite the media never actually alleging that. But when they hear the word “genocide” over and over, that’s what people imagine.
The report details the second, third and fourth of those acts. It effectively qualifies as genocide.
But those were brown people so they dont count - Americans probably.
Shills gonna shill
I tend to lean into accepting that ‘the US government has done some pretty horrific shit too’ camp, but I don’t do it as a way to shill for China, because fuck that authoritarian place. But it is dumb not to recognize massacres like Kent State, Tulsa, or the systematic genocides of First Nations peoples.
Tiananmen Square really isn’t the best example to use as an example of how China isn’t like the US. There’s plenty of much more insidious dystopian shit happening in China every day to use than that.
Yeah exactly my point.
this article isn’t about the US. I believe there is a reason so many in so many threads like that do what you’re doing and worse. THE TOPIC IS NOT THE US, STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT THAT WAY
Jesus Christ, this thread is cursed.
Circling back to the article: it would be easier to name software that doesn’t collect your data and send/sell it to your respective government. The point being made in this thread is that it isn’t just a China problem. If you think you’re safe from government observation just because you don’t live in China, I have bad news for you.
I think you know without doubt that this is something NO ONE ever ever ever said. You know this. And yet still – you want to make this about the united states. Maybe you can explain a way that this got brought up without China shills infecting the thread?
Because the article is not about the US. It’s not.
I didn’t mention the US.
The article makes it sound like it’s UNUSUAL that a phone app is spying on its users and sending user data to the government. It’s not an exception, it’s the rule. People pointing this out are doing you a favor, because the article’s framing would otherwise lead you to believe this is a China problem and not a tech problem.
no, people who do this are shilling for China and/or tiktok. we all know this.
and yes the raw keyboard data going directly from your fingers to the government is not something that likely happens in the US, so either way this is a false equivalence.
I’m not defending China.
Again, I never mentioned the US.
What does it matter if the data is routed to the government server first or second? Blanket data collection is nefarious no matter who is doing it, but it landing in the hands of any government is dangerous. It isn’t somehow less dangerous just because it hits a private server first (although it’s harder to tell spying is happening, so in that respect it may be worse)
E2E encryption should be standard across all tech platforms in every country, full stop.
I think it’s a response to how there are so many CHINA BAD articles. You could take each article as isolated, but there is the idea of manufacturing consent and it’s how people develop negative feelings towards particular things after seeing so many negative articles about them.
Well, you can post all the bad shit the US has done.
China IS A BAD ACTOR on the international, national, regional, and Municipal levels. The whole state apparatus is corrupted.
It’s a lot more quick for me to point out that it’s not unique to China. The way you phrase the second part of your post is as if China is unique in this sort of corruption. The US is just as corrupt, plus it has a lot more influence around the world thanks to the sheer amount of resources it controls.
And it’s completely beside the point.
China IS bad. Changing the subject isn’t the reaction of an unbiased person.
I’m not trying to change the subject from China to the US, I’m trying to point out that the example of Tiananmen Square is not the best example to use as a distinguishing factor for China vs the US when there are numerous examples of the US commuting similar atrocities throughout its history.
The current and active oppression and genicide of the Uyghurs.
The brutal silencing of political and ideological ‘dissidents’.
The openly dystopian social credit system being developed.
The suppression of free speech and self-expression.
There is a long list of examples to pull from that set China apart from the US.
“China’s Orwellian Social Credit Score Isn’t Real”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/
“China’s Social Credit System Is Actually Quite Boring – A supposedly Orwellian system is fragmented, localized, and mostly targeted at businesses”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
It’s called Whataboutism. Very common deflection tactic.
yep
Do you even know what the word shill means?
Like wtf do you think I’m trying to sell?
it seems you’re selling that idea that China = USA as to minimize bad actions by China.
Thats not really a thing you sell and I literally start my comment with
So it seems you really just cant cope with the fact that the US is a bad guy as well.
ideas are sold every day. maybe there is a reason you want to focus on the US instead? hmm weird no that can’t be true at all.
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Oh no, you insulted a genocidal dictator that I would fucking celebrate like it was fucking mardi gras if he was hung by his own intestines. However will I recover from this devastation.