Plus also the point about Chinese people not necessarily sharing your western liberal values is a good one. It's not true that western values are universal (they are just a product of our society and history) and perhaps they have slightly different set of values based on their society and history.
The first three were military interventions, very different from fighting censorship. I don't know enough about Egypt/Mubarak to say the level of Western involvement if any.
Also China is interfering in other governments - specifically Taiwan and HK - all the time. *
* Re: HK, China agreed to allow HK people to vote for the leaders by 2017 in return for sovereignty, and did not fulfill this promise, therefore there is no reason to recognize their sovereignty.
Sure there is, short of nuclear war there’s no way to get the PRC’s government out of Hong Kong.
And the PRC signed a treaty with the U.K., and the U.K.’s signature on a treaty is dirt. They guaranteed the indivisibility and independence of Cyprus and did nothing when the Greeks invaded, they guaranteed Ukraine’s borders along with Russia and the USA. Two things are always true in international relations; never give up your nukes and never trust the U.K. or USA.
Turks, not Greeks
> they guaranteed Ukraine’s borders along with Russia and the USA
The Ukraine situation has much more nuance than you give credit for.
> and never trust the U.K. or USA.
As history shows, every superpower has interests, not friends.
Fuck nuance. Never give up your nukes and never trust anyone for your vital interests.
The nukes in Ukraine were not Ukrainian - they were Soviet. Ukraine had no knowledge and resources to maintain them in usable state, they would simply expire anyway. So at least someone made a quick buck on that. This episode actually sums up behaviour of Ukraine's politicians in their 25 years of existence - whatever can be sold, will be sold, consequences for your co-citizens be damned. Ukraine as a state has no interests, vital or not - only politicians have.
On the other hand, do you wonder why North Korea wants nukes?
I don’t wonder why North Korea wants nukes. I know why. Iraq, Libya, Iran. Compare and contrast.
It's entirely possible PRC could collapse. High growth rates and widespread corruption could easily cause a financial crisis that turns into a political one.
They were ultimately military interventions but military solution is used always as last resort if you can't achieve your goal without it. West has been meddling in their domestic affairs and trying to influence these countries internally long before military invasions. And it continues to meddle and influence after war is over.
With Mubarak of course there was a lot of US involvement. Obama and Clinton supporter Muslim Brotherhood & Morsi heavily for some reason which ended in overthrowing of Mubarak and establishment of a theocratic state... which had to be then reversed in another revolution.
> Also China is interfering in other governments - specifically Taiwan and HK - all the time. *
From their point of view HK and Taiwan are part of China. On Western maps it shows Taiwan as an independent country but mainland Chinese consider it integral part of China.
> * Re: HK, China agreed to allow HK people to vote for the leaders by 2017 in return for sovereignty, and did not fulfill this promise, therefore there is no reason to recognize their sovereignty.
That's true. But countries break promises when convenient including western democracies.
For example, suppose a ship with 1000 people was sinking.
- 800 lives saved by swift action and heroic first responders.
- Botched government response results in 200 dead.
It's no surprise that Russia tried to influence US politics. We need to do a better job of educating our citizens on critical thinking, including recognizing propaganda and fake news.
This may be true if correctly done, but chances are good that if a state actor tried to Correct the Record, they would add their own political spin or only give information that helps the nation giving the information, and it would be widely seen as propaganda and looked at with disdain by most of the population.
Not all of what Russia released was just emotional manipulation. Russia released the DNC emails, which greatly increased political instability despite the fact that it was true. Russia is now seen as a meddler in our democratic process.
You don't think similar disdain would be seen towards Americans if we inject political instability into their country?
Would you say this is propaganda?
Which were massively abused to spread FUD.
China can go ban github or something if they get upset over "foreign intervention". Then they will suffer all the economic damages that comes from that.
The reason to do something like this is PRECISELY because it makes those who do not support "western liberal values" upset.
If you're on the internet, then you can be targeted by anyone across the world, no matter where you live. Psyops/social engineering, identity theft, DDoS, doxxing, blackmail...
Oh no, my anonymous github account will be hacked!
Seriously, this shit doesn't happen. There are too many people doing too many things in the world for a government across the world to do much of anything to anyone.
I am not ever going to live my life in fear of something dumb, like that. I am going to criticize and offend whatever world governments deserve to be offended.
If they don't like it, they can send their secret james bond assassins after me for posting stuff on the internet that hurt their feelings.
China would most definitely retaliate; first by threatening and attacking GitHub, and if that didn't work then block the site completely. This would result in the Chinese companies/government losing billions, their tech progress could be severely hurt, and they would risk enraging the Chinese dev community.
It's very naive to think that the people responsible for creating and spreading this repo wouldn't be attacked, and while you might succeed in maintaining anonymity of the GitHub account (risky assumption), you most certainly wouldn't be able to remain anonymous when spreading it on Chinese services like QQ/WeChat/Weibo/etc (at least if an individual were to attempt to do this).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatFire
China did not win. Github did not get permanently blocked. They got DDoS for a week or something, but ultimately did not lose "billions".
The reason these temporary blocking attempts and attacks fail, is because github is a critical piece of infrastructure, and if a country blocks it, then it will suffer massive economic damage, and be forced to reconsider the block.
I very much hope that China continues to waste their time on these attacks. They will fail like they failed before. The more desperate they are, the more that they thrash around and fail to achieve any results, the more that people realize how little power they actually have to stop people from spreading information.
"This would result in the Chinese companies/government losing billions, their tech progress could be severely hurt, and they would risk enraging the Chinese dev community."
Good. Maybe then the Chinese citizens will do something about it. Chinese censorship mostly only hurts their own people (and by extension, it would then hurt the people in power), which will hurt them in the long term.
"It's very naive to think that the people responsible for creating and spreading this repo wouldn't be attacked"
The GreatFire people seem to be doing just fine, despite how much they have pissed off the chinese government. So empirically, as proven by facts, you are wrong.
What I suggested and GreatFire is miles apart. Moreover, I'm not saying that throwing up some wikipedia articles about Tiananmen, Chairman Mao, etc. will result in China being forced to block GitHub or attack you. The path to success is to have the repo spread to tens of millions of Chinese locals. Regular people, not just the tech savvy that knows what a VPN is. It certainly won't be easy, especially considering they can easily shadowblock all links to the repo, the name of the repo, a picture with a link/QR, etc.
By the way, people have already been and continue to be tracked down and attacked for doing these kinds of things (a notably incident that reached the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469), so no, the assumption that people will be attacked for doing this is most definitely not wrong.
You don't think governments hack their enemies?
Maybe the US would never agree, but imagine you are vacationing in some country that has good relations with China.
Seriously. Thats what this is about. People posting true stuff on the internet about china. I am not going to tiptoe around stuff like that, lol.
Question 1: Since they have the same access as you to "truthful history" why are their values different?
Question 2: Do you believe you could change their perspectives by introducing them to additional historical information?
Everyone is unique, have different ideas, beliefs and thinking capabilities. It's only natural that, as such, people will process and respond to the same content in different ways.
I do believe that many Chinese people would form drastically different opinions if they had access to factual information. That being said, I must admit that my personal motivation would be less about helping the Chinese people, and more about attempting to limit China's power.
However, as I also mentioned in the other post, I'm not brave enough to even attempt to execute this idea. It's also important to anyone who might consider it that they would, if successful, endanger the life of themselves and their loved ones.
An additional question: suppose you could limit the power of the alt-right, neo-nazies, and other racist agitators by limiting the flow of information.
Would also be against that?
1. http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/22535/both-china-and-west-...
In an ideal world, then I'd say that the goal should be to educate the current and future generations to develop critical thinking capabilities, so that they'll hopefully laugh/cry/shake their head (or if they have more patience/heart than me, try to educate) when they read the kind of information you'd more often than not find on the_donald.
I honestly don't support the idea of censorship, and I believe everyone should have the right to privacy (I'm very saddened today to discover that Apple/NSA/Chinese government/etc is likely secretly recording my iPhone screen as I type this message). A part of me would even want to go as far as to say that if people wanted to spread hateful messages/illegal activity, then the solution shouldn't be to censor them, but rather to rely on the people to downvote and educate. Imagine a Reddit where mods were incapable of deleting/censoring any content. What do you think would happen? I personally have no idea, but I believe that there's a real chance these alt-right and racist aggregators wouldn't be able to succeed in creating a "safe haven" where they'd continue to have their hateful views reinforced. I recently read an interesting article about a neo-nazi that was forced to interact with a black police officer, resulting in a friendship that ended his hateful views. I strongly believe that if they couldn't censor rational voices (which I'd like to believe outnumber them by at least 10 to 1) then there's a high chance that their views could be corrected.
It would definitely be very difficult to achieve this when governments like Russia's appear willing to commit hundreds of millions of dollars (I'm assuming) in supporting hateful views. But I do (probably naively) believe that if people were highly educated then it should be possible to build a platform that could withstand these state attacks (e.g. value an upvote by a high karma user higher than a low karma user). Do you think the HN crowd would be negatively influenced (persuaded) by hateful flow of information? If the answer is no, doesn't that mean that high intelligence can withstand hateful/fake information and that there'd therefore be no need to censor it?
Censorship is dangerous because it can easily be abused. You may want to argue that with the right censorship tools then we could've prevented Trump from becoming the president. But what happens when a manic like him ends up in a position of control over said censorship tools? I'm guessing he'd do everything possible to become a dictator, to rewrite history, to spread his hateful views, to worsen the education and attempt to brainwash the students, etc. The way I see it, the only sustainable solution would be achieving a highly intelligent population.
I agree that many Chinese don't share these values (although I do believe most of them choose to sacrifice their freedom because they don't really have a choice, and they feel it's justified by the country's growth), and that many innocent people would suffer. But I feel as long as the repo focus on spreading truthful history, then the government is to blame for whatever negative effect that occurs as a result of this.