Today is a Lucky 10000 day for you. We'll start with human rights in China [0] and look at some highlights. (Yes, every citation is to Wikipedia today. You've earned it.)
* There are millions of people imprisoned in China. Could be as few as 1.5mil, but likelier around 3.5mil, [2] including likely over 1mil in "re-education" concentration camps in the Western region of Xinjiang. [1] By comparison, while the USA's legendarily held the highest per-capita incarceration rate for decades, presumably this is because we are more honest than China about our rates. (Not to mention Russia.) Also, consider this map of incarceration per state in the USA. [3] Thanks, Louisiana.
* The Internet is neither Free nor neutral in China. [4] You can expect not just to be spied upon, but also to have lots of non-Chinese literature removed from your view, and also to face social consequences from your Internet browsing choices. You would already be known as outspoken for your posts, which would not be hidden or pseudonymous, and which would travel through both automated and manually-reviewed filters before being published. Rumor has it that both Russia and China are researching ways to construct their own Internet-like sub-networks and infrastructure so that they can disconnect entirely from the rest of the world.
* A family-and-caste system, hukou [5], is used to systematically deny freedom of movement to the vast majority of Chinese citizens. While the system has experienced reforms since Deng, in the time of Mao, hukou was an oppressive tool, and to this day, one must apply for a permit to move to large cities in Eastern China like Beijing. Worse, if I understand correctly, the hukou permits can be zoned within a metropolitan area, so that one is only permitted to move to certain parts of Beijing. As a reminder, for contrast, the USA has a strong history of legally supporting the right to freedom of movement since 1823 [6], even if we have often failed to ensure those rights. [7]
* The USA has freedom of religion written into the Constitution, in the First Amendment. China does not have freedom of religion. [8] Party members must be atheists. Christians must belong to state-run churches. [11] Tibetan Buddhism is state-managed; lamas must fill out permits for reincarnation [9] and the Panchen Lama has been kidnapped and replaced with a state-chosen impostor. [10] Falun Gong has been systematically persecuted. [12]
* Tibet. [13] Additionally, Hong Kong. [15]
* In more recent fields of human rights: Homosexuality and non-binary sexuality are only recently permitted, within the past few decades, and associated rights like marriage/civil unions are still forthcoming.
* Meta: The Communist Party of China wants to appear to have a unified will. To this end, they tend to allow whatever the Central Committee wants, to promote their ability and right to do whatever they like to the people of China, to dismiss individual human rights as deleterious to the Party and its state, and to concentrate power arbitrarily. Compare and contrast with the USA.
Please do not haul pre-existing lists of links and talking points into HN threads. These discussions are supposed to be thoughtful conversations. Boilerplate kills that.
Also, nationalistic battle is off topic here, even in a thread like this one, and your comment is a huge step in that direction.
Also, please don't snark. That's in the site guidelines too.
I am honored to have been mistaken for boilerplate! Thank you. In truth, this morning I woke up, read the claim, "I don't think China is any more evil than the US," and decided to examine it. What followed was 100% my own words, off the cuff, based on reading Wikipedia and their citations and sources. (For what it's worth, not much of this resembles what I remember studying when I was younger; "modern" Chinese history focused on Mao and Deng.) I stopped after I realized that no amount of refactoring would revive footnote 14.
Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you think that these aren't fresh words, then please explain where they came from.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Do you have commentary on the state of human rights in China?
I'm sorry I mistakenly assumed your words weren't freshly written. Still, please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. We don't want it here, and there has been a dismaying surge of it lately.
> The Communist Party of China wants to appear to have a unified will. To this end, they tend to allow whatever the Central Committee wants ...
This is the principle of democratic centralism[1]. A case could be made for conceptions of democracy other than the western one, but with the abolishment of term limits China is not making that case very well.
Our society is not homogenous enough to make a statement like "white supremacist society" substantial. However, there are three closely-related truths which are pretty obvious about our society:
* Our society is, itself, a fascist, classist, militaristic society.
* Pockets of people and parochial cultures in some specific regions are white supremacists.
This isn't definitional or axiomatic, but if you don't perceive these things as true in your day-to-day experience of our country, then you're not likely to feel that they're true. And that's fine! We don't have to agree. But it's useful to point out how and where we don't agree.
It's not that I don't perceive many things that might be described with some truth-of-the-matter as "fascist, classist, militaristic". What I might object to is the use of such terms as "fascist", "classist", "militaristic" as thought-terminating cliches deprived of any real content, which is astoundingly common. And the meme of "the white-supremacist society" is not significantly different in any real sense - though it does seem more likely to prompt attitudes such as Ravelry's, as reported in the OP.
Rather than switch to a meta-conversation about "memes", could you address the more concrete questions I asked earlier? That is, I wanted to know if you think that "white supremacy and "supporting white supremacy" were meaningful terms at all.
Before doing that, I'll note that you were the first to use the term 'society' in this thread. My previous statements were along the lines of 'support for open white supremacy'. I think "society" is a distraction because there's always the "not all" objection - not all white people in Virgiania in 1850s were in favor of slavery, even though it was a slave society.
So when I mean "society", I mean "the main cultural views as reinforced by the government and others with political, economic, and physical power".
Going back to my earlier questions, which I'll augment:
1) can the 1970s South Africa be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. For obvious reasons.
2) can the 1850s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can, for obvious reasons.
3) can the 1950s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. Jim Crow laws. Sundowner towns, Redlining, Mississippi Burning.
4) can the current US be described as a white supremacist society? I have come to the conclusion that viewing the dominate power structures in the US as being strongly influenced by white supremacy is a valid, though incomplete one.
If you reject that 'white-supremacist society' is a useful term, then perhaps you shouldn't have introduced it?
Oregonian here. Yes, she was talking about WW2 concentration camps. It's disgusting that you've forgotten that, during WW2, we ran concentration camps too, for Japanese-Americans and others who we failed to trust in spite of their citizenship. Read the parent comment again. George Takei was in one of these camps!
FDR, Eisenhower, and many other high-ranking government officials at the time referred to the Japanese 'internment camps' also as 'concentration camps'.
See http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.h... as an example of how in the 1990s there was already the complaint that it "seems strange that we are still debating the use of terms describing this event" when it was well-established that the Japanese were indeed in concentration camps in all but official name.
It also gives quotes, like Truman in 1961 saying "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
The term "concentration camp" was also used in the Spanish-American and Boer Wars, for something other than "murder centers".
All evidence I've seen says that calling these facilities something other than "concentration camp" is a euphemism to hide the atrocities that we are committing YET AGAIN.
The president is not a CEO; the executive branch is not a corporation. [0] Moreover, the executive branch does not need to be "run" from the top; instead, it operates in a distributed and semi-autonomous fashion. Think not of the Cartesian brain, but the octopus.
The Constitution outlines specific responsibilities of the President in Article Two. [1] Those responsibilities:
* Command the armed forces
* Have a Cabinet (have the heads of subbranches as direct reports)
* Conduct foreign diplomacy
* Give State-of-the-Union addresses
* Not be bad at carrying out the will of the law; "faithfully execute" whatever the law tells them to do
* Get impeached if Congress says so
There are some things that the President is enabled to do at a whim, but they are not as broad as you'd think:
* Issue pardons
* Appoint judges, diplomats, etc. with Congress's approval
* Call special sessions of Congress
I agree that, in order to be aware of the full nature of the law, the President needs to be surrounded with legal professionals who can advise them on how to not violate the law. But, in Article Two, it's clearly spelled out that the President should have a Cabinet in order to delegate day-to-day responsibilities further.
Finally, as a reminder, the President wasn't supposed to be chosen by the people, but by the Electoral College. [2] The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.
The president is, literally, the chief executive officer of the US government. He holds an office under the United States, and that office is executive in nature, and it is not subordinate to any other office.
You obviously are not familiar with the USA's Constitution. Please re-read it. In particular, Article Two, Section Four; "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." This means that the President may be removed from office in certain circumstances.
In the time when the Constitution was framed, and in many times since, there is the meme of "checks and balances". [0] The overall idea is that no one branch of the Federal powers may be unilaterally or universally unabridged in its ability to act; other branches have powers which may check, veto, review, or otherwise neutralize certain actions.
So, why is the President sometimes called "chief"? Because, as Article Two also states, they are the "Commander in Chief" of the armed forces. When it comes to military decisions, yes, there is no office above the President's; however, note that the President's military powers are neither unilateral nor unlimited. Crucially, the President isn't able to declare war or allocate funds for military use without Congress' approval.
Hope this was informative. The USA's Constitution is a fascinating document worth reading, even for those not from the USA.
>The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.
Correct. Well, I mean, popular among the states, but not the people individually. I'm stunned how this is a difficult concept for people. I'd bet the people arguing for popular vote would change their mind in a hot second if LA and NYC went red.
The whole union's representative model is bent over backwards to keep consensus with the south eastern US for reasons that have little relevance this century, but are impossible to change.
The electoral college is from when there were 800,000 free white males in all the original states (US 1790 census), and the union still felt like it needed Georgia and South Carolina to agree to be a part of this contract for strategic reasons. I wonder how many of them were literate land owners!
Is that relevant today? Is ANY of that relevant today? Many other countries looked at the electoral college over the last 250 years and saw how it was a strategic compromise masqueraded as a feature. They decided not to do it and stick with popularity contests.
DO other countries not use it because they are not a collection of geographically / culturally / and relatively-recently separate states that have united so there is little reason to adopt a system that fairly treats unique states in relation to a larger unified federal body?
The people vote in thier states, the states vote for the president. Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population. We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
You may even think you want NYC and LA to pick the president every year, but you don't.
For reference [0] I think you're going to have a bad time if you tell the people outside of NYC and LA that their voice, concerns, representation is totally irrelevant. We don't have a perfect system, but we have one that's been working for 240-some years.
> We don't have a perfect system, but we have one that's been working for 240-some years.
What does that mean?
Just because we haven't had a military coup then our system is good enough and the should not be questioned?
I'm really curious what you and other people mean by that
You know people laugh at ours right? People laugh at our religion of checks and balances, since they don't accomplish that in the most optimal way. I'm not promoting any alternative, only pointing out that accepting its flaws is missing in the collective conscious in the US. Practically all attempts at democracy over the last 200 years contain patches seen as improvements over what the US created and mostly stuck with.
> For reference [0] I think you're going to have a bad time
Youre going to have to be more specific.
> if you tell the people outside of NYC and LA that their voice, concerns, representation is totally irrelevant.
Nobody is saying anyones representation is irrelevant.
But how is it fair that the vote of someone living in Wyoming weighs 3.5x that of someone in New York or California?
"Thats just the way it is" is not a counter-argument.
Electoral college votes are not weighted by population, 20% of the votes are divided evenly between states and the remainder is weighted by population.
There is nothing intrinsic to representative democracy that requires this particular arrangement and practically no other developed country uses a system like the electoral college.
Plenty of fair elections occur with popular votes in developed nations; Brexit is a whole separate can of idiocy and just obscures the debate here.
> Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population.
You're viewing things from the point of view of the states instead of the people. Either
- The states get railroaded because each person gets an equal vote, OR
- The people get railroaded because each state gets an equal vote.
> DO other countries not use it because they are not a collection of geographically / culturally / and relatively-recently separate states that have united so there is little reason to adopt a system that fairly treats unique states in relation to a larger unified federal body?
There are plenty of countries with proportionally representative/popular-vote (or at the very least, mixed-member PR) models that are culturally and geographically diverse. Germany is the best example that comes to mind.
> The people vote in thier states, the states vote for the president. Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population. We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
The alternative was shown in 2016. Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but won in three smaller states by ultra-thin margins. So instead of California, Texas, Florida, and NY dominating Presidential elections, we have Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan dominating them. Considering that small states are already dangerously overrepresented in the Senate, it seems reasonable to have the one truly national official elected by true popular vote.
> We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
This is wrong on two fronts. First, we have a representative democracy because southern states essentially held the Constitutional Convention hostage. Second, the truly "representative" part of government is already sufficiently exhibited in Congress. If you want empty space to have power, you already have that in the Senate (and the House, in which small states are also over-represented).
In the USA, at least, there is a singular problem: In the early 70s, the HMO Act and similar legislation was passed, bringing in the HMO-oriented system of healthcare.
A silver bullet would consist of introducing a single-payer system and winding down the HMOs.
HMO's are very successful in terms of providing cost/care solutions. The fact that they are so unpopular reveals the american preference: they want to see any doctor, at any time, with as much access as possible.
Anecdata: A nuclear family member was the president of an HMO for a few years, as far as I know they successfully pooled Medicare resources and made group-wide decisions that saved a lot of money.
Language author here; I work on a modern flavor of a classic 90s language.
There are three problems. The first is that closed languages die [0]. V is not Free Software, which is disappointing but not atypical; however, V is not even open source, which precludes a healthy community. Additionally, closed languages tend to have bad patterns like code dumps over the wall, poor community communication, untrustworthy binary behaviors [1], and delayed product/feature releases. Yes, it's certainly embarrassing to have years of history on display for everybody to see, but we all apparently have gotten over it. What's hiding in V's codebase? We don't know. As a best guess, I think that the author may be ashamed of the particular nature of their bootstrap.
The second is that V's author makes promises and claims which are then retracted, falsified, or untestable. Most notably, source for V's toolchain has been teased repeatedly as coming soon, but has never been released. Without an open toolchain, none of the claims made on V's front page [2] can be verified.
Finally, because we can't not talk about it, V isn't a very compelling language. At best, it could be seen as an iterative improvement on Go. If V were more open, then we could make more sincere and complete comparisions, but as it is, V's author alone gets to control the comparisons [3] and benchmarks [4]. Maybe the best argument to be made is that there is room for a series of languages which focus on compile speed, where languages like Go, Jai, and V compete based primarily on how quickly they can transform zero-cost abstractions into low-level code in a single pass.
...But if that's the game, then it's only a matter of time until one of them rediscovers FORTH...
Can the V toolchain translate C++ to V? It could in February [0] and May [1]. You had only to document it [2]; will the feature be available at the end of the week?
There are several rings of anonymous HN accounts which are guarded such that anybody (who knows a bit of a trick) can use them to post whatever they like. These accounts aren't official, but grey; officially, there's not really a way to prevent such a thing.
Sure, it's a slogan, but you don't really have any arguments against it. The nature of the argument is slippery-slope, or syllogistic: If freedom of speech disappears, then freedom of religion goes with it. There's actually a tight binding between these two in the USA, since the same clause of the Constitution protects both.
No country has ever had truest freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that freedom of speech is bad; it could just as well mean that no country has ever been out of the hands of aristocrats for long enough to forge a freedom of speech which trumps their desire to be immune from the lower classes. But you're critiquing a position which has not yet existed and implying that the world will collapse if that position is realized, again without evidence.
The phrase "turn everyone into mindless drones" is telltale; it shows that you currently believe that people are not mindless drones. To the contrary, though, it's even easier to imagine that people have been gaining more freedoms through the centuries, and that people are turning into more mindful creatures, with less droning behavior. Even if progressivism is wrong, certainly the communication technologies that we have invented have given the everyday person a power of speech that empowers them beyond what their ancestors had.
Speaking of power, the cheesy line I'll choose today is that power and responsibility are formally dual in any category of social relations; if X has power over Y to do Z, then Y has responsibilities to do Z for X. And yes, freedom of speech is an insistence that this power not be abridged from everyday citizens. That's not a bad thing at all; beyond the progressive metanarrative, the slow and steady task of decentralizing and dividing power amongst people is important.
To summarize, you are suffering from tropes three through five from the list of censorship tropes. [0]
I'm saying that the whole concept is a distraction. It's like talking about absolute zero when somebody asks you to turn down the thermostat. It's simply not constructive.
The original linked article is better in that regards. At least we're talking about a specific instance, and considering what you want to deregulate (police, australia, warrants, government broadcasters, etc.).
If you have specific tropes from that link with specific reasons they apply and believe the reasoning is sound and applies here, I'd have a little more respect for that link . Merely calling something a trope does not affect validity; it's just name calling.
Also: you seem really eager to assume you have any idea what I think. I don't think you do! All I'm objecting to is the fundamentalism.
---
I totally see the value in protecting speech; I just see it as a means to an end, not a divine calling. Communication isn't always constructive and clarifying; it can also be misleading and destructive. It can also be divisive (which sounds more negative that I intend - the positive flip side being forming a group identity perhaps?). I think intentional, malicious deception is almost universal regarded as not worth protecting, but where do you draw the line, and just as critically: how to you draw that line? I think there's a lot more value we as a society could gain from communication in general if we'ld try to improve here. Noise matters; incentives, not just restrictions and penalties matter; network effects matter. Regardless of where you live, but definitely in the US: the legal framework doesn't appear to be well equipped to deal with all that. If you will: it's a good attempt... for hundreds of years ago, but it's just not good enough anymore. These are rules that largely predate facebook network bubbles; predates game theory (certainly as a political force as in the 20th century); predates all forms of mass media that actually reached the masses (sure, there was a printing press - but what percentage of the populace did that really reach?).
Also, I want to make one more point, about how this discussion we're having matters. Because while I might quibble about the notion that freedom of speech is universally a good thing with no risks to be mitigated, I agree with the general notion. So for the sake of argument: let's assume you simply want to reap the benefits of that free flow of information. Got to protect that, right? It turns out the concept is hard to pin down exactly, and you need some approximation of exactness for a legal text to be a useful in practice. A law nobody can agree on what it means isn't going to work and certainly won't work as intended. So you do your best, and protect something; some definition that is close to the "ground truth" of the communication that is valuable to protect. Is that a perfect approximation? Almost axiomatically: no. And what's the worst thing (well... one seriously bad thing at least) you could possibly do to undermine the effectiveness of that protection? You could assume that it's great and that it works. Because that's when people stop being critical. There are all kinds of reasons people want to subvert rules like these, many selfish, some perhaps ideological. And after 200+ years of bending the rules, I think it's fair to be a little critical of the assumption that whatever ideas people had when they wrote those protections have survived undamaged to this day; not to mention that it's risky to assume that whatever ideas they had back then couldn't be improved upon in hindsight, and furthermore risky to assume that even perfect execution 200 years ago would be a perfect fit now.
And boy, have we tinkered over the years. Lobbying used to be considered a kind of fraud - in essence, the very opposite of the speech intended to be protected. Now it's protected itself. Freedom of speech would have applied to natural persons in 1791. Yet without textual change it now applies to corporations. And please don't think of this as good or bad - even if it's largely good, it's definitely change. Non-governmental restrictions and regulations on information transfer (e.g. NDAs or the reverse where you hire somebody to say something) would have been largely irrelevant back then (at least compared to now); and no surprise then that they're not addressed (AFAIK, at least). And even the prohibition on governmental restrictions are not terribly robust: the distinction between prior restraint, threats, and post-publication punishment is technically comprehensible, but conceptually pretty dubious. You don't need prior restraint if you treat whistleblowers the way we do today - anybody sane will shut up by themselves.
The US does not have a completely free flow of ideas. It has some a specific limited instantiation thereof. Not all communication is beneficial, nor is a government or court system all-powerful, nor is a legislative branch perfect; so limited protection is the best we should hope for. But.. not necessarily these exact limitations. If you say the US "has" freedom of speech or otherwise imply that it's good enough, or if you imply that the definition of speech is a given: you're undermining the underlying point of freedom of speech.
And spiritually: isn't the whole point of freedom of speech that a lively debate helps find the best solution to various problems? Then we should vigorously apply that tool to freedom of speech itself.
I'm not saying freedom of speech is a bad idea. I'm saying it's not perfect, and it never can be. But if we're not open to the imperfections in both the concept and our implementation, then not only will we be fail to reach perfection, we're going to stray very far from it.
Along these lines, I don't have any words for my younger self, but I would probably thrash the hell out of him with my fists until he stopped being such a brat.
* There are millions of people imprisoned in China. Could be as few as 1.5mil, but likelier around 3.5mil, [2] including likely over 1mil in "re-education" concentration camps in the Western region of Xinjiang. [1] By comparison, while the USA's legendarily held the highest per-capita incarceration rate for decades, presumably this is because we are more honest than China about our rates. (Not to mention Russia.) Also, consider this map of incarceration per state in the USA. [3] Thanks, Louisiana.
* The Internet is neither Free nor neutral in China. [4] You can expect not just to be spied upon, but also to have lots of non-Chinese literature removed from your view, and also to face social consequences from your Internet browsing choices. You would already be known as outspoken for your posts, which would not be hidden or pseudonymous, and which would travel through both automated and manually-reviewed filters before being published. Rumor has it that both Russia and China are researching ways to construct their own Internet-like sub-networks and infrastructure so that they can disconnect entirely from the rest of the world.
* A family-and-caste system, hukou [5], is used to systematically deny freedom of movement to the vast majority of Chinese citizens. While the system has experienced reforms since Deng, in the time of Mao, hukou was an oppressive tool, and to this day, one must apply for a permit to move to large cities in Eastern China like Beijing. Worse, if I understand correctly, the hukou permits can be zoned within a metropolitan area, so that one is only permitted to move to certain parts of Beijing. As a reminder, for contrast, the USA has a strong history of legally supporting the right to freedom of movement since 1823 [6], even if we have often failed to ensure those rights. [7]
* The USA has freedom of religion written into the Constitution, in the First Amendment. China does not have freedom of religion. [8] Party members must be atheists. Christians must belong to state-run churches. [11] Tibetan Buddhism is state-managed; lamas must fill out permits for reincarnation [9] and the Panchen Lama has been kidnapped and replaced with a state-chosen impostor. [10] Falun Gong has been systematically persecuted. [12]
* Tibet. [13] Additionally, Hong Kong. [15]
* In more recent fields of human rights: Homosexuality and non-binary sexuality are only recently permitted, within the past few decades, and associated rights like marriage/civil unions are still forthcoming.
* Meta: The Communist Party of China wants to appear to have a unified will. To this end, they tend to allow whatever the Central Committee wants, to promote their ability and right to do whatever they like to the people of China, to dismiss individual human rights as deleterious to the Party and its state, and to concentrate power arbitrarily. Compare and contrast with the USA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peo...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfield_v._Coryell
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_China
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Religious_Affairs_Bureau...
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_China#Subdivis...
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Tibet
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Hong_Kong