https://www.wsj.com/video/life-inside-chinas-total-surveilla...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-...
The FBI raided a man's home on the basis of Facebook posts that the agency itself admitted couldn't be characterized as threats to any person or organization. They nevertheless held him without bail for five months while they attempted to find evidence to justify a charge of abetting terrorism or the like. They couldn't come up with anything. In the end they charged him with unlawful gun possession, but that charge was specious enough that it thrown out by a judge before even going to trial. In the meantime the man lost his job and his home.
This wasn't the normal functioning of law enforcement. This was abuse of law enforcement to punish politically disfavored speech (which speech, I repeat, the law-enforcement agency in question conceded was non-threatening).
The decision to deny bail was based on logic that they provided in open court. I'll let you look at their logic and decide for yourself whether it makes sense.
This is at least a reasonable system even if it needs some adjustments to get closer to justice.
I referenced the following two URLs:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/30/is-a-court-case-in-texas...
I'm not sure why that is a justification. The Chinese security services clearly got the authority to act as they did to. It doesn't make it right.
It's a justification because they had to provide evidence to a judge who had to assess it given our laws. What better system should I expect? If it's not a system problem and so there's a particular failing in this case, please point it out.
How was the authority given to the Chinese security services? This is a very important detail, because you can setup systems with checks and balances and laws or you can give carte blanche.
It is a travesty, I'll agree. But words have meanings, and "abducted" is not what that was.
(Yes, you can pick a nit about whether that's really a "crime", and you can argue about whether it should be. It's still illegal, under the existing law, for those people to be here.)
This is the model for the next world-wide government after China wipes the USA off the map as planned. Most people can’t deal with this information, despite the fact that it is staring them right in the face. “Made in China” is a curse that people have accepted though, so as usual they get exactly what they deserve.
The "China of Today" one could say was created by Western Powers would be Taiwan, but even Taiwan had it's foundings on anti-Western sentiments (Chiang Kai-Shek despised Western democracy).
You can also read an article about it on Yales website titled “Yale spurs Maos emergence“.
I wish I were wrong about the direction things are heading in, but I'm not.
Travel restrictions or ineligibiliy for universities. Public shaming via automated voice messages or displays, denouncing you as dishonest. You don't think that's worse?
Also note that in Germany, the right to be informed about any data companies may have on you has been law for a while. The EU-wide General Data Protection Regulation becomes enforceable next week.
Freedom of movement and GDPR are good things. The EU is not (yet) China. But the social credit score is not the bogeyman people make it out to be - or, to the extent that it is, it's already here.
In the West, are those things engineered by the government on a mass scale to coerce political support for the regime and silence dissent?
I've never understood this American notion that just because a private company is doing something that makes it fine. If you can't get a loan and can't find out why, what difference does it make whether it was the government or a private entity that blocked you?
> Also, you avoid even having a credit score if you just pay cash for everything.
Sure, but at that point you're unable to participate in much of society, just like someone without a social credit score.
A lot, actually. It might help you to understand if you realize it's not really about the loan. It's about the political control that such opaque denials can be used to implement. A private company, especially a large public one, has a lot fewer incentives for exerting political control over its customers than an authoritarian government over its people. The private company actually has a lot of incentives for not doing so, since that kind of thing can alienate customers.
You're reaching too far for an equivalence. Yes they have "deeper," more esoteric interests, but having them limited to those rather than supporting a party-regime is a far better situation.
Private company credit scores are better than government social credit scores, even though they're not totally neutral in idealistic way. The difference is big enough for them to be entirely different animals.
You seem to be confused about the salient differences between the social credit system and Western credit scores. Focusing on the fact that you can be "denied...for no clear reason or way to appeal" to draw an equivalence entirely misses the point.
What's novel and scary about the social credit system is that political actions like criticizing the government or associating with activists could hurt your score. It's not scoped to financial activity like western systems. If I have a low FICO score, I'm 100% certain that it's not because I didn't vote for Trump.
What gives you that certainty?
I worked on this stuff in the finance industry a few years back. Even at that stage we were taking any available data and throwing it into opaque machine learning models, and using those to make lending decisions. There was no nefarious intent, but it's not like we had (or cared to have) any way to exclude political affiliation effects either.
There is a trend in resume writing right now to include “rich people hobbies” such as skiing, horseback riding, mountain climbing, etc. because they signal affluence and make you more likely to be hired.
Same shit as a social credit system, just a bit more hidden.
But honestly, do you think ours and their systems are equivalently indoctrinational?
Correction: it depended on who you are.
Those schools have been closed and have been repudiated at the highest levels of the Canadian government:
> On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology, on behalf of the sitting Cabinet, in front of an audience of Indigenous delegates, and in an address that was broadcast nationally on the CBC, for the past governments' policies of assimilation.[78][79] The Prime Minister apologized not only for the known excesses of the residential school system, but for the creation of the system itself. Harper delivered the speech in the House of Commons; the procedural device of a Committee of the Whole was used, so that Indigenous leaders, who were not Members of Parliament, could be allowed to respond to the apology on the floor of the House.
The echoes of these abuses continue long after the abuse itself ends.
Lots of similarities, actually. Both systems were designed to destroy a culture seen as backwards by the powers that be.
Yeah, except one occurred in the past and is now condemned; the other is a present, newly-created reality.
Do you think the school in 1996 was doing the same things as the schools in, say, 1896? Don't you think it's more reasonable to see the 1996 closure as the end (or near the end) of a longer, continuous process, not a binary state change?
Unsurprisingly, things are more complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
Thankfully, enlightened western nations like Canada have not been so cruel since the distant, distant year of 1996 [0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
My 8 year old son who is in the third grade has spent all year 'studying' for the SOL (Standards of Learning) test. All day everyday for the last year nothing but SOL 'prep'. He sits on a Chromebook all day. All of his work is done on a Chromebook, his teacher doesn't even have to grade the assignments it's automatically done by the application. The teacher doesn't even come up with the lesson plan, it's all pushed by the school system. No deviation.
The only reason he has to 'attend' school is because his mother and I work full time. I've considered working remote and just homeschooling my son but I worry about him missing out on the social aspect of school. but that's a double edge sword also.
One last kicker. I never signed anything that would allow my son to use a chromebook or consent to google data mining my son who is under the age of 13. But alas I am sure google has a whole profile built around him and his classmates...
So yes, teachers are underpaid and overworked, and I believe that’s partially causing our system to be so mediocre - it’s hard to hire talented teachers who have time and energy to do a good job when the job is so exhausting and financially unrewarding.
This is the uncharitable, slightly tongue in cheek interpretation of events.
At the very least freedom should come with "being well informed", however we are informed by commercials nowadays. Is this freedom?
Torture & forced reeducation camps are wrong regardless of some other wrongness somewhere else.