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It's a bit ironic how we are constantly reminded that china isn't a democracy because they have censorship, while we are free and democratic and don't have cens

• mda 2y ago
  One of them is 100 times more extensive. Ideal is to have none, but lets not pretend that magnitude and severity is not relevant.
  • cies 2y ago
    Relevant to the people living in it. Not relevant to the ideals set forth, which our moderns free democracies are based on. This is fundamental, so it's actually worse than when it happens in China.
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      Not really. Compromise and nuance have always been necessary features of democracies. This has also frequently been seized upon by autocratic apologists with this framing (“it’s actually worse here because of our idealism!”) and yet autocracies remain reliably worse off than democracies in practice.
      • guappa 2y ago
        Every country calls their enemy "undemocratic"
        • llamaimperative 2y ago
          Stunningly, not all of them are correct. It’s actually not a sign of intelligence or honesty to be able to squint so hard that you see no meaningful differences between e.g. the US and Russia/Iran/China. It’s just called closing your eyes.
          • guappa 2y ago
            Shall we talk about what % of the population is imprisoned in all the countries you mentioned?
            • llamaimperative 2y ago
              Happy to once you explain clearly how that number is relevant to whether a country is democratic or not. Or are you just trying to change the topic?
              • mistermann 2y ago
                Did American citizens directly vote for the level of imprisonment in the country? The game is rigged: any political system that allows any voting at all can be "accurately" described as "being democratic", and this (especially when combined with non-stop supplemental propaganda) is more than adequate to satisfy the heuristic based thinking of most people (and to pull the wool over their eyes). Noteworthy: who sets educational curriculum (which is what enables people to think skilfully about such things) in schools in "democracies"? How likely does it seem that among thousands of people over decades, no one connected to the department of education noticed that the basic skills for practicing critical thinking are not contained within K-12 curriculum?
                • cies 2y ago
                  Democratic, rules based order, freedom: all words used to paint oneself in the good and others in the back. They barely have meaning in political discourse nowadays.
                  • llamaimperative 2y ago
                    Go to Qatar and strike up a conversation like the ones that are had millions of times per day in the US about how awful/incompetent/evil/illegitimate the government is. It's you who is degrading the meaning of these things. You can go experience the difference for yourself.
        • cies 2y ago
          I was in China, they called democracy "hopelessly inefficient, will not work for a large population like ours". What you describe is mostly western/NATO rhetoric, after which they can influence the election (which drives them to tears when it supposedly happens back home).
• lupusreal 2y ago
  > china isn't a democracy because they have censorship, What the fuck even is this? That's like saying Pizza Hut isn't a hamburger shop because they don't sell french fries. They're not, but that's not the reason!
  • raxxorraxor 2y ago
    A democracy is dependent on people having access to information. Free information is a direct requirement of any democracy. It just isn't the only requirement of course.
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      > It just isn't the only requirement of course. Right, and it's far from the only one the PRC is lacking. If a tyrannical dictatorship hypothetically permitted free speech, it wouldn't be a democracy. The most conspicuous lacking feature of a democracy in the PRC is the lack of legal competing parties and elections, so it's strange to hear that China isn't a democracy because they don't have free speech. Incidental to that, free speech as a qualification of democracy is less than cut and dry; every democratic country recognizes some limits to free speech, be that as simple as libel and slander laws, wartime censorship (as America had during WW2), or even hate speech laws like most of the democracies other than America have. If absolute free speech is a prerequisite for having a democracy, then no democracy exists. If you concede some limits, then we're just quibbling the details. Probably, America "" banning"" tiktok still qualifies as having free speech since it's still legal for Americans and American media companies to say nearly anything they like, limited mostly just by slander and libel laws (e.g. infowars getting sued for saying Sandy Hook didn't happen.) Certainly on the spectrum of speech freeness, America is far further on the free side than the PRC where you can get your organs harvested for saying that the government should be replaced. The supposed irony guappa was talking about up-thread is farcical, you have to be out of your mind to think America and China are even remotely close to each other on the speech freeness spectrum.
      • raxxorraxor 2y ago
        No tyrannical dictatorship ever permitted free speech because it would pose an immediate threat to their rule. Competing parties is an indication of a working democracy. Theoretically everyone could agree with a single party to rule. Edge case and very unlikely of course. But there is a reason freedom of opinion is a human right instead of the freedom to have multiple political factions. It isn't comparable. In contrast to that freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental requirement. For parties forming in the first place for that matter. It is a right that can be abused and different countries deal differently with that problem, although the technicalities should be very carefully considered here. I don't believe TikTok is an essential part to freedom of speech, but it could very well suppress voices otherwise unheard. Even if I disagree with most of them, there is a restriction. I do believe the decision against it is populist drivel though and I agree that there is a stark difference between China and the US in offering freedoms. China banning foreign platforms is a sign of weakness in their convictions and they are afraid that different ideas would challenge their order.
• mrtksn 2y ago
  I’m also quite concerned about the Western world adopting the Chinese style of governance but censorship at wartime is very different from censorship at peace time. False information leading to spreading misguided ideas is deadly at wartime because there is no time to address it. I definitely don’t support Italy blocking websites or the US blocking apps.
  • logicchains 2y ago
    >I’m also quite concerned about the Western world adopting the Chinese style of governance but censorship at wartime is very different from censorship at peace time If you allow this then the government will just forever find excuses to be at war.
    • mrtksn 2y ago
      We live in a broken world, there are no perfect solutions. But I would argue that staying alive comes as a primary priority.
      • guappa 2y ago
        Ah yes the "we must kill them, to stay alive" narrative. It has never been abused in the whole history of mankind.
        • mrtksn 2y ago
          What are you even talking about? Of course those attacked must kill the attackers to stay alive.
  • cpursley 2y ago
    What about all the misleading news (i.e., positive spin) in the Western world's "free press" that lead to many believing that Ukraine had a chance for a counter offensive (against even basic military thinking and logic). Didn't that lead to unnecessary suffering and deaths during war time (vs say an alternative, beefing up defense lines)? That's just a random recent example. Another older one is the the media going nuts over "WMDs", leading to an unnecessary US invasion and millions of deaths. My point being is that even free press can spread bad ideas and narratives - in fact, it frequently does. And those ideas should be able to be challenged, at any time, by any source.
• tenlp 2y ago
  In fact, a series of Western media including the BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc. all have offices in China.... and you can also easily access Western media websites through VPN and other methods which are uncensored
  • gravescale 2y ago
    VPNs increasingly don't work well, however, it's not like they completely turn a blind eye. It's some kind of statistical thing that drops connections that "look wierd" that can interfere with even quite obfuscated VPNs.
    • tenlp 2y ago
      yeah, actually what I told 'VPN' is also included like SS/SSR/V2Ray/Xray/Trojan, which is easily gotten, and smooth link and you can even have a HK phone number and used the no GFW network in China.
• AlecSchueler 2y ago
  In Germany they can't publicly gather to protest Israel's actions either, not legally anyway. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/26/complete-censorship-germanys-palestinian-diaspora-fights-crackdown https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/26/complete-censo...
  • meijer 2y ago
    There are regular pro Palestine protests in my German hometown. And they do condemn Israel's actions.
    • AlecSchueler 2y ago
      I know some people who are regularly protesting in Germany also, but my understanding is that they knowingly break the law in doing so. Is this not correct?
      • hnbad 2y ago
        It's complicated. Germany has pretty strict laws against "incitement of hatred". Additionally it's illegal to deface, damage or destroy a foreign flag. Also demonstrations and protests need to be registered in advance with proof of proper security and safety measures. Germany is also very biased in favor of Israel and has (like the US) adopted the stance that an attack on Israel is an attack on Judaism. This has led to Jewish anti-Israel protestors being arrested. In theory it is possible to have a "spontaneous" protest without leaders but in practice this means the police will designate the loudest persons in the crowd as leaders and claim that they organized a protest without a permit and arrest them for that. Also the political bias favoring Israel means pro-Israel counter-protestors are likely to be tolerated more than anti-Israel protests. And of course anti-genocide is conflated with anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, again like in the US. But yes, most political protests are illegal because they are not formally organized with the authorities (and even with organized protests you often have break-out protests deviating from the permitted route/location or overstaying). From personal experience I can tell you though that unless the police can pin anything on you (e.g. trespassing, resisting arrest, "attacking a police officer"[0]) this usually only ends up with the police roughing you up a bit maybe and then recording your identity before dropping you off somewhere else with a temporary restraining order. [0]: This is worth mentioning because it explains the low police numbers for injured protestors in Lüzerath compared with the video evidence of police charging unarmed protestors: being injured by a police officer is considered evidence for attacking a police officer as unless there is evidence for the police officer doing anything wrong the assumption is that they followed the guidelines for escalating force, i.e. they must have had a good reason. It's also worth mentioning that in many places riot cops do not have any visible unique identification so reporting any claim of police brutality at a protest is usually fruitless as the alleged perp can not uniquely be identified and you need an individual person to accuse. Protest medics thus have stopped giving detailed statistics as merely keeping a tally would help the police in tracking down "suspects" by visiting the nearby hospitals (which they did e.g. after Lüzerath). So tl;dr: depending on your demographic, your cause and which police you end up being surrounded by, it's relatively safe to take part in an illegal protest in Germany as long as they can't prove you did anything illegal and don't get hurt.
• _heimdall 2y ago
  Freedom and democracy are luxuries of peacetime, unfortunately. Fear does terrible things to many people. When the guns come out, leaders that previously were the most staunch supporters of freedom will file them away and promise to reinstate them when the war is "won".
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  China agrees that it's not a democracy. They don't even have sham elections on the national level.
• cutemonster 2y ago
  > china isn't a democracy because they have censorship You got that wrong. The reason China is not a democracy, is instead that it is a dictatorship, that's why it's not a democracy. Democracies can have censorship, there's no contradiction. (Although less common.) For example, IMO it's good to censor some of Putin's manipulation, because most people are dangerously easy to fool. It's a mistake to let an enemy state broadcast their psychological warfare unhindered.