> One variety show compere says he almost “died laughing”. In subtitles, the word “died” must be put inside double quotation marks, otherwise it is a breach of regulations. It’s as though viewers are considered not intelligent enough to understand an extremely simple phrase.
This is almost out of Discworld.
The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”
Pray to $DEITY is spot on. American's aren't censored overtly - instead every speech act is filtered through the prism of economics and markets and folks are making cost-benefit calculations on everything they say.
Have you ever felt like if you said how you really felt that your life would be ruined? Congrats, you experienced $DEITY enforcement and bent the knee.
That sounds like a coded/oblique complaint against cases of: "I was racist online and now my employer doesn't want to have anything to do with me."
Injustice and unjust-ostracization exist everywhere, but it's like that Churchill quip about democracy: Even a flawed system can still be the best compared to the alternatives.
I'd rather be in an environment where everyone's interests and actions are visible, with a diversity of actors (e.g. alternative employers), as opposed to one where MAGA Patriotic Duty Monitor #45215 observes wrong-think and puts a thumbs-down on my DOGE Permanent File and now everybody has to shun me (on pain of CECOT) and nobody is permitted to even tell me why.
> He often logs on to the Weibo webpage, not as a censor but as an ordinary user. On Weibo, his username is Ordinary Fascist (普通法西斯). It’s a satirical name but Liu is unsure whom it satirises.
Oof. This sort of black self-aware humor was quite common in the Soviet Union, too.
> In spring 2014, the Chinese government begins to purge influential Weibo users, the so-called big V – as in, verified – accounts. A journalist at the People’s Liberation Army Daily is so impassioned that he publishes a post on Weibo calling all big Vs vermin who must be dealt with severely
This reminds me of the Musk purge of verified accounts, the old blueticks, mostly because they were liberal journalists, replacing them with the meaningless "I paid for my bad posts to be promoted" badge.
Is being appointed a personal censor dystopian, or is it less dystopian than posting to youtube etc. knowing that you may have your posts deleted and be banned but never have the opportunity to speak to your censor?
> prohibits university-level teachers from discussing seven topics in class: universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civil rights, historical mistakes of the Communist party, powerful bourgeoisie and judicial independence.
side-eyes Columbia university
> None of the participants foresees that, in 10 years, half the people around the table will be in jail. Some, like me, will be living in exile. Those still in Beijing will have long been silenced and will not utter a word.
Oof.
> Some of the orders are unbelievable. One variety show compere says he almost “died laughing”. In subtitles, the word “died” must be put inside double quotation marks, otherwise it is a breach of regulations. It’s as though viewers are considered not intelligent enough to understand an extremely simple phrase
See "Unalive". Although the Chinese and Japanese languages have stronger taboos than English about death words.
No, blue ticks were for far more groups than liberal journalists. You're right that certain progressive anti-shibboleths, like saying "masks might not work" or "trans women shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms" could well get you de-ckeckmarked, or outright banned, but pretty much everyone on there as a blue checkmark was toeing that line, or quickly recanting if they strayed.
I think he wanted to de-emphasise celebrity and also raise some cash.
I don't think people were being punished for saying "masks might not work", but rather for things such as "mask mandates are literally exactly the same as Nazi Germany" and that type of thing. Same with the trans women, which often was (and still is) more along the lines of "the only reason is sexual deviants who want to rape our kids". I'm sure there are some exceptions here and there for people who said some more nuanced things, but that was not the norm.
As government grows larger, it becomes more powerful and more stifling of rights. This dystopian nightmare is the natural end destination for a government once it gets big enough.
We need bipartisan work to shrink the government so that neither Trump nor Biden's actions will damage us.
>The choice is not China or the US. The choice is between autocracy vs liberal, democratic society with separation of powers and independent judiciary.
We have a lot of choices actually. I don't particularly like either of those.
Every Western liberal democracy has turned into a progressive authoritarian state by now. Perhaps that's the inevitable conclusion of such an ideology.
Plenty of people arrested in the UK by the police for Tweets. Nothing to do with separation of powers; it's more like an administrative/HR/etc layer in all sorts of orgs that has shared and hired its own values for a few decades, to the point where almost all orgs all look very similar, regardless of which "power" they are.
> One variety show compere says he almost “died laughing”. In subtitles, the word “died” must be put inside double quotation marks, otherwise it is a breach of regulations. It’s as though viewers are considered not intelligent enough to understand an extremely simple phrase.
This is almost out of Discworld.
The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”
China's certainly a different place these days, and I can only pray to $DEITY that America isn't going down the same path now.
Pray to $DEITY is spot on. American's aren't censored overtly - instead every speech act is filtered through the prism of economics and markets and folks are making cost-benefit calculations on everything they say.
Have you ever felt like if you said how you really felt that your life would be ruined? Congrats, you experienced $DEITY enforcement and bent the knee.
That sounds like a coded/oblique complaint against cases of: "I was racist online and now my employer doesn't want to have anything to do with me."
Injustice and unjust-ostracization exist everywhere, but it's like that Churchill quip about democracy: Even a flawed system can still be the best compared to the alternatives.
I'd rather be in an environment where everyone's interests and actions are visible, with a diversity of actors (e.g. alternative employers), as opposed to one where MAGA Patriotic Duty Monitor #45215 observes wrong-think and puts a thumbs-down on my DOGE Permanent File and now everybody has to shun me (on pain of CECOT) and nobody is permitted to even tell me why.
see also, "The Lives of Others" film, set in East Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
> He often logs on to the Weibo webpage, not as a censor but as an ordinary user. On Weibo, his username is Ordinary Fascist (普通法西斯). It’s a satirical name but Liu is unsure whom it satirises.
Oof. This sort of black self-aware humor was quite common in the Soviet Union, too.
> In spring 2014, the Chinese government begins to purge influential Weibo users, the so-called big V – as in, verified – accounts. A journalist at the People’s Liberation Army Daily is so impassioned that he publishes a post on Weibo calling all big Vs vermin who must be dealt with severely
This reminds me of the Musk purge of verified accounts, the old blueticks, mostly because they were liberal journalists, replacing them with the meaningless "I paid for my bad posts to be promoted" badge.
Is being appointed a personal censor dystopian, or is it less dystopian than posting to youtube etc. knowing that you may have your posts deleted and be banned but never have the opportunity to speak to your censor?
> prohibits university-level teachers from discussing seven topics in class: universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civil rights, historical mistakes of the Communist party, powerful bourgeoisie and judicial independence.
side-eyes Columbia university
> None of the participants foresees that, in 10 years, half the people around the table will be in jail. Some, like me, will be living in exile. Those still in Beijing will have long been silenced and will not utter a word.
Oof.
> Some of the orders are unbelievable. One variety show compere says he almost “died laughing”. In subtitles, the word “died” must be put inside double quotation marks, otherwise it is a breach of regulations. It’s as though viewers are considered not intelligent enough to understand an extremely simple phrase
See "Unalive". Although the Chinese and Japanese languages have stronger taboos than English about death words.
> mostly because they were liberal journalists
No, blue ticks were for far more groups than liberal journalists. You're right that certain progressive anti-shibboleths, like saying "masks might not work" or "trans women shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms" could well get you de-ckeckmarked, or outright banned, but pretty much everyone on there as a blue checkmark was toeing that line, or quickly recanting if they strayed.
I think he wanted to de-emphasise celebrity and also raise some cash.
I don't think people were being punished for saying "masks might not work", but rather for things such as "mask mandates are literally exactly the same as Nazi Germany" and that type of thing. Same with the trans women, which often was (and still is) more along the lines of "the only reason is sexual deviants who want to rape our kids". I'm sure there are some exceptions here and there for people who said some more nuanced things, but that was not the norm.
As government grows larger, it becomes more powerful and more stifling of rights. This dystopian nightmare is the natural end destination for a government once it gets big enough.
We need bipartisan work to shrink the government so that neither Trump nor Biden's actions will damage us.
[dead]
[flagged]
The choice is not China or the US. The choice is between autocracy vs liberal, democratic society with separation of powers and independent judiciary.
What choice do you make?
>The choice is not China or the US. The choice is between autocracy vs liberal, democratic society with separation of powers and independent judiciary.
Which one is which?
We have a lot of choices actually. I don't particularly like either of those.
Every Western liberal democracy has turned into a progressive authoritarian state by now. Perhaps that's the inevitable conclusion of such an ideology.
Plenty of people arrested in the UK by the police for Tweets. Nothing to do with separation of powers; it's more like an administrative/HR/etc layer in all sorts of orgs that has shared and hired its own values for a few decades, to the point where almost all orgs all look very similar, regardless of which "power" they are.
What kind of tweets?? That's monstrous (unless the tweets are like inciting violence or organizing terrorism or such I suppose)