except it's not cancel culture. it's not cancelling people for being bad.
it's just pure poltical/ideological tail behind the legs super cowardice. an impermissivieness, terror of multiculturalism & horror that the autocratic system might be disturbed by alternate views. bed wetted terror of weakling leaders.
Yeah. The economist paralleling the two is carrying massive massive water for weak kneed authoritarianism. Oh no, their haircut wasnt manly enough for us leaders taste, gonna stop that is far far removed from a principled, with cause outcry against predators & abuse.
There's some serious fucked up 1984 oceania was always at war with Eastasia shit going on in this econist pueces & these threads. the production, that there are similar forces, is horseshit. society expressing it's democratic view of whats ok versus leaders forcing cancellation, mandating what culture can be without any will of the people- one leads clearly to heaven & i like jefferson swear i will forever stand against tyranny. i refuse that hell. serious propoganda mind bending shit, bending way over to accomodate low petty stupid blunt authoriarianism.
to be clear, there are hella problems with inverted totalitarianism. there are dangers of mob rule, of dumber populist senses. but holy shit, the amount of efforts i see in these threads to horseshoe the issues around, to say that the two problems are the same, regardless of whether it's a few projecting narrow minded stupidity or a masser body- it's ignorant & stupid in the extreme to say these are at all the same. sure there may be some symptoms. but fuck this apologia, fuck saying they are the same, fuck this so much. one could not work harder to sabotage democracia.
Nope. If millions of people want you out of the public sphere that's different from a few politicians deciding they want you out of the public sphere. Saying those are the same is incredible short sighted and wrong. For example, the "braying twitter mobs" can't dis-appear anyone, or put them on a no-fly list.
It isn't "cancel culture"; we have an entirely separate lexicon for when a state uses its authority to silence and outright disappear people. Framing the PRC's actions with a cutesy Twitter phrase feels more like a cheap and not-very-interesting "gotcha" than an accurate account of what's going on.
yeah... one is the good people defending each other & pluralism, the other is goosestepping fascists pushing their narrow perogatives onto a culture & the world.
And the effects. Canceled people feel victimized and then write papers an attend conferences about how they can't say anything anymore. I'm still waiting Jack Ma's papers or conference.
CCP doesn’t tolerate companies or persons becoming more influential than they are. It’s an existential threat to their survival. CCP doesn’t mess around. One day you’re a hotshot internet billionaire, the next day you’re touring Europe to help secure the food supply chain.
I wonder how long their reign will last. Nothing lasts forever. But as long as the economy keep growing the party is safe. The chances of war with Taiwan will increase in a recession. The perfect distraction for domestic issues.
No, it really doesn't: plenty of tech titans and influencers scrapped with the US government and lived to tell the tale. Dorsey kicked Trump off Twitter, how long do you think Weibo would last if they tried the same with Xi?
I was more focused on the threat of nuclear war than I was about who gets to tweet but you do you.
You all enjoy your daily dose of the two minute hate on China while they prep you to accept the next war over something that isn't in your interest. I don't want to be the China defender here (I think they have pluses and minuses), but the war propaganda has been relentless for about two years now and increasing in frequency. It (proximally) traces back to Obama's pivot to Asia, Trump's desire to pin responsibility for the COVID disaster on anyone but the US and populist nationalism, and Biden's continuation of both deflecting attention from COVID and satisfying the warlords and profiteers that hover around DC with their hand out. However, at its root is a pervasive cold-war anti-communism in the US elite (even if reasonable people can debate if China is really communist) combined with military Keynesianism that constructed the military industrial complex in the post-war era and diverts money intentionally from anything that would ever help any normal person.
It also is a hang over from the western imperialists being driven out during the Chinese revolution, beat at their game by poor peasants. Now they fear those peasants will set up a compelling and competing world trade system that will knock the decaying American Empire out of its bloody time in the sun.
The solution is really easy. Just laugh at the TV when they tell you to hate the people making your iPhone and go into the streets when they start firing shots in "defense" half-way around the world far outside their territorial waters like they always do.
We're going pretty far off topic here, but it's not the US that's going to be starting the next war. What's looking increasingly likely, though, is that China under Xi will invade Taiwan, and then the US will be in the hard position of having to choose whether it will blink, or back up its pledges to defend the island with action.
The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
> but it's not the US that's going to be starting the next war.
I like your optimism, but are you forgetting Iran?
> What's looking increasingly likely, though, is that China under Xi will invade Taiwan, and then the US will be in the hard position of having to choose whether it will blink, or back up its pledges to defend the island with action.
It's a very specific scenario. Officially, Taiwan isn't an independent country, the US has no relations with them and doesn't have a pact of mutual assistance or promises to come to its aid. In case China invades what it and most of the world officially consider to be a part of China ( One China policy, almost all countries in the world recognise the PRC as the single China), the US can close its eyes and it wouldn't have violated any treaty or anything of the like, or they can join the war under some pretense.
> The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
He got it wrong because the US, and most notably their ambassador to Iraq, shat the bed spectacularly bad leading him to believe he will get away with it. I recommend the Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups book, it had a chapter on that debacle.
Were Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam threats to the US? That was my point precisely, the US is perfectly capable of starting wars, and many people up top were gearing up for war with Iran a few years ago under the Trump and Obama administrations.
The average joe hates both the US government and the CCP. But given the choice between the two, which one would you rather live under? The answer is important because that will be the country you should be rooting for to win in this crazy global war for supremacy.
Clearly not the case. You think Musk's bizarre Tweets including violations of his SEC agreement and mocking of major US politicians would fly in China? He would have been "Jack Ma'ed" long ago in China.
Reframing the top-down censorship being performed by an authoritarian government as "cancel culture" feels like a double whammy of disservices: it manages to both downplay the severity of the PRC's actions and overplay a social movement in the US.
kind of a bad piece tbh. Viewing this through the lens of 'cancel culture' or 'censorship' is looking at China through a Westernized lens. Social prohibitions, shaming and cultivation of particular values have been bread and butter in China for 3000 years, it's like calling prohibitions on sexuality in an Islamic society cancel culture.
Secondly the more important miss is that the Economist focuses on the economic and political aspect of celebrities. There's some superficial truth to that but the party isn't afraid of the political power of internet celebs. What they completely omit in the piece is the resurgence of a nationalist, Confucian focus on cultural values and virtue, creating a particular way of Chinese life, it's not about socialist economics.
There's been a strong crackdown on individuals or media that promote promiscuous women 'feminine men', homosexuality, divorce and a strong focus on imposing traditional moral, not economic values.
31 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 84.6 ms ] threadit's just pure poltical/ideological tail behind the legs super cowardice. an impermissivieness, terror of multiculturalism & horror that the autocratic system might be disturbed by alternate views. bed wetted terror of weakling leaders.
The net effect is the same though: the targets are deprived of their platform and their income.
There's some serious fucked up 1984 oceania was always at war with Eastasia shit going on in this econist pueces & these threads. the production, that there are similar forces, is horseshit. society expressing it's democratic view of whats ok versus leaders forcing cancellation, mandating what culture can be without any will of the people- one leads clearly to heaven & i like jefferson swear i will forever stand against tyranny. i refuse that hell. serious propoganda mind bending shit, bending way over to accomodate low petty stupid blunt authoriarianism.
to be clear, there are hella problems with inverted totalitarianism. there are dangers of mob rule, of dumber populist senses. but holy shit, the amount of efforts i see in these threads to horseshoe the issues around, to say that the two problems are the same, regardless of whether it's a few projecting narrow minded stupidity or a masser body- it's ignorant & stupid in the extreme to say these are at all the same. sure there may be some symptoms. but fuck this apologia, fuck saying they are the same, fuck this so much. one could not work harder to sabotage democracia.
Nope. If millions of people want you out of the public sphere that's different from a few politicians deciding they want you out of the public sphere. Saying those are the same is incredible short sighted and wrong. For example, the "braying twitter mobs" can't dis-appear anyone, or put them on a no-fly list.
What makes you think the CPP isn't "canceling" because those people are being "bad"?
It's actually the same. It's silencing people who don't adhere to an ideology.
I wonder how long their reign will last. Nothing lasts forever. But as long as the economy keep growing the party is safe. The chances of war with Taiwan will increase in a recession. The perfect distraction for domestic issues.
You all enjoy your daily dose of the two minute hate on China while they prep you to accept the next war over something that isn't in your interest. I don't want to be the China defender here (I think they have pluses and minuses), but the war propaganda has been relentless for about two years now and increasing in frequency. It (proximally) traces back to Obama's pivot to Asia, Trump's desire to pin responsibility for the COVID disaster on anyone but the US and populist nationalism, and Biden's continuation of both deflecting attention from COVID and satisfying the warlords and profiteers that hover around DC with their hand out. However, at its root is a pervasive cold-war anti-communism in the US elite (even if reasonable people can debate if China is really communist) combined with military Keynesianism that constructed the military industrial complex in the post-war era and diverts money intentionally from anything that would ever help any normal person.
It also is a hang over from the western imperialists being driven out during the Chinese revolution, beat at their game by poor peasants. Now they fear those peasants will set up a compelling and competing world trade system that will knock the decaying American Empire out of its bloody time in the sun.
The solution is really easy. Just laugh at the TV when they tell you to hate the people making your iPhone and go into the streets when they start firing shots in "defense" half-way around the world far outside their territorial waters like they always do.
The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
I like your optimism, but are you forgetting Iran?
> What's looking increasingly likely, though, is that China under Xi will invade Taiwan, and then the US will be in the hard position of having to choose whether it will blink, or back up its pledges to defend the island with action.
It's a very specific scenario. Officially, Taiwan isn't an independent country, the US has no relations with them and doesn't have a pact of mutual assistance or promises to come to its aid. In case China invades what it and most of the world officially consider to be a part of China ( One China policy, almost all countries in the world recognise the PRC as the single China), the US can close its eyes and it wouldn't have violated any treaty or anything of the like, or they can join the war under some pretense.
> The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
He got it wrong because the US, and most notably their ambassador to Iraq, shat the bed spectacularly bad leading him to believe he will get away with it. I recommend the Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups book, it had a chapter on that debacle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPLQNUVmq3o
Secondly the more important miss is that the Economist focuses on the economic and political aspect of celebrities. There's some superficial truth to that but the party isn't afraid of the political power of internet celebs. What they completely omit in the piece is the resurgence of a nationalist, Confucian focus on cultural values and virtue, creating a particular way of Chinese life, it's not about socialist economics.
There's been a strong crackdown on individuals or media that promote promiscuous women 'feminine men', homosexuality, divorce and a strong focus on imposing traditional moral, not economic values.