https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_worship_(Chinese_internet...
searching "膜蛤" on baidu.com yields zero results.
In China, Toad King Warship (膜蛤文化) is very popular in some people, espcially young ones. There are tones of memes and internet jokes around that and obviously nobody gets into trouble because of it.
I don't know why your interviewer told you he was afraid. A wild guess is that he was one of those young people who loves Toad King Warship, and your ice frog reminded him of it. But it's hard to explain it to a foreigner (or he find it inappropriate to mention in an interview. it's a sub-culture anyway). So he just say he cannot say about it. As you further asked for reason, he gives you the answer you have in mind, by acting as victim of surveillance state (another culture thing).
Take your interpretation for example, am I mistaken to conclude that you believe all who post that frog are both misogynist and racist, or did I guess wrong? If so, could you clarify?
It's interesting how on the internet those in positions of power get described as the real victims.
The closest person I was referring to is the player in the "Chinese esports team" that dx87 was talking about. Or possibly a hypothetical white player on who could have been put in a similar situation by an interviewer. I guess they have a little bit of power due to their position on a top team, but I don't consider that to be much power. I don't consider them victims either, just humans who have their own set of goals and fears, that I can try to analyze.
This is as asinine as getting someone to say “bomb” at airport security.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-win...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...
The company is not very relevant for actual "working" photographers today (I use one, but tellingly photography isn't a real job for me), but it once was and at the time they stood up to their own homegrown totalitarian regime by helping jews escape Germany disguised as transferring employees.
Voigtlander is a brandname used by Cosina.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/world/asia/china-xi-jinpi...
>Schools are shaming students with low app scores. Government offices are holding study sessions and forcing workers who fall behind to write reports criticizing themselves. Private companies, hoping to curry favor with party officials, are ranking employees based on their use of the app and awarding top performers the title of “star learner.”
>Many employers now require workers to submit daily screenshots documenting how many points they have earned.
How long until we see weaker nations require the same of their own people? Participating in the firewall, etc?
Also, I was told by the one who actually use the app that many of the quiz questions in the app are just about general scientific/cultural knowledge and stuff; only a small percentage involves current events (censored or not) or politics. I find that pointless, but again NY Times chose to cherry-pick the content here to paint a more horrifying picture.
It's intentionally or unintentionally (I don't know which) incomplete or cherry-picked coverage like this that makes me not trust Western coverage of China, Russia, or any other "enemy" nation at all.
The article does say there are >100M users of the app, and according to Wikipedia, CCP has ~100M members, so the numbers appear in line.
More detailed anecdata: the aforementioned acquaintance who use the app is employed at a Chinese university, and according to him they do have an institution-wide rank (among employees; students not included); party members are ranked, but non-party members are not (because they're not required to "study", as I already pointed out). He even told me he's ranked at around 30% at the moment, lol.
Cellphones
https://www.sfgate.com/business/amp/China-requires-ID-to-buy...
Trains
https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g297411-i3650-k1024500...
There are official confirmations
http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/22/china-social-credi...
They also officially admit they can:
Throttle your internet speed
Ban your kids from some schools
Banning you from certain jobs
Taking your pets away
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-pu...
I think that predicting possible restricting ability to buy food is not “unfounded speculation” but rather pointing out something that can literally be one step away. If you help someone with a low social credit score who has been restricted, your score also lowers. The AI can track where you’ve been and who you helped. Uyghur markets are gone. Their freedom of movement has been restricted as they are in the re-education centers for years.
Are you really taking issue with the suggestion that food can be next, how much hyperbole is it given the scale of what happened in 2018 and 2019 thus far alone?
"Extreme claim not based in fact, stated as fact"
[link, implied to support the claim but doesn't]
When you do this, some percentage of people are going to take what you're saying at face value and believe that this is actual policy, especially since you seem to have provided a source (even though clicking on that source reveals it to be a paper thin cnet article that provides no support for what you're saying).
Frustratingly, you're doing it again here - you say "purchases for mobility and communication are restricted by social credit scores", and then you provide two links - one for cellphones and one for trains - that just say you need to use IDs to sign up for mobile plans and to buy train tickets in China, describing policies that existed long prior to social credit scores and have nothing to do with social credit scores. Those are also policies that exist in a lot of other countries, the first link you provide even says this in the first sentence:
"...joining many European and Asian countries in curbing the anonymous use of mobile technology."
Also, at least in my personal experience, you need an ID to buy a train ticket in the US as well. Also your source for that is a comment in a trip advisor thread about needing an ID to buy bus tickets, not train tickets, and consists entirely of people speculating and things they've heard second hand - a truly horrible source if ever I've seen one, and not in support of what you're saying even if it was a good source.
Without going through it, as I think it's pretty clear at this point that you're being very sloppy with your sources, that business insider article doesn't say what you're saying it says either.
Even looking past the many false claims here completely unsupported by the links you're providing, you can't just list a few things you don't like that seem "unfree" to you and then say you think that predicting keeping people that don't use an app regularly enough from buying food is a reasonable prediction. Or rather, go ahead and say it if you want but please just make it clear that it's your prediction rather than a fact like you did above, and be careful that the links you provide as supporting sources actually relate to what you're saying.
And please, please, please, be careful with how you summarize linked content - the way you do it here and appear to be doing it in your previous post is so inaccurate and so mixed with your own predictions and fears that I'm giving you a lot of benefit of the doubt by saying it's "sloppy" rather than "intentionally deceptive".
We’re talking about a country that has extrajudicial detention facilities to detain for years and re-educate huge numbers of people who committed no crime, based not on due process but on their religion alone, including Falun Gong and Uyghurs and probably some underground Churches and Buddhists. They probably already have the food-based control I’m talking about. I mean, the trajectory and overton window is REALLY worrying. What I said is coming to be within that window.
Reminds me of this: https://vimeo.com/44078865
Thats just spooky close to the "It doesn't look like anything to me" from Westworld. How long until they really don't see the man and the tank at all?
Joining Mercedes Benz in that particular hall of shame:
https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/07/technology/mercedes-benz-ti...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-...
> There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to betrustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says,'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.
[..]
> It is fortunate and wise that no law exists for sins of omission and no human court is called up onto sit in judgment over them. But it is equally fortunate that there exists still one institution in society in which it is well-nigh impossible to evade issues of personal responsibility, where all justifications of a nonspecific, abstract nature - from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex - break down, where not systems or trends or original sin are judged, but men of flesh and blood like you and me, whose deeds are of course still human deeds but who appear before a tribunal because they have broken some law whose maintenance we regard as essential for the integrity of our common humanity. Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the power of judgment.
[..]
> What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-07/dolce-gab...
You can't claim to be a democracy and do these things by definition yet not only are 'democracies' doing these things openly but we have people who seem less outraged by what's happening in their own 'democratic' backyards and more outraged by what a totalitarian country is doing.
This lacks credibility and seems more like a way to score political points than out of any genuine concern for democracy or human rights.
While they may live in another country, they still deserve all of the rights and liberties that all human beings deserve.
The Chinese government should be criticized when they do things that infringe on the natural human rights of the Chinese people... just as any other person or government should also be criticized.
Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China [...] the Chinese people of all nationalities will continue [...] to turn China into a socialist country that is prosperous, powerful, democratic and culturally advanced.
http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/con...
Of course the literal text of the constitution is completely ignored in practice, but criticizing that doesn't automatically lack credibility.
In the West, we see democracy as a means of limiting the excesses of power. As Karl Popper noted, 'democracy' is not so much the answer to the question "who should rule?", as to the question "how do we prevent bad rulers ruling absolutely?". When 'democracy' is taken to imply the first answer, it is seen as the grounds of total legitimacy for the ruler. It is simply a substitute for the divine right of kings. In the second case, the ruler seen as having limited legitimacy, subject to the rule of law, of criticism, even ridicule, and of lawful challenge from other potential rulers.
When totalitarian states called themselves 'Democratic People's Republics' they were not so much lying as using the term 'democracy' in the first sense above. They were signaling that their governments had a legitimate claim to absolute power on the grounds that they were the expression of Rousseau's 'general will'. Those who clashed with the state were not seen as rebels against the ruler, but as 'enemies of the people'.
But now with deepfakes and other video editing, it wouldn't be that crazy for an average person in China to simply not believe the video was real if their government universally denies it.
I find when I speak in Mandarin, and in a nonjudgmental manner, they all know about it.
Of course they all say the protest started due to labor reform issues and not because of democracy.
It's all about plausible deniability. Funnily enough, that's exactly why censorship doesn't actually work - these things are precisely what people would say if they knew about the picture and its significance, but wanted to make an outer impression that they don't. I think it's quite possible that the Chinese nationalists "protesting" Leica's shameful, anti-Chinese campaign are playing a very similar game, even while clearly hinting that they do respect the government's authority. These things are not what they seem to be, there's a lot of subtlety involved.
https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-...
What? You have a source on this? Last I checked, people were jumping out of buildings to commit suicide so the gov put nets around the bottom. Things may have gotten better, but they are far from the ideal anyone wants to live in. I think the "apathy" you're referring to is actually "resignation" to the fact that they feel they can't do anything about the problem. Their country is dying off, and all they can do is watch. Miserably sad. :..(
Personal economic issues aren’t always caused by politics.
I mean, what percentage of US students would recognize the Tuskegee experiments continued until 1972? I've had many people straight up tell me that is a lie, or a 'conspiracy theory'. In fact, I think this post will get down voted, despite asking a perfectly valid question and having concrete factual examples.
Not saying it isn't appalling that Leica is apologizing. Thought it makes sense from a business perspective.
I'm just curious to know what is more effective: the soft censorship of the west created by unwritten social norms or the hard censorship of the east?
Literally everyone who has ever had to take a medical or scientific ethics course knows this, since the IRB process was born specifically from this horrific abuse of science.
I'm guessing most high schools cover it in US History and/or World History, also, as mine did.
My post was just a question as to the overall percentage. Not whether there were any Americans who knew about the experiments.
Apparently asking questions and being inquisitive is bad now.
Society is a complex system. The west has soft censorship via control systems.
If you can't see any now, that is fine. But we can deduct they exist from logic.
Here's an example: We can recognize the old ones. US newspapers and schools had effective censorship of, for example, the struggle of gay people in the US. The struggle was there, but it wasn't talked about. No matter the mechanisms to achieve this, it is effective soft censoring. While this doesn't exist anymore, it would be unreasonable to think we don't have similar blind sides now (I see plenty, but... that is neither here nor there, I'm going off logic)
> ... When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph [of Tank Man] 16 years afterwards, they were "genuinely mystified." One of the students said that the image was "artwork." It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that he whispered to the student next to him "89," which led the interviewer to surmise that the student may have concealed his knowledge of the event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
The fact that Leica, a foreign company, is now apologizing about the ad (and has deleted it from their YouTube account) shows just how effective the Chinese government has become at their trade. From the article:
> “Leica Camera AG must, therefore, distance itself from the content shown in the video and regrets any misunderstandings or false conclusions that may have been drawn,” Emily Anderson, a spokesperson for Leica, told SCMP.