It's a bit telling when a media giant like CBS can't strike a happy medium by you know - both not censoring it in the US and censoring it in china - instead, choosing to censor the whole thing outright on the entire platform.
It's almost like all these American companies are moving en masse to do business in China with the sole purpose of increasing profits every single quarter, irrespective of (and arguably, now encouraging) the numerous, controversial human rights and ethics violations that China is known for.
Absolutely. Most corporations have no more loyalty to one "side" or the other nor any more loyalty to an ideology than the Coke/Fanta hybrid-monstrosity of the 1940s. It took employees to force Google to reverse some of its policies, not its board of directors.
At the same time, as the US withdraws from the world, China fills in. They zealously sell the surveillance state and its equipment world wide just as the US exported its form of capital constrained democracy. So it's not remotely just CBS nor just in the US.
For those annoyed by the occasionally harmful American hegemony, just wait till you see what China is going to do.
> For those annoyed by the occasionally harmful American hegemony, just wait till you see what China is going to do.
There are plenty of abuses to call out on all sides, but let's not resort to euphemisms when comparing the historical abuses [1] of one side to future abuses from another. It's a great disservice to all those who have been just "occasionally harmed" (I'm sure they don't feel the same way as you do).
Human rights abuses in China are in no way "future". They are very much in present and in the past. Somehow in the West it becomes fashionable to dismiss those just because US has its troubles. But the fact that US government has troublesome part in no way absolves the crimes that Chinese government perpetrated and continues to perpetrate. It's not "either-or" proposition.
I knew my comment would draw exactly this response.
My comment was simply stating that the past abuses of one side should not be compared to future, hypothetical abuses of the other (referring to the sentence "just wait till you see what China is going to do").
One may compare the historical abuses of one side to the historical abuses of the other.
> referring to the sentence "just wait till you see what China is going to do"
It is hard to believe you didn't understand this phrase, but just in case I'll explain. It means "if China had been the dominating power to the measure the US is, their abuses would be much more massive than whatever abuses US has done or is accused of. And if China will achieve such dominant position, we will have the misfortune of experiencing this abuse". The validity of this statement can be confirmed by looking into past and present abuses by Chinese government, and concluding that if that government becomes as powerful and dominant as US government is now, it's lust for human rights abuses is not likely to diminish.
Thus, we are not comparing present to the future. We are comparing the level of dominance and level of abusiveness at the same level of dominance, while assuming that more dominance would allow the government to be more abusive to more people.
> It is hard to believe you didn't understand this phrase, but just in case I'll explain. It means "if China had been the dominating power to the measure the US is, their abuses would be much more massive than whatever abuses US has done or is accused of. And if China will achieve such dominant position, we will have the misfortune of experiencing this abuse".
I understood the phrase completely. The OP's original sentence is very unambiguous. My interpretation, or re-phrasing of it is:
> If you think America is bad right now, wait till you see what China is going to do in the future.
It's a very clear comparison of America's present abuses to China's future potential ones. As I have said many times already, that is not a fair comparison. One can compare America's past or present abuses to China's past or present abuses. One cannot make a comparison based on future abuses, unless one is a time traveller or has possession of a crystal ball. I'm actually very surprised that this is such a point of contention.
> The validity of this statement can be confirmed by looking into past and present abuses by Chinese government, and concluding that if that government becomes as powerful and dominant as US government is now, it's lust for human rights abuses is not likely to diminish.
> We are comparing the level of dominance and level of abusiveness at the same level of dominance, while assuming that more dominance would allow the government to be more abusive to more people.
I'm not sure that the OP speaks with the same voice as you do. Regardless, to repeat the point again, you are condemning China for future, hypothetical abuses it will possibly carry out as a possible future world hegemon based on past and present actions.
The assumption is invalid because they are based on the premise that countries are static and do not evolve over time. You're saying because a country has done X and is doing Y, it will continue to do so in the future. History trivially shows this to be untrue. If you follow that train of thought, there will never be enough countries in the world for you to condemn.
Anyways, I feel like this conversation is not very productive and we're not supposed to engage in political battles, so I will end this thread here.
No, you didn't. I assume English is not your native tongue (it's ok, it's not mine either), but after I explained it to you I don't think it makes sense to keep purposefully misunderstanding it.
> you are condemning China for future, hypothetical abuses it will possibly carry out as a possible future world hegemon based on past and present actions.
Nope. I am condemning China for past and present abuse, and tell you that if China had chance to dominate, this abuse would increase orders of magnitude. Exactly because China is abusive right now. It's not some hypothetical guess about the future, it's the fact. Just as I can predict what happens if I drop a stone - it will fall to the ground, due to gravity, and the laws of gravity is not something hypothetical in the future - it has been long established and this is what allows me to make predictions - I can also predict what would happen with China exactly because I know present and past of China. You are trying to pretend it's some play of imagination that has no connection to facts. It is the opposite.
> You're saying because a country has done X and is doing Y, it will continue to do so in the future. History trivially shows this to be untrue
If history trivially shows that, it wouldn't be hard for you to show three examples of totalitarian states that voluntarily stopped being totalitarian while their dominance was on the raise.
I meant to compare a hypothetical continued American hegemony to a hypothetical future Chinese hegemony. It's hard to condense that along with other concepts into a brief post.
But I think that hypothetical, to the degree any hypothetical can be, is fairly valid. For example, at this moment, one side supports North Korea the other South Korea.
> Totalitarianism is a scorpion that cannot but sting.
I'm 100% onboard with this notion.
Our opinions differ only with respect to where we think China is headed, which was the premise of my original comment. Yours is the pessimistic view, mine is the optimistic one.
I happen to believe that as China continues to modernize, it will reach a point where its government will no longer feel the need to resort to totalitarian policies to ensure the stability and prosperity of its society. You and many others will disagree.
The point is, we won't know until we're actually there.
> it will reach a point where its government will no longer feel the need to resort to totalitarian policies to ensure the stability and prosperity of its society
Do you have an example from history of a totalitarian society voluntarily undergoing such transformation?
There are many, many such examples in history which you are free to spend time reading about. At the moment, I am not particularly inclined to research and type up a report for your personal consumption. I hope you understand.
US hegemony was 1945-present, which is important context for interpreting the grandparent comment and also the list.
Much of that list predates 1945. You can also exclude any internal repression when considering the effects of US hegemony, which is experienced only by people outside the US.
There's still a LOT to account for. Vietnam and Iraq being the two biggest.
But, on the other hand, 70 years, a couple hundred total countries. When you average it out, "occasionally harmful" isn't inconsistent with reality. It's consistent with a lot of interventions in a lot of places over that timeframe.
You are right on the point about the list containing internal repression and incidents from before 1945, which should be discounted. I will not pull the list of post-1945 'interventions', but again we are in agreement that it is still a substantial list.
I guess I should have put it in the context I was thinking of: which historical hegemon was preferable?
My sense is that being a hegemon seems to involve such harms and interventions, and the US hegemony was especially vast. So I'm viewing things in terms of that scale.
(If a non-hegemon had done that list, they would be public enemy number 1)
Several odd examples fill out that list. A handful of individuals wrongfully incarcerated out a system of millions, when other states don't even have a semblance of due process.
The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful. But the alternative was, what, permit the holocaust? Acquiesce to an increasing tempo of rockets raining on London from an unchallenged Germany? It was an era where every state was engaged in total war and no one found a way to engage in that fight for survival with clean hands. If there was even a hundredth of a percent chance Dresden would have broken the will of Germany and halted the internal genocide and outward aggression, it could have easily been worth it.
Then that bit is accompanied by criticisms of more modern targeted strikes. By their very design, those are an attempt to limit civilian casualties, especially compared to past weapons that inflict devastation at scale. Concern about Dresden and Hiroshima produces the smart bomb and the drone, it is a straight line. So that leaves, what exactly as the moral recommendation here? Radical pacifism and turning a blind eye to genocides?
A useful question for gauging atrocities is intent. A thought experiment is, if there was a device with a button that could instantly kill every civilian in the territory you're at war with, would the government press it? If they had a separate magic button that would reduce the harms of their actions, would they press it?
Those are hypotheticals, but we actually have evidence to get at intent, and compare the US to other actors in similar situations.
In contrast, the Russian approach to war in the middle east featured total war in Afghanistan, killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians with the explicit goal of systematic depopulation. This included raping women, deploying chemical weapons, and scorched earth tactics to prevent the return of refugees, all to break the will of the people writ large, not just combatants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War#Atrocities
Terrorists, dictators, Russians. In contrast to that rogues gallery, actively trying to decimate civilian populations, the US seems like the only power that's ever been in the region with any interest in actually preserving civilian lives.
And this wasn't just the historical Soviet Union. Moscow continues to support these tactics by a Russian proxy in Syria and, to no one's surprise, have once again created one of the largest humanitarian / refugee crises the world has ever seen, one which is destablizing European politics (so a double win for Putin?). The impact of these different approaches to foreign policy and conflict is night and day. Go back to the statista chart. One approach reduces local casualties when there's a heightened presence. The other expands a conflict into a global humanitarian crisis.
If the Americans had a tool to reduce the harms while achieving their objectives, no doubt they would use it. Not a question.
Meanwhile, if the Chinese had a magic button that would promote human rights by allowing their citizens to actually, say, discuss politics with one another? They literally have that capacity right now and have chosen not to use it! They could turn off the great firewall tomorrow!
The most extreme authoritarian basket-cases of the world, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, China, all have the Soviets to thank for providing a model of inhumane totalitarian oppression. Some of those aligned with the US, like South Korea and Chile, went through some genuinely awful political dynamics in order to prevent becoming Communist themselves, but have emerged as some of the most stable, prosperous, and politically free countries in the world.
In the long run, do you want to tally individual incidents which had admittedly serious impacts on individuals, but were nontheless incidental as part of a system that reduced human rights violations overall? Or do you want to take a hard look at totalitarian states that support systemic deprivation of human rights as a core component of their being? No one is saying any state power is harmless, especially when it uses military power to confront inhumanity. But if you want to improve human rights, there's much lower hanging fruit than cherry picking examples taken out of context of larger geopolitical issues.
That's true right now, over the last century, and probably will be into the next.
The last couple of days I've been learning a little more about China's emerging surveillance state and while terrifying to think about and worse sad knowing they're building essentially concentration camps, I am wondering how effective are China's policies.
i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?
Without looking at any figures, surely policing the internet, building large re-education camps, and employing a whole lot of social police gobbles up a lot of resources. The people employed could be doing something else productive right?
So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity due to less violence or lower productivity because the net gain from a safer society is less than what would be gained if the resources were distributed to other societal needs like healthcare and infrastructure?
I think it's less about building a productive China, and more about maintaining power for those in charge, but they could also honestly believe that the masses need to be controlled in order to have a productive China.
IMHO, the US also has an overreaching surveillance state, and it also exists to maintain power at the cost of overall productivity and quality of life, but it's to a lesser extent than China.
>So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity ....
Most folks that have any opinion on humanitarian or privacy social issues would probably be unwilling to entertain the idea of cost/benefit analysis with regards to whether or not concentration camps (no, not 're-education' camps) provide a societal good.
> i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?
The same question people used to ask about USSR. USSR had it all - mass prison camps, massive industrialization programs, surveillance and terror state (of course, at different technology level), massive successes in some areas - like space technologies, unconditional love of all well-meaning people in the West, especially in academy and significant part of Hollywood - everything was there. Until USSR crumbled into dust. Turns out enslaving and oppressing people under the slogans of "most free society on the planet" is, after all, not sustainable, and free economy (even the semi-free one we're witnessing now) outperforms the socialist planned one. I don't think China would fare much better - though it may take a long time to see it, and sometimes it would seem like they have won - as was proclaimed many times by USSR fans over the course of 20th century.
While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that free economies outperform planned ones, and when the planned ones explode, they tend to explode spectacularly. The only mitigating counterpoint is that it's not clear how free the US and EU economies really are these days, as they've increasingly become dominated by large companies via market power, lobbying and regulatory capture.
Occasionally harmful? Hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the middle east in the past two decades isn't "occasionally harmful! China isn't even in the same league when it comes to the harm of US hegemony.
> China isn't even in the same league when it comes to the harm of US hegemony.
No need to pick one or the other. There's plenty of hegemony from both to go around:
"The Communist Chinese invasion in 1950 led to years of turmoil, that culminated in the complete overthrow of the Tibetan Government and the self-imposed exile of the Dalai Lama and 100,000 Tibetans in 1959.
Since that time over a million Tibetans have been killed. With the Chinese policy of resettlement of Chinese to Tibet, Tibetans have become a minority in their own country. Chinese is the official language. Compared to pre-1959 levels, only 1/20 monks are still allowed to practice, under the government's watch. Up to 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. Famines have appeared for the first time in recorded history, natural resources are devastated, and wildlife depleted to extinction. Tibetan culture comes close to being eradicated there."
I agree that China is horrible. There is one thing that separates China from the US though and that is that the US thinks the entire world should dance to its tune. The US will invade nations in distant continents, overthrow distant governments it doesn't like, kidnap people all over the world (extraordinary rendition), all while sitting on a horse so high it blocks out the sun.
China is a horrible state led by a despot, but it doesn't have a history of invading and killing anywhere beyond what it's historically claimed to be part of itself.
So to most of the world, the US has always been the greater threat.
There's still a lack of peace in some countries. The US should invade to slaughter the naughty people and anyone standing next to them in order to impose peace and prosperity in those places as well.
The analogy fails, because it’s more like projecting power as a beat cop who doesn’t always feel like risking their life going to every neighborhood, but on a whole, (from a utilitarian point of view), things are better off than they would be had the beat cop failed to exist prior.
CBS said "This is the creative solution that we agreed upon with the producers". I have been wondering if the producers insisted that the segment be censored in all regions so that everyone would know about it. Otherwise Americans would never know about the censorship.
You don't fight censorship by doubling down on censorship. It's entirely possible to show the uncensored version in America and raise awareness that the segment was censored in other regions.
It's entirely possible to fight censorship by selectively doubling down on censorship when you know or suspect the effect of that censorship will backfire and have the opposite result.
It's not just about what you do, it's about the outcome you expect and aim for.
But then it wouldn't be on the front page of HN or a NY Times article. I hope it's still available if you access some obscure torrent site using a VPN.
"Agreed with the producers" might be just "execs told them either you agree to air it as we say, or it doesn't air at all and look behind this door - there's a line of people just like you waiting to take your spot in the lineup, so think quick". In this position, one doesn't have too much space for disagreement if one want to keep one's job.
It's also strange how quick people in this very thread are to brush it off and shift the blame. "An authoritarian communist regime is engaging in human rights violations? This is capitalism's fault :^)"
This is a large American media company bowing to pressure from a totalitarian regime. Even Google bowed down after initially taking a stand. So many other's have as well.
> Same with the silly apology tour multiple companies did over merely including Taiwan and Hong Kong as a separate country from China...in a dropdown menu on their websites
You say it's silly, but I imagine if we had the internet during the civil war and some European company listed the United States as two separate items for North and South, that could very easily end up being a political issue and politicians might threaten repercussions over it. I don't actually think it's silly, whether I agree with it or not. It is lamentable because I'm not sure there's a "right" way for a company to handle it other than going where the money dictates until it's mostly settled politically (which may never happen).
One of the selling points for economic normalization of Chinese relations in the 80s and 90s was the belief that free markets would inevitably lead to our values of democracy and civil liberties overpowering the communist values. No one ever considered the opposite effect, that the emmeshed markets would give communists power to push their values on western companies.
I'm not saying it's capitalisms fault at all here - I would arguably say that what CBS and many other companies are doing is not true capitalism in the first place.
OP posted an article on why an American company chose to accommodate said authoritarian communist regime, against the principles of our domestic media culture. What motivates a company to do such a thing, if not capitalism?
>What motivates a company to do such a thing, if not capitalism?
You're just proving grand parent commenter's point.
Saying that capitalism motivates censorship is like saying that money is what causes theft and robbery. It's a meaningless statement based on conflating motivation in one specific case with motivation for a class of actions in general. Not to mention that you're also conflating an economic system with what most people would simply call greed.
Capitalism absolutely motivates censorship. Companies change their products to fit regional taste in order to appeal to the largest market possible.
To say otherwise would be to ignore the entire history of the gaming industry. We can argue about whether or not certain changes are good or not, but it is undeniable that companies modify their products for maximum profit which is at the core what capitalism is about.
Their decision to universally censor the content may have been contractually obligated by the Chinese. Not saying that's definitely the case, but it makes sense.
If one version of the content appears on approved channels in China and another uncensored version can be seen via VPN, that certainly wouldn't make the government look good.
As far as Americans using China as a means to increase profits, that's capitalism working exactly the way it was designed, unfortunately. The stock market doesn't care who was best-behaved last quarter, the market cares who made the most money last quarter. Our system is woefully incapable of factoring behavior and ethics into the equation.
To be fair they should censor any content that would be subversive in India. Then why stop there? Make sure all media is vetted by all nations for moral and political purity.
They don’t care about fairness, they care about profit (or rather, they care about how much their share value would drop if they sacrificed a given source of profit.) If the American stock market would punish an American [public] corporation for reneging on being a lapdog to China, then said American corporation is basically constitutionally incapable of leaving China (if it’s structured in the usual way with a board whose positions are controlled by shareholder election.) And right now, it seems that China is the only market that traders see as large enough to make them short the stock when you do anything to mess with it.
Private corporations, public corporations that are still founder-controlled, and “public-benefit” corporations might be immune to this effect, but your average traded C-Corp or S-Corp won’t be.
I completely agree that this sets a bad precedent. I don't think CBS is in the right here. But as long as these companies have financial interests in abandoning values that we've come to rely on in the US, this is going to keep happening.
I feel like free speech has never been under such attack. Culturally, we don't care about it, we find offensive content more offensive than censorship of offensive content.
Politically, they can censor you completely if they want to by hitting you with an NSL. EFF says that happens 60 times a day. The most hard hitting journalist in the west, Julian Assange, was just put in jail.
I'm scared about the future. It's not any particular point, it's just the movement overall.
Assuming we are taking a US centric view here, I feel just the opposite: that speech has scarcely ever been so free.
It was less than a decade ago that the U.S. military had a policy literally called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". It was only fifty years ago that Martin Luther King Jr. was being investigated by the FBI, for speech that is now broadly considered necessary. About 100 years ago, check out the Sedition Act of 1918. Such a thing would not even pass the smell test today.
Sure, we've had some recent setbacks in some areas. The journey is not in a straight line. The destination is pretty clearly in a place of "more freedom".
"Don't ask don't tell" wasn't an attempt at censorship. In fact, when it was introduced by the Clinton administration it was hailed by LGBT groups because it allowed gay people to serve in the military.
People have forgotten the context in which Don't Ask Don't Tell was created. Today people assume it was some evil, presumably Republican, plan to keep gay people down. It was seen as quite the opposite when it first started. But since many people don't remember, weren't born, or don't bother doing research into their politics, they think of DADT as the opposite of what it was.
Agreed, and adding on: DADT was basically a non-enforcement policy. LGBT people were disallowed from military service for decades before 1993. Bill Clinton actually tried to remove that restriction entirely, but ran headfirst into political opposition. DADT was a "temporary workaround" that he could impose at the executive level to make some amount of progress, signify a successful compromise, and make the issue go away.
This was a theme of Clinton's early administration: he interpreted enthusiastic political support for him personally as enthusiastic political support for the sorts of progressive reforms he was trying to enact and ran full-speed into a brick wall trying to pass those reforms. Another example was the attempt to pass universal health care. After Clinton faced one of the biggest midterm electoral backlashes of all time in 1994, he changed strategy and never returned to the issue.
Clinton's legacy on LGBT issues (and many others) has to be addressed within the context of the times. Clinton faced a heavily resurgent Republican Party for 3/4 of his administration after spending the first 1/4 of his administration pushing for progressive reforms that were too far and too fast for most Americans. Clinton is unfairly remembered and blamed for the compromises he made at the time; in the greater context, Clinton's compromises were calculated holding actions that stemmed the tide of conservative reaction long enough for American public opinion to come around on these issues.
When folks from the LGBT community were in discussions about family life and military duty... these folks couldn't say a word, lest they be dishonorably discharged from the military and possibly be charged with a crime. Folks going to boot camp around '97/'98 were told that oral and/or anal sex were grounds for a sodomy charge, after all.
Yes, it was a step in the right direction, but folks still couldn't realistically be open about their love life if you were not in a more traditional relationship. Regardless of intent, it was still censorship.
It is true that censorship was offered as an alternative to overt discrimination, and to that end it was a clear improvement. It is also true that the end result was indeed censorship.
However, if you prefer a more pure anti-censorship change in the past decade, you might look at Citizens United v. FEC.
I think you & the parent are both correct, despite holding opinions that are poles apart.
Certainly in the kinds of things we are allowed to watch, we are more free than ever before. For instance, wikipedia says the adult entertainment industry is atleast 50 years old, but the kind of material you can access today without fear of repercussions is beyond precedent. For instance, any adult site will happily serve hundreds of atm clips. Even 20 years ago, the term atm was practically unknown, and certainly you couldn’t get performers to engage in atm, let alone film it & host it online.
At the same time, what is and isn’t permissible for discussion in the public sphere has narrowed rather sharply. Especially in academia, this kind of hypocrisy & doublespeak is so blatant & overt, it makes you wonder what else is being swept under the rug. We had an incident at the stat seminar a few weeks back. A Stanford professor was interrupted by one of our professors who simply said “i don’t like lasso”. This became full blown drama, statisticians thumping desks and saying “hear hear” & so forth. What should have been an educational lecture in penalties & their properties got shut down by the moderator! If one can’t even discuss harmless on-point topic like this in an academic setting, what is the point of freedom of speech & rest of the machinery ? Are we so scared of causing offence ?
You're not wrong about that. I don't think this is a case of that, though.
CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now).
This show is exclusive to the CBS web streaming service, an arena with even more competition.
That doesn't seem like a sufficiently-dominant corporation to me. They are a major player, yes, but at best second strongest in their domain.
> CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now).
National Amusements owns Viacom, which kind of undermines the contrast you are drawing. And Disney doesn't own Fox (the broadcast network) it owns 21st Century Fox, which uses to be the corporate parent of Fox Broadcasting, but Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, and a number of other assets were spun out to make Fox Corporation which didn't go with 21st Century Fox to Disney, and which is still controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
That's all correct. I'd looked at News Corporation for the list of assets not acquired by Disney, and didn't notice the spin-out of Fox Broadcasting.
This does rather undermine that particular contrast. National Amusements still does not have anything like a monopoly position in either the broadcast television or web streaming spaces.
I actually disagree with you. I think US public opinion is currently swinging very hard in a direction reminiscent of the predominant reasoning behind the Sedition Act and its contemporaries.
I like to take a judiciary-centered view; Congress can pass whatever censorious laws they want to, but those laws are toothless without the Court constructing the First Amendment in a way that upholds them. That construction was established in Schenck v. United States, where the unanimous opinion stated:
> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
This is precisely where the "fire in a crowded theatre" meme comes from. In Schenck, this reasoning was used to uphold the conviction of a Socialist Party leader, under the Espionage Act of 1917, who published and mailed pamphlets advocating resistance to the draft. Abrams v. United States used the Schenck standard to uphold the conviction of a man, under the Sedition Act, who disseminated leaflets calling for an end to US arms production and condemning US intervention in the Russian Civil War.
Multiple states passed laws against "criminal syndicalism" during this time as well. Whitney v. California in 1927 upheld the conviction, under California's criminal syndicalism law, of one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of America. The federal Smith Act of 1940 outlawed calling for the overthrow of the US government, and in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1951 upheld the convictions, under the Smith Act, of eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA on the grounds that communism inherently entailed advocating for the overthrow of the government.
As a whole, this early-to-mid-century legal reasoning is very similar to the justification for the restriction of "hate speech", even down to the "fire in a crowded theater" meme. The "paradox of tolerance" argument--that a tolerant society can only survive by refusing to tolerate intolerance--is often interpreted these days to justify a very similar Schenck-esque standard. I daresay that many people would agree with every Supreme Court decision I've named if you switched the specifics around such that the defendants were far-right and not far-left people.
Another similar argument you see a lot these days is that the private sector should have broad discretion in terms of "no-platforming" "hate speech". This is more or less the same reasoning behind the Hollywood blacklist, with the bogeymen swapped out.
The legal standard of "clear and present danger" and the precedents of Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis were all more or less overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, where the Court established the standard of "imminent lawless action". Brandenburg himself was a KKK leader convicted of "advocating violence" under Ohio's "criminal syndicalism" law.
Brandenburg is an interesting case in a lot of ways, particularly because I suspect many self-described American liberals today would not agree with the ruling. At the time, though, Brandenburg was considered a sweeping liberal ruling, characteristic of the late Warren Court. Liberals in the 60's and 70's were reflexively skeptical of the censorious rationale behind the Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis rulings, as well as the Red Scare atmosphere that surrounded the passage of criminal syndicalism laws in general. The fundamental principle of free expression was the cause to be upheld, even if an individual case benefitted a far-right defendant. In 1977, this was exemplified in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, where the Nazis sued for their right to hold a protest march. The lead attorney representing the Nazis was the ACLU's David Goldberger[1], himself Jewish. The Skokie ruling was a controversial stand even at the time; it might become unthinkable if current trends continue, especially since many of those criticisms uncritically mirror the reasoning of Schenck and its successive rulings.
Thank you for your very well researched and reasoned disagreement. It's frankly a breath of fresh air, and I can't really say that you're wrong on any specific point.
I think the fundamental issue in the US right now is not an overall shift in public opinion, but rather a polarization. It's a super weird polarization, because none of the significant poles (I think there are at least four) are ideologically consistent. Nor do any benefit any particular cohesive group. Such is the nature of coalition politics in the information age.
When two sides are so far apart on an issue, it becomes very difficult to have a constructive debate. When something is difficult, it's only human nature to find a different way to accomplish the same goal. Censorship is one way to do that: leveraging resources outside the debate in an attempt to make your opposition less effective.
That being said, I think some of the reaction to this is overstated. People are often quick to cry censorship at someone else's act of using his or her own free speech in response, e.g. the "no-platforming" stuff you refer to. Citizens United v. FEC held that corporations, being made up of individuals, have very similar free speech rights to those of individuals. It's not a stretch to extend this to editorial discretion, which means that these companies do indeed have that discretion.
Yet two of the major poles that I identify largely agree with the no-platforming of hate speech, and disagree with the decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The other two agree with Citizens United v. FEC, and disagree with no-platforming of hate speech. These are based on the same principle, but to a good first approximation, nobody is consistent in that principle.
I'm not totally sure where we go from here, but it's sure to be interesting (in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse).
I don't think it should be illegal for online platforms to filter user-generated content on ideological grounds. But it's still a form of censorship and it's something I generally don't favor.
I think the root issue actually is, in itself, the decline of consistent principles. The foundation of liberalism is, in many ways, the agreement to step back from the specific political disagreements of the day and agree on a common set of ground rules. But now politics is turning into a race to the bottom where both sides feel the ends justify the means and if the basic principles are invoked at all, it's because one side in particular is always on the losing side of them.
The fact that hundreds of thousands of Muslims are put into concentration camps and the world does nothing is amazing. I think that is how bad the world wants cheap stuff.
I feel the same way about North Korean work camps. People are not going to look kindly at this time in history when the world just allowed that to happen.
Nazi Germany had concentration camps as early as 1933 (Dachau) and nobody did anything either until they started invasions and a war.
Most genocides have happened as the world watches and says "oh wow that's terrible we should do something" and then do nothing. This is simply how humans behave on an international scale. There is nothing 'amazing' about it.
B) The 'final solution' stuff did not happen until much later ie. i) scale and ii) death
C) That was in 1930. There was barely radio. There was no 'globalism' or 'global news'. There was no global awareness. What 'went on in Germany' might have been going on on mars.
It's 2019 now, China has no excuse, and we have no excuse.
>It's 2019 now, China has no excuse, and we have no excuse.
Well, I guess the question is : if things were so much different in the 30s, and it was stalled by the lack of global information awareness, why are we (humans on earth) complicit with the camps that exist now-a-days (and in more places than just China.)?
First - I don't think there is anything comparable to what is going on in China right now. The scale of it - 100 000's to millions - and arbitrary detention based on ethnicity.
There are some 'dark spots' in the world where this happens, but there, it's chaos: Syria, Congo, Somalia.
The reason we don't hear about it from China is exactly the basis of the article: China has everyone in fear of them.
China speaks with one voice, the West with thousands: political leaders, CEO's, NGOs, deans of big schools - in the West nobody really has that much power - and China is hyper aggressive in pursuing their power everywhere, and in everything.
CEO's will never hint a word, they don't need to be told to shut up because they want money.
Politicians, sadly are spooked, mostly for economic reasons as well. Governments are very afraid to speak out due to fear or the response. Germany sells a lot of high end gear to China.
Airlines that use the actual name of Taiwan for example are threatened with not being able to fly in China.
The head of the student union at Ryserson in Toronto is Tibetan, and this drew mass outrage from the Chines 'expat' community, it was fierce and organized from back home.
Consider that 'Tibet' used to be a huge thing in Hollywood/Cali 20 years ago, now magically everyone has just 'shut up' about it. If any political group or state even mentions the Dalai Lama, China screams. So we haven't heard about him in a while.
Almost everyone is afraid to speak out, so it only happens behind closed doors.
Trump, oddly, is one of the few people with both the power and wherewithal to say things but I don't think he cares: if negotiations are going bad with China he'll scream murder, if negotiations are going well, he'll talk about China as such a great partner in peace etc..
The issue of the concentration camps in China is met with strong force and intimidation the world over.
> Throughout World War II, the American media published and broadcast timely, detailed, and accurate accounts of what was happening to the Jews in Europe. The New York Times alone printed nearly 1,200 articles about what we have now come to call the Holocaust, about one every other day.
> The articles in the Times and elsewhere described the propagation of anti-Semitic laws in German allied countries; death from disease and starvation of hundreds of thousands in ghettos and labor camps; mass executions in Nazi-occupied Russia; and mass gassings in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek. The articles also indicated that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a systematic campaign to kill all the Jews in Europe.
> And yet, at the end of the war and for decades afterward, Americans claimed they did not know about the Holocaust as it was happening. How was it possible for so much information to be available in the mass media and yet simultaneously for the public to be ignorant?
> The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front-page stories, and most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities.” In only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims.
You kind of misrepresented your references as the later link essentially makes the case that the NYT actually did not give prominent coverage of the holocaust. That's actually the point of the article.
Also - I wouldn't meant to indicate that 'nobody knew that Jews were having trouble in Germany' - but rather the true horrors of the situation.
The 'final solution' was not fully on until the world was fully at war, essentially. Millions of people are dying all over the world ... and Americans started fighting and dying on mass (i.e. front page news, and everyone knows someone personally who's dead) - this is going to be the visceral thing people are concerned with. The 'holocaust' is only a chapter of that.
There was no reference point for 'death camps' - since American Japanese were interned in camps - I suggest that's probably what many were thinking of.
And before the war, during the 1930's ... this was an international issue. Very few of the proles are concerned with international affairs. Internment of the Jews in the 1930's I think would be comparable to victims of African wing of ISIS etc. It's tragic, but it's not something we reference every day.
And of course - farmers and townsfolk don't read the NYT! There was no 'mass media' as we know it. No television. Unless it was on some kind of national broadcast, constantly, it was not going to be in the hearts and minds of regular people.
And of course, once the 'final solution' was scaled up - Americans were doing something about it, they were literally fighting and dying while liberating such camps (!). So I'm doubtful of the premise that Americans 'knew but didn't care' while they were quite actively working against the Nazis.
Journalist don't have to be good journalist to qualify as a journalist.
"Not a real journalist" opinions follow the "Not a real X." where X can also be American, Patriot, good persont etc. where informally deciding something allow you to strip them their rights.
I think Assange has gone shit over the time, but that does not mean that I jump into the bandwagon where I change categories arbitrarily and quit tinkling based on general principles.
When Assange wants to be a journalist, he should receive critique as a journalist. He certainly has screwed up plenty. But he should also receive some protections when appropriate.
Don't trust his motives or bias, but if folk at the Daily Mail and Fox News supposedly qualify as journalists, then Assange counts, and then isn't even one of the most biased. Personally I'd place him more in an editorial role than a journalist, but I suspect he may disagree.
I won’t make any specific judgments to any outlets but at a certain point you’re really just a propagandist rather than a journalist if your primary goal is to sway public opinion instead of informing people on the truth.
>if your primary goal is to sway public opinion instead of informing people on the truth.
That could cut out a lot. So much of journalism sits in a grey area in the middle of that.
edit - With my cynical hat on, the mainstream press, a. shifts product, b. sways opinion and c. tells stories that it thinks people are interested in to help a. and b.
The press has found over time that most of the new stories people are interested in are in some regard varying degrees of true, or at least based on the fact something may have happened, so it publishes those. Actually publishing truth is something it essentially does entirely by accident, almost in the same way as Hollywood occaisionaly produces art.
He selectively revealed truths that were hidden from us by people who were either out-right lying, or were totally ignorant to the existence of what was revealed.
So, as a citizen, do I trust an individual who selectively introduces me to information, or do I trust the large conglomerate governments which I now know to wholeheartedly lie to me on a repeated basis?
In old Louisiana parlance : " if I gotta choose between bags of shit, i'll take the one that comes with the clothes pin for my nose. "
Thats fair, but he's a rank amateur at that compared to many major news organisations. At one point the BBC had it down to a fine art, but these days they seem to be getting a lot more clumsy.
Assange doesn't write news, and classified documents are not, themselves, the product of journalism merely for being leaked. Writing a story about the Pentagon papers is journalism, printing them verbatim without context or comment is not journalism.
If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.
> So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?
I don't know, ask Wikipedia, because my comment was using the definition you provided via that site.
Either way, the answer isn't relevant to Assange or Wikileaks. He's not an editor in chief, because he doesn't run an organization which has editorial policies or which writes stories which have to conform to those policies. We disagree that the definition you provided applies to Assange - as I see it, it clearly doesn't.
There's a reason Snowden didn't go to Wikileaks - he wanted journalists to handle the release of his information responsibly, and to provide the necessary context and framing narrative to the public. Wikileaks would simply have dumped all of them onto the web, because that's what they do.
Not calling Assange a journalist does a great deal of unwarranted justice to the plenty clickbait bloggers, who also happen to be labelled as journalists.
You can be a shit journalist and still be a journalist. If I push a csv to a GitHub repo does that make me a journalists? I think this is the semantics posters are trying to highlight.
A publisher, maybe. But I'm squarely in the 'not a journalist' camp.
The last free press of Novaya Gazeta received plenty and published plenty. Their journalists have been murdered left and right, often leading back to Kreml.
Why do people keep saying they haven't published anything on Russia? It's simply not truth and I see that being said over and over again.
What do you mean by that? What I meant was that a lot of the sources for Novoya Gazeta regarding the murder of Anna Politkovskaya (as an example) who was one of their co-workers was Wikileaks. The very openly blamed Kreml/Putin. I don't know how else can I phrase it, I answered to the statement that "publish anything that would embarrass Russia".
Also "Spy Files Russia" aka a national system of online surveillance. That counts too. You can call him an asset all you want and you might be right but the statement that is repeated by the media and a lot of the Americans that they never publish anything on Russia is simply untrue.
> “These are tricks that the Russians were willing to give up,” says James Andrew Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who formerly worked as a Foreign Service officer and an information security rapporteur for the United Nations. “I actually thought it was a bit slow and belated. They probably had to get FSB clearance to release anything and that may have taken a while. Think of it as vaudeville for leakers.”
He wasn't. He produced a show and RT aired it. As did some Italian television program. Journeyman Pictures was the distributor. They have a good YouTube channel by the way. Noam Chomsky also took part of one episode.
A lot of people have appeared on RT. Yes, it's a Russian state owned television and obviously propaganda, but so is any other state (or private in fact) owned television/news reporting agency. BBC is being broadcasted in every language you can imagine in. No doubt Russia took advantage of the situation, but there's nothing suggesting that Assange is a Russian agent that gets parroted everywhere. Heck, not even the Mueller report said anything like that and it was very long. At least not the redacted version.
>Mr. Coulton said that he was told that CBS had concerns for the safety of its employees in China if the segment were included.
Sounds like you're right to be scared. US comedy television isn't allowed to mention Tiananmen Square because the owners fear violent retaliation? How did we get here? This is insane.
People care about it. It's the wealthy elites who don't care about it. The problem is that through control over media and social media, the elites can make it seem like nobody cares about it.
Also, the relentless censorship has been a fairly recent phenomenon. Oddly enough, pushed for by media elites like the nytimes and others.
It is a strange time where both the "left" and the "right" want censorship. But I doubt it will last too long. People are going to start pushing back sooner or later.
I disagree with the notion that Julian Assange is a journalist. I don't find the way he goes about his activities to be commendable. I contrast his/Wikileak disclosures with the way the Snowden materials were disseminated and reported on as the the boundaries of proper and improper journalism of these subjects.
I reject your Wikipedia links as authoritative sources on what constitutes a journalist as well as your contention that he's doing anything other than dumping documents (selectively).
No, because they read these papers and wrote the story on them. Wikileaks just provided mostly unprocessed data dumps. Explaining the story is a very big part of a journalist's job.
And, of course he does more than dumping documents. For example, he has to come by them (collecting as a journalist does), which is no small feat considering which kind of documents we are taking about.
If you're genuinely curious, just take a look at his work [1] to see that it's absolutely not "just dumping documents".
Are you going to provide any alternatives, because if not my rejection overrides yours. I would also point out that outright rejecting something without presenting either an argument or alternative why leads up away from productive discussion.
Every outlet, from the New York Times to Fox News to Slate selectively front-pages certain leaks and stories while de-emphasizing and outright ignoring others. Does that make them not-journalists too?
>I feel like free speech has never been under such attack. Culturally, we don't care about it, we find offensive content more offensive than censorship of offensive content.
Speak for your own filter bubble. Most people in my filter bubble seem to be coming around to the fact that the way things are going they might have to "get off the porch" (metaphorically and maybe literally too in a few cases) in the coming decade or three.
In the US I seem to be able to find people saying virtually anything. Certain privately owned and operated platforms have kicked off certain voices (as is their right if you believe in property rights), but they've just moved to other platforms that are easy to find.
Assange is being charged with a crime, not speech. He deserves a fair trial of course, but what got him in trouble is not merely speaking.
I can't think of much I could say in the US that would actually get me in legal trouble except for directly threatening or inciting violence against someone.
Daniel Ellsberg was charged with a crime, not speech too. He only got off because the Nixon administration bungled things so bad that he got a mistrial.
So US media censors US content, containing bits about China censors, due to financial and other unknown reasons, but when it comes to US happenings, good and bad, they want and have complete freedom of press and speech.
Add to that the fact that the NYT won’t let me read the story because my browser is in private mode, but regularly runs features about the Chinese surveillance state.
It won't let you read it because you're not signed in correct? I haven't had an issue with private browsing and reading the 5 or so free articles a month that they offer.
Oh, so it was adblock that was the problem. I was confused, since I knew NYT works in incognito mode.
Can you really blame them for blocking Adblock users? They're a business, if you're both not logged in (ie, not a subscriber) and blocking ads, you're preventing them from capturing any revenue. How do you suggest the New York Times stays in business?
If you’re not logged in, you’re not (verifiably) a subscriber, so I’m not sure how that’s relevent.
I for one would much rather NYT block adblock users than increase their reliance on native ads. Also, native ads are relatively new, what do you mean “for 150 years”?
Native ads are what print newspapers have, and they don't require logins. They'd just charge Chevrolet $50,000 to run a skyscraper on sports articles for a week or whatever.
Print newspapers don't require logins because you can't read a print paper unless you already purchased it. To replicate that online, a login is necessary.
I was under the impression the New York Times didn't allow companies to pay for custom articles until recently, but I could be wrong. Do you know when this happened?
Sorry, I was referring to "sponsored stories", or other paid content that is not immediately recognizable as an ad. This is often referred to as "Native Advertising" in the industry.
They want to make money, and to limit the number of articles consumed without paying. The way to do that is to have a cookie that tracks it on the client. That is not evil, or for bad ends.
The US is thankfully unaccepting of blatant censorship, at least by government bodies. It's far from immune to centralized manipulation of public discourse and opinion. My feeling is that CBS and other big media entities are compliant in both contexts, but in the US the way it works is subtler, because it needs to be to have the desired outcome.
How is different from companies which tout their the human rights stands, whether it based on sex, religion, or identity, but continue to manufacture product in China for sale in other countries.
it doesn't and it never will till we hold our politicians accountable for not holding China accountable and the only way to do so is with trade restrictions. if not directly on China than any company which chooses to move their manufacturing there.
Unfortunately, that's the cost of courting a massive market backed by an authoritarian regime. Personally, I don't agree with it, but Capitalism isn't inherently moral.
China has such a massive trade presence globally that companies are willing to abandon domestic values to make them happy. The media certainly aren't the only party guilty of this (tech & military companies selling surveillance technology, etc.)
It's easy to blame everything on the media because they market themselves as the purveyors of transparency and democracy in our society. But they're just businesses too, and businesses sacrifice ethics all the time to stay alive.
As Ice-T once said: "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
It's possible to be ethical in a capitalist system. I don't believe it's acceptable to give them a free pass because they chose the option that might be the most profitable (and that's arguable).
It's even worse. The previous controversy this show caused was actual calls to violence, including a very overtly "coded" message to assassinate Trump.
So, CBS will let that run, but will censor anything that offends the communist party of China.
Edit: For everyone jumping on the downvote train: I don't think either should be censored, but what they do censor is very telling of their ethics.
In context, this was a list of the words that are being monitored by the NSA. It stands to reason that the NSA would want to track people who discuss assassinating the president.
Technically it's an 'easter egg'. [1] It's hard to think that the phrase is accidental (see upper left corner). If you want to poke fun at the other phrases in the list, be my guest, but you're not disproving the ugly and intentional nature of the political message in that easter egg.
Your annotations are actually quite useful, as they certainly seem to deflate the point that they were intentionally providing a political message - "assassinate Trump" and "slay fake news" / "hit Mueller" are opposite sides of the political spectrum.
As others have mentioned in the thread, it's just a plausible list of NSA watchlist words. (Unfortunately, my post here probably wound up in one of their datacenters now.)
But, in the show, that context is glaringly and completely clear! There are two NSA employees looking at their list of NSA-provided words to determine whether they have cause to spy on a citizen. How could it be more clear?
"the show called for violence against Trump" is not a fact. The words "assassinate" and "President" appear on a NSA watch list in the show. That's not a call to violence any more than this comment is.
Indeed, we are in a sort of cold civil war in western culture right now over core beliefs and culture. HN definitely seems to have a collective bias to one side of that.
Who said they had complete freedom of the press on US matters? Individuals have a right to that total freedom, whether they choose to exercise that right it totally up to them. US news stations regularly "hold back" on things to appease the US government, choose not to exercise their total freedom. Why should we expect them to treat China's government any differently?
There is a difference between government censorship and a corporation acting in its own best interests. The Chinese government never told them to drop the story, just as the US government never tells people to drop stories. News corporations know that they must maintain good relations if they want future access. Sometimes that means holding back on things they know would anger a government. Profit means striking a balance between giving the viewers what they want today, and making sure you will be able to give them that tomorrow.
Look at the US news landscape. Look at the access CNN gets as opposed to Fox. If you want the big interviews with the biggest players you have to remain on good terms with their leadership.
> News corporations know that they must maintain good relations if they want future access. Sometimes that means holding back on things they know would anger a government.
This is pretty much the opposite of what I would expect out of a journalist. What good is all that "access" if you're just publishing approved content? Wasn't the relevant quote was something like "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
I can imagine many situations where a journalist would hold back on things (names of underage accused, names of spies, locations of military operations, etc.) in order to a) stay out of prison and b) keep the communication pipelines open with their sources.
"Publish and be damned" will quickly lead to you having no-one willing to speak to you.
(Imagine someone who immediately told everyone any secrets they learnt. How long would people tolerate that?)
Reporters act like reporters but often work for massive publicly-traded media companies (CBS). If you want perfect reporting you have to take profit out of the mix, which in turn brings other problems. Don't trust corporations to be the champions of democracy. That isn't their job. Their job is to make money for their owners and we shouldn't criticize them for doing so.
I used to work in television news (not as a journalist). I remember when the news divisions were not controlled by the other parts of the corporation and were, essentially, an entity unto themselves answering to no one.
EDIT: The downvotes are saying news divisions were not so? If that, I think some people need to take a few minutes to learn the history.
> Their job is to make money for their owners and we shouldn't criticize them for doing so
I've seen this argument before used to defend oil companies and the like. Or a company for not paying taxes. Or lobbying to change the laws. "They're just performing their fiduciary responsibility their shareholders!"
I disagree entirely. The existence of capitalism doesn't give people or companies a free morality pass.
When I watched the show last week and that censored bit showed up, I thought it was actually a gag and not for real.
The animated Jonathan Coulton bits on that show are my favorite part of the show, they're quite well done and funny. The show, however, is overly politicized. When compared to the Good Wife, it is much less about fighting interesting legal cases now than it is about US politics.
I'm wondering if CBS bows to pressure (real or imagined) from China over a news story, if a US company would do so as far as who they hire or fire when it comes to personnel decisions.
The same happened to South Park where the network ended up censoring a depiction of Muhammad - well, in the one episode, in an earlier one it was still up. And thankfully they didn't quit, they ran with it because it points out the hypocrisy, double standards, and weird morals that the US networks have.
The crazy thing with South Park was it wasn't just censoring Mohammed. There was a 5 minute monologue from one of the characters about the importance of not giving in to people who make threats of violence...which had a continuous tone censoring the whole speech. (A network decision, due to having received such threats.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/201_(South_Park)
Kyle: That's because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise. You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we've all wanted to show things that we weren't allowed to show, but it wasn't because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That's obviously the only true power. If there's anything we've all learned, it's that terrorizing people works.
Jesus: That's right. Don't you see, gingers, if you don't want to be made fun of anymore, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop.
Santa: That's right, friends. All you need to do is instill fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence.
Stan: Yeah.
— The closing speech, which was censored by Comedy Central[2]
Do you seriously think they should've cancelled a series they've been working on for the past decade due to 120 seconds of content? Let me be the first to say I'm glad the writers didn't do that.
If you watch the show, you'll quickly discover that the writers have been given an immense amount of creative freedom. The Good Fight makes a lot of strong political statements that I don't think would fly on many other platforms.
Furthermore, the writers responded in a way that draws very clear, explicit attention to CBS's censorship, as opposed to sweeping it under the rug.
> Failure to walk away from the show over this has lost the writers any moral high ground they might have once held.
No. This kind of thing is far more effective. I'd probably have never even heard about this unless they'd stayed and gone on-air with a notice like this.
If they walked they'd have been replaced and new writers would have made substitute content.
There are no effects. If you only watch the show but don't read NYT, you don't even know there was a controversy because of the censure.
That's why censure is effective.
You'll want to watch the original series The Good Wife first. The Good Fight is a sequel series after the main character finishes her arc.
It was a really great show. It's a typical law firm drama but it was very well written and surprisingly tech-savvy. Some of the topics and cases in the show dealt with things like the NSA, Anonymous, fugitives from justice (like Snowden), the haziness of the Constitution at the border, social media, FBI investigations, Bitcoin and lots more.
Just echoing the above—watch The Good Wife! I think it's my favorite TV show, and I'm really picky. Don't be put off by the title—this is absolutely not "the real housewives" or the like.
One addendum, however: I would greatly encourage skipping the last two seasons of The Good Wife (6 and 7), which constitute a massive and sudden drop in quality. There are a few good episodes, but not enough. You'll hear tidbits about what happened when you watch The Good Fight, and it's better that way.
I really am loving this show, and I thought the "censored by CBS" was some sort of joke. The animated shorts they mix into the show are great fun. The good wife had interesting takes on tech issues of the day and The Good Fight has really taken the format into some interesting political directions.
This isn't "ironic" or a "creative solution", this is straight up censorship. Wow.
China has basically made it known they will go after a company's employees. I'm sure that CBS is very concerned about general access to the Chinese market and don't want their shows banned for purely economic reasons, but the subtle threat of their Chinese employees disappearing because of a cartoon is a real thing.
Let's say this was my decision, pretend I'm a director or VP at CBS and I need to make the call about this cartoon, and whether the threat against my subordinates in country - or myself on my next business trip - is real. After Fan Bingbing's disappearance last year, I would take this very seriously and I'm not sure I would make a different call.
That's censorship, full stop.
I'm not sure what CBS alone can do about this - they're a single company against a sovereign nation. Not to let them off the hook, but I really feel the U.S. government has to step up here.
> Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who also teaches courses on Chinese film, expressed doubt that airing such a cartoon would have exposed CBS employees to risk, although, he added, that might depend on whether network executives were seen as personally responsible for the segment.
I'm going to call BS on CBS' excuse that the Chinese government would actually harm CBS employees in China over the companies production of content that isn't available in China.
China did make Hongkong Bookstore owners disappear(some of them disappeared while visiting China), because they were selling books(banned in mainland china) in Hongkong.
'Ms. King said that she and her husband initially told CBS that they would quit the show if the song was pulled but that they eventually agreed on inserting a message saying that the company had censored it.'
Man, if only the nytimes and the media was more concerned about censorship here in the US. But then again, it's the nytimes and the media championing censorship at home.
What are the odds this will teach the American left that censorship is not a good thing and lead them to stop demanding Google, Twitter, and Facebook ban every user who wants to reduce immigration? 1%? 0%?
I don't think this is a good comparison. The bans you are talking about (ignoring the hyperbole) are for hate speech. This is censhorship of critisicm of an authoritarian government. I don't think the two are remotely comparable.
Capitalism doesn’t work without choice of consumption. If you have a bad or misleading product, eventually people won’t use it.
I’m less worried about typical profit-mongering than I am about the corporate owned media however - media has a powerful ability to skew and censor truthful news.
But until then, the bad and misleading products are quite profitable for those engaging in the bad practices, thereby ensuring the behavior will continue to happen. Once they're "found out", they'll just re-brand or move to some other garbage to manufacture.
That works well for bad products, which is why bad products are the least of our problems. But consumer choice is utterly ineffective at internalizing externalities, because consumers don't have the time to research the supply chains behind different options and don't feel like they have the money to make choices that don't lead to disaster in the long run.
That's a myth of Capitalism, a lot of crappy products are used every day because of marketing, market flooding, patenting, copyright, corruption and so on and so forth.
Not a myth at all; what you just described is generally a result of crony capitalism, in bed with the government.
When a true free market is allowed to operate (which happens all the time in many aspects of our economy), it is the most democratic meritocratic and fair way to exchange goods and services, and accumulate wealth. Pure capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system or system of government in the history of mankind.
How is a completely free market insulated from the influence of marketing/advertising? They are very effective techniques for convincing buyers to choose non-optimal products, and work exceedingly well in that regard.
I also think you would find it very hard to point at an example of a working free market that has not devolved into an oligopoly, with no govrnment support at all; nevermind one that has produced large-scale wealth.
> As long as Capitalism is the main economic system this will always be only about the profits.
I disagree. It's a matter of priorities. It's totally possible for a capitalist society to prioritize things like human rights, etc. over profits through political and social means.
I think the main issue here is that capitalist institutions and capitalist thinking are ascendent (in the US at least) while rival political and social institutions and modes of thought that could keep it in check are being hollowed out and weakened.
Sort of. Socialists contend that the mechanical logic of the system makes that impossible, so the economic system must be refounded on the material basis of the political power of the majority - worker control of the economy / democratic control of the economy. Those two ideas go hand in hand.
You're confusing socialism with communism. Socialism is a political philosophy, whereas communism is one specific (but not the only possible) implementation of that philosophy. Socialism is also intended to be a criticism of and attempt to redress the immorality of capitalism, so morality does enter into it, at least in theory.
Socialism as it's understood now is a specific plan for replacing Capitalism, tied to a specific theory of history, not just a philosophy. At the level of implementation, it isn't morality, it's economics and politics. There might be morality behind it, but there's morality behind all actions, to some extent.
Many modern capitalist governments, including the US, employ socialist programs with no intention of overturning capitalism itself.
And the entire thesis behind socialism is that it's morally superior to capitalism, in a similar way that free software is argued as being morally superior to proprietary software.
> I believe that is what most people would call socialism. When taken at its root idea anyway.
No, it could also be the society's moral system. For instance, take a hypothetical capitalist society where the shame and stigma of violating human rights is very strong. A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.
> A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.
This sounds like the kind of whataboutism you'd encounter on any thread negatively countering China, but it isn't. This is an uncontroversial fact about capitalism that Adam Smith covered before capitalism even emerged as a concept.
The goal of capitalism is to maximize production output. Everything else is peripheral. Maybe it's a hard truth to come to grips with, but that is what we need to do in order to move forward on resolving today's issues.
This whole thread derails from the topic of American CBS censorship,
so it sort of did fall into a whataboutism type of distraction cycle.
Theoretically capitalist companies that are censoring important content can be pressured with boycotts over censorship, though I'm not sure how feasible that is here.
> This whole thread derails from the topic of censorship
Or highlights the relationship between capitalism and censorship when the capital is held by a totalitarian state?
China has quietly sat and waited for the last 50 years while they accrued capital. Now they have it, and they're using it to take control of the same incentive systems that created the developed world. Ignoring the threat that's posed, or ignoring the weakness of those incentive systems is going to be fatal to the ideologies that China has targeted.
Before damming CBS you might want to hear their motive. According to them the 90 second segment was removed because "such a sequence would endanger CBS executives on the ground in China". If that is the true motive, I personally give them a pass. If this is about preserving safety of employees and not about profit, can anyone condemn them?
This article written by a friend of one of the performers in the 90 second animated short that was cut out has what I think is the best coverage. It includes a good amount of detail including a play by play of the cut content:
If they're concerned about the safety of employees in China over the content they produce, perhaps they should not station employees in China.
Unfortunately it's such a big market it's apparent that companies are willing to forego ethics to do business with China, despite the numerous human rights violations.
I didn't claim the United States is perfect, but it certainly isn't mass incarcerating members of a peaceful religious group and harvesting their organs, so I won't agree to your false equivalence.
> In September 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.
I would like to see their evidence that the Chinese government would actually harm CBS employees over the airing of this clip in the US. The international shitstorm that would create pales in comparison to Saudi Arabia's assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. And unlike with Saudi Arabia, the current US government isn't too keen on being best buddies with China.
