The jump so many people take to encourage strong enforcement for bagatelles is astonishing.

Greece also has a lot of bribes but if you would know anything about the culture, you probably wouldn't conclude that you have to liberate the country. Well, I at least hope so...

You can use the stick of course, but loosing that, all benefits it brought you would be lost too. And you would have stripped any opportunities to develop any understanding.

I think it’s a false equivalence to compare the belief that a country needs something fixed and saying that it needs to be “liberated” with the force of arms.

Citation super needed here. Nobody trusts the state because it's corrupt, but that hasn't changed in centuries. The main problem Greece has is that everyone puts their own interests above the common good, from littering and double-parking to appropriating state funds.

The highlight is that more than 9/10 Greeks disagreed with the statement that people could be trusted.

So? They have their culture and it works well enough for them. They might not be the richest country in Europe and they're still digging themselves out of an economic hole but there's not much else about them that's worth complaining about. It sure beats living your life under the thumb of the government.

And living a life distrusting everyone (9/10 Greeks think people can’t be trusted) seems exhausting and bad for your mental health. Is it better than tyranny? Sure. But that’s a false choice, tyranny or corruption.

Increasing social trust through surveillance is like traversing space on a bicycle. Not even that because surveillance probably has a direct massive negative effect on social trust.

This sidesteps that under the umbrella of “virtuous behaviours” are those that support the ruling party. Under the umbrella of undesirable behaviours is dissent of any stripe. That’s what makes this dystopian in a way e.g. London’s CCTV system is not.

Cleaner example would have been Snowden, who peacefully dissented and responsibly disclosed his leaks. But even then, the comparison would be wrong. Snowden is a single case, and one which one can freely argue shines poorly on American values. The social credit experiments point to Beijing’s ambitions to scale the threat Snowden saw realised against him nationally and explicitly.

And he published information about war crimes. Sorry to mention it, but I prefer to stay on topic. That is on the military and I don't see why it should get any form of protection here.

edit: To clarify: The military has been traitorous to their own people, therefore to itself and is fully responsible for anything that happened.

Which is illegal how exactly?

> The journalists who wrote about it and activists who protested surrounding it were not jailed.

So, the journalist Julian Assange was not jailed then?

Sure, until something abuses the power to control those behaviors.

> I should note that Western countries had their own large-scale nearly universal social indoctrination and social credit systems—organized religion.

And religion in the West is slowly dying by the right and will of the people. What happens when people want their social credit system to die? They won't have a choice in that matter.

This debate reeks similarly to the one about the use of electronic ballot systems, which are not better than paper ballots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

The greatest lie were being told is that technology is democratizing our lives. It does until it reaches network effects, which it then hits an inflection point and gives power to very few.

Why on earth would you commend this behaviour?

I appreciate that my judgement of this behaviour depends on the street, but from my experience of Tokyo, the streets are not particularly wide, or busy.

If it is possible to cross sufficiently safely without walking to the cross walk why walk to the cross walk?

Eventually, everyone would be looking for a chance to cross the road without using a crosswalk = jaywalking, which is exactly what has become the norm in some countries.

In some cities, you put your life on the line every time you cross the road.

I am not exaggerating.

Do you really want that to become the norm?

Any systemic attempt to direct the development of culture by the government is a terrible idea. The government should reflect the people. The people should not be nudge, cajoled or forced into accepting the culture the government wants them to have.

The line blurs when you actually have a democratically elected government (is the will of the government the will of the people) but I think it suffices to say that china's social credit system would cross it.

>nearly universal social indoctrination and social credit systems—organized religion.

The church doesn't record your every misdeed and every major religion includes some strong message of forgiveness for misdeeds. It's not the middle ages anymore so the church can't bar you from doing things under threat of violence like the government can. This comparison is crazy on so many levels.

>We regularly talk about neighbors who display antisocial behaviors

Any neighborhood that includes people who say things like this in a context other than to parodying the hyper-conformity you find in some of the better off parts of the US and Europe (think stuffy HOAs and local councils) is a massive red flag that your neighborhood is somewhere no freedom loving person would ever want to live.

evidently it is blurred to some but I would suggest that your original assertion stands. They should try to keep their nudging subtle or people will nudge back at some point. It does not matter how good the intent was meant. I think we currently see a lot of this in western democracies.

Which they do without the threat of a “social credit system.”

It’s not just a problem in China, either. If you drive to DC from Annapolis, you’ll see car after car violating the HOV restriction on US 50. Like 80% of vehicles in the HOV lane are single occupant. How do you solve that? Or people blocking the box in DC? Or people taking lefts from K Street during rush hour, when they are prohibited? There is a cost to all that—it slows things down for everyone and undermines deliberate traffic planning. I’d support, for example, cameras that automatically ticket violators.

“In public” is an important part of that sentence. China is attempting, with the direct and indirect assistance of Western firms like Facebook and Google who have experience building deep surveillance systems, to extend that scrutiny into what was previously the private sphere.

Not at all true. Especially in contrast to today. People actually had a lot of privacy on every possible metric.

edit: Or asked differently: What was surveilled and through which channels?

If you go into a restaurant in Sibley Iowa and leave your table a mess, people you know personally notice. If you do it in Manhattan, you can be shameless—the odds of someone recognizing you are remote, and even if someone does nobody sees you in public often enough to put together a pattern of behavior.

in a very limited way, with even less tools than today. Scale is a factor but there are a million other factors in "tightly knight communities" that corrected for what you call "antisocial" behavior.

I think you mean policing. The societal worth doesn't need to be established here.

Surveillance is the act of looking for suspicious behavior with the intent to find flaws. That wasn't a requirement to a society. If anything, these ideas lead to witch hunts.

Living closer together is not just mutual surveillance. That would be quite the stretch.

But more importantly, in a village there is at least some sense of a two way flow of information, citizens interact with each other and their leaders - albeit occasionally at the end of a sharp dagger.

There is no interaction in constant surveillance, there is no appeal. Obey orders, no matter how stupid or nonsensical they are, imposed by somebody with no local knowledge. The history of that society does not end up getting written by its perpetrators.

So what you're saying is that humans have no rights. If humans have rights, then there is a point where culture doesn't matter.

There are rights we consider so important that they all but transcend culture, but that "all but" is critical. It's only a matter of consensus, not celestial fiat.

I don't see how due process could be universal - it can scarcely even exist outside of bureaucracy. In any simpler system of government the process is "the most powerful person decides". Heck, rule of law only came into being what, 4000 years ago?

I think they're odd choices though, because there are much stronger cases for things like right to life. But I still don't see how they can be anything but cultural. Where would they come from? What is the font of rights?

This is the authoritarians dream: 360, total control of people's lives, right out of a dystopian novel.

Second 'organized religion' is a world wide phenom, and is only one of many means by which people are socialized.

There are exceptions, including some East Asian countries, I think.

I think that jaywalking laws are nuts, but then again I am from the UK where we get indoctrinated with a thing called 'the green cross code' in primary school, that tells us how to cross a road safely.