451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country
belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call
765-743-1111.
This is a student newspaper, not actually a property of the university itself. Moreover, we’re you seriously considering ponying up tuition for a US university (most of which goes to fund a bloated administration apparatus)?
They probably just don’t have the legal and technical resources to navigate GDPR in a manner more sophisticated than “geoblocking” and frankly I don’t blame them—how often do they get legitimate traffic from Europe, especially without the benefit of hindsight from this incident. I like the spirit of GDPR, but blaming the entire world for not understanding your own country’s laws is the pinnacle of navel gazing.
If it costs more than zero and you don’t care about euros not visiting your site, it makes sense.
For example if you have ads or external analytics (practically 100% of websites) you need a cookie banner. Best to restrict access than to annoy your innocent users.
>For example if you have ads or external analytics
It is not about ads or analytics and about collecting private data without consent. Just to remind americans GDPR does not specifically target the Internet, it apples for real world places with physical paper (like you got to a lab and want to do some tests they are forced to tell you what they will do with your private data and you have to agree or not).
You can have no tracking ads or analytics that do not record private data just fine, you can also have non tracking cookies without a popup. But honestly it makes sense that there is a big rich group that spread a lot of FUD about this stuff so many places will just decide not to server EU. If you never seen such GDPR popup maybe you should try to have a look at some of them, see how many "partners" this people share your tracking data with and how scummy the UX patherns they use are.
Btw I am 100% fine with some US resources blocking me, I can go read soemthing else and for sure not try workaround for accessing this people page.
Well, you have to know something about the law to know when it does/doesn’t apply, and this student newspaper apparently decided it didn’t care to invest that kind of time. I think this is understandable for those of us who don’t prefer to study other countries’ laws. Perhaps EU subjects should seek to improve their laws.
Nah. Speaking as an American ex-pat, it's about Americans being offended that foreign laws have heft and import. It pierces the sovereignty bubble. The Internet is home-grown. How dare other nations dictate to us Americans how we run our sites, amirite? We're gonna take our toys and home.
This is a silly, shamefully obvious straw man. No one is saying “Americans uniquely shouldn’t have to parse other countries’ laws”, the argument is “it’s ruggedly impractical for ordinary citizens of any country to parse the laws of other countries”.
Those aren’t cases of “ordinary individuals” and thus don’t apply, but yes the general principle also implies the special case that ordinary non-Americans shouldn’t have to parse American law just to go about their lives.
Foreign nationals contending with extraditions to the US for alleged actions performed while in foreign, sovereign lands is a far more serious problem by any measure than having to protect user data or risk not being able to do business in Europe. But go on with your "No True Scotsman" arguments
The "compliance" is quite simple. Don't do this thing. Don't collect personal information without permission. Very, very simple.
If you do collect personal data,
with permission, it's only slightly more complicated. Let the individuals control their data, including deletion. Don't do anything with it without permission. Again, not hard to understand.
The "morass" is for people who are gonna try anyway. "Well, what about if we bury the permission under exhausting legalese?" No, that's unlawful. "What if we collect it but obfuscate it?" Not without permission. Etc.
So, "compliance morass" is not an argument. It's an extremely simple law.
Imagine they locked out afrika there'd be a huge amount of screaming about injustice and isms...
You can identify users by geoip and ASN surprisingly well, don't pretend supporting that has to annoy ameri-land, it's the same as arguing lock off California, it's a bad argument.
GDPR is a hundred articles of legalese, and to understand what it means to be compliant you probably need an understanding of EU legal context as well. Services of people who can do that do cost a lot.
I am surprised it's blocked in the EU. My first guess is that this student newspaper doesn't have a lot of technical folks on staff and didn't see much point in investing in being Europe-friendly. Their hosting site, https://townnews.com/, doesn't look super legit at a glance but perhaps someone else knows more.
As an American living in London, I find GDPR blocks extremely annoying…but I blame GDPR. It is a well intentioned law but horribly scoped. If I were the technical staff at a regional university in the US, I wouldn’t invest in compliance with a law that in theory can issue severe penalties. I would simply block that traffic, as they and many others have done.
Are the logs permanent? If not then GDPR doesn't cover it. Can you use the logs to identify users and their behaviour? If not GDPR doesn't cover it.
If you keep permanent logs with information about users, then yeah that is a problem. But it should be a problem, that is a big potential security/privacy issue.
This is a student run newspaper. They probably don’t employ a dedicated IT professional nor a legal professional to help them understand what GDPR requires of them. It’s easy to say “compliance with GDPR is so easy” when you’ve taken the time to understand what it requires—why should an American student newspaper have to take the time to learn other countries’ laws? Blocking access is easier especially considering the probability of the web site appealing to an international audience.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to parse this. Maybe the “continents” is meant to be a correction from “countries’ laws”, but that would be a mistake because the EU isn’t a continent but rather a union of sovereign nations, and “countries’” is plural possessive so the original wording is correct.
Since GDPR, I've had to implement a lot of data retention policy and "nuke" button type feature in various systems.
But as a general web consumer myself, all I've noticed is that nearly every website I visit has a banner at the bottom saying "We use cookies, click Accept". Very rarely is there some kind of "Please Don't" button. It's just tacit acceptance, or else close the browser tab to opt-out.
“Not much harder” for the technical person maybe, but for the nontechnical person who doesn’t even know what information their software stores or for how long much less the requirements to appease GDPR, it’s much easier to block and get on with life especially considering what little legitimate EU-originating traffic their site probably received when the decision to geoblock was made.
How does a nontechnical user with little knowledge of GDPR know if he needs to display a cookie popup (he may not even know what a cookie is or whether or not his software uses them or in what capacity). What about email addresses in user accounts? Is he now collecting private information and making himself culpable for expunging that information on request? He may not even know how to expunge in the case of log files or other artifacts. “Not much harder” my arse.
More likely they're blocking it because they're a local campus newspaper and they spent money on 1hrs worth of time with a lawyer who, well informed or not, told them if they just block the EU/UK they won't have to spend any more money to figure out if they're GDPR compliant or not.
I don't quite understand how EEA GDPR regulations can extend to entities with no European footprint at all, such as this student newspaper. Can't they just issue cookies and give the EU the finger?
Someone was presented with an issue that was both technical and legal in scope and just punted. The contact info was added by minions who knew it was a stupid decision.
I find it highly entertaining that they talk about denying rights and then deny the whole of the EU access because they insist on violating their readers' privacy rights and that would be illegal in the EU.
Perhaps a fair point, but I don't think it's remotely comparable to the topic at hand. We're talking about Chinese-born students in America being ratted out to the Chinese government for exercising their free expression rights like model American citizens, even though they are foreigners.
If I had the relevant Presidential powers, I'd offer citizenship to every one of the threatened students, and the rats would be sent packing home to China the second they were identified.
The 50 cent lackeys of Pooh-Bear[1] are not welcome here in America. Go home, scumbags!!
It would be kinda interesting if somebody actually implemented a law like this: all citizens without free speech get automatic asylum. You'd have half of the world turning up on your doorstep within a month.
More seriously, it's also interesting when you think back to how asylum worked during the cold war. Migrants, even explicit economic migrants, were encouraged to emigrate from communist countries (cuba, east germany, etc), while asylum seekers in imminent threat of torture and death (say, 70's era Iranians, 80's tamils, etc) were blocked.
This is a very shallow statement. Probably 99.99% of people fleeing the above-mentioned communist countries were detained at border and sent to camps with tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands being literally murdered while attempting to do so. Obviously the big difference in this case is the numbers of potential asylum seekers, not the origin.
"Probably 99.99% of people fleeing the above-mentioned communist countries"
As far as Czechoslovakia goes, the success rate was WAY beyond 1:10000, that is why people still tried.
About 400 people were killed on our militarized border with West Germany and Austria. The # of people who succeeded was actually over 10 thousand, especially in the earliest phase (1948-51), when the security of the border was far from perfect.
You could also escape in less dramatic fashion, for example by going to Yugoslavia (a non-aligned country) for a vacation and defecting.
Of course, whoever was caught and their families would face serious repercussions. In the Stalinist era, Gulag, after it, less pronounced bullying (loss of jobs, forbidden from higher education, forcibly moved to rural regions).
Your assumption that I'm assuming that is even more bizarre. But regardless, plenty of them do want to become citizens -- especially the kind that speaks their mind in public. There's nothing wrong with making the offer.
Trust me most students in US nowadays are family financial support. They are already rich. And the US do not often give enough working position for them (outside of tech, which h1b is not particularly friendly)
> better quality of life
This definitely is wrong. Those kids enjoyed a far better life in China than US.
> more personal freedoms.
Well, for what they want to do, they'll have more freedom...
If China is such a paradise for the children of the Chinese elite, why do they overwhelmingly go to US universities? Why bother ever leaving China at all?
The fact that they don't want to spend the time and money to conform to the EU's bureaucratic "privacy theatre" is not evidence that they're actually violating anyone's privacy rights.
What makes you day they are violating readers' privacy rights? It's a not-for-profit student newspaper, they probably just don't want to risk GDPR fines. Or they don't expect readers from Europe.
I have not a deep knowledge of GDPR but wouldn't their study abroad / student exchanges programs with universities from Europe be considered like doing business in Europe?
I have no clue about Purdue, but many large universities with significant numbers of international students have things like recruiting offices abroad, etc.
Of course, lawyers exist to make themselves money. Doesn't change that if you don't violate GDPR you won't be fined. A simple blog does not violate it, so they must be doing something creepy.
> Doesn't change that if you don't violate GDPR you won't be fined.
For most companies figuring out if they violate a foreign privacy law like GDPR and remaining compliant with it isn't a technical question, it's a legal one.
Attempting to hand-wave this away is likely what led to the decision to geo-block in the first place (tech person says "there's no risk", board says "prove it", lawyer says "pay me", tech person blocks the EU).
Very simple sites can violate it. For one example: if you, or anything in your stack, logs IP addresses you need a legitimate business interest to do so. It is needed for security and usage statistics and stuff but you will need a lawyer to explain that when you get hit with some fines.
First you would get a request from a private citizen to explain. And -if you can indeed explain- it would seldom go further than that.
Possibly it'd be nice to have some boilerplate and possibly config tweaks for some of the most common default server configurations though. (Eg. for a standard Wordpress site).
> but you will need a lawyer to explain that when you get hit with some fines.
This is really just scaremongering. Usually there are exceptions to a rule but here I feel fairly comfortable saying: show me a single case where someone got "hit with some fines" and then they needed a lawyer to "explain" things in a lawyery manner and then suddenly everything was fine whereas it wasn't when the site owners responded to an inquiry in normal human language.
If you don't do tracking for no reason and aren't blatantly invading privacy, you'll get a warning if anything -- and for a USA-only site, no country's DPA feels responsible anyway so I'd be highly surprised if they even got to the warning phase even if you were doing something wrong.
I know there are technically some requirements in every privacy policy, e.g. mentioning which rights the user has (I'm not in favor of having those, citing the law in every policy makes them much longer than necessary to read and dilutes the real content, and also it makes it so that you can't have a legal website without complying with the EU's specific laws -- that won't scale if all ~190 countries in the world try to pull that crap), but that's not the same as needing to lawyer up to wave away fines that you got hit with out of the blue as a website that had nothing to do with the EU in the first place.
Like a sibling said, you misunderstand these laws (there have been more than one, but the main one now is GDPR). I never heard of a law where you needed a privacy wall to inform people about some technical features of how the website works. It's only when you store tracking tokens in the cookie jar, localStorage, etags, etc., that you need to tell them what data you are collecting.
If you do not need opt-in consent just to view the page, then no coercive wall is ever required.
Literally every single one of the sites with so-called cookie walls can be divided into two categories: site owners that have no idea what the law actually says but they think it's trendy or something, and sites that have no legitimate interest or other legal reason for processing some data and therefore need to seek your "freely given" opt-in consent. If they already had a legal grounds, they wouldn't need to ask for it.
I feel like you've got that backwards: making the site available if it violates GDPR would be violating your rights. Making the site unavailable to you is respecting them.
That's not to mention that what's much more likely here is that a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN likely just considers the EU out of scope of their audience vs the cost of figuring out if they're GDPR compliant.
At quick glance their page does have a login button, which you can't implement on a static site. It also has social network buttons. These are probably all useful features for them and their audience
Indeed, though that's extra work. One can also just send people to the social media site when they click on the site's button, afaik they all have dedicated pages for sharing content (they want you to share stuff on their platform). Don't need to import their javascript and run it on every visitor's system just to have links to their sites.
It’s also negligible if you block EU access. The people that own the content get to decide which approach to take.
I for one am a little tired of EU citizens telling me something doesn’t have compliance costs when I’ve been in the room when outside counsel couldn’t agree if a brochure ware site was compliant because the logs contained IP addresses.
You may wish that the regulations didn’t make the choice of blocking EU citizens the more palatable but that doesn’t make it true.
You should take the outside perspective into account: For me as an EU employer, this implies students from West Lafayette, Indiana, are unable to fulfils even the most basic of rules regarding privacy and are thus a liability. Doing this - even if the site itself is not directly associated with the student body - diminishes the perceived worth of the degree.
I'm not sure that computes for me. Can you explain in more detail how refusing service outright is better than providing ethical service?
To trigger GDPR, you need to be collecting PII (of EU citizens).
What interest would a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN have in people's PII (let alone the PII of European Citizens) in the first place, and why would they be collecting it?
> because they insist on violating their readers' privacy rights and that would be illegal in the EU.
Bad assumption. Maybe an unpopular fact, but many sites simply block EU access to avoid potential legal pitfalls of navigating foreign laws. Getting the site compliant would require review from legal teams and work from (likely contracted) web developers, which is almost certainly not in the budget for a side site like this.
Not every website is backed by a corporation with on-staff web developers and corporate counsel to double-check everything. Their audience is primarily a local one, so allocating the budget to do this and maintain it isn’t worth it.
This is a completely backwards way of looking at it. If you don't have the budget, create a static website and throw it behind github pages or s3 or whatever. An entire university with a school of computer science cannot figure out some standard way of doing this ?
Right, but surely they have resources at the school if they need technical assistance. It's a university. Just find any CS major and they'll tell you how to set up a website.
• with all images / external resources hosted on the same domain;
• where the logs are default configuration, don't leave the server (except as GoAccess reports), and are deleted / anonymised eventually;
is GDPR-compliant. Sure, there are other ways to be compliant, but this works, and is basically the default way of setting up a website. It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
When you put together that simple bulletpoint approach you still leveraged baselevel knowledge about the GDPR that would be ridiculous to assume of a CS major.
> is basically the default way of setting up a website
It's not the default way of setting up an online content management system to which student journalists can post articles without going through some convoluted command-line build process ("...then you do a git commit and push, run the Hugo script, and rsync the files to the server"... yeah, no.)
> It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
Since they're using a third-party content management system, they most likely neither know nor even care how the website works. Why should they? They're journalists, not system administrators.
As others have noted, this is an independent student newspaper. Their normal readership outside the Purdue community is probably in the low single digits on a percentage basis, and their EU readership is likely close to non-existent. They (or, more likely, the people who run the CMS for them) have concluded that a full audit of their system to ensure GPDR compliance is simply not worth it for the minuscule number of additional readers they'd gain. And they're almost certainly right.
I don't know how this newspaper works, but typically the team itself will comprise students from different majors, seniority, etc. So it's not a question of begging for help or money.
This is an independent website, not part of the official University budget.
You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
This involves legal teams, contracted developers, and constrained budgets that are already stretched thin on operating in their core business. It’s not reasonable to demand they invest tens of thousands of dollars (or demand equivalent free labor from CS students and lawyers) to serve a population that almost never visits the site.
How are they producing a website compliant with local laws then ? What if they inadvertently end up violating DMCA ? What happens then ? The answer to that is one can be reasonably sure that they aren't doing anything stupid or malicious. It's the same with GDPR. Don't use trackers, cookies, adware etc., none of which are necessary for a college newspaper. This is a simple technical problem.
> You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
But the issue isn't "international law" in the general case (which, indeed, would be very hard), it's the specific case of the GDPR, the solution to which (for this particular site, which only serves static content) is mind-numbingly trivial: don't collect personal data, don't set cookies. That's it. That's all you have to do.
You're only talking about the technial part. But there are non technical requirements as well: In many cases you need to name a person responsible for data protection, a privacy policy, a list of services you're sharing data with,...
Though I'm not sure if a local US newspaper even needs to be compliant, since it doesn't target EU residents and thus might be out of scope.
It’s a form of purity spiral where the consensus on acceptable behaviour becomes narrower and narrower as peope try to out-compete each other on who is the most virtuous, or in this case who is the most careful about nonexistent GDPR risks.
> or in this case who is the most careful about nonexistent GDPR risks.
Parent comment is convinced the site is doing something that would be illegal.
You are convinced that the site’s GDPR risk is non-existence.
It’s amazing how many people sitting on the sidelines can be so confident about GDPR while having entirely opposite opinions.
But my point stands: This stuff is complicated and requires sign-off from the lawyers in any large institution. If you don’t have a reason or budget to go through that process, you don’t do it. It’s not virtue signaling or anything silly like that. It’s basic corporate legal protections.
Within the EU itself, GDPR is rarely enforced. A paper tiger of sorts. Its main meaning is to scare some people straight, but the resources for actual enforcement of its provisions are rather limited.
For example, I still receive a lot of commercial spam that advertises in-EU businesses.
Maybe but no lawyer is going to say it’s probably fine to break the law since enforcement is lax, and the engineering team isn’t going to say we can stand by all the random code this we pulled from npm. The obvious thing to do here is blocking readers from 7 time zones away which up until today went unnoticed.
Eh, talk is cheap. Glad they’re speaking out against China, but as far as I know it costs them nothing to do so and they stand to gain some positive PR.
I assume university leaders’ pay is correlated to a university’s budget, which is correlated to international students paying full price, which is correlated to students from China due to their large numbers.
> At Brandeis University near Boston, Chinese students mobilized last year to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.
> U.S. universities have received more than $1 billion in donations from mainland China — from individuals, companies, government organizations — since 2013, according to the Department of Education. That doesn’t include tuition paid by Chinese students, whose numbers in the U.S. reached 370,000 in 2019.
The number of Chinese students is already already in decline for various reasons [1]. It means less money for the American universities. It also means less tensions between students in the future. I don't think it's good news for the US though.
Purdue President Mitch Daniels sent an email to the university criticizing the harassment against Purdue student Zhihao Kong, whose experience was documented in an article on ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet based in New York City.
This is great, but I wonder how long these things will last? Big companies with a strong dependency on China tend take China's side, and since big companies controls the narrative I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a social faux pas to criticize CCP in the future.
China doesn't have enough power and influence for that to happen today, but what if/when their GDP per capita reaches the same level as US? At that point every big company has to adapt or get outcompeted by the companies allowed to operate in the Chinese market.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a social faux pas to criticize CCP in the future
It has been for years. You can find many stories of it, including companies firing employees who are critical of the CCP and CEOs apologizing. Look up stories of Disney, most of Hollywood, the NBA (a firestorm, though I don't know about apologies), etc.
Excellent. Supporting free thought and expression is exactly what universities are supposed to do. I don't feel they've always done so sufficiently in recent years, but it's great to see them taking a stand here.
That's an easy stand to take. It would be more interesting to see what stand would they take on more controversial subjects that also support free thought and expression.
> I don't feel they've always done so sufficiently in recent years
I TA'd for an anthro program a bit and the 'free thought' people were usually finding out that they'd been abusing terms of art or needed to switch contexts and were struggling to reframe their perceptions.
The difference between "you can't do that" and "that's not what we're doing here" evaded some people for a while.
I was a Republican. I was always pro choice. I was always skeptical of cops. I thought the Soviet Union and then the rump empire under Putin was dangerous. I never felt "oppressed" by standards of decency. Maybe it's not about being a Republican.
Your post supports with facts - ie. your own experience - the idea that moderate members of a group don't get oppressed, which is missing the point, in my opinion.
I think the point of the parent of your post and the article is that regardless of what you believe, you should have the right to your opinion and should not be persecuted for it.
Your "persecution" is a cheap shadow of actual persecution, which was meted out to whole sexes and races under the flag of inherent superiority. That's not what the modern right is feeling. They are feeling the consequences of expressing overt racism and sexism. It is their right to do so. Nobody has taken away that right. It is everyone's right to reject racism and sexism and the people espousing it.
Wow, you're making a lot of assumptions, and it sounds like you haven't been on a college campus in about 30 years (USSR was a while ago).
A lot has changed in even the last 10 years since the 43rd's DCL.
Nowadays you can report students and professors for saying things you find offensive in class. It can be as simple as mixing up identifiers, or making a claim that others disagree with.
You can't say "Israel is an apartheid state" or "Gaza and Palestinians have elected terrorists" because various factions now have the ability to weaponize the university's bureaucracy against each other, replete with show trials that would make Kafka blush.
The among the reasons we have strong free speech protections is that the ACLU used to defend groups with truly repugnant beliefs, including literal Nazis. That's happening less and less.
Whether a one-state outcome in Israel entails apartheid or whether the terrorists among Palestinian leadership positions is fundamentally different than Sinn Fein are wonky policy nerd topics.
That's not what the modern right is about. It is about denying the bodily autonomy of women, for example. And they wonder why women won't touch them.
I think it more depends on how you fall on the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. As a libertarian myself, I certainly feel that my views are not welcome. I have often been accused of being a horrible person for holding a belief in what is essentially tolerance of intolerance, and voluntary cooperation.
I am estranged from libertarianism. Too many people self-assigning that label are against women's rights, voting rights, and are comfortable with the dictator in Russia. And this is before one gets to issues like Pareto optimal policies entrenching existing disadvantages.
Have you become attracted to authoritarianism then? I'd be very curious as to why. I'm very much pro women's and voting rights, and am under no illusion that Russia is somehow a liberal place.
If you're referring to abortion, I think the main disagreement between sensible people is the point at which a group of cells becomes a child, deserving of protection? And whose responsibility is that child? My answers are at conception, and whoever is currently in custody (the mother, before birth); simply because I don't see an alternative that isn't highly arbitrary or subjective.
In regard to voting rights, democracy is clearly better than the other things we've tried. I just don't think the people we elect should have quite so much power. Their remit should be limited to the administration of peace and order, not binding us all into one cooperative working towards a common goal. Society is about peaceful coexistence, not collectivizing the realities of misfortune or inadequacy.
Most basically, I think anyone who is drawn to the idea of forcing people to cooperate is taking a moral stance that I simply cannot follow. In the absence of an oracle to divine good from evil, I can't come up with a justification, save one, for using force to compel cooperation. Doing so is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery.
This "the idea of forcing people to cooperate is taking a moral stance that I simply cannot follow" is why libertarianism, especially recently, is naive and counterproductive.
Would you care to elaborate as to why? Is productivity or Pareto optimization universally more important than agency? How did you arrive at this conclusion?
That might be hard.If i recall correctly a few years ago there were some numbers indicating somewhere between 1-3 million people who were either "proper spying", doing espionage(industrial,research,etc) or having ties(actively involved, not merely having relatives/distant connections) with China living in the US.[I will edit with a source assuming it still is online, otherwise i have to dig in my local data]
This happens a lot at 'FAANG-tier' companies, but then again screening employees is virtually impossible at this scale, US companies still have an advantage and they remain ahead of the competition because copying/leaking information takes time, and the re-engineering also takes time.Academia is a sensitive area, because on one hand you have to be transparent and keep discourse public and open, but on the other hand state-sponsored entities actively engage in battles(especially cybernetic ones) to control narratives about certain subjects, especially in 'public spaces'.
We are all rightfully outraged that a foreign regime is able to impact free expression on college campuses in the US.
It strikes me as relevant that we are building a lot of the same infrastructure of our own accord, with strikingly similar justifications.
At this same university, anybody can anonymously complain about professors or other students based on what they say in a classroom or lecture hall, and that complaint will be investigated.
Maybe so, but rightful outrage is not a sufficient condition for a good HN thread. If anything, it makes people forget all about the mandate of this site in a rush to express their rightful outrage.
No, because the submission is interesting, contains new information, and is possible to discuss substantively—as many commenters in the thread are demonstrating. That makes it on topic for HN.
The onus is on commenters to stick to the site guidelines, regardless of how provocative the information in a submission may be.
For those geo blocked. The president of Purdue sent out and email in response to learning that Chinese students had been harassing a Chinese student who spoke out about the heroism of the students who died in Tiananmen Square, insisting all students respect free speech.
“Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”
"In my world there's always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however
In your world there's no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn't it?"
Feels the same to me, makes me wonder who'd ever disagree with it. Does the person this was written in response to really feel like it is false and that people should not be allowed to exist if they think certain things?
America literally invaded South Vietnam out of fear that communist ideas would spread. Now if war does not fall under the category of “elimination” then I don’t know what does.
I don’t think that I am. My flagged reply was to a comment about the difference between the “liberal” and the “authoritarian” mindset. Some university has not invaded any country. In fact it hasn’t even done anything wrong—it has just condemned political persecution, which is just admirable if anything.
Could a reply to some statement like “the X mindset” be about ideologies in general and not directly about what we just read in the linked article? Several replies from the top of the thread? No. Surely not.
well, at least it seems like you understand why people flagged your comment in the first place. Maybe in the future don't bring up unnecessary generalizations that muddy the discussion?
What's your point? That doesn't exclude US Americans from offering criticism. We are not all one entity, there's ~300M of us. Many of us had nothing to do with Vietnam and I can damn near guarantee wouldn't repeat that decision today.
While flawed in practice, I think the so-called "domino theory" had some valid roots in the so-called Paradox of Tolerance.
It's hard to dispute one historical aspect of communism in particular, namely that it cannot tolerate competing ideologies. The only way to implement communism is through the use of force; it's not something free people will adopt voluntarily. I may think of myself as a tolerant person, but if you have to stick a gun in my back to make me practice your ideology -- which you do -- why should I be required to tolerate that?
It can be argued that it's a moral responsibility to stop the spread of such a pathological system of thought by any means necessary, just as if we were fighting an infectious disease. I won't go that far personally, but others in America did, and the wars in Korea and Viet Nam were the result. Not so much an apology as an (admittedly oversimplified) explanation.
Of course you have just hoisted yourself on your own petard: it’s hard to dispute that American capitalism cannot tolerate competing ideologies, evidenced by (e.g.) The Vietnam War and Korean War. But now I am just repeating my original comment.
You also have another glaring problem to address: it is very easy and simple to tolerate the kind of socialism/communism where an independent nation state wants to use it’s own national resources instead of opening it up to foreign private interests. No one is harmed by that.[1] I guess the CIA just had a very eccentric interpretation of Popper.
[1] Unless you want to get real Red Scare and concoct some crazy theory about how those small nation states are really puppets of the Soviet Union who will use those resources to eventually nuke the Free World… and therefore War is Peace, Paradox of Tolerance and all that.
Comparisons to capitalism as an abstract ideology notwithstanding, you do have to use violence to keep people from voluntarily buying from and selling to each other.
There is a reason why the Communist Party of the USA is a thing and the Capitalist Party of the PRC is not. They are willing to use violence within their own borders to suppress competing ideologies in the absence of tangible criminal offenses, while we generally are not.
And then there's the simple question of whether more people die trying to sneak into your country or out of it. Moral relativists run into serious trouble with that one.
You have to use violence in order to stop people from nationalising their own resources instead of opening themselves up to foreign corporate penetration. The US federal state had to use violence to suppress the socialist Black Panthers.
I could go on like this all day. You have no legs to stand on when your claim is that capitalism is just voluntarism.
What a strange parallel to draw when it comes to the actions of the current Democrats and Republicans in our House and Senate along with the current presidency and adminstration.
It's pretty clear that in the context of the comment the usage of small-l liberal was referring to the classical ideal, not the homonym label misused in contemporary American politics.
This reminds me of a bit of trivia from Italian politics.
A few years after WWII, a senator from the main post-Fascist party greeted a fellow senator from the Socialist party (who had fought for the Resistance), saying: "We fought gallantly on opposite sides, now we can shake hands". The other replied: "Yeah, then we won so you could become a senator. If you had won, I'd still be a prisoner".
There was the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the Revolutions of 1848. Not everyone who opposes socialism is a fascist. There are arguments against it:
- Bad people tend to use it as lip service to take over.
- Somethings you want people out of the way, like piloting an airplane or performing heart surgery.
- There will always be favoritism. "Your mom" is a lot different than "moms v. the council of moms"
- Often the best solution is stay out of it. Leave it alone. Otherwise you're just making things worse.
- My argument: it does nothing. The problems we face are not due to a lack of mutual cooperation. There are solutions but too far off. Xi, Putin, jihadis, drug lords are all going to die. An adolescent version of myself would respond to this by getting them to bully a psycho who wants their family dead, or set someone up who did nothing. Now I've grown up. My delusions are gone. Horrible pain and death awaits us all. I feel sympathy for others even the hateful.
It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?
There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.
But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.
Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.
In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.
I believe the answer is 'yes' and it's also true for most 'noble' causes.
Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."
Yes, it is. We all like to believe in ideals like turn the other cheek, take the high road, welcome opposing views no matter how extreme etc. Looking back through human history though, the only way to combat intolerance has been to be intolerant yourself. Freedoms need to be defended, sometimes with blood. Look at WW2 for example. Appeasement didn't go very far, direct action did.
Freedom is never absolute. You can respect other people's freedom to disagree with you, but not their freedom to kill you. You can choose to only stop them from the latter, but not the former.
But should you respect someone's freedom to vote? What if they vote against freedom? And then what if that leads to the same result as them killing you?
You have no choice but to respect that freedom. The only alternative is to establish a tyranny of your own -- that's the only way you can tell people how to vote.
Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).
This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.
(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)
But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
> Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over.
Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?
Jefferson said "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Which is probably one reason why we now have efforts to read him out of the discussion.
The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.
I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.
The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.
I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.
I'm confused by the last paragraph, out of my own naïveté, do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
I suppose it's not surprising when someone's when someone adopts their parents' culture etc. despite being born abroad (e.g. self-describing as Indian without being a citizen/born there) - so makes sense, I just hadn't realised.
The English word "Chinese" describes three different things:
- a state (the PRC)
- an ethnic group (Han)
- a culture
The government of the PRC will gladly conflate those things serves their interests.
Most people in Hongkong would definitely identify as culturally and ethnically Chinese. That third item is ... a point of contention. I expect the situation in Taiwan is similar.
On the other side, it is possible to be nationally Chinese but neither culturally nor ethnically so -- see the Tibetans or Uighur for examples.
> do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
If they were born in HK and raised there, they would call themselves a HKer (香港人) from Hong Kong. It's highly unlikely they would say they are from 'China' because in their eyes China is Mainland China (大陆/中国) and there is negativity associated with it.
Confusingly, my friends whose parents are from Hong Kong and were born in the UK identify themselves as 'British Born Chinese' rather than 'British Born HKer'.
I use Cantonese or English when in Hong Kong. Speaking Mandarin there, when you look East Asian, is just asking for trouble if you are in wrong part of town.
If you have ever attended a college in the US, you must have had to submit a list of vaccinations, with their dates. I remember digging through files to to find my son's list.
And for a little context: Mitch Daniels is a Republican, twice governor of Indiana. The form of political correctness you have in mind (which I think is improperly taken to include vaccination requirements) does not flourish in Republican circles.
Normally, I would think that this is a fake threat. However, it's written by Mitch Daniels who is also the same guy who froze Purdue's tuition for at least 7 years.
So, I figure there's a chance he means it. Time will have to tell for sure though.
The brainwashing must be strong for students thousands of miles away from China in the middle of nowhere Indiana for them to feel the need to snitch on dissenters. Or, more likely, they were threatened before they left China that they would be watched while abroad.
Students, privileged ones at least, are still living in a fairly black and white life and have not seen that the world is many colours of truth. So defending one broad ideology is pretty easy for them, until they live a little longer and experience that we are more greys than hard edges.
The term was first brought to the English language by American anti-communist and alleged CIA asset Edward Hunter to trash talk something China was doing to POWs in the Korean war. Prior art didn't call it like that.
Curiously enough, the term is also a transliteration of what Chinese people were calling the phenomenon.
So it is actually a sinophobic loanword from the chinese language, which is _very_ interesting.
Indoctrination in different countries does different things to people. Some people will think nothing of exploding babies into pink mist while waging war against abstract concepts for decades, some people will make kids believe "freedom" is untenable under the system that made them prosperous and which totally by coincidence happens to be holding a knife to their mum's neck.
No real point here, just felt like reflecting on how words mold our worldviews.
I get leery of claiming "brainwashing" because I know some people in the US who would probably do the same thing... no threats or direct government intervention necessary. For some people it seems our natural predilection for tribalism only needs a little push to get there.
The network effect is even worse when consider a lot of the alternative are banned in china. This makes it difficult basically impossible for Chinese abroad to communicate with their friends and family back in mainland using some alternative service.
I get it. But atleast I'm not living in fear of my family being put in jail due to some offhand remark on a WhatsApp group (not saying that is not a possibility in future due to how things are turning around the world).
I don't know, I remember a naturalized college classmate of mine who came to the US permanently in elementary school (from China) going on off the cuff rants about the Dalai Lama poisoning people.
I think they do a really good job at creating a narrative of victimhood and inculcating a sort of unhinged teenage belligerence. Not that threats don't have their role, or that they aren't keeping folks under observation, but they get a lot of mileage without those tools.
You don't need to be brainwashed, you just need to be afraid.
Afraid of being reported yourself, if you don't report others. You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported. Reverse prisoner's dilemma.
> You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported.
I am worried about the authoritarian turn my country (not China) is taking. But reading and contemplating these words sent a shiver down my spine.
I've heard it from another Chinese student that a lot of Chinese students come from families that are blessed by CCP. So naturally they are very loyal to CCP. Very few students/people in general can make it outside of China without being blessed by CCP. Hence very high loyalty to CCP among international Chinese students.
The narrative of Chinese international students being brainwashed CCP militants or terrified informants is miles away from every interaction I've actually had with Chinese international students. Even when 'sensitive topics' are brought up.
I think there are some bad trends and some very vocal and nationalistic exceptions that make for some sensational news stories. Like most college students, everyone is mostly just concerned with homework and getting along with their roommates.
"Those seeking to deny those rights" are not, in the sense that matters, individual students. This is a state pursuit, a state seeking to...
Chinese points of priority are going to continue increasing in relevance. "Is the CCP good?" is not an acceptable conversation topic, in chinese, even in Purdue. Superpower superpowers, so to speak. The US has some of these too.
By “those,” they mean the other Chinese students that harassed him after his speech and more than likely reported him to the Chinese government. Did you read the article?
Still, this is a state effort. The state/ccp made of people. The other students, the chinese officers.. the parents who got a visit in China. This is not all that different from how college "censorship" works in china itself..
Applause for Purdue eh. I am excited to see how this plays out for them but I support this position.
Universities are a place of learning. If someone is misunderstood in their worldview or something else. That's the place to learn where you're wrong. Therefore all viewpoints must be allowed.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective.
The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
maybe not the book itself, but if you read the article you'll see that even weirder stuff are banned:
The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
Do you know of any examples of descent against the government that ended well for those that spoke up? I highly doubt the people are sheep and I'm pretty positive I would act in the same exact way and keep my mouth shut in order to live my life if I was living in a country with an oppressive government.
The collapse of the Eastern European socialist countries 30 years ago is an excellent example. But it only works when the general public had suffered enough and isn't willing to support the regime anymore. And the economic situation needs to get worse for one or two generations, it won't happen overnight and in a working economy. A few dissidents "speaking up" to incite change is a romantic idea, but it's not enough.
It's a kind of miracle it happened in most these countries without bloodshed. You need to mobilize large parts of society and have a favorable political situation to perform a coup like this without a civil war.
Yea, I meant in China but those examples you provided definitely illustrate how unlikely it will be to happen in China. It's pretty sad and I can't imagine having such a bleak future, especially for those that are more oppressed than others over there.
So, should the outside observers who noticed the mass hysteria, death and destruction in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, Myanmar, Romania, Turkey and myriad other examples during the 20th century just have realized that they needed to "reconsider their perspective"? It's entirely possible, and in fact, highly probable, that entire mass groups of people can be manipulated into collective insanity quite easily. That doesn't make them sheep, it makes them Human, and it's up to us to be aware of this aspect of our collective psychology and point it out where visible.
I don't see anything in that quote that's specific to the Chinese in general. Most people make an at least intuitive distinction between individuals of an ethnic or national group and the ethnic or national group as an organized political entity. When we say "the Russians exterminated thousands of Polish officers in Katyn", obviously we don't mean every Russian exterminated Polish soldiers. When we say "the Germans exterminated millions of Poles", we don't mean every German was murdering Poles. We mean that the the Russians or Germans as organized political entities, led by certain people, perpetuated those crimes. Some individual Russians and Germans themselves payed for opposing such actions. Similarly with "the Chinese". That's why when there is animosity between two groups, the cautious presumption might be that someone of the other side is an enemy, but personal contact can reveal what their individual stances are and that they may differ from the political stance.
FWIW, Americans themselves often suffer from a great deal of myopia and Americentrism, regardless of political leaning, and lots of people who lived under the boot of the Soviet Union who've moved to the US are sensitized to the subtler forms of psychological warfare the American public has been subjected to for decades.
I'm beginning to think this is an intentional tactic made in bad faith. Criticisms of the CCP are not criticisms of Chinese people. This was used two years ago regarding the cover up by the CCP of the Wuhan Lab.
Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while.
One and a half billion is still a big number though.
Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective.
My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty.
My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family.
All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example.
While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages).
Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
I wonder how much business Western cyber companies have with China? If I recall, the Great Firewall was actually started by a US company built out of either an IARPA or DARPA project. It wasn’t until many years later that DoD started using similar products, only then after they jailed (Shawn Carpenter).
>The Chinese people [are] not some herd of sheep without mental faculties.
Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say.
One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force.
To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level.
Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
The point in 1984 is that *everyone* can fall victim to mental manipulation, and an observer can discover the manipulation easily. Like American sees the hypocrisy of Chinese democracy, and, equally, Chinese seeing the hypocrisy of American one. They are virtually identical in the observation, and both sides can easily convince themselves of their own conviction.
God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way.
The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Freedom loving" sects applaud military intervention, increased police presence, spying on citizens, and the death of any protester, peaceful or otherwise.
Sadly not - remember, the US with the UK's complicity is going to let Julian Assange rot in prison probably for the rest of his life. For engaging in an act of journalism which in all likelihood ended the Iraq war, or at least made a substantial contribution to doing so.
It's the same type of problem, but much more limited in extent.
Every country has it to some degree, authoritarian regimes typically go crazy with nationalism since it's the most powerful tool they have to force their victims on the side of the aggressors against the evil foreigners.
US embarrassments, however, have movies made about them, as opposed to burying them as deeply as possible whilst simultaneously threatening every single citizen with, essentially, removal from society, if they speak against the chosen narrative.
No country is innocent, some are, however, free (moreso, at least, enough to matter, enough to choose if the need arises).
Those movies are more often than not glorifying such embarrassments, which make them propaganda.
As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.
Subjective comparisons are really useless on a debate eg. "I think USA/EU are bad but China is worse" while someone else will say exactly the opposite. You'll then say "he's blinded by propaganda" and the other side will say the same. If the debate is in a western website, you win, if it's in China, they win. That's a flamewar shitshow, not a debate.
The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.
Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.
Yeah, I mean you're basically saying if someone is so inclined they can approach any question from a perspective of bad faith, and never recognize any merit to a theoretically valid argument. I don't think that problem in general can be solved, even if we eliminated propaganda or otherwise. No one can make anyone agree with someone, even if they're right.
That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.
Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).
I believe discourse/debate on the internet are broken. I'll go as far as saying internet forums have failed because they're still text-only, moderation is still upvote/downvote-only and people are not obligated to add citations for what they claim. We're left with finding forums where people are more rational and less biased, which is why I frequent HN.
Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.
You and me are doing it right now! Respect and setting a good example at the end of the day I think succeed. I can't prove it, but I take it as a matter of faith I suppose.
O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.
AFAIK there was (still is) huge public backlash after it became apparent that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Ofc you can argue that this reaction was too late and maybe even insincere (since public support was very high in the beginning of the war).
Two that come to mind are The Big Short and The Trial of the Chicago Seven.
Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.
Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.
I'm still waiting for the incontestable proof China is trying to get rid of Uygurs. No, a known anti-China source such as Adrian Zenz being propped up by adversaries of China does not count. If you have the slightest understanding of discourse, you already know this: you don't get a biased source to report on the subject they're biased about.
It seems unreasonable to require that all bad information about China come from previously neutral sources. Is Zenz an anti-China source because he's "biased", or because he's reached a reasonable evidence-based conclusion that the Chinese government is very bad?
> people who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths
Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?
Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.
I have yet to see a feature-length film depicting Trump the way, e.g. Oliver Stone's "W" or Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" depicted Bush. Trump's crimes are buried in a mountain of...other crimes, and the atmosphere is so thick with bullshit that investigating facts is to tempt a firehouse of political hate of epic proportions. I think certain topics are virtually suicide these days.
One "feature" of democracy is that it doesn't matter whether people speak out against something. You just need 51% of people to agree with you, which can come from manufactured consent, and you can accomplish all the evil deeds you want all the same. If you try to do anything thar actually threatens the government's operations, you're treasonous and can be punished accordingly.
> US embarrassments, however, have movies made about them, as opposed to burying them as deeply as possible
In some ways, I think this can actually serve to make people believe that real events were fictional - after all, movies are generally fictional or at least with a good dose of artistic license.
I also must point out that some western governments will go to extreme lengths to bury bad actions as deeply as possible - if it wasn't for leakers, there are a whole host of Western war crimes and atrocities that would never have surfaced to the public. Even when they do, government and media propaganda machines are very efficient at convincing the general populace there is nothing to see here.
We like to berate China and others for bad actions (rightly so), but in many respects Western governments are appalling hypocrites.
You've conveniently focused on one group without noting the overwhelming power of the far left whose insanity is currently tearing through the US and the West in general (the tail end of a long progression). As far as political power goes, the latter is what should arouse more concern given how entrenched (philosophical) liberalism is.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Equity loving" sects applaud disregarding national boarders, easy release of multiple time offenders, shouting down those who disagree, and the death of any vaccine protester.
One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives. This displays the virtues of our imperfect system better than anything else, imo.
Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
I mean I think that is a very simplistic, limited and isolated point of view to address a population, but also very optimistic about the democratic West population capability to logically read situations.
I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.
What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of
I suspect the two of you are agreeing more that in initially seems - IMHO the proper response of the west to the current time of troubles is to double down on the values of freedom over safety that made us the dominant cultural force. Stupidity exists in dictatorships also, it's when we're not willing to be distracted by propaganda against our rivals and look at our own mistakes that a democratic system lets much of that stupidity cancel itself out.
> I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out
Who is this?
> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp
https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc
This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.
>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia
If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...
Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.
>one of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives
I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.
This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.
If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.
It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency
China as a strong lobby in DC [0]. And, while admitting you're wrong should show strength and courage, for some reason, probably due to media pressure among other things, the political discourse in the US doesn't allow people to admit they were wrong and course correct or just come to a new position when new information is found. Remember the huge campaign calling John Kerry a "flip-flopper" [1]? I suspect the lobbyist money is more of the driving factor here though. If you can somehow eliminate that, our elected leaders wouldn't have the motivation for lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry in the first place.
I am less worried about our democratic governments then I am about private entities, especially in sports and entertainment bending over to various totalitarian governments for a handful of bucks. Because that is making it easier for our governments to do the same, simply because people are used to it.
> One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives
Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.
> Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.
"Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'. ", This bugs me so much. The biden administration literally complained to MSM about the bad news they were getting. In a few days CNN came out with "Gas prices are coming down ", being still not as low as the Trump era.
Reminds me of 1984 when Winston makes up an article about chocolate rations
From your source, gas was an average of ~2.40 on jan 20th. Rite after biden gets in gas spikes, peaking around 3.40 end of october. Now it's around 3.20. Still up by 80c nationally. But CNN is saying "gas is going down" trying to give biden a favorable image, instead of saying "Gas is still way up because of the ESG policies of the biden administration"
The headline from CNN I found is: "Finally some relief: Gasoline and natural gas prices are falling". Does that sound particularly positive? Not really, it actually emphasizes how bad it had been and how it's something that even needs relief. You'd rather they inject politics into their statement of fact headlines like your example? Is that even true? It's also been high recently in Europe so I'm skeptical.
This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.
Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.
This is just wishful thinking. Doesn’t help other countries. We just think way too much of ourselves in the US and our influence in the world, specifically how our way of life influences other countries. It probably stems from the collapse of the USSR, which was mostly because of internal system rot but we attributed it to American freedom and democracy. Every foreign policy decision since then is taken with those lens and we ended up failing miserably in all of them.
The best way for us to combat this is to strengthen our diplomatic relations and develop our economy, which is exactly want China is doing itself.
I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.
America was like this during the run-up to the Iraq war. The last iteration of "cancel culture" was when anyone questioning the war was shouted down as un-patriotic. Search for the Dixie Chicks, a country group who spoke out against the war, and read about what happened to them.
One of the things I've learned in my years on this planet is that propaganda works. It works very very well. That's why governments, corporations, and special interests spend so much money on it.
> Search for the Dixie Chicks, a country group who spoke out against the war, and read about what happened to them.
In case anyone is curious, the group fka the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2005, they won a Grammy award. In 2007, they won five Grammies, including all three overall major categories (excluding "best new artist" from the four general field categories, because they weren't new). They are also the first female band in chart history to have three albums debut at No. 1.
In 2020, the group dropped the word "Dixie" from their name ... because of cancel culture? In any case, the Chicks then performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
I used to think but the last few years in the US taught me that people everywhere have the same capacity for zealotry, they may have to be reached/triggered differently that’s all.
My commentary is (intended to be) more about how effectively it's been triggered than any particular group of people's susceptibility to it. The effectiveness of the execution of it.
Plenty of groups of Western folks get super amped up over any threat to the continuity of their chosen self destructive, unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. Because freedom!
Plato talked a lot about this. It's very easy for politicians to feed people things that they like but aren't good for them, and this is the normal course of affairs in history. It doesn't really mean anything bad about the USA in the great picture, because we're no different than the rest of the world. That being said, good things happen when "divine providence" (or whatever) produces leaders who feed the people things that improve their health. History in this way is sort of chaotic and kind of a waiting game. The best way to minimize the time in between downward spirals is by strengthening the fabric of society when you have the opportunity, by teaching them - for lack of a better word - how to recognize knowledge.
My low-information view is that the Chinese government is an extraordinarily effective communications agency who very clearly understands the role that university students play in transmitting culture, especially when studying abroad, and has very openly worked to help spread their message throughout their diaspora.
Many US universities have a Chinese Student & Scholar Association and it's not like they try to hide that they are arms of the CCP. (Just for a random example https://myinvolvement.org/organization/cssaatualbany - "The Chinese Student and Scholar Association at the University of Albany is joined and organized by the Chinese students and scholars at the University of Albany of their own record. It is a nonprofit organization that is supported and guided by CCP through the Consulate-General of the PRC in New York.")
Mass organization can do incredible things -- a group of people is much more effective than the individuals.
I wonder how much of it is similar to East Germany with their informants, it's possible that even overseas the students don't dare speak out because someone in their friend group could report them. And as the press release said, even the student's parents back home got harassed by the cops.
It'd be an effective way of control, "Hey why didn't you come to our student org meeting last week?".
The CSSA is part of the CCP’s overseas surveillance and intimidation arm.
I speculated last year that the CSSA was also involved in the arrest of Chinese student Luo Daiqing from the University of Minnesota. He was arrested when he set foot in China for Xinnie the Pooh meme tweets he made while in the states.[0]
You only have to look at this very website to see the same happening with US citizens' support for their government's chosen narrative. It bodes poorly for Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua and every other nation who had military juntas propped up by the USG and still suffer from american influence. Some will go to great lengths to foment hatred against whistleblowers, such as Assange or Snowden.
Oh yes, I totally agree, but I just think this is on a different scale, and I might be way wrong on this, but...
Imagine a US college student studying overseas commenting about the US failures in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War over nonexistent WMDs. Would other US students harass that individual, and if so, would they report the individual to US "authorities" to make sure a message was passed on to the individuals parents?
I get riled up about bad opinions, but I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable or report them to authorities. Fuck man, I've got shit to do of my own.
> I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable
But things like that often happen in the US, like, for example, in the case of people who spoke against the invasion of Iraq. This can even escalate further, I will never forget the “freedom fries” or “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!”
These are other students though, if that makes a difference. Kids, in a foreign country, who should be either studying, drinking, or fucking. Doing shit because their parents are a thousand miles away. Anything but home country goddamn politics.
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but usually that level of zealotry requires a few years of career and relationship failure that's out of reach to the average student.
The US governemnt is inept and oppressive in its ways, but you are acting exactly as a hostile foreign agent would, stirring up strife and making exaggerated equivocations to create division.
From my point of view, being a foreigner to US citizens, it's the USG stirring strife, exaggerated equivocations like the Uygur genocide fiasco... All in an attempt to create division and weaken their adversaries. It goes both ways, the US doesn't get to be morally in a higher ground when you do the same things (or worse) as the people you're accusing. If you cut down on the jingoism, it's 2 global superpowers in a geopolitical battle, and that's the only objective view.
I personally haven't met anyone from China who has liked their government. I would assume there is some selection bias there and those that love their country are more likely to stay home, but would be really interested to talk to a true believer. I wouldn't be surprised if pressure was applied to those individuals to harass the one that spoke out against the party. The regime is brutal and most will toe the line when their family is threatened back home.
If you want to talk to a true believer, go to reddit, on /r/sino. /r/china has the people critical to China, /r/sino has the pro-CCP crowd. As for similar subs I'd expect the threshold for getting banned to be fairly low, though.
I'd be pretty curious to know if there are many people working for the CCP in propaganda in the /r/china forum. The possibility of astroturfing makes it kind of impossible to know the truth. But, I will definitely give it a read.
/r/china is very critical of the CCP, so I doubt there are many there - even relatively innocuous-looking stuff positive on China tends to get piled on there. /r/sino is opposite.
Have you met them at a $30k+/yr university? I think that's an important piece of context here. The current Chinese system affords these students the ability to go to prestigious universities abroad. Things are going good for these students, so why wouldn't they like the government that grants them such privilege?
Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...
For some of them, yes [0], but even beside that, if you're well off enough, in country that treats dissenters so poorly, to send your child abroad to study at an expensive university, you're likely in favor of the status quo.
Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]
I don't think I met any in college who spoke about their thoughts about the CCP. But yea, it definitely seems plausible and very likely that there are a proportion that are grateful to the CCP for the opportunities they are given. I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.
> I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.
Escaped? Lolololol.
If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.
Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.
The same can be said about the citizens of the empire. Unfortunately, it is the global problem. Especially, countries with the oil are affected (e.g., remember Iraq and fake 911, WMD connections). Though, countries with social leaning should be concerned too I'm looking at you Europe: universal health care is a cardinal sin that will be corrected by the empire sooner or later.
Eh, I don't think that this pattern is even remotely a uniquely Chinese thing; this is just how most people react defensively of the country and narrative they identify with when it is seen as threatened by a hostile country. Look into any Reddit thread on the topic of Russia and Ukraine, and you will see the same patterns play out with Americans giving each other backrubs for the most implausible theories imputing cartoonish evil to their geopolitical opponents (these days I quite often see celebrated posts suggesting that the US should withdraw its military protection from the ungrateful Germans which surely will result in Russia invading them), while accusing every disagreeing poster of being personally on the payroll of the Russian propaganda apparatus.
Of course, the situation in Russian popular forums is not better in the slightest, and the relevant patterns of conspiratorial thinking are reproduced at even the smallest of scales all the time. It has become a bit of a trope on 4chan that some contingent of posters will, if more than one post disagrees with their viewpoint, immediately claim that the two posts were actually made by the same person sockpuppeting; and last time I checked the recurring threads for some video games I play (still among the best sources for real-time information and gossip about updates and what-not...), they were all getting torn apart by mutual accusations of off-site conspiracies (usually on Discord) to push some viewpoint or meme or another.
There is also a large contingent of young english speaking CCP loyalists who go around liberal American social media and absolutely shred the US about everything (to much applause). It just looks like typical, albeit extreme, young liberal anti-establishment (and race centric) rhetoric. Dig through their profile though and you'll see they are oddly sympathetic to China.
These are people who are simultaneously calling for America to be dissolved on the grounds of repaying for slavery while also arguing that the youth of Hong Kong are confused and mislead.
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
Yeah, this is the wrong response code, but I guess there isn't one for "we want to harm you, but since this is illegal, we prefer to deny you service". Looks like a severe overlook from the IETF.
This isn't an inside joke that someone just made up, other than someone (Timothy Bray?) choosing this particular constant out of the remaining unused 4xx series.
For me, the spirit of 451 was as a form protest, not some sort of blanket arse-covering.
In other news, a friend of a friend's mom's tennis partner's cat sitter knew someone whose website was taken down by socialist European lawyers, so what harm is there from banning them from the village? It's not like we want them here anyway!
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
Maybe it is just me, but the "therefore" is not consequential.
AFAIK, if you don't gather data, you don't have to protect them, GDPR or not.
Based on their privacy policy, it's data extraction. Also for some reason they link out to privacy policies of the Walt Disney company and the Washington Post? They also seem to use some obscure, third party CMS provider, and perhaps the ads are handled by that organization? In either case, I'm not sure why a student run, university newspaper needs to have such predatory data practices.
Can't help seeing the irony that the censored document is a declaration by the publisher about how strongly they are committed to freedom of expression in international context..
CORRECTION: As other have pointed out, the publisher is actually the student newspaper, which is independent from Purdue University itself.
The letter is from the president of Purdue, while the web site is a news site that is independent of the university.
Also, it’s not really censorship — they have to deal with the GDPR headache, one way or the other, just like everyone else. Simply blocking the EU is a blunt but simple and effective way of doing so, and makes decent sense for a site where the interest is 99% local.
> What headache? A sensible solution: when EU visitor is detected, don't set cookies.
The headache is convincing someone to pay a lawyer to agree that this is the solution when serving content to the EU is outside your publication's mission.
Also: The Exponent isn't Purdue, it's independent. Purdue chose email as their publication medium.
The GDPR is about personal data. It can get complex when you actually start to deal with personal data. You need to notify users, enable them to modify their data and so on. For many platforms this is already very easy or built in, for some like ERP systems it was quite complicated.
Fortunately there exist a very simple solution: don't gather personal data. Note that it does not necessarily applies to cookies: they are considered personal data only if they can be used to identify the individual.[0] There is exactly zero chance anybody would go after you if you don't set cookies or set them for reasons other than making personal identification possible.
Not sure if that is enough. They seem to have facebook and twitter links and as far as I remember these usually come in a JavaScript spyware bundle and those are only the obvious ones.
How do you know that somewhere in the stack of things the server is running isn't something that would set a cookie for some valid reason, and thus trigger the EU's stupid laws?
A positive stop, the redirect to a text page, is far better than a hope and a prayer.
Not setting cookies is a radical solution. Actually there is no problem with cookies at all unless they are being used to identify the individual. [0] So by definition any valid reason causes absolutely no problem. It is only if you decide that you want to deal with personally identifiable information, transfer it to third parties etc., it becomes problematic. People in the EU quickly learned not to do that and we're very happy about it.
>Can't help seeing the irony that the censored document is a declaration by the publisher about how strongly they are committed to freedom of expression in international context..
Yep, and - also ironically - the root of publisher is the same as public, so you want to make something public but you restrict the access to a whole subset of the public.
Besides that, if they had written (without recurring to http 451[0]) a simple message like:
"We are sorry but we cannot serve this content due to the possible non-compliance of this site with EU Laws (GDPR)"
it would have been (IMHO) much more correct/polite.
I read the message "as is" more like:
Hallo, stupid visitor from Europe, you are denied access to the contents because you voted stupid people that wrote stupid laws that we won't respect.
The page served should be reachable even from non EU countries:
This website is an independent publication about Purdue, not Purdue itself.
If you're small and running ads, I'm pretty sure you don't want to risk dealing with the significant legal pitfalls of GDPR. They EU isn't your audience, and lawyers that confirm you're in compliance (or not) are expensive.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Those that try to collect as much data as possible data from visitors will of course find it difficult to be compliant, but many do not do this and are therefore in compliance with GDPR.
I do find the propaganda against GDPR annoying though. As an EU citizen (and someone who had to make sure we were compliant on multiple projects) I am happy about it. Is it perfect? No. But it's still waaaay better than nothing.
If you're an explicitly US website with no operations abroad, you shouldn't even give the GDPR a second thought. And if that's the case and you also have no operations in California, you should give the CCPA the same treatment.
I am not sure about Purdue and their affiliation with their student newspaper, but many US universities have operations abroad to some extent, like a recruiting office or something.
My guess is that there is not enough staff resources to ensure that all sites are compliant to the GDPR regulations so a blanket block of the EU was the most (only) cost effective solution to mitigate risk.
You're kidding, right? I was hoping after so many years it's clear. GDPR is about personal information. First, if you have no way of linking the IP to personal information, it does not apply. Second, even if it's linked (as in a web store etc.), storing it is perfectly fine! You just need to clearly state what information you store and for how long.
Everybody, also in the EU, are storing IP addresses. Everybody. Even the company who bragged they don't store logs for privacy reasons was caught storing them. It is important, it is necessary, and in many cases required by law.
Why risk getting entangled in weird foreign laws that might still have consequences here? The simplest solution is the best, just say no thanks in a simple redirect.
I understand why some people might be afraid of the risk. My point is that since you already implemented the code to detect EU customers, you could as well decide to not to set cookies rather than block them. In terms of complexity it's basically the same, but you get the benefit of increased exposure.
As an European citizen, yes I am profoundly glad these effects exist. Error 418 means, to me, that the website is disappointed it cannot exploit my personal data without my consent. Good riddance.
Note Gdpr is not only about cookies. It's about data collection.
Being able to get and erase your personal data from any website is quite a nice feature.
Quite the opposite! I'd much rather that the website denied me access than treated my private info like their own property purely because they are too lazy to be GDPR compliant.
I find the use of the 451 status code almost offensive in this case. They're invoking one of the most famous literary treatments of censorship, when really what's happening is that the citizens of the EU are being protected from an assault on our human rights.
I would strongly prefer if my browser handled my privacy preferences and ensured my personal data isn't shared with websites I don't want to share it with.
Because even if a website promises to obey GDPR rules, I have no way to verify if they actually do.
I'd rather seriously reconsider dealing with publishers of sites who consider it so important to trample all over our privacy rights that they'd rather block access than address the issues.
I occasionally run into websites that deny access rather than complying with the GDPR, but that's fairly rare and happens perhaps a few times a year. Most sites I've seen have gone through the trouble of complying and implementing cookie consent controls instead.
The added legal complexity from the GDPR for small-time operations has made me skeptical at times, but geoblocking due to the GDPR seems surprisingly rare and not a reason for that skepticism at all. I'd frankly have expected it to be much more common than it's turned out to be.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 403 ms ] threadCommenting on geoblocking isn't exactly what I would call navel gazing there is literally nothing more for me to take away from this content :^)
For example if you have ads or external analytics (practically 100% of websites) you need a cookie banner. Best to restrict access than to annoy your innocent users.
It is not about ads or analytics and about collecting private data without consent. Just to remind americans GDPR does not specifically target the Internet, it apples for real world places with physical paper (like you got to a lab and want to do some tests they are forced to tell you what they will do with your private data and you have to agree or not).
You can have no tracking ads or analytics that do not record private data just fine, you can also have non tracking cookies without a popup. But honestly it makes sense that there is a big rich group that spread a lot of FUD about this stuff so many places will just decide not to server EU. If you never seen such GDPR popup maybe you should try to have a look at some of them, see how many "partners" this people share your tracking data with and how scummy the UX patherns they use are.
Btw I am 100% fine with some US resources blocking me, I can go read soemthing else and for sure not try workaround for accessing this people page.
Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom and myriad less famous individuals will be relieved to hear it.
Says the guy frantically moving goalposts. :)
If you do collect personal data, with permission, it's only slightly more complicated. Let the individuals control their data, including deletion. Don't do anything with it without permission. Again, not hard to understand.
The "morass" is for people who are gonna try anyway. "Well, what about if we bury the permission under exhausting legalese?" No, that's unlawful. "What if we collect it but obfuscate it?" Not without permission. Etc.
So, "compliance morass" is not an argument. It's an extremely simple law.
Imagine they locked out afrika there'd be a huge amount of screaming about injustice and isms...
You can identify users by geoip and ASN surprisingly well, don't pretend supporting that has to annoy ameri-land, it's the same as arguing lock off California, it's a bad argument.
It would be great to have a web page that you could send them to that explains what they can do.
[0] I don't know, I can't see the site.
I am surprised it's blocked in the EU. My first guess is that this student newspaper doesn't have a lot of technical folks on staff and didn't see much point in investing in being Europe-friendly. Their hosting site, https://townnews.com/, doesn't look super legit at a glance but perhaps someone else knows more.
If you do insist on tracking, make it opt out by default.
If you keep permanent logs with information about users, then yeah that is a problem. But it should be a problem, that is a big potential security/privacy issue.
Students! Learning! (Continents!).
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to parse this. Maybe the “continents” is meant to be a correction from “countries’ laws”, but that would be a mistake because the EU isn’t a continent but rather a union of sovereign nations, and “countries’” is plural possessive so the original wording is correct.
But as a general web consumer myself, all I've noticed is that nearly every website I visit has a banner at the bottom saying "We use cookies, click Accept". Very rarely is there some kind of "Please Don't" button. It's just tacit acceptance, or else close the browser tab to opt-out.
How does a nontechnical user with little knowledge of GDPR know if he needs to display a cookie popup (he may not even know what a cookie is or whether or not his software uses them or in what capacity). What about email addresses in user accounts? Is he now collecting private information and making himself culpable for expunging that information on request? He may not even know how to expunge in the case of log files or other artifacts. “Not much harder” my arse.
I assume they're blocking it because they don't care about user privacy. Their choice, but not a good sign.
'members or ex-members of the EU' would be the actual correct wording.
They have just fallen (or not bothered to look into) for FUD.
If I had the relevant Presidential powers, I'd offer citizenship to every one of the threatened students, and the rats would be sent packing home to China the second they were identified.
The 50 cent lackeys of Pooh-Bear[1] are not welcome here in America. Go home, scumbags!!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-win...
More seriously, it's also interesting when you think back to how asylum worked during the cold war. Migrants, even explicit economic migrants, were encouraged to emigrate from communist countries (cuba, east germany, etc), while asylum seekers in imminent threat of torture and death (say, 70's era Iranians, 80's tamils, etc) were blocked.
As far as Czechoslovakia goes, the success rate was WAY beyond 1:10000, that is why people still tried.
About 400 people were killed on our militarized border with West Germany and Austria. The # of people who succeeded was actually over 10 thousand, especially in the earliest phase (1948-51), when the security of the border was far from perfect.
You could also escape in less dramatic fashion, for example by going to Yugoslavia (a non-aligned country) for a vacation and defecting.
Of course, whoever was caught and their families would face serious repercussions. In the Stalinist era, Gulag, after it, less pronounced bullying (loss of jobs, forbidden from higher education, forcibly moved to rural regions).
Trust me most students in US nowadays are family financial support. They are already rich. And the US do not often give enough working position for them (outside of tech, which h1b is not particularly friendly)
> better quality of life
This definitely is wrong. Those kids enjoyed a far better life in China than US.
> more personal freedoms.
Well, for what they want to do, they'll have more freedom...
they can stay there then lol
For most companies figuring out if they violate a foreign privacy law like GDPR and remaining compliant with it isn't a technical question, it's a legal one.
Attempting to hand-wave this away is likely what led to the decision to geo-block in the first place (tech person says "there's no risk", board says "prove it", lawyer says "pay me", tech person blocks the EU).
Possibly it'd be nice to have some boilerplate and possibly config tweaks for some of the most common default server configurations though. (Eg. for a standard Wordpress site).
This is really just scaremongering. Usually there are exceptions to a rule but here I feel fairly comfortable saying: show me a single case where someone got "hit with some fines" and then they needed a lawyer to "explain" things in a lawyery manner and then suddenly everything was fine whereas it wasn't when the site owners responded to an inquiry in normal human language.
If you don't do tracking for no reason and aren't blatantly invading privacy, you'll get a warning if anything -- and for a USA-only site, no country's DPA feels responsible anyway so I'd be highly surprised if they even got to the warning phase even if you were doing something wrong.
I know there are technically some requirements in every privacy policy, e.g. mentioning which rights the user has (I'm not in favor of having those, citing the law in every policy makes them much longer than necessary to read and dilutes the real content, and also it makes it so that you can't have a legal website without complying with the EU's specific laws -- that won't scale if all ~190 countries in the world try to pull that crap), but that's not the same as needing to lawyer up to wave away fines that you got hit with out of the blue as a website that had nothing to do with the EU in the first place.
If you do not need opt-in consent just to view the page, then no coercive wall is ever required.
Literally every single one of the sites with so-called cookie walls can be divided into two categories: site owners that have no idea what the law actually says but they think it's trendy or something, and sites that have no legitimate interest or other legal reason for processing some data and therefore need to seek your "freely given" opt-in consent. If they already had a legal grounds, they wouldn't need to ask for it.
That's not to mention that what's much more likely here is that a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN likely just considers the EU out of scope of their audience vs the cost of figuring out if they're GDPR compliant.
I for one am a little tired of EU citizens telling me something doesn’t have compliance costs when I’ve been in the room when outside counsel couldn’t agree if a brochure ware site was compliant because the logs contained IP addresses.
You may wish that the regulations didn’t make the choice of blocking EU citizens the more palatable but that doesn’t make it true.
At times it seems like the common sense behind the GDPR is not -in fact- entirely common to American (lawyers) somehow.
That can't be entirely true though, since some US states seem to have been considering similar laws recently.
Color me confused by it all. (see also an earlier comment I made in a similar conversation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29126413 )
To trigger GDPR, you need to be collecting PII (of EU citizens).
What interest would a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN have in people's PII (let alone the PII of European Citizens) in the first place, and why would they be collecting it?
Bad assumption. Maybe an unpopular fact, but many sites simply block EU access to avoid potential legal pitfalls of navigating foreign laws. Getting the site compliant would require review from legal teams and work from (likely contracted) web developers, which is almost certainly not in the budget for a side site like this.
Not every website is backed by a corporation with on-staff web developers and corporate counsel to double-check everything. Their audience is primarily a local one, so allocating the budget to do this and maintain it isn’t worth it.
• A static site without JavaScript;
• with all images / external resources hosted on the same domain;
• where the logs are default configuration, don't leave the server (except as GoAccess reports), and are deleted / anonymised eventually;
is GDPR-compliant. Sure, there are other ways to be compliant, but this works, and is basically the default way of setting up a website. It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
You can get this knowledge with just the first 7 articles.
It's not the default way of setting up an online content management system to which student journalists can post articles without going through some convoluted command-line build process ("...then you do a git commit and push, run the Hugo script, and rsync the files to the server"... yeah, no.)
> It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
Since they're using a third-party content management system, they most likely neither know nor even care how the website works. Why should they? They're journalists, not system administrators.
As others have noted, this is an independent student newspaper. Their normal readership outside the Purdue community is probably in the low single digits on a percentage basis, and their EU readership is likely close to non-existent. They (or, more likely, the people who run the CMS for them) have concluded that a full audit of their system to ensure GPDR compliance is simply not worth it for the minuscule number of additional readers they'd gain. And they're almost certainly right.
I collaborated with some EE and ME students on personal projects, but they were 1) more interesting than GDPR and 2) friends.
You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
This involves legal teams, contracted developers, and constrained budgets that are already stretched thin on operating in their core business. It’s not reasonable to demand they invest tens of thousands of dollars (or demand equivalent free labor from CS students and lawyers) to serve a population that almost never visits the site.
But the issue isn't "international law" in the general case (which, indeed, would be very hard), it's the specific case of the GDPR, the solution to which (for this particular site, which only serves static content) is mind-numbingly trivial: don't collect personal data, don't set cookies. That's it. That's all you have to do.
Though I'm not sure if a local US newspaper even needs to be compliant, since it doesn't target EU residents and thus might be out of scope.
Parent comment is convinced the site is doing something that would be illegal.
You are convinced that the site’s GDPR risk is non-existence.
It’s amazing how many people sitting on the sidelines can be so confident about GDPR while having entirely opposite opinions.
But my point stands: This stuff is complicated and requires sign-off from the lawyers in any large institution. If you don’t have a reason or budget to go through that process, you don’t do it. It’s not virtue signaling or anything silly like that. It’s basic corporate legal protections.
In fact this is the first one I’ve seen that isn’t being done as a protest.
For example, I still receive a lot of commercial spam that advertises in-EU businesses.
GDPR-related 451 is quite widespread in my experience, but that is what VPNs are for :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140406
https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
> At Brandeis University near Boston, Chinese students mobilized last year to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.
> U.S. universities have received more than $1 billion in donations from mainland China — from individuals, companies, government organizations — since 2013, according to the Department of Education. That doesn’t include tuition paid by Chinese students, whose numbers in the U.S. reached 370,000 in 2019.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/international-students-impa...
Here is the probulica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
China doesn't have enough power and influence for that to happen today, but what if/when their GDP per capita reaches the same level as US? At that point every big company has to adapt or get outcompeted by the companies allowed to operate in the Chinese market.
(Which isn't to say I believe in letting corporations off the hook.)
It has been for years. You can find many stories of it, including companies firing employees who are critical of the CCP and CEOs apologizing. Look up stories of Disney, most of Hollywood, the NBA (a firestorm, though I don't know about apologies), etc.
Pose of indignation struck; commitment to follow-through with actual investigation, nonexistent.
I TA'd for an anthro program a bit and the 'free thought' people were usually finding out that they'd been abusing terms of art or needed to switch contexts and were struggling to reframe their perceptions.
The difference between "you can't do that" and "that's not what we're doing here" evaded some people for a while.
All suspects will need to report to the DEI offices for re-education.
Joking, but they literally do the exact same shit to Republicans.
They even include "offensive classroom comment" as a category
I think the point of the parent of your post and the article is that regardless of what you believe, you should have the right to your opinion and should not be persecuted for it.
If you really were a Republican and did not face persecution in university, then most likely you either kept quiet about it, or you are a boomer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A lot has changed in even the last 10 years since the 43rd's DCL.
Nowadays you can report students and professors for saying things you find offensive in class. It can be as simple as mixing up identifiers, or making a claim that others disagree with.
You can't say "Israel is an apartheid state" or "Gaza and Palestinians have elected terrorists" because various factions now have the ability to weaponize the university's bureaucracy against each other, replete with show trials that would make Kafka blush.
The among the reasons we have strong free speech protections is that the ACLU used to defend groups with truly repugnant beliefs, including literal Nazis. That's happening less and less.
That's not what the modern right is about. It is about denying the bodily autonomy of women, for example. And they wonder why women won't touch them.
Don't get heat stroke fighting all of those strawmen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you're referring to abortion, I think the main disagreement between sensible people is the point at which a group of cells becomes a child, deserving of protection? And whose responsibility is that child? My answers are at conception, and whoever is currently in custody (the mother, before birth); simply because I don't see an alternative that isn't highly arbitrary or subjective.
In regard to voting rights, democracy is clearly better than the other things we've tried. I just don't think the people we elect should have quite so much power. Their remit should be limited to the administration of peace and order, not binding us all into one cooperative working towards a common goal. Society is about peaceful coexistence, not collectivizing the realities of misfortune or inadequacy.
Most basically, I think anyone who is drawn to the idea of forcing people to cooperate is taking a moral stance that I simply cannot follow. In the absence of an oracle to divine good from evil, I can't come up with a justification, save one, for using force to compel cooperation. Doing so is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery.
This happens a lot at 'FAANG-tier' companies, but then again screening employees is virtually impossible at this scale, US companies still have an advantage and they remain ahead of the competition because copying/leaking information takes time, and the re-engineering also takes time.Academia is a sensitive area, because on one hand you have to be transparent and keep discourse public and open, but on the other hand state-sponsored entities actively engage in battles(especially cybernetic ones) to control narratives about certain subjects, especially in 'public spaces'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It strikes me as relevant that we are building a lot of the same infrastructure of our own accord, with strikingly similar justifications.
At this same university, anybody can anonymously complain about professors or other students based on what they say in a classroom or lecture hall, and that complaint will be investigated.
Does that have an impact on free expression?
The onus is on commenters to stick to the site guidelines, regardless of how provocative the information in a submission may be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
“Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”
"In my world there's always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however
In your world there's no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn't it?"
Could a reply to some statement like “the X mindset” be about ideologies in general and not directly about what we just read in the linked article? Several replies from the top of the thread? No. Surely not.
Not really haha. I have no problem replying to a generalization—and “the liberal and authorian mindset” are definitely generalizations!
People flagged my comment because they are attached to the “liberal mindset”. That much is obvious.
I wasn’t replying to the criticism. I was replying to the comparison to the “liberal mindset”.
If liberal democracies hadn’t invaded countries in order to stop the spread of ideas then the comment would have been fine.
It's hard to dispute one historical aspect of communism in particular, namely that it cannot tolerate competing ideologies. The only way to implement communism is through the use of force; it's not something free people will adopt voluntarily. I may think of myself as a tolerant person, but if you have to stick a gun in my back to make me practice your ideology -- which you do -- why should I be required to tolerate that?
It can be argued that it's a moral responsibility to stop the spread of such a pathological system of thought by any means necessary, just as if we were fighting an infectious disease. I won't go that far personally, but others in America did, and the wars in Korea and Viet Nam were the result. Not so much an apology as an (admittedly oversimplified) explanation.
Of course you have just hoisted yourself on your own petard: it’s hard to dispute that American capitalism cannot tolerate competing ideologies, evidenced by (e.g.) The Vietnam War and Korean War. But now I am just repeating my original comment.
You also have another glaring problem to address: it is very easy and simple to tolerate the kind of socialism/communism where an independent nation state wants to use it’s own national resources instead of opening it up to foreign private interests. No one is harmed by that.[1] I guess the CIA just had a very eccentric interpretation of Popper.
[1] Unless you want to get real Red Scare and concoct some crazy theory about how those small nation states are really puppets of the Soviet Union who will use those resources to eventually nuke the Free World… and therefore War is Peace, Paradox of Tolerance and all that.
There is a reason why the Communist Party of the USA is a thing and the Capitalist Party of the PRC is not. They are willing to use violence within their own borders to suppress competing ideologies in the absence of tangible criminal offenses, while we generally are not.
And then there's the simple question of whether more people die trying to sneak into your country or out of it. Moral relativists run into serious trouble with that one.
I could go on like this all day. You have no legs to stand on when your claim is that capitalism is just voluntarism.
Looks that way. I think we're talking past each other, peace out.
- Bad people tend to use it as lip service to take over.
- Somethings you want people out of the way, like piloting an airplane or performing heart surgery.
- There will always be favoritism. "Your mom" is a lot different than "moms v. the council of moms"
- Often the best solution is stay out of it. Leave it alone. Otherwise you're just making things worse.
- My argument: it does nothing. The problems we face are not due to a lack of mutual cooperation. There are solutions but too far off. Xi, Putin, jihadis, drug lords are all going to die. An adolescent version of myself would respond to this by getting them to bully a psycho who wants their family dead, or set someone up who did nothing. Now I've grown up. My delusions are gone. Horrible pain and death awaits us all. I feel sympathy for others even the hateful.
It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?
There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.
But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.
Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.
In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.
Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."
Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).
This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.
(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)
But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.
I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.
The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.
I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.
I suppose it's not surprising when someone's when someone adopts their parents' culture etc. despite being born abroad (e.g. self-describing as Indian without being a citizen/born there) - so makes sense, I just hadn't realised.
- a state (the PRC) - an ethnic group (Han) - a culture
The government of the PRC will gladly conflate those things serves their interests.
Most people in Hongkong would definitely identify as culturally and ethnically Chinese. That third item is ... a point of contention. I expect the situation in Taiwan is similar.
On the other side, it is possible to be nationally Chinese but neither culturally nor ethnically so -- see the Tibetans or Uighur for examples.
If they were born in HK and raised there, they would call themselves a HKer (香港人) from Hong Kong. It's highly unlikely they would say they are from 'China' because in their eyes China is Mainland China (大陆/中国) and there is negativity associated with it.
Confusingly, my friends whose parents are from Hong Kong and were born in the UK identify themselves as 'British Born Chinese' rather than 'British Born HKer'.
I use Cantonese or English when in Hong Kong. Speaking Mandarin there, when you look East Asian, is just asking for trouble if you are in wrong part of town.
And for a little context: Mitch Daniels is a Republican, twice governor of Indiana. The form of political correctness you have in mind (which I think is improperly taken to include vaccination requirements) does not flourish in Republican circles.
So is it just a fake threat or are they really taking action?
So, I figure there's a chance he means it. Time will have to tell for sure though.
The term was first brought to the English language by American anti-communist and alleged CIA asset Edward Hunter to trash talk something China was doing to POWs in the Korean war. Prior art didn't call it like that. Curiously enough, the term is also a transliteration of what Chinese people were calling the phenomenon.
So it is actually a sinophobic loanword from the chinese language, which is _very_ interesting.
Indoctrination in different countries does different things to people. Some people will think nothing of exploding babies into pink mist while waging war against abstract concepts for decades, some people will make kids believe "freedom" is untenable under the system that made them prosperous and which totally by coincidence happens to be holding a knife to their mum's neck.
No real point here, just felt like reflecting on how words mold our worldviews.
I think they do a really good job at creating a narrative of victimhood and inculcating a sort of unhinged teenage belligerence. Not that threats don't have their role, or that they aren't keeping folks under observation, but they get a lot of mileage without those tools.
You don't need to be brainwashed, you just need to be afraid.
Afraid of being reported yourself, if you don't report others. You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported. Reverse prisoner's dilemma.
I am worried about the authoritarian turn my country (not China) is taking. But reading and contemplating these words sent a shiver down my spine.
Does this really matter in the age of the internet?
I think there are some bad trends and some very vocal and nationalistic exceptions that make for some sensational news stories. Like most college students, everyone is mostly just concerned with homework and getting along with their roommates.
Chinese points of priority are going to continue increasing in relevance. "Is the CCP good?" is not an acceptable conversation topic, in chinese, even in Purdue. Superpower superpowers, so to speak. The US has some of these too.
Still, this is a state effort. The state/ccp made of people. The other students, the chinese officers.. the parents who got a visit in China. This is not all that different from how college "censorship" works in china itself..
The wealthiest billionaire athletes are afraid to lose millions of dollars and don’t even speak up.
Universities are a place of learning. If someone is misunderstood in their worldview or something else. That's the place to learn where you're wrong. Therefore all viewpoints must be allowed.
Zealots make great cannon fodder, and the more cannon fodder the higher the chance of winning.
It bodes poorly for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and any other country with a coastline along the South China Sea.
~ George Orwell, 1984
The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
Have you read 1984? Neither are the Party members. (And also, the quote doesn't mention the people.)
The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
The (Chinese) people are the victims in this.
FWIW, Americans themselves often suffer from a great deal of myopia and Americentrism, regardless of political leaning, and lots of people who lived under the boot of the Soviet Union who've moved to the US are sensitized to the subtler forms of psychological warfare the American public has been subjected to for decades.
Neither were inhabitants of all the other nations where totalitarian regimes seized power, but it did not help them.
Totalitarian systems are really adept at controlling people. It is a matter of survival for them.
Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while.
One and a half billion is still a big number though.
Can Chinese people freely communicate with each other? The ability to do so is critical for unimpaired mental faculties of the collective.
My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty.
My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family.
All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example.
While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages).
Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say.
One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force.
To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level.
Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way.
The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...
Every country has it to some degree, authoritarian regimes typically go crazy with nationalism since it's the most powerful tool they have to force their victims on the side of the aggressors against the evil foreigners.
No country is innocent, some are, however, free (moreso, at least, enough to matter, enough to choose if the need arises).
As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.
Second, the USA/EU is not perfectly innocent wrt to propaganda, but still... it could be much worse.
The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.
Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.
That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.
Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).
Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.
O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.
[0] https://www.defense.gov/News/Inside-DOD/Blog/article/2062735...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-mi...
Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.
Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.
Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?
Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.
In some ways, I think this can actually serve to make people believe that real events were fictional - after all, movies are generally fictional or at least with a good dose of artistic license.
I also must point out that some western governments will go to extreme lengths to bury bad actions as deeply as possible - if it wasn't for leakers, there are a whole host of Western war crimes and atrocities that would never have surfaced to the public. Even when they do, government and media propaganda machines are very efficient at convincing the general populace there is nothing to see here.
We like to berate China and others for bad actions (rightly so), but in many respects Western governments are appalling hypocrites.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Equity loving" sects applaud disregarding national boarders, easy release of multiple time offenders, shouting down those who disagree, and the death of any vaccine protester.
Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.
What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of
what kind of example can the west be to the world
Who is this?
> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp
https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.
>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia
If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...
Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.
I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.
This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.
If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.
It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency
0 - https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-us-officials-who-now-...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(politics)
Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.
But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.
This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.
Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.
I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.
One of the things I've learned in my years on this planet is that propaganda works. It works very very well. That's why governments, corporations, and special interests spend so much money on it.
In case anyone is curious, the group fka the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2005, they won a Grammy award. In 2007, they won five Grammies, including all three overall major categories (excluding "best new artist" from the four general field categories, because they weren't new). They are also the first female band in chart history to have three albums debut at No. 1.
In 2020, the group dropped the word "Dixie" from their name ... because of cancel culture? In any case, the Chicks then performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
It seems like the summary of their story is that at worst they "switched sides", attracting fewer fans from Texas (though their tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_%26_Accusations_Tour still finished with a couple shows in Texas) but more from the rest of the country, something they had struggled with. Harvey Weinstein even produced one of their films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks:_Shut_Up_and_Sing
Regarding the Dixie Chicks, I'm not sure that's a good exemplar to support your main point. (See sibling comment that suggests they did quite well.)
Plenty of groups of Western folks get super amped up over any threat to the continuity of their chosen self destructive, unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. Because freedom!
You can bring a horse to the library, but you can't make it read
Many US universities have a Chinese Student & Scholar Association and it's not like they try to hide that they are arms of the CCP. (Just for a random example https://myinvolvement.org/organization/cssaatualbany - "The Chinese Student and Scholar Association at the University of Albany is joined and organized by the Chinese students and scholars at the University of Albany of their own record. It is a nonprofit organization that is supported and guided by CCP through the Consulate-General of the PRC in New York.")
Mass organization can do incredible things -- a group of people is much more effective than the individuals.
It'd be an effective way of control, "Hey why didn't you come to our student org meeting last week?".
I speculated last year that the CSSA was also involved in the arrest of Chinese student Luo Daiqing from the University of Minnesota. He was arrested when he set foot in China for Xinnie the Pooh meme tweets he made while in the states.[0]
[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/university-of-min...
Imagine a US college student studying overseas commenting about the US failures in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War over nonexistent WMDs. Would other US students harass that individual, and if so, would they report the individual to US "authorities" to make sure a message was passed on to the individuals parents?
I get riled up about bad opinions, but I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable or report them to authorities. Fuck man, I've got shit to do of my own.
But things like that often happen in the US, like, for example, in the case of people who spoke against the invasion of Iraq. This can even escalate further, I will never forget the “freedom fries” or “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!”
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but usually that level of zealotry requires a few years of career and relationship failure that's out of reach to the average student.
China is not a global power, it is a regional power.
Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Scholarship_Council
Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]
Don't get confused with the CSC who mainly give scholarships (tuition, accommodation, stipend) to non Chinese nationals to study in China.
Escaped? Lolololol.
If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.
Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.
Of course, the situation in Russian popular forums is not better in the slightest, and the relevant patterns of conspiratorial thinking are reproduced at even the smallest of scales all the time. It has become a bit of a trope on 4chan that some contingent of posters will, if more than one post disagrees with their viewpoint, immediately claim that the two posts were actually made by the same person sockpuppeting; and last time I checked the recurring threads for some video games I play (still among the best sources for real-time information and gossip about updates and what-not...), they were all getting torn apart by mutual accusations of off-site conspiracies (usually on Discord) to push some viewpoint or meme or another.
These are people who are simultaneously calling for America to be dissolved on the grounds of repaying for slavery while also arguing that the youth of Hong Kong are confused and mislead.
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
A touch over dramatic, verging on smug given that it’s a nerd in-joke.
(If you didn’t know, this HTTP status code is a tongue in cheek reference to the dystopian sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 where information is outlawed.)
I could elaborate but unfortunately due to our safety and security policies I am unable to comment further. Your wellbeing is my number one priority.
I don't see how it's dramatic or smug at all.
451 is an improvement on the vague 403 forbidden status code, and is specified in RFC 7725, a standards track document:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7725
This isn't an inside joke that someone just made up, other than someone (Timothy Bray?) choosing this particular constant out of the remaining unused 4xx series.
In other news, a friend of a friend's mom's tennis partner's cat sitter knew someone whose website was taken down by socialist European lawyers, so what harm is there from banning them from the village? It's not like we want them here anyway!
Only for the record, the message I get from EU:
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
Maybe it is just me, but the "therefore" is not consequential.
AFAIK, if you don't gather data, you don't have to protect them, GDPR or not.
CORRECTION: As other have pointed out, the publisher is actually the student newspaper, which is independent from Purdue University itself.
Also, it’s not really censorship — they have to deal with the GDPR headache, one way or the other, just like everyone else. Simply blocking the EU is a blunt but simple and effective way of doing so, and makes decent sense for a site where the interest is 99% local.
What headache? A sensible solution: when EU visitor is detected, don't set cookies. Purdue solution: when EU visitor is detected, block them.
The headache is convincing someone to pay a lawyer to agree that this is the solution when serving content to the EU is outside your publication's mission.
Also: The Exponent isn't Purdue, it's independent. Purdue chose email as their publication medium.
Fortunately there exist a very simple solution: don't gather personal data. Note that it does not necessarily applies to cookies: they are considered personal data only if they can be used to identify the individual.[0] There is exactly zero chance anybody would go after you if you don't set cookies or set them for reasons other than making personal identification possible.
[0] https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/how-the-gdpr-affects-coo...
How do you know that somewhere in the stack of things the server is running isn't something that would set a cookie for some valid reason, and thus trigger the EU's stupid laws?
A positive stop, the redirect to a text page, is far better than a hope and a prayer.
[0] https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/how-the-gdpr-affects-coo...
This started happening even before the GDPR was finalised.
Yep, and - also ironically - the root of publisher is the same as public, so you want to make something public but you restrict the access to a whole subset of the public.
Besides that, if they had written (without recurring to http 451[0]) a simple message like:
"We are sorry but we cannot serve this content due to the possible non-compliance of this site with EU Laws (GDPR)"
it would have been (IMHO) much more correct/polite.
I read the message "as is" more like:
Hallo, stupid visitor from Europe, you are denied access to the contents because you voted stupid people that wrote stupid laws that we won't respect.
The page served should be reachable even from non EU countries:
https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_aa3e67de-5de9-...
and it has some interesting html keywords in "base":
<meta name="keywords" content="mitch, daniels, mitch daniels, purdue, central intelligence agency, chinese embassy, tiananmen square, zhihao kong">
<meta name="news_keywords" content="mitch, daniels, mitch daniels, purdue, central intelligence agency, chinese embassy, tiananmen square, zhihao kong">
[0] the example on Wikipedia is a good one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451
If you're small and running ads, I'm pretty sure you don't want to risk dealing with the significant legal pitfalls of GDPR. They EU isn't your audience, and lawyers that confirm you're in compliance (or not) are expensive.
The GDPR is one of the easiest pieces of legislation I've ever read. And the answer is: no, basically nobody is in compliance.
I do find the propaganda against GDPR annoying though. As an EU citizen (and someone who had to make sure we were compliant on multiple projects) I am happy about it. Is it perfect? No. But it's still waaaay better than nothing.
Of the parts of the web I frequent? Sure. Most people will never leave the GDPR-violating web most months.
Everybody, also in the EU, are storing IP addresses. Everybody. Even the company who bragged they don't store logs for privacy reasons was caught storing them. It is important, it is necessary, and in many cases required by law.
Is anything being prepared for that?
[1] https://noyb.eu/en/project/advertising-ids
I find the use of the 451 status code almost offensive in this case. They're invoking one of the most famous literary treatments of censorship, when really what's happening is that the citizens of the EU are being protected from an assault on our human rights.
Because even if a website promises to obey GDPR rules, I have no way to verify if they actually do.
The added legal complexity from the GDPR for small-time operations has made me skeptical at times, but geoblocking due to the GDPR seems surprisingly rare and not a reason for that skepticism at all. I'd frankly have expected it to be much more common than it's turned out to be.
I did that so the latter could be pinned to the top of the thread without being offtopic.
I am French so I do care very much about privacy, just do not understand these blocks.