4 ms·
Imagine that the war of 1812 had resulted a complete British/Canadian conquest of the US, which lasted for the most of the 19th century. Then imagine that Flori
by oconnor663 7y ago
Imagine that the war of 1812 had resulted a complete British/Canadian conquest of the US, which lasted for the most of the 19th century. Then imagine that Florida had successfully seceded from the US after WWII and joined the Soviet Union, along with all of Canada. Then finally imagine that the Soviet Union won the Cold War and has been the sole world superpower for the last thirty years.
How would we feel, in that world, if the US government wanted to censor people mentioning Florida? Of course there would be complicated questions about whether that censorship was ethical or helpful, and about the government's real motivations for proposing it. But I think it would be clear to everyone involved that "kindergarten levels of pettiness" wasn't the right starting point for understanding those motivations.
- frozenport 7y agoNot complicated, we've never sensored the names of our enemies, at all.
- Analemma_ 7y agoTell your bosses at the Ministry of Culture that trying to use Britain and the United States as analogies to the situation with Taiwan is going to backfire on you. At this point, Taiwan is fully-independent with its own national identity, and so saying they need to reunify with China is as ridiculous as asking Americans to "reunify" with the UK. It's not gonna happen, at least not voluntarily.
- yellowarchangel 7y agoI don't think censoring facts is ever anything but black and white. The fact that Taiwan exists, Hong Kong exists, Falun Gong, Tibet... These are all real things. There shouldn't ever be a reason to hide the fact that they exist no matter if todays reality wasn't todays reality.
- yourbandsucks 7y agoFacts are rarely black and white. Look at USA reporting about Venezuela or Cuba. It's factual, yet it also implicitly takes sides. Which facts? How are they presented?
- howhigh12323 7y agoYou are confusing perspective with facts. A cup is filled with water, you can say its half empty or half full. The cup has water is a fact. Whether its half empty or half full is perspective. But at the end of the day, there is still water in the cup.
- yourbandsucks 7y agoI'm relating perspective to facts. Palestine has a UN seat, Taiwan doesn't. Taiwan has control of their territory, Palestine doesn't. Which one is more 'a country'?
- oconnor663 7y agoI mean, yes, I'm an American and it's no surprise to anyone that I think censoring speech is deeply problematic. (I think telling people how much money they're allowed to spend on political ads is also problematic, though most Americans seems to be cool with that restriction. It's really hard to draw black and white lines when you get into the details.) But when I see other people (in China, in Europe, really in most places that aren't the US) supporting tighter speech restrictions than we do, I understand that that's for some reason other than them being assholes, or childish, or hypersensitive, or whatever. I probably wouldn't like their reasons if I fully understood them, but I also accept that being an American means I don't fully understand them. [As a side note not directed at you but at some others in this thread, it sounds like trying to draw this distinction gets me labeled as some kind of communist shill. What the fuck ever.]
- 7u5432throw 7y agoExactly. China’s reaction is far from petty. They had a civil war and the other side fled to Taiwan. This is a major issue for China.
- Apocryphon 7y agoThis is an incredibly tortured alternate history metaphor. A much simpler real world analogy would be the DPRK forcing censorship of the South Korean flag, or the ROK doing the same to North Korea. Or something involving Israel and Iran. Or India and Pakistan.