That can be really hard to find out. Chinese culture looks down on people who criticize their own group in front of outsiders. So it's bad to truthfully criticize your family in front of a neighbor, even if you do it at home, and similarly bad to truthfully criticize your country in front of a foreigner. For an example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuping_Yang_commencement_spee.... That student was ripped apart and called a traitor in regular media and social media, even though a lot of the things she said were true and often complained about. Add mass censorship to the mix, which denies access to honest options shared among the Chinese themselves, and it gets to be extremely difficult to get an accurate sense of true Chinese public opinion.
There are also other confounding factors: such as the CCP not emphasizing the distinction between the the government and the nation. Lots of people might not realize "you can love your country and hate your government" at the same time.
Reminds me of Russia very much. Self-proclaimed "patriots" standard response to any critics of government is "you just hate everything Russian".
Self-proclaimed [X] standard response to any critics of [X] is "you just hate everything [X]".
I think it's a standard self-defense mechanism for any meme in the Dawkins sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
It kind of works. Perhaps I need to include parts of speech?
Self-proclaimed Feminist standard response to any critics of Feminism is "you just hate everything female".
I think you missed my point. That's inaccurate and not what I intended to communicate.
My point was that Chinese can complain about their country among themselves, but there are social taboos against doing the same thing among foreigners. The implication is that when a foreigner asks a Chinese person what they really think about their country, they'll probably get a whitewashed version rather than their true feelings.
In private? I think the government's ever tightening grip is going to explode in their face eventually.
China's economy developed under a multi-person single-party system. That has devolved into a dictatorship. I would be cautious about using the last thirty years as a baseline for the next fifty.
Care to elaborate? (full disclosure: I was born and raised in SU and lived in it for 20 years of my life and then another 20 in Russia after the fall). My family were "dissidents", we were under almost constant surveillance since at least 1980 (when I went to the 5th grade) and I can tell that the grip weakened every year until Andropov, who tried to hysterically tighten it, but it didn't work already.
In my simplified opinion, it was just the oil price that killed the Soviet Union. It went from $120 in 1980 to $23 in 1986. Soviet Union as any sufficiently developed socialist economy became more and more dependent on the external supply of goods for which it had to get some hard currency. It basically just run out of money and went bankrupt.
https://www.mindmeister.com/213923097/persuasive-techniques-...
In a hypothetical world where humans were not subject to social pressure and the corresponding ability of social systems to produce situations where privately everybody knows a thing but nobody is publicly allowed to acknowledge it... well... that's effectively a world on the other side of a singularity from us. Presumably it would have its own pathologies, greater ones for all I know. But it would not have this problem of entire societies riding off the rails because it applied ever stronger powers of social coercion to prevent the society from correctly (without reference to any particular definition of "correct") reacting to the changes that occur over time. It would have to come up with its own new pathologies.
This scenario doesn't fail when everybody stops believing in it; it fails, and then everybody stops believing in it.
(Peer pressure in the modern world is dangerous, and merely "being pressured to do drugs" is a fairly innocent instance of it, because that only does local harm. When you find yourself unable to speak out about your own beliefs to your own neighbors and friends because of the social costs, it's not just a problem for you, it's a problem for your society.)
The 21st century 1st world aspirant intelligentsia is in this situation right now.
When you find yourself unable to speak out about your own beliefs to your own neighbors and friends because of the social costs, it's not just a problem for you, it's a problem for your society.
My "tribe" is trapped in such a bubble. It's intellectually doomed.
2) Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, which results in some biologically driven differences on average between men and women. Again, I can write this here on HN, but I've encountered what can only be described as extreme toxicity on other social media and in person.
the precision with which you said that is key. you can say things about populations that are not necessarily true of many, or even most, of the individuals in the population.
as a human, i can run, but how would you define running for a given cell? cells don't run, but a specific collection and configuration of cells can. other collections of cells can swim. still others do both.
Specifically, the actions you refer to are not perpetrated by antifascists as a whole. The groups calling themselves Antifa (a name shared by several specific antifascist activist groups in different countries) have several internal factions, and the violent protests that the news love to cover are specifically the actions of the minority black bloc factions of some Antifa groups, which are more or less autonomous "extreme activist" subgroups.
Normal Antifa paints over swastikas and run counter-protests against the KKK and similar groups. The black bloc activists tend more towards chaos and violence, out of a belief that violence is the only language fascists respond to, so they are fighting fire with fire, in their own words.
I don't dispute that some regular Antifa members turn a blind eye to black bloc actions, but certainly not all of them.
As a pacifist, I strongly support anti-fascism and ordinary Antifa, but I absolutely do not condone black bloc activities.
Then, if you've ever conflated a normal run of the mill republican or a libertarian or classical liberal or centrist with a fascist or nazi -- particularly without sufficient evidence -- or even if you've ever held your tongue while others representing Antifa have done so -- you are a hypocrite.
As a pacifist, I strongly support anti-fascism and ordinary Antifa, but I absolutely do not condone black bloc activities.
Do you oppose black bloc as vigorously and strongly as you've opposed fascism? Do you ever hold your tongue?
Decades back, there were people who hid their faces in masks, feeling strong in their numbers and anonymity, who created symbolic spectacles for their view of "justice." Some, not all of them, went around committing crimes of vandalism and even murder. These masks were white. Did any of the people who did not commit those crimes, but wore the same colors and held their tongues -- are any of them innocent, or are all of them complicit?
Until I see public communications from Antifa that they are opposing and repudiating the Black Bloc and their violence and vandalism, anyone with them who claims they are pacifists are hypocrites.
>“Then, if you've ever conflated a normal run of the mill republican or a libertarian or classical liberal or centrist with a fascist or nazi -- particularly without sufficient evidence -- or even if you've ever held your tongue while others representing Antifa have done so -- you are a hypocrite.“
Then, if you've ever conflated a normal run of the mill social democrat or a socialist or liberal democrat or centrist with a stalinist -- particularly without sufficient evidence -- or even if you've ever held your tongue while others representing right wingers have done so -- you are a hypocrite.
See how that works? Did we just alle collectively forget the name-calling that happens from the right whenever anyone even remotely left wing wins an election or enacts a policy?
For the record, I save the terms "fascist" and "Nazi" for actual fascists, including the ones trying to be cute about it (the dudes with "I <3 AH" t-shirts and the like).
No, I do not oppose black Bloc quite as vigorously as I oppose (actual) fascists and Nazis.
Why? Because fascists exploit, harass, beat up and outright murder those they seem to be lesser people, simply based on the color of their skin or their culture/religion.
Black Bloc beats up fascists and yes, cause petty vandalism.
You absolutely cannot draw equivalency between them. They are in completely different leagues.
That's sneaky. It's a meta-false-equivalency! You are trying to conflate equivalency in principle with equivalency in degree. Somehow, just a little violence and mayhem -- using authoritarian force to gain compliance -- is better because it is less. By that logic, a little rape better than a lot of it! Nice principle! In fairness, you probably just talked yourself into that, and didn't realize. You see, principles like human rights matter, and not adhering to them brings you into these contradictions.
Then, if you've ever conflated a normal run of the mill social democrat or a socialist or liberal democrat or centrist with a stalinist -- particularly without sufficient evidence -- or even if you've ever held your tongue while others representing right wingers have done so -- you are a hypocrite.
Fact: Many of those are equivalent in terms of being collectivist. The evidence is in on collectivist governments. (Which include Nazism and Fascism, by the way.) Stalinism is only the extreme endpoint. So people who do violence, do violence. Those who do not, do not. People who violate human rights are people who violate human rights. People who abet those violations, abet those violations. There is no contradiction there. The only equivalency is between those who would do violence to impose their political will on others who only seek to exercise their human rights to free speech. It's a moral equivalency on principle, as opposed to your intellectually bankrupt non-equivalency on quantity.
For the record, I save the terms "fascist" and "Nazi" for actual fascists, including the ones trying to be cute about it
Do you correct and speak out against your fellow Antifa who mess that up? Not doing so is basically like standing by while someone racially bashes someone. (An experience that I know first hand, by the way: being racially bashed while others stand around.) Lumping people into groups, when it hides the truth and short-circuits logic is disgusting to me. Standing by, complicit, when people smear others in your name is just as bad.
Black Bloc beats up fascists and yes, cause petty vandalism.
You absolutely cannot draw equivalency between them. They are in completely different leagues.
Then by your own words, you are alright with just a little bit of immorality, violation of human rights, and authoritarian use of force, just because you see fit to do it. A little bit of what fascists do -- beating people up and intimidating them for their view of "justice" -- is alright, because it's not as bad, being less in quantity than Nazis. Thanks for clearing that up.
Any movement that depends on the other side being worse to justify itself has failed to justify itself on principles. Such a movement is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Good day.
>"your politics"
There you go again completely conflating wildly disparate political movements.
I'm primarily AnCom, not pro-authoritarian dictatorship ala Stalin. There's a pretty big difference, and calling an AnCom (or even just a run-of-the-mill socialist) a stalinist is a grave insult.
Unless you make up for that in a very big fashion, we're completely done here.
This has been true of media since the beginning. It's certainly at play in social media today. It has been glaringly true of print and television media for decades.
Anyways, I actually asked around about that topic on an domestic Chinese online forum that only had few dozens of visitors, the result that I've received showing that the most of those people who replied are actually ... let say ... not in the opposition of it.
Things are vastly different on another domestic website, where most of people are (implicitly) against it.
So, it's actually depends on who you asking. And remind you, we Chinese are also effected by echo chambers.