This thought-terminating cliche is getting so tired. You may as well just say “let’s just agree to disagree”.
It’s telling that this cliche is most often applied when western whataboutism is correctly called out, and all it does is serve to legitimize the act of manufacturing consent against China.
USA invents credit score way back in the 50s
credit score is immediately used to pull off the most calculatingly misogynistic, racist, and classist financial enforcement in modern history.
china implements a technically similar system that aims not to control working people’s financial agency, but to strengthen public trust.
the west immediately spins up the presses and releases dozens of hit pieces a year that manufacture consent against China by portraying the Chinese social credit system as an orwellian nightmare that will rip a child out of their parent’s home if the household spends too much time on videos games.
leftists identify this whataboutism and correctly call it out
liberals drop one of their various thought-terminating cliches to (not so) subtly bolster the western narrative - thus manufacturing consent against China.
You’ve been effortlessly oriented by the State Department and its various propaganda apparatus.
Brother i don’t want to live in a country that scores my social media nor one that scores my credit. I have the right to not want either of those things
I’m still going to engage with you despite you not engaging with any part of my comment…
i don’t want to live in a country that scores [me]. I have the right to not want [that].
You sure do have that right. Your right to not want that is just dandy. However, Chinese people, by and large, do support their implementation of the social credit system. The Chinese people are developing their vision of socialism. For you to personally not like certain features of Chinese socialism is fine and dandy. But to condemn the Chinese for some aspect of their development of socialism that enjoys high support is chauvinistic of you.
Since when does having a “good behaviour score” have anything to do with socialism? Seriously wtf is this revisionism? It’s gotten so bad that so called “Marxists” accept any nonsense as long as it has a hammer and sickle on its flag.
What is wrong with you people? Does anyone even read anymore?
Oy, both of you are acting like the social credit score is real. It’s not. China implemented a social credit score for businesses based on how much harm they were doing to society and some provinces ran limited experiments with individuals years ago. It went very poorly and the government, being democratic, responded to the people and ended the pilots.
There’s another credit score that Alibaba offers which is opt-in only and it tracks your financial behavior (paying on time, paying back debts, not over borrowing in a short time period, etc) and it’s used to give financial incentives and discounts, but again is opt-in only.
You’re arguing the morality and alignment of something that only exists in Western propaganda. Read something, I am begging you.
Not necessarily. You can consider two things and decide that none of them are good. You don’t know how much I considered both systems. You’re just guessing and are mad that I don’ share your opinion.
You’ve been effortlessly oriented by the State Department and its various propaganda apparatus.
Can you explain to me, how I’m propagandized by a foreign government when I’m not cheering on the policies of their opponent?
I’m not taking any sides on this conflict, because it’s not my conflict. I’m a socialist… Let me assure you that my fundamental critique of the chinese state apparatus doesn’t really align too much with the US state propaganda.
That you critique China without researching it is aligned with the US State Dept. That you share lies about China (e.g. the social credit score) is aligned with the state department. That you don’t think there’s anything to discuss positively about the Chinese project aligns with the state department.
You said “you don’t know how much I considerer both systems” in another comment.
That’s pretty much all the back up one needs.
The social credit system in China does not apply to individuals. It was originally designed for businesses. A limited pilot in certain locales was applied to individuals. That pilot program was shutdown in 2019.
So sure, go ahead and consider both systems that actually really exist. Go ahead and claim that both things can be bad. Keep on pretending!
If that’s all you need to accept a wild fucking guess: you do you.
Go ahead and claim that both things can be bad.
Cool, I will.
Keep on pretending!
… that two things can be bad at the same time? Are you claiming that I “pretend” that malaria and the flu are both bad and actually one of them is great?
I am claiming that you pretend malaria and bad humors are both bad. One exists. The other doesn’t. You don’t seem to have the willingness to acknowledge that. The social credit score in China that effects individuals does not exist. Sure. You can say both the US credit scoring system and the nonexistent Chinese personal social credit score are bad, but that would be foolish.
You could be saying that the US credit score system and the Chinese social credit score that is used to manage negative externalities of businesses are both bad, but I would disagree with you.
But I am pretty sure you don’t know that the social credit score for individuals does not exist.
If you believe China’s social credit system is a good way to “strengthen public trust” then I want to know how you feel about people like Xu Xiaodong, whose social credit was destroyed for exposing fake martial artists and refusing to apologize to them.
If you violate a court order in my country you get sent to prison. China is so progressive that you aren’t even put under house arrest for the same offense.
The Chinese government ended the pilot programs for social credit scores for individuals in 2019 because the Chinese people didn’t want it, so Xu Xiaodong is likely one of those examples where a local government running their implementation of the pilot overreached and the central government, responding to the will of the people, ended it.
I like that you brought up an example that can be analyzed. The court ordered him to apologize and he didn’t follow through, there has to be some consequence to disobeying a judge. But it seems to me they could benefit from less hegemonic judges.
No because France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and Germany are all problematic in the same ways, as are their colonies, former colonies, contributions to the body of work (like racism), and collaboration with the problems of today (Third Reich, NATO, etc). We could even include more European nations in the list for these same reasons.
It doesn’t say it’s voluntary, it says there were voluntary pilot programs within the larger initiative, which, as far as I can tell, is not voluntary.
Also, there can be harsh penalties including being put on blacklists that prevent you from traveling or your children from receiving education.
I don’t get it either. The west is an imperialist death machine and capitalism is taking down the whole biosphere in its death throes. Instead of looking at China and seeing signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer metastasizing in its government tankies stop at “they oppose the west” and give them a pass rather than realizing that their system is fundamentally compromised as well. If they believe a state is necessary to achieve what they consider true socialism then have some standards beyond “opposes the west” and stop hand waving the suicide nets at the Foxconn iPhone factory and the totally not concentration camps in Xinjiang. If anarchist theory involved caging people behind barbed wire, conducting mass censorship and surveillance, and allowing the existence of something so beyond the pale such as billionaires I would never have even considered it as an ideology much less a hill to die on.
signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer
China accounts for 75% of poverty alleviation globally
China has not dropped any bomb in 36 years.
China invented the social credit system in response to dairy producers cutting corners and poisoning people. It was punishing profit seekers that harmed the people. It then ran a limited experiment with some local governments to apply it to people. It did not go well, and the democratic will of the people was that the program should end, so it did.
China’s opposition to the West is a bare minimum requirement. The alternative is an integration with the West that subordinates the needs of the people to the needs of the Western elite. It doesn’t stop there, but it’s a necessary prerequisite.
Once that bar has been cleared, the next problem becomes one of defending against Western interference. One cannot be materially opposed to the West and not materially capable of defending against the West. So the second bar is whether the nation is capable of defending against the West. China is clearing this bar as well, but it includes authoritarian behaviors in order to stop covet operations. There is currently no known way to stop covert ops without use of authority.
From there each individual thing you want to discuss needs to be discussed on detail, but the overall picture is one of separating from the imperialist cancer and maintaining that separation and an attempt to build a space for healthier growth for which there are no models and there are not successful experiments that can be drawn from, which means creating sufficient space for experimenting and that means sufficient space for doing it wrong, and likey doing it wrong more often than doing it right for a significant period of time. (Looking at Mao)
No, tankies don’t see the same imperial cancer because it clearly isn’t the same imperial cancer
I get that it isn’t the exact same imperialist cancer but it is there and growing and will end up with similar results. Western imperialism in the 20th and 21st century is economic coercion backed by (primarily US) power projection. The Chinese lack the ability to project military power globally at this point but they have started to spread their economic hegemony to the global south. They are actively building up their naval power, thus improving their ability to project power globally. With the active abdication/eradication of US soft power by the Trump regime China has started to fill the void as any rational actor that wants to be a global superpower would. That is the imperialist cancer I maintain is growing in China, it is implemented in a different order and wears a different ideological cloak but the outcome will essentially the same. We’ll know for sure in a decade or two.
As for surveillance, I understand why a nation state not aligned with western capitalism would feel the need to defend itself against the CIA and its ilk. I don’t like it and don’t agree with it on a moral level but intellectually I can understand why Cuba feels the need to have its security state. China’s surveillance state is on a different level. The “Great Firewall” got thoroughly infiltrated by a group with state level capabilities and they published all of the exfil’d data. Just on a technical level the amount of effort from all sectors of the Chinese state (Academic, Military, Corporate, Intelligence) to restrict access to information is staggering. Their internal censorship is also above and beyond what can be reasonably be explained as hardening against CIA propaganda. We’ve seen corporate influenced algorithmic behavior modification over the last few years with the rise of “unalived” instead of killed or “PDF File” instead of pedophile. It is immaterial if there are any consequences beyond having a post deleted under their current internal censorship program, for most people the threat of getting a post deleted is enough to modify behavior and speech.
I’ve seen in a few places in this thread that the social credit score was a pilot program that has been discontinued. I don’t trust governments and corps to be honest if there is data to be harvested but lets say they really did discontinue the program. I can all but guarantee you that a mountain of data was collected and is still being analyzed, the source code and infrastructure plans still exist, and any modifications to physical and digital infrastructure are still in place. Governments do not give up power or control willingly without a way to trivially undo the changes. There is still infrastructure from the FBI’s Carnivore/Omnivore program in most ISPs and almost all the world’s government are unwilling to move away from the legacy PSTN standards from the 70’s because of the ease of SS7 based surveillance. The Chinese literally chose to use a variant with these vulnerabilities despite the opportunity to innovate a new secure standard.
Let’s imagine a glorious future where China is the world’s sole superpower. The world is living in a state socialist golden age. Now is the time to end the dictatorship of the proletariat and fulfill the promise of full communism. Based on all of human history what are the chances that the President for Life will make a speech to the Politburo dissolving the government, ordering the military to lay down their rifles and take up a factory or farming job, the political elite to leave their positions of wealth and privilege, and the state corp C-Suite to toss the factory keys to the nearest machinist on their way to their new life of working a collective farm? Governments and the craven ghouls who control them never give up power willingly. That is the fatal flaw of state socialism or for that matter any state. Human nature, especially the nature of humans that desire power over others, will almost always prevail over their espoused ideology when faced with the chance of losing their power and privilege.
i keep saying i want something fundamentally different not just aesthetically different. that tends to get me called “typical lib” even though i think the liberal project of capital is what got us here
It’s just brain-dead campism. Far from any proper application of Marxist theory. A lazy way of analyzing politics. It’s the same reason they support Russia even though they’re the same as the US
Two things can be bad at the same time.
Yes that seems to be the point of the post
Not if you look at OP’s other comments.
Nope, that’s literally the point of the post.
Something someone who doesn’t condone a system apparently says. /s
Oh, then you’re just not very good at conveying that it seems
I didn’t make the meme believe it or not.
“I didn’t make it, I just posted it and added a comment and everyone is misinterpreting it and reading into it”
Cool story.
This thought-terminating cliche is getting so tired. You may as well just say “let’s just agree to disagree”.
It’s telling that this cliche is most often applied when western whataboutism is correctly called out, and all it does is serve to legitimize the act of manufacturing consent against China.
You’ve been effortlessly oriented by the State Department and its various propaganda apparatus.
Brother i don’t want to live in a country that scores my social media nor one that scores my credit. I have the right to not want either of those things
…
I’m still going to engage with you despite you not engaging with any part of my comment…
You sure do have that right. Your right to not want that is just dandy. However, Chinese people, by and large, do support their implementation of the social credit system. The Chinese people are developing their vision of socialism. For you to personally not like certain features of Chinese socialism is fine and dandy. But to condemn the Chinese for some aspect of their development of socialism that enjoys high support is chauvinistic of you.
Since when does having a “good behaviour score” have anything to do with socialism? Seriously wtf is this revisionism? It’s gotten so bad that so called “Marxists” accept any nonsense as long as it has a hammer and sickle on its flag.
What is wrong with you people? Does anyone even read anymore?
Oy, both of you are acting like the social credit score is real. It’s not. China implemented a social credit score for businesses based on how much harm they were doing to society and some provinces ran limited experiments with individuals years ago. It went very poorly and the government, being democratic, responded to the people and ended the pilots.
There’s another credit score that Alibaba offers which is opt-in only and it tracks your financial behavior (paying on time, paying back debts, not over borrowing in a short time period, etc) and it’s used to give financial incentives and discounts, but again is opt-in only.
You’re arguing the morality and alignment of something that only exists in Western propaganda. Read something, I am begging you.
How is it thought terminating to consider two different things bad at the same time?
because you don’t actually consider them; you just assume they are
Not necessarily. You can consider two things and decide that none of them are good. You don’t know how much I considered both systems. You’re just guessing and are mad that I don’ share your opinion.
yeah, you’re right, i was assuming too :)
I really don’t know what you are trying to say here
Can you explain to me, how I’m propagandized by a foreign government when I’m not cheering on the policies of their opponent?
I’m not taking any sides on this conflict, because it’s not my conflict. I’m a socialist… Let me assure you that my fundamental critique of the chinese state apparatus doesn’t really align too much with the US state propaganda.
That you critique China without researching it is aligned with the US State Dept. That you share lies about China (e.g. the social credit score) is aligned with the state department. That you don’t think there’s anything to discuss positively about the Chinese project aligns with the state department.
So not liking something from China automatically means I didn’t “research” it? Interesting. /s
Care to back up that bold claim?
Sure you’re not talking about someone else?
You said “you don’t know how much I considerer both systems” in another comment.
That’s pretty much all the back up one needs.
The social credit system in China does not apply to individuals. It was originally designed for businesses. A limited pilot in certain locales was applied to individuals. That pilot program was shutdown in 2019.
So sure, go ahead and consider both systems that actually really exist. Go ahead and claim that both things can be bad. Keep on pretending!
If that’s all you need to accept a wild fucking guess: you do you.
Cool, I will.
… that two things can be bad at the same time? Are you claiming that I “pretend” that malaria and the flu are both bad and actually one of them is great?
I am claiming that you pretend malaria and bad humors are both bad. One exists. The other doesn’t. You don’t seem to have the willingness to acknowledge that. The social credit score in China that effects individuals does not exist. Sure. You can say both the US credit scoring system and the nonexistent Chinese personal social credit score are bad, but that would be foolish.
You could be saying that the US credit score system and the Chinese social credit score that is used to manage negative externalities of businesses are both bad, but I would disagree with you.
But I am pretty sure you don’t know that the social credit score for individuals does not exist.
Disengage
If you believe China’s social credit system is a good way to “strengthen public trust” then I want to know how you feel about people like Xu Xiaodong, whose social credit was destroyed for exposing fake martial artists and refusing to apologize to them.
If you violate a court order in my country you get sent to prison. China is so progressive that you aren’t even put under house arrest for the same offense.
The Chinese government ended the pilot programs for social credit scores for individuals in 2019 because the Chinese people didn’t want it, so Xu Xiaodong is likely one of those examples where a local government running their implementation of the pilot overreached and the central government, responding to the will of the people, ended it.
I like that you brought up an example that can be analyzed. The court ordered him to apologize and he didn’t follow through, there has to be some consequence to disobeying a judge. But it seems to me they could benefit from less hegemonic judges.
Could we stop saying “west” when you seem to mean commonwealth?
No because France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and Germany are all problematic in the same ways, as are their colonies, former colonies, contributions to the body of work (like racism), and collaboration with the problems of today (Third Reich, NATO, etc). We could even include more European nations in the list for these same reasons.
I see what you did there.
The former is a voluntary system, the latter can make you homeless.
It doesn’t say it’s voluntary, it says there were voluntary pilot programs within the larger initiative, which, as far as I can tell, is not voluntary.
Also, there can be harsh penalties including being put on blacklists that prevent you from traveling or your children from receiving education.
Both are technocratic systems of control.
Fucking tankies man
I don’t get it either. The west is an imperialist death machine and capitalism is taking down the whole biosphere in its death throes. Instead of looking at China and seeing signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer metastasizing in its government tankies stop at “they oppose the west” and give them a pass rather than realizing that their system is fundamentally compromised as well. If they believe a state is necessary to achieve what they consider true socialism then have some standards beyond “opposes the west” and stop hand waving the suicide nets at the Foxconn iPhone factory and the totally not concentration camps in Xinjiang. If anarchist theory involved caging people behind barbed wire, conducting mass censorship and surveillance, and allowing the existence of something so beyond the pale such as billionaires I would never have even considered it as an ideology much less a hill to die on.
China accounts for 75% of poverty alleviation globally
China has not dropped any bomb in 36 years.
China invented the social credit system in response to dairy producers cutting corners and poisoning people. It was punishing profit seekers that harmed the people. It then ran a limited experiment with some local governments to apply it to people. It did not go well, and the democratic will of the people was that the program should end, so it did.
China’s opposition to the West is a bare minimum requirement. The alternative is an integration with the West that subordinates the needs of the people to the needs of the Western elite. It doesn’t stop there, but it’s a necessary prerequisite.
Once that bar has been cleared, the next problem becomes one of defending against Western interference. One cannot be materially opposed to the West and not materially capable of defending against the West. So the second bar is whether the nation is capable of defending against the West. China is clearing this bar as well, but it includes authoritarian behaviors in order to stop covet operations. There is currently no known way to stop covert ops without use of authority.
From there each individual thing you want to discuss needs to be discussed on detail, but the overall picture is one of separating from the imperialist cancer and maintaining that separation and an attempt to build a space for healthier growth for which there are no models and there are not successful experiments that can be drawn from, which means creating sufficient space for experimenting and that means sufficient space for doing it wrong, and likey doing it wrong more often than doing it right for a significant period of time. (Looking at Mao)
No, tankies don’t see the same imperial cancer because it clearly isn’t the same imperial cancer
I get that it isn’t the exact same imperialist cancer but it is there and growing and will end up with similar results. Western imperialism in the 20th and 21st century is economic coercion backed by (primarily US) power projection. The Chinese lack the ability to project military power globally at this point but they have started to spread their economic hegemony to the global south. They are actively building up their naval power, thus improving their ability to project power globally. With the active abdication/eradication of US soft power by the Trump regime China has started to fill the void as any rational actor that wants to be a global superpower would. That is the imperialist cancer I maintain is growing in China, it is implemented in a different order and wears a different ideological cloak but the outcome will essentially the same. We’ll know for sure in a decade or two.
As for surveillance, I understand why a nation state not aligned with western capitalism would feel the need to defend itself against the CIA and its ilk. I don’t like it and don’t agree with it on a moral level but intellectually I can understand why Cuba feels the need to have its security state. China’s surveillance state is on a different level. The “Great Firewall” got thoroughly infiltrated by a group with state level capabilities and they published all of the exfil’d data. Just on a technical level the amount of effort from all sectors of the Chinese state (Academic, Military, Corporate, Intelligence) to restrict access to information is staggering. Their internal censorship is also above and beyond what can be reasonably be explained as hardening against CIA propaganda. We’ve seen corporate influenced algorithmic behavior modification over the last few years with the rise of “unalived” instead of killed or “PDF File” instead of pedophile. It is immaterial if there are any consequences beyond having a post deleted under their current internal censorship program, for most people the threat of getting a post deleted is enough to modify behavior and speech.
I’ve seen in a few places in this thread that the social credit score was a pilot program that has been discontinued. I don’t trust governments and corps to be honest if there is data to be harvested but lets say they really did discontinue the program. I can all but guarantee you that a mountain of data was collected and is still being analyzed, the source code and infrastructure plans still exist, and any modifications to physical and digital infrastructure are still in place. Governments do not give up power or control willingly without a way to trivially undo the changes. There is still infrastructure from the FBI’s Carnivore/Omnivore program in most ISPs and almost all the world’s government are unwilling to move away from the legacy PSTN standards from the 70’s because of the ease of SS7 based surveillance. The Chinese literally chose to use a variant with these vulnerabilities despite the opportunity to innovate a new secure standard.
Let’s imagine a glorious future where China is the world’s sole superpower. The world is living in a state socialist golden age. Now is the time to end the dictatorship of the proletariat and fulfill the promise of full communism. Based on all of human history what are the chances that the President for Life will make a speech to the Politburo dissolving the government, ordering the military to lay down their rifles and take up a factory or farming job, the political elite to leave their positions of wealth and privilege, and the state corp C-Suite to toss the factory keys to the nearest machinist on their way to their new life of working a collective farm? Governments and the craven ghouls who control them never give up power willingly. That is the fatal flaw of state socialism or for that matter any state. Human nature, especially the nature of humans that desire power over others, will almost always prevail over their espoused ideology when faced with the chance of losing their power and privilege.
i keep saying i want something fundamentally different not just aesthetically different. that tends to get me called “typical lib” even though i think the liberal project of capital is what got us here
It’s just brain-dead campism. Far from any proper application of Marxist theory. A lazy way of analyzing politics. It’s the same reason they support Russia even though they’re the same as the US