Well, there's other sources for this, becauses it's actually true. I wonder what "armor" you think HN even has as inane tripe like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426407 is glued to #1, while something that actually matters and pertains to the responsibilities of this crowd is, once again, penalized.
I'm not arguing that the story itself isn't frontpage newsworthy... just we should not be validating that particular source with pageviews/clicks.
ZH has pushed Coronavirus misinformation, Seth Rich conspiracies, and openly labels itself as "far-right libertarian". Of course this unsurprisingly attracts some slice of the HN demographic :)
As a counterpoint here's something Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Elli Hermann 1921, badly translated by me.
> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.
For the totalitarian claim to rewrite history all territories are ultimately problematic.
> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.
- Hannah Arendt
I would add that several totalitarian singularities, that each are closed off from one another or perceive each other through a completely controlled ideological filter, might also constitute such total control.
Well, there's any kind of person anywhere, anyway.
I think it's not wrong to be pre-emptively wary of that (and prepare arguments for it), considering the way F.U.D. about "cookie banners" [1] got many people worked up against a supposedly useless and clueless law that (again, supposedly) "forces" sites to show such banners -- because their desire to track, which is the first link in this causal chain, is being ignored or assumed as given and benign.
[1] banners sites put up because they would prefer to track everyone on the first visit, rather than having an opt-in link somewhere in the footer for example.
So what you're saying is, when I post that Catalonia should be free and go on holiday in Spain, no spooks would follow me around, and no pressure would be put on German companies to fire me, and this isn't even remotely comparable.
7 elected politicians and 2 leaders of the independence movement have been arrested and convicted for the ‘crime’ of holding a referendum. Up to 13 years in prison.
They spent public money on the referendum, didn't they? If the subordinate government could do whatever they wanted, they wouldn't need a referendum, would they.
On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?
You can't really draw a direct comparison between PRC and the US, and ask how China would react to a 'Chinese Chomsky'. Their respective conditions and rational incentives for population control are not very similar. The US (after the fall of the USSR) is a country who's stability has not truly been threatened by criticism and dissident voices, while China is a state which has been and currently is extremely vulnerable and threatened by instability, unrest and separatism, and is consequentially on high alert.
Reaction to criticism and dissidence not really a principled stand in the eyes of a state. The way the US clamped down hard on leftist political groups and organizations during the Cold War is rather the actions of a country believing itself to be threatened by instability and unrest. Political figures who fronted harsh criticisms against the government have routinely been assassinated or framed and arrested. COINTELPRO is a program which shows how political repression works the US when it feels politically vulnerable.
I don't think any of what you say is true. The people in China would like to be free just like in the USA (although our freedoms are fading with time). People have the right to speak freely. What the CCP is doing is a dictatorship, plain and simple. They're afraid of free thought and criticism.
That's just not true. The Chinese don't consider themselves unfree, the CCP is very popular, and its approval rate has only increased in recent decades. Moreover, the US does not have a very good reputation around the world. Who envies their predatory health care system? Their high-cost system of education? Their oppressive police force? The world recognizes the failure of the US in providing for their citizens, "freedom" is ultimately just the excuse for society being the way it is.
> Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades
This is only as I understand it, but technically, yes.
People like to think that the Chinese Communist Party is a single body with a single well-defined set of ideas.
It's not.
It's perfectly possible for academics and even party politicians to utter criticism of the current party direction. They can, for example, advocate the return of fundamental Maoism, or advocate free market mechanisms. As long as you can argue a point of view that lies within the party's tenets, there is usually no problem.
It's different when:
- you are a person of influence.
and
- you argue against the stability of the country (where, conveniently, the CCP is seen as the most important stabilising force in mainland China (by the CCP)).
I don't know if a Chinese Chomsky exists. I have the impression that if he would exist, he would be marginalised by the media, or some of his ideas would be adopted and used in some splintered minority faction of the CCP and hailed as a great but impractical thinker, and mostly ignored.
a so-called Chinese Chomsky (an academic type as you say) could indeed advocate either of those two points or variations between them from inside China but for one thing, he or she would have to couch their phrasing in very careful ways to avoid being coercively punished by the apparatus of the state. Furthermore, they'd have a harder time of doing these things today with Xinping's domineering influence at play. In 2005 or 2006, it would have been much easier.
Secondly and much more fundamentally, even if they made such arguments, at no point could they get away with simply advocating for the full removal of the CCP's monopoly on political power.
That's a no-go and it's also something that defines a huge difference between China and, say, the U.S, where an academic or media personality or pretty much anyone can freely advocate all kinds of stuff against the political system without having to phrase it in any particularly careful way.
This includes being able to state that the Republican/Democrat duopoloy is a piece of ineffective garbage and needs to be removed. They might face some social backlash from fans of opposing views but they won't have their legal, financial or human standing destroyed by the government through literal punishments.
Nobody said you shouldn't try. But part of that is calling out those who talk of being "unbiased" or "objective" not as a shorthand, but as something they seen think is actually within their possession.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
-- C.S. Lewis
> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective. So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that. I believe it will lead many to believe it isn't worth the attempt. I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
> The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective.
What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.
> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that
.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.
> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.
I don’t even believe that being unbiased is impossible so I do not even believe it is a true statement to begin with. I believe it is said by those that want to justify their sophistry.
I fundamentally don’t think you understand what I am saying from this reply. Therefore I think any discussion past this point on this matter is worthless.
It's easy to explain -- just not to people whose salary whose salary depends on not understanding it, who keep shaking their heads as the predictable results of the boat they won't rock roll in.
> people want some understanding of what's happening, but they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government
[..]
> it's happening all over and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effect of neo-liberalism. It had a goal remember: the goal of neo-liberalism was to transfer decisions away from the public to the hands of private power and to atomize the population.
> the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
