9 ms·

I agree it's unfair, but when you defend something for moral reasons or claim to have a moral high ground, you should stick with it even if it's unfair, right?

I agree it's unfair, but when you defend something for moral reasons or claim to have a moral high ground, you should stick with it even if it's unfair, right? The West has always said that the Chinese bans to Western social media and tech companies were authoritarian and antidemocratic. How is this less so?

skissane 6y ago
> The West has always said that the Chinese bans to Western social media and tech companies were authoritarian and antidemocratic. How is this less so? Policy A: "Any social media platform that refuses to censor opinions the government doesn't like is banned" Policy B: "Foreign social media platforms are only allowed to operate in our country if our own social media platforms are allowed to operate on the same terms in theirs" Can you see why Policy A is antidemocratic but Policy B isn't? One reason why is that Policy B is viewpoint-neutral – the ban has nothing directly to do with what viewpoints the social media platform allows or disallows, it is simply demanding regulatory reciprocity ("We won't ban yours if you don't ban ours"). Whereas, in Policy A, the ban is part of the government trying to control which opinions are allowed to be expressed, which is anti-democratic. (I haven't heard a clear explanation from the Trump administration of what their reasons for banning TikTok are. It is possible those reasons include Policy B, it is possible those reasons are completely unrelated.)
- saimiam 6y ago
  I won't torture your POWs if you don't torture ours. I won't nationalize your assets in my country if you don't nationalize my assets in your country. I will ban your books if you ban mine. "I will x if you will also x" makes you reactionary and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf.
  - skissane 6y ago
    It is standard behaviour in international trade though. “If you ban our products from your country, we’ll ban your products from ours”. Suppose hypothetically, that the EU banned imports of Australian wine, why would it be “reactionary” for Australia to respond in kind by banning imports of EU wine?
    - schrodinger 6y ago
      It would definitely be reactionary, I think the real question is why would that be a bad thing?
    - hrktb 6y ago
      There is nothing positive coming from an aggressive situation anyway, but I’d wager the main issue is the reacting party is always getting hurt more than the other one. EU would ban Aussie wine only if the benefits overweights straight reciprocation. So Australia stating it will ban EU wines as a reaction just let’s the EU validate it’s worth it. If it’s not, no ban is set and nobody gets hurt. If it is, both bans are set but the EU comes out better if their calculations are right.
  - sturgill 6y ago
    “‘I will x if you will also x’ makes you reactionary and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf.” This is true to an extent, but I find it unpersuasive. Because it’s basically my main negotiating and parenting technique. I don’t bluff well or frequently. I prefer to lay out the options ahead of time (because I’ve already thought them through) so I can let the other party make an informed decision. “I will buy this widget for $X. Anything more than that and I will use your competitor / build it in-house.” “If you clean your room, we’ll get ice cream. Otherwise, no video games today.” “If you drop a nuclear bomb we will drop our nuclear bombs.” The catch is that you have to mean it. Which is why I don’t see any real value in bluffing in long-term relationships. We’ve all seen those parents who tell their kids “If you don’t stop doing X right now then Y” and everyone knows (especially the kid) that there will be no follow through. But predetermining your response doesn’t give away your agency. It’s simply stating in advance how you will respond to others agency in an effort to let them make an informed decision.
  - kiba 6y ago
    Then China will always win a game of chicken and our words mean less than nothing.
  - patmorgan23 6y ago
    Just because it's reactionary doesn't mean its not effective.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    "I will nuke you if you nuke us" is what's been keeping most of the planet at peace since 1945. > and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf Relinquishing control is a very effective negotiation tactic. If you can credibly lose agency in a given situation - precommit yourself to a course of action - this means the other party has all the control and all the responsibility. If, given your pre-committed response, one choice is bad for your opponent, they're essentially forced by you to take another one. Thomas Schelling wrote a whole book ("The Strategy of Conflict") about such scenarios. A toy example (I think it's even from the book): imagine we're both in cars, driving towards each other and playing chicken. Whoever veers off to avoid collision first loses. If you want to win for sure, all you have to do is to rip out your steering wheel and throw it out of the window - if I see that, my choices are suddenly reduced to "lose the game, or we both die". A real example is automated retaliatory strike systems that both sides of the Cold War worked on - strenghtening deterrence by ensuring a retaliatory strike will happen even if humans in charge change their minds.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dmch-1 6y ago
I defend free trade/market not for moral reasons but for efficiency reasons. But when something as big as China violates it, the efficiency breaks, and there is no point in sticking to it for moral reasons.
- eru 6y ago
  What makes you think so? The classic arguments for eg free trade suggest that even if the other countries decide to sink stones in their harbours, you still benefit from unilateral free trade. (And that's also why free trade agreements are a bit silly from an economic point of view.)
roenxi 6y ago
We're allowed to take a little more of the broader context into account - China is banning things because ideas might be spread that they don't like. People might spread fake news stories, like a genocide in Xianjiang. The US will read all your messages; but you can say what you like in them. The ban isn't for authoritarian reasons; it is a fairly pure economic/geopolitical play. You can say whatever crazy stuff you like as far as the government is concerned.
- orestarod 6y ago
  Until you can't.
- usrusr 6y ago
  The modern form of power stemming from controlling a social media platform doesn't lie in completely blocking out inconvenient information (old-fashioned censoring) or spreading that one official truth (Volksempfänger-age propaganda), it's the power of subtly augmenting some groups of voices while giving others less exposure. It's mostly a destructive power because the most reliable way to use it is to blow up harmless disagreements into crippling internal conflicts - and all without anyone noticing that they are being played. The present-day equivalent to the train that carried Lenin from Zürich to Petrograd would be a little tweak in a social feed visibility algorithm in some corporate codebase.
mam2 6y ago
> when you defend something for moral reasons or claim to have a moral high ground It was never a reason of moral. There are all sorts of gates like that in many us industries which favor us compagnies
esperent 6y ago
Context is important. When someone keeps playing dirty and you find yourself losing to them because of that, sometimes it's important to show that you can play dirty too.
- henriquemaia 6y ago
  I agree that this has tones of adjusting your moves to match those of your adversary. I just think that the losing side, when adopting similar moves, is not playing dirty per se. It's just leveling the field. You can only play foul if both players share, at least superficially, a similar moral framework.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. This ban is against something that's controlled by it. Bans per se aren't antidemocratic, we already have plenty of banned stuff. The only thing that can be antidemocratic is their purpose.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. Really? So why are there Apple stores in China? It seems like a rationalization to always see ourselves as the "good guys" no matter what. Every empire ever did. Playing devil's advocate, I can see the Chinese rationalizing their bans as defending their sovereignty against Western dominance since we have a long history of bullying China and other nations that don't toe the line. My point being, there's rationalizations you can make from their side too, which doesn't make their behavior correct. Just because you can find some kind of a rationale for banning TikTok doesn't mean it's not hypocritical, especially while we often like to claim to hold higher moral values.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    Or maybe exposing the Chinese population to to a tiny bit of critical thinking or anything not in line with CCP’s propaganda is what is feared, not necessarily bullying, don’t you think?
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      I am talking about how they may rationalize it, not what the actual goal is. Take the Iraq war. The goal was to further assert ourselves in the Middle East, settle old scores, signal to our official enemies we mean business and enrich a bunch of military contravtors. But the rationalization that I think made it possible for a lot of these people to sleep at night was things like defending the country, empowering women, bringing in democracy etc. These are different things. Also, as an aside, I may be wrong on this, but I think people sometimes underestimate the foothold of the CCP in mainland China and assume a coup would happen a week after YouTube was let in. I feel this is incredibly naive; I mean if you look at how in our democratic societies narratives are regularly constructed to strengthen the status quo, often by pretending that the 2 parties actually have major principled disagreements, while nothing fundamentally changes almost no matter who gets elected, to the point where there are studies showing that the majority of policies people in the U.S. are in favor of don't get enacted. Hong Kong is a bit different, because people there don't necessarily see themselves as having that much in common with mainland Chinese, but I don't think CCP would actually collapse if YouTube and Twitter were to be let in. I happen to think the bans have more to do with wanting to empower local companies, (which yes are more easily controllable too), so that there's a strong internal economy that would ultimately be able to withstand sanctions etc.
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
An effective method of dealing with strangers/new people is mirroring. You give a smiley face on first meeting, then mirror their response: smiley or frowny face. Also, countries aren't people and can't have friends. Countries have allies and opponents. This colors every interaction.
SXX 6y ago
No freedom to the enemies of freedom. China is openly show everyone that they'll censor and force state-backed monopolies in every area they have control over. There is nothing wrong regarding morals if means help to stop totalitarian system from spreading.
aww_dang 6y ago
In principle I believe in unilateral free trade, but idealism must be tempered against pragmatism in the practical sense. In the literal sense for a TikTok ban to be democratic it only has to be voted on. We can call it 'democratic' if a democratically elected politician can legally prohibit the app.
CydeWeys 6y ago
This gets right to the heart of the paradox of tolerance. When your country is tolerant of other countries' companies operating locally, but they aren't tolerant of the same, then you're going to eventually be overrun. You cannot defeat the intolerant through blanket tolerance; consequences and retaliation are necessary. To make it even simpler, tit-for-tat is a good strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma; always cooperate isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- bigpumpkin 6y ago
  Hah! Why doesn't the US ban the Nazi party or the KKK if it really cares about the Paradox of tolerance?
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Why doesn't the US ban the Nazi party or the KKK if it really cares about the Paradox of tolerance? Ideas versus actions and objects.
  - Finnucane 6y ago
    See also: Red Scare, 1950s, court cases related to.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    Because neither are numerous enough so as to constitute a legitimate threat. If we started seeing local governments having openly KKK or neo-Nazi majorities, the freedom of speech balance would substantially alter. First amendment rights in the US are typically circumscribed only via a requirement to show actual, existential harm.
    - musha68k 6y ago
      The problem is that historically this has been the case only when it was essentially too late. Death by a thousand cuts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality
enaaem 6y ago
The world isn’t black and white. Just different shades of grey. Some darker than others. You will find inconsistencies everywhere.
hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
As far as that scoreboard is concerned, the US has yet to be caught using applications to spy on its own people for the express purpose of automating who should receive “free” re-education.
ffggvv 6y ago
i don’t think there was any moral high ground there. it was just blind belief in “free trade” and globalism. but if only one side is engaging in free trade it’s just called being swindled
throwaway894345 6y ago
The US ostensibly isn’t banning TikTok to prevent its population from being exposed to foreign criticism, ideas, etc which might reflect badly on The Party. We know this because the US permits lots and lots of foreign media, applications, and websites while China restricts far, far more. None of this is to say that I think the executive action is a good idea, but there is a middle ground between “a bad idea” and “literally the same as the CCP”.
refurb 6y ago
The West has always said that the Chinese bans to Western social media and tech companies were authoritarian and antidemocratic. How is this less so? I’ve never heard of it described that way. I’ve heard it called “anticompetitive” or “protectionist”. I mean, the US bans Kinder Surprise eggs, but I wouldn’t call that “authoritarian”.

skissane 6y ago

> The West has always said that the Chinese bans to Western social media and tech companies were authoritarian and antidemocratic. How is this less so? Policy A: "Any social media platform that refuses to censor opinions the government doesn't like is banned" Policy B: "Foreign social media platforms are only allowed to operate in our country if our own social media platforms are allowed to operate on the same terms in theirs" Can you see why Policy A is antidemocratic but Policy B isn't? One reason why is that Policy B is viewpoint-neutral – the ban has nothing directly to do with what viewpoints the social media platform allows or disallows, it is simply demanding regulatory reciprocity ("We won't ban yours if you don't ban ours"). Whereas, in Policy A, the ban is part of the government trying to control which opinions are allowed to be expressed, which is anti-democratic. (I haven't heard a clear explanation from the Trump administration of what their reasons for banning TikTok are. It is possible those reasons include Policy B, it is possible those reasons are completely unrelated.)

saimiam 6y ago
I won't torture your POWs if you don't torture ours. I won't nationalize your assets in my country if you don't nationalize my assets in your country. I will ban your books if you ban mine. "I will x if you will also x" makes you reactionary and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf.
- skissane 6y ago
  It is standard behaviour in international trade though. “If you ban our products from your country, we’ll ban your products from ours”. Suppose hypothetically, that the EU banned imports of Australian wine, why would it be “reactionary” for Australia to respond in kind by banning imports of EU wine?
  - schrodinger 6y ago
    It would definitely be reactionary, I think the real question is why would that be a bad thing?
  - hrktb 6y ago
    There is nothing positive coming from an aggressive situation anyway, but I’d wager the main issue is the reacting party is always getting hurt more than the other one. EU would ban Aussie wine only if the benefits overweights straight reciprocation. So Australia stating it will ban EU wines as a reaction just let’s the EU validate it’s worth it. If it’s not, no ban is set and nobody gets hurt. If it is, both bans are set but the EU comes out better if their calculations are right.
- sturgill 6y ago
  “‘I will x if you will also x’ makes you reactionary and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf.” This is true to an extent, but I find it unpersuasive. Because it’s basically my main negotiating and parenting technique. I don’t bluff well or frequently. I prefer to lay out the options ahead of time (because I’ve already thought them through) so I can let the other party make an informed decision. “I will buy this widget for $X. Anything more than that and I will use your competitor / build it in-house.” “If you clean your room, we’ll get ice cream. Otherwise, no video games today.” “If you drop a nuclear bomb we will drop our nuclear bombs.” The catch is that you have to mean it. Which is why I don’t see any real value in bluffing in long-term relationships. We’ve all seen those parents who tell their kids “If you don’t stop doing X right now then Y” and everyone knows (especially the kid) that there will be no follow through. But predetermining your response doesn’t give away your agency. It’s simply stating in advance how you will respond to others agency in an effort to let them make an informed decision.
- kiba 6y ago
  Then China will always win a game of chicken and our words mean less than nothing.
- patmorgan23 6y ago
  Just because it's reactionary doesn't mean its not effective.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  "I will nuke you if you nuke us" is what's been keeping most of the planet at peace since 1945. > and gives agency to someone else to act on your behalf Relinquishing control is a very effective negotiation tactic. If you can credibly lose agency in a given situation - precommit yourself to a course of action - this means the other party has all the control and all the responsibility. If, given your pre-committed response, one choice is bad for your opponent, they're essentially forced by you to take another one. Thomas Schelling wrote a whole book ("The Strategy of Conflict") about such scenarios. A toy example (I think it's even from the book): imagine we're both in cars, driving towards each other and playing chicken. Whoever veers off to avoid collision first loses. If you want to win for sure, all you have to do is to rip out your steering wheel and throw it out of the window - if I see that, my choices are suddenly reduced to "lose the game, or we both die". A real example is automated retaliatory strike systems that both sides of the Cold War worked on - strenghtening deterrence by ensuring a retaliatory strike will happen even if humans in charge change their minds.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dmch-1 6y ago

I defend free trade/market not for moral reasons but for efficiency reasons. But when something as big as China violates it, the efficiency breaks, and there is no point in sticking to it for moral reasons.

eru 6y ago
What makes you think so? The classic arguments for eg free trade suggest that even if the other countries decide to sink stones in their harbours, you still benefit from unilateral free trade. (And that's also why free trade agreements are a bit silly from an economic point of view.)

roenxi 6y ago

We're allowed to take a little more of the broader context into account - China is banning things because ideas might be spread that they don't like. People might spread fake news stories, like a genocide in Xianjiang. The US will read all your messages; but you can say what you like in them. The ban isn't for authoritarian reasons; it is a fairly pure economic/geopolitical play. You can say whatever crazy stuff you like as far as the government is concerned.

orestarod 6y ago
Until you can't.
usrusr 6y ago
The modern form of power stemming from controlling a social media platform doesn't lie in completely blocking out inconvenient information (old-fashioned censoring) or spreading that one official truth (Volksempfänger-age propaganda), it's the power of subtly augmenting some groups of voices while giving others less exposure. It's mostly a destructive power because the most reliable way to use it is to blow up harmless disagreements into crippling internal conflicts - and all without anyone noticing that they are being played. The present-day equivalent to the train that carried Lenin from Zürich to Petrograd would be a little tweak in a social feed visibility algorithm in some corporate codebase.

mam2 6y ago

> when you defend something for moral reasons or claim to have a moral high ground It was never a reason of moral. There are all sorts of gates like that in many us industries which favor us compagnies

esperent 6y ago

Context is important. When someone keeps playing dirty and you find yourself losing to them because of that, sometimes it's important to show that you can play dirty too.

henriquemaia 6y ago
I agree that this has tones of adjusting your moves to match those of your adversary. I just think that the losing side, when adopting similar moves, is not playing dirty per se. It's just leveling the field. You can only play foul if both players share, at least superficially, a similar moral framework.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. This ban is against something that's controlled by it. Bans per se aren't antidemocratic, we already have plenty of banned stuff. The only thing that can be antidemocratic is their purpose.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. Really? So why are there Apple stores in China? It seems like a rationalization to always see ourselves as the "good guys" no matter what. Every empire ever did. Playing devil's advocate, I can see the Chinese rationalizing their bans as defending their sovereignty against Western dominance since we have a long history of bullying China and other nations that don't toe the line. My point being, there's rationalizations you can make from their side too, which doesn't make their behavior correct. Just because you can find some kind of a rationale for banning TikTok doesn't mean it's not hypocritical, especially while we often like to claim to hold higher moral values.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Or maybe exposing the Chinese population to to a tiny bit of critical thinking or anything not in line with CCP’s propaganda is what is feared, not necessarily bullying, don’t you think?
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    I am talking about how they may rationalize it, not what the actual goal is. Take the Iraq war. The goal was to further assert ourselves in the Middle East, settle old scores, signal to our official enemies we mean business and enrich a bunch of military contravtors. But the rationalization that I think made it possible for a lot of these people to sleep at night was things like defending the country, empowering women, bringing in democracy etc. These are different things. Also, as an aside, I may be wrong on this, but I think people sometimes underestimate the foothold of the CCP in mainland China and assume a coup would happen a week after YouTube was let in. I feel this is incredibly naive; I mean if you look at how in our democratic societies narratives are regularly constructed to strengthen the status quo, often by pretending that the 2 parties actually have major principled disagreements, while nothing fundamentally changes almost no matter who gets elected, to the point where there are studies showing that the majority of policies people in the U.S. are in favor of don't get enacted. Hong Kong is a bit different, because people there don't necessarily see themselves as having that much in common with mainland Chinese, but I don't think CCP would actually collapse if YouTube and Twitter were to be let in. I happen to think the bans have more to do with wanting to empower local companies, (which yes are more easily controllable too), so that there's a strong internal economy that would ultimately be able to withstand sanctions etc.

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

An effective method of dealing with strangers/new people is mirroring. You give a smiley face on first meeting, then mirror their response: smiley or frowny face. Also, countries aren't people and can't have friends. Countries have allies and opponents. This colors every interaction.

SXX 6y ago

No freedom to the enemies of freedom. China is openly show everyone that they'll censor and force state-backed monopolies in every area they have control over. There is nothing wrong regarding morals if means help to stop totalitarian system from spreading.

aww_dang 6y ago

In principle I believe in unilateral free trade, but idealism must be tempered against pragmatism in the practical sense. In the literal sense for a TikTok ban to be democratic it only has to be voted on. We can call it 'democratic' if a democratically elected politician can legally prohibit the app.

CydeWeys 6y ago

This gets right to the heart of the paradox of tolerance. When your country is tolerant of other countries' companies operating locally, but they aren't tolerant of the same, then you're going to eventually be overrun. You cannot defeat the intolerant through blanket tolerance; consequences and retaliation are necessary. To make it even simpler, tit-for-tat is a good strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma; always cooperate isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

bigpumpkin 6y ago
Hah! Why doesn't the US ban the Nazi party or the KKK if it really cares about the Paradox of tolerance?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Why doesn't the US ban the Nazi party or the KKK if it really cares about the Paradox of tolerance? Ideas versus actions and objects.
- Finnucane 6y ago
  See also: Red Scare, 1950s, court cases related to.
- ethbro 6y ago
  Because neither are numerous enough so as to constitute a legitimate threat. If we started seeing local governments having openly KKK or neo-Nazi majorities, the freedom of speech balance would substantially alter. First amendment rights in the US are typically circumscribed only via a requirement to show actual, existential harm.
  - musha68k 6y ago
    The problem is that historically this has been the case only when it was essentially too late. Death by a thousand cuts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality

enaaem 6y ago

The world isn’t black and white. Just different shades of grey. Some darker than others. You will find inconsistencies everywhere.

hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago

As far as that scoreboard is concerned, the US has yet to be caught using applications to spy on its own people for the express purpose of automating who should receive “free” re-education.

ffggvv 6y ago

i don’t think there was any moral high ground there. it was just blind belief in “free trade” and globalism. but if only one side is engaging in free trade it’s just called being swindled

throwaway894345 6y ago

The US ostensibly isn’t banning TikTok to prevent its population from being exposed to foreign criticism, ideas, etc which might reflect badly on The Party. We know this because the US permits lots and lots of foreign media, applications, and websites while China restricts far, far more. None of this is to say that I think the executive action is a good idea, but there is a middle ground between “a bad idea” and “literally the same as the CCP”.

refurb 6y ago

The West has always said that the Chinese bans to Western social media and tech companies were authoritarian and antidemocratic. How is this less so? I’ve never heard of it described that way. I’ve heard it called “anticompetitive” or “protectionist”. I mean, the US bans Kinder Surprise eggs, but I wouldn’t call that “authoritarian”.