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Like the other poster, I'm curious to hear your perspective. You don't find it a bit strange that "only government-owned websites and specially approved politi

Like the other poster, I'm curious to hear your perspective. You don't find it a bit strange that "only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs...are allowed to post photos of top leaders."? You also think it's better to cover up events like Tiananmen Square? It seems like it's almost entirely forgotten even though it happened only 30 years ago. My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it.

wybiral 8y ago
> My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it. Exactly. No country has a perfect history but by confronting past mistakes you have a chance to learn from them and hopefully support laws or norms that prevent them from happening again. Perhaps this only applies in countries that practice democracy, where the people's awareness has a chance of translating into representation. Otherwise it's only likely to create discontent with the inability to change things (and thus unrest).
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  Discontent and unrest can lead to revolution and the chance to improve. Authoritarians simply bank on the cost of revolution being prohibitive.
  - mc32 8y ago
    When Mao felt threatened he unleashed the very impressionable and mouldable Hongweibings. Once he reaffirmed his power, the Hongweibings were disbanded. So, they have a few more options as laid out by Lennin.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  This perspective always cracks me up. The way the US does it is less brutal and obvious, but pretty much the same thing; old books are scrapped and forgotten. Formerly popular thinkers are memory holed or declared 'thought criminals' (pick your '-ist'). Their books are no longer taught in college, and the perspectives they represent are gone forever. Present day thinkers and reporters are given the same silent treatment on mainstream media which is obviously controlled by the narrow oligarchy which controls everything else. Same treatment is happening on youtube as China is doing; non-conforming perspectives are actively sought out and removed by censorious apparatchiks. Oh yeah, and now they're also sometimes denounced as "russian agents" as well -a pack of absurd, paranoid and Orwellian nonsense which makes anything the ChiComs say look like objective common sense. The US engages in ritual denunciation of itself for slavery and killing off the Indians. Somehow our most excellent international adventures, ridiculous military provocations, poisoning of the food chain, extractive slave economics of the native population and colonial control of half the population of the world is A-OK. For all I know, China engages in ritual denunciation of its pre-Maoist self as well. That doesn't mean they're not carefully controlling the narrative now.
  - wybiral 8y ago
    That's not apples-for-apples. Yes, history and society are subject to shifts and bias. But do you think that there's a hidden branch of US government dictating which books are used or what words aren't allowed, carefully crafting this revised perception of our reality? Or is it just social effects that happen in all countries?
    - paraditedc 8y ago
      Luckily this was just recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816040
      - wybiral 8y ago
        Withholding information about military strategy or the operations of an intelligence agency to the press is one thing. Meticulous and widespread censoring of phrases like "rubber duckies" just because it might remind people of Tiananmen Square or "Winnie the Pooh" just because people mocked Xi Jinping is another thing.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - quxbar 8y ago
    My college education was pretty honest about the atrocities of the USA. I get to openly post about politics all day on facebook without any fear of reprisal. Pretty different from a country with a whole dictionary of secret codewords used to discuss politics and history. There is no 'both sides', there's just your self-pity - the people you call censorious apparatchiks are just people who don't respect your opinion. You mistake being unpopular for being persecuted, which is common for privileged engineering types like us.
    - xfs 8y ago
      The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. -Julian Assange
stevenwoo 8y ago
Arguably the Espionage Act could be interpreted and used to prosecute any speech that is not supportive of the US government and lately for any federal whistleblowers, it seems pretty incongruous with the First Amendment but the law has been supported by the Supreme Court multiple times and here we are.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  It’s true that Americans are pretty extremist about freedom of speech, but even they understand that speech in the service of actual espionage should be punished. Outside of that I’m unaware of how the Espionage Act has been used to suppress speech.
  - dTal 8y ago
    Let me enlighten you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917#History
AzzieElbab 8y ago
"My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it." You cannot possibly be serious when taken scale and timeframes into account
- benrbray 8y ago
  About which part? The US has done some pretty terrible things (slavery, interment camps, destabilizing the middle east and south america). So you disagree that we're allowed to talk about it? Is there a government agency censoring HN comments?
  - AzzieElbab 8y ago
    The things you listed wouldn't even top my list of horrible things the US have done. You can talk about them all you want. But if you have half a brain you should be able to them in context of time and scale and take a look at what else was going on in the world at the same time and how many people were actually effected. Saying that todays US is somehow comparable to todays China because of slavery doesn't make any sense whatsoever
dghughes 8y ago
I wouldn't be too quick to say that. A quick Google came back with words and phrases banned by the US government. It's federal employee who are ordered not to use the words and phrases not individuals, but chilling nonetheless. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/f503837a-e1cf-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.de422c2a7680 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-g... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-cli...
- wybiral 8y ago
  > "Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead." That sounds more like a branding guideline for employees than censorship of a topic. But, as you said, this doesn't apply to normal citizens and presumably is done so that the spokespeople seem like they're on the same page.
  - chris_mc 8y ago
    No, that's clearly censorship. Climate change had a different contextual meaning than extreme weather. One indicates that the climate is on a path towards something different, the other indicates events outside the norm but no overall change. This is an attempt by the Trump administration to cover up the fact that humans are fucking ourselves, so that their corporate overlords may continue to reverse-Robinhood the masses.
    - wybiral 8y ago
      I'm not saying that I agree with it, but this is an agency with leaders who have a say in the wording that their employees use in public documents. It's not censorship, it's just stupid leadership and it's from ephemeral positions that our democracy can be used to reverse by putting people with sane policies in place.

wybiral 8y ago

> My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it. Exactly. No country has a perfect history but by confronting past mistakes you have a chance to learn from them and hopefully support laws or norms that prevent them from happening again. Perhaps this only applies in countries that practice democracy, where the people's awareness has a chance of translating into representation. Otherwise it's only likely to create discontent with the inability to change things (and thus unrest).

stochastic_monk 8y ago
Discontent and unrest can lead to revolution and the chance to improve. Authoritarians simply bank on the cost of revolution being prohibitive.
- mc32 8y ago
  When Mao felt threatened he unleashed the very impressionable and mouldable Hongweibings. Once he reaffirmed his power, the Hongweibings were disbanded. So, they have a few more options as laid out by Lennin.
scottlocklin 8y ago
This perspective always cracks me up. The way the US does it is less brutal and obvious, but pretty much the same thing; old books are scrapped and forgotten. Formerly popular thinkers are memory holed or declared 'thought criminals' (pick your '-ist'). Their books are no longer taught in college, and the perspectives they represent are gone forever. Present day thinkers and reporters are given the same silent treatment on mainstream media which is obviously controlled by the narrow oligarchy which controls everything else. Same treatment is happening on youtube as China is doing; non-conforming perspectives are actively sought out and removed by censorious apparatchiks. Oh yeah, and now they're also sometimes denounced as "russian agents" as well -a pack of absurd, paranoid and Orwellian nonsense which makes anything the ChiComs say look like objective common sense. The US engages in ritual denunciation of itself for slavery and killing off the Indians. Somehow our most excellent international adventures, ridiculous military provocations, poisoning of the food chain, extractive slave economics of the native population and colonial control of half the population of the world is A-OK. For all I know, China engages in ritual denunciation of its pre-Maoist self as well. That doesn't mean they're not carefully controlling the narrative now.
- wybiral 8y ago
  That's not apples-for-apples. Yes, history and society are subject to shifts and bias. But do you think that there's a hidden branch of US government dictating which books are used or what words aren't allowed, carefully crafting this revised perception of our reality? Or is it just social effects that happen in all countries?
  - paraditedc 8y ago
    Luckily this was just recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816040
    - wybiral 8y ago
      Withholding information about military strategy or the operations of an intelligence agency to the press is one thing. Meticulous and widespread censoring of phrases like "rubber duckies" just because it might remind people of Tiananmen Square or "Winnie the Pooh" just because people mocked Xi Jinping is another thing.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- quxbar 8y ago
  My college education was pretty honest about the atrocities of the USA. I get to openly post about politics all day on facebook without any fear of reprisal. Pretty different from a country with a whole dictionary of secret codewords used to discuss politics and history. There is no 'both sides', there's just your self-pity - the people you call censorious apparatchiks are just people who don't respect your opinion. You mistake being unpopular for being persecuted, which is common for privileged engineering types like us.
  - xfs 8y ago
    The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. -Julian Assange

stevenwoo 8y ago

Arguably the Espionage Act could be interpreted and used to prosecute any speech that is not supportive of the US government and lately for any federal whistleblowers, it seems pretty incongruous with the First Amendment but the law has been supported by the Supreme Court multiple times and here we are.

i_am_nomad 8y ago
It’s true that Americans are pretty extremist about freedom of speech, but even they understand that speech in the service of actual espionage should be punished. Outside of that I’m unaware of how the Espionage Act has been used to suppress speech.
- dTal 8y ago
  Let me enlighten you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917#History

AzzieElbab 8y ago

"My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it." You cannot possibly be serious when taken scale and timeframes into account

benrbray 8y ago
About which part? The US has done some pretty terrible things (slavery, interment camps, destabilizing the middle east and south america). So you disagree that we're allowed to talk about it? Is there a government agency censoring HN comments?
- AzzieElbab 8y ago
  The things you listed wouldn't even top my list of horrible things the US have done. You can talk about them all you want. But if you have half a brain you should be able to them in context of time and scale and take a look at what else was going on in the world at the same time and how many people were actually effected. Saying that todays US is somehow comparable to todays China because of slavery doesn't make any sense whatsoever

dghughes 8y ago

I wouldn't be too quick to say that. A quick Google came back with words and phrases banned by the US government. It's federal employee who are ordered not to use the words and phrases not individuals, but chilling nonetheless. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/f503837a-e1cf-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.de422c2a7680 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-g... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-cli...

wybiral 8y ago
> "Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead." That sounds more like a branding guideline for employees than censorship of a topic. But, as you said, this doesn't apply to normal citizens and presumably is done so that the spokespeople seem like they're on the same page.
- chris_mc 8y ago
  No, that's clearly censorship. Climate change had a different contextual meaning than extreme weather. One indicates that the climate is on a path towards something different, the other indicates events outside the norm but no overall change. This is an attempt by the Trump administration to cover up the fact that humans are fucking ourselves, so that their corporate overlords may continue to reverse-Robinhood the masses.
  - wybiral 8y ago
    I'm not saying that I agree with it, but this is an agency with leaders who have a say in the wording that their employees use in public documents. It's not censorship, it's just stupid leadership and it's from ephemeral positions that our democracy can be used to reverse by putting people with sane policies in place.