Philosophical Vegan Forum

It seems bad. I think being able to dissent is important to society.. This sort of system seems like it will kill off innovation, free-thinking and creativity more or less completely

brimstoneSalad wrote: How? Try to work it out, and find examples in real life and history to alert you to any potential
problems.

The Tang dynasty's bureaucracy of merit proved itself to be a system capable of recruiting competent government officials for the Chinese bureaucracy. It tested the intellectual capability of potential officials with the rigorous imperial civil service examinations. The curriculum concentrated on Chinese literature and philosophy. The Tang meritocracy's effectiveness is demonstrated by the lasting stability (excluding the occasional interruption) in China during its thirteen year lifespan.

The primary issue with the bureaucracy of merit was its corruptible nature. In the late Qing period, it was not uncommon for examiners to be successfully bribed into allowing potential officials to skip earlier stages of the exam. Issues of corruption could be solved by increasing the wages of the examiners and increasing the amount of examiners grading the same test.

Considering the effectiveness of the bureaucracy of merit, a system which placed constitutional monarchs into positions of power based upon their performance on rigorous examinations graded by multiple well paid officials could consistently yield competent and benevolent constitutional monarchs. Such a system would avoid the stagnancy of a democracy and the tyranny of an absolute monarchy.

Woah, how did I miss this topic?

miniboes wrote:I heard about it from this video: https://youtu.be/lHcTKWiZ8sI

If the explanation in this video is accurate, I think it's really scary.

I'm barely surprised that China would employ something so draconian, seeing as it sends back North Koreans who escape concentration camps back to the hellhole to be murdered.

brimstoneSalad wrote:'Mandatory' doesn't really mean anything in this case, it's just rhetoric. Now it's opt in, later it will be automatic. That's functionally irrelevant: What matters is the consequences of the system.

When there's potential penalization for having a low score, I think it matters.

If people could opt out, they wouldn't have to be forced to conform or be penalized. If it is mandatory, then they are forcibly penalized for contradicting the system.

brimstoneSalad wrote: Potential for peer pressure to influence people more to be more productive and become better people (like avoid committing crimes, drive more safely, and other metrics this will track).

It's not just influencing them to do good things, though, it's influencing them to give up their freedom of speech, and in doing so stifles controversial ideas.

And I don't think it's really sustainable to force people to conform like that. Maybe in the short term, but in the long run, it's going to build resentment.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Squashing pseudoscience and inhibiting the spread of damaging religious cults. Reducing violent dissident behavior (there are people in China who are planning violent overthrow of the government -- no country stands for that, and it's rarely justified in terms of consequence).

Taking away freedom of speech is a slippery slope. Who's going to decide what speech is acceptable or not? The moral China, that supports concentration camps in the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' that torture people for non-crimes?

They're already prohibiting certain kinds of political speech because it goes against their party (not for any kind of moral reasons)... They're prohibiting the spread of information in general (like by penalizing sharing articles about issues with the Chinese economy).
What's going to stop them from prohibiting speech against North Korean concentration camps etc.?

brimstoneSalad wrote:That's the eternal dilemma of government.
A benevolent dictator is the best system possible, but then you never know how his son will turn out. A system with enough checks and balances to prevent abuse will be safer in the sense that it won't oppress the people as easily, but will ultimately become gridlocked and may actually be more dangerous because it will allow social problems (and environmental ones, as we see) to snowball.

But can you even trust a 'benevolent' dictator? Power corrupts.

Anyway, non-oppressive governments don't need to be so heavily influenced by donors. America currently is very influenced by it on the national level, but some countries have laws against that kind of corruption, and America currently is working on fixing that issue (look at the rise of Bernie Sanders, and groups like Wolf-PAC).

EquALLity wrote:seeing as it sends back North Koreans who escape concentration camps back to the hellhole to be murdered.

That's not fair; China is bound by issues of international diplomacy. It's kind of like the LUSH thing.

When Northern states refused to send runaway slaves back, that ultimately triggered the civil war.

You understand consequentialism: What's better, war or a small hand full of people go back to a shitty work camp jail unjustly? Mass starvation (because China employs sanctions), or a few people go back to the work camp jail?

Also, you're being a little deceptive in using "concentration camp"; it's political rhetoric, and will make people far more angry than is useful to real discussion. These are work camps, and there's no mass extermination going on as in the Nazi concentration camps (which is what people think of).

North Korea is doing some undeniably shitty things to some of its people, but you can't put that on China.
The U.S. stirs a lot of shit by putting its nose in other countries' business; likely more death and terrorism than had they left "well enough" alone and let other cultures evolve on their own out of their dark ages (or just let more free market forces take over, so the money could pressure reform).

China has a strong policy of national sovereignty, and they put that into practice by not interfering in other countries. They are trying not to lead a double standard. Get into international diplomacy more, and you'll see the issue is not that simple, and the U.S. way to do things is not necessarily the right or best way to do them (Americans are far too deontological, and ready to start wars over ideological differences).

EquALLity wrote:When there's potential penalization for having a low score, I think it matters.

It's not a bad thing in itself. If the program is bad, then mandatory is bad, if the program is good, then mandatory is good.

It's kind of like the "use/exploitatiin/abuse" issue in veganism, where some people conflate those.
Mandatory -- as in mandatory healthcare that Obama implemented -- can also be good.

So you can't put "mandatory" on a list of bad things. All it does is exaggerate the qualities of whatever the thing is -- good or bad.

EquALLity wrote: It's not just influencing them to do good things, though, it's influencing them to give up their freedom of speech, and in doing so stifles controversial ideas.

Why is this bad?

EquALLity wrote:And I don't think it's really sustainable to force people to conform like that. Maybe in the short term, but in the long run, it's going to build resentment.

That's what has been happening to an extent, and that's what this is trying to address.

EquALLity wrote: Taking away freedom of speech is a slippery slope.

It can be in some cases, and I talked about that. But be careful not to make the slippery slope fallacy.

EquALLity wrote:that supports concentration camps in the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' that torture people for non-crimes?

There are four inaccuracies in that sentence.

"...that doesn't intervene against labor camps in the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' that punish people unreasonably (like to the third generation) for often unreasonably criminalized crimes?"

That's more accurate, but less divisive and agitating as rhetoric.

EquALLity wrote:They're already prohibiting certain kinds of political speech because it goes against their party (not for any kind of moral reasons)...

Moral reasons, political reasons -- it's not necessarily different. The party platforms are not exactly arbitrary. People follow those because they think they're the best platforms for the country.

A one party system has the capacity to be fundamentally different from a two party system in that way (to be more flexible). Although be mindful the Democrats and Republicans both push what they regard to be moral agendas.

Imagine the benefit to the U.S. if the Republican party were banned, and many of the Republican platforms could just be outright prohibited (and enforced).
Warmongering, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-choice, etc. These things could just disappear from politics. In many ways, this is what the Chinese government has done.
The problem being the underground resistance.

Dissidents in China are not necessarily good people. We romanticize rebels, but many if not most Chinese dissidents are religious fundamentalists.

EquALLity wrote:But can you even trust a 'benevolent' dictator? Power corrupts.

It doesn't always corrupt; that's just a tendency in psychology, not any kind of law. A benevolent dictator wants the best for the people, will hold his or herself to high standards, and will not corrupt.

That said, distributing the power among many people (as in the CCP) is a safer bet. They're developing a culture of corruption hunting (which is amazing), so they're starting to police themselves.

EquALLity wrote:Anyway, non-oppressive governments don't need to be so heavily influenced by donors. America currently is very influenced by it on the national level, but some countries have laws against that kind of corruption, and America currently is working on fixing that issue (look at the rise of Bernie Sanders, and groups like Wolf-PAC).

You will see many European countries also in gridlock in terms of social reform.
Private money is also just one issue; special interest groups and lobbying by the majority against minority interests are also very big problems, even if you keep corporate money from directly interfering. You can't block entirely the influence of power or strong dogma.

brimstoneSalad wrote:That's not fair; China is bound by issues of international diplomacy. It's kind of like the LUSH thing.

When Northern states refused to send runaway slaves back, that ultimately triggered the civil war.

You understand consequentialism: What's better, war or a small hand full of people go back to a shitty work camp jail unjustly? Mass starvation (because China employs sanctions), or a few people go back to the work camp jail?

They often are tortured and sometimes killed when they go back. It's not a minor thing.

I'm not sure what you think the world should do about the crisis in North Korea. Don't do anything, even if not violent, because it might start a war with North Korea?

I thought you said the leaders of NK are ultimately rational? So wouldn't they, by that logic, try to avoid war when unnecessary?

brimstoneSalad wrote:Also, you're being a little deceptive in using "concentration camp"; it's political rhetoric, and will make people far more angry than is useful to real discussion. These are work camps, and there's no mass extermination going on as in the Nazi concentration camps (which is what people think of).

The definition that comes up for 'concentration camp': "a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz."
Well, that's what they are. I think that it should anger people.

You say 'work camps', like they're largely benign or something. I'm thinking you must not have heard of all the stories from defectors of North Korea who were imprisoned in these concentration camps, or read about the UN report on them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... gs/283899/

Former North Korean Prisoner wrote:We are supposed to think there’s an imaginary motorcycle and we are supposed to be in this position as if we are riding the motorcycle. And for this, we pose as if we are airplanes ourselves. We are flying. And if we stand like this there’s no way that you can hold that position for a long time. You are bound to fall forward. Everybody in the detention centre goes through this kind of this torture.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Co ... yDPRK.aspx

United Nations wrote:24. The commission finds that systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In many instances, the violations found entailed crimes against humanity based on State policies.

United Nations wrote:76. These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. The commission further finds that crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.
77. Persons detained in political and other prison camps, those who try to flee the State, Christians and others considered to introduce subversive influences are the primary targets of a systematic and widespread attack against all populations that are considered to pose a threat to the political system and leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. This attack is embedded in the larger patterns of politically motivated human rights violations experienced by the general population, including the discriminatory system of classification of persons based on songbun.
78. In addition, the commission finds that crimes against humanity have been committed against starving populations, particularly during the 1990s. These crimes arose from decisions and policies violating the right to food, which were applied for the purposes of sustaining the present political system, in full awareness that such decisions would exacerbate starvation and related deaths of much of the population.
79. Lastly, the commission finds that crimes against humanity are being committed against persons from other countries who were systematically abducted or denied repatriation, in order to gain labour and other skills for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Anyway, what do you mean, useful to a 'real discussion'? It seems like you support banning certain ideas... How can there be a real discussion if certain ideas are banned?

brimstoneSalad wrote:The U.S. stirs a lot of shit by putting its nose in other countries' business; likely more death and terrorism than had they left "well enough" alone and let other cultures evolve on their own out of their dark ages (or just let more free market forces take over, so the money could pressure reform).

China has a strong policy of national sovereignty, and they put that into practice by not interfering in other countries. They are trying not to lead a double standard. Get into international diplomacy more, and you'll see the issue is not that simple, and the U.S. way to do things is not necessarily the right or best way to do them (Americans are far too deontological, and ready to start wars over ideological differences).

I agree that the United States has a pretty bad foreign policy in regards to the Middle East (ie constant bombing that creates more terrorists), but that doesn't justify China's foreign policy of "screw people being tortured in North Korean concentration camps if it benefits us economically to not give a damn".

China doesn't have to invade North Korea or something to stop the horrible human rights violations that go on there, and the least it can do is not to support them.

brimstoneSalad wrote:It's not a bad thing in itself. If the program is bad, then mandatory is bad, if the program is good, then mandatory is good.

It's kind of like the "use/exploitatiin/abuse" issue in veganism, where some people conflate those.
Mandatory -- as in mandatory healthcare that Obama implemented -- can also be good.

So you can't put "mandatory" on a list of bad things. All it does is exaggerate the qualities of whatever the thing is -- good or bad.

Ah, I see. So it's not bad in and of itself, it just exaggerates the badness.

brimstoneSalad wrote: Why is this bad?

It prevents discussion and creates resentment.

brimstoneSalad wrote:That's what has been happening to an extent, and that's what this is trying to address.

What?
Seems like a very counterproductive way of addressing an issue to employ policies that promote the problem.

brimstoneSalad wrote:There are four inaccuracies in that sentence.

"...that doesn't intervene against labor camps in the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' that punish people unreasonably (like to the third generation) for often unreasonably criminalized crimes?"

That's more accurate, but less divisive and agitating as rhetoric.

It supports them by being an ally of North Korea, by trading with North Korea, etc..
They're concentration camps because they systematically abuse and kill people, and take away their freedoms for non-crimes.
I'm not sure why you disagree with the idea that NK tortures people... guessing you just aren't familiar with the reports?
Yeah, they're technically crimes in North Korea, just saying that they shouldn't be by calling them non-crimes.
Remember... "everything Hitler did was legal". He made things illegal that by any reasonable standard have no business being crimes, or that by any reasonable standard should be 'non-crimes'.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Moral reasons, political reasons -- it's not necessarily different. The party platforms are not exactly arbitrary. People follow those because they think they're the best platforms for the country.

A one party system has the capacity to be fundamentally different from a two party system in that way (to be more flexible). Although be mindful the Democrats and Republicans both push what they regard to be moral agendas.

So what if they think that they're the best policies for the people (but do they, or do they just care about their own power?)? That doesn't make them right.
And even if they are the best policies right now, there's a huge potential for corruption with only one political party that penalizes differing opinions etc..

I don't agree about the democrats and the republicans, or at least when it comes to a lot of them. A lot of them are pushing policies that are best for their donors.

Why do you think that a one party system would be more flexible?

brimstoneSalad wrote:Imagine the benefit to the U.S. if the Republican party were banned, and many of the Republican platforms could just be outright prohibited (and enforced).
Warmongering, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-choice, etc. These things could just disappear from politics. In many ways, this is what the Chinese government has done.
The problem being the underground resistance.

Yeah, I don't agree with republican warmongering etc., but I'm not going to support destroying free speech.
It's a slippery slope. How do we decide what speech to ban? Why? What stops us from banning good speech? Who decides what is good speech and what is bad speech? What if we change our mind, and do we even have the right to voice that if we do? Who decides, and why? Etc.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Dissidents in China are not necessarily good people. We romanticize rebels, but many if not most Chinese dissidents are religious fundamentalists.

I never said that they were. But China's program declares them all bad people.

brimstoneSalad wrote:It doesn't always corrupt; that's just a tendency in psychology, not any kind of law. A benevolent dictator wants the best for the people, will hold his or herself to high standards, and will not corrupt.

A benevolent dictator wants the best for the people? Sure, but I find it hard to believe that there are benevolent dictators.

brimstoneSalad wrote: That said, distributing the power among many people (as in the CCP) is a safer bet. They're developing a culture of corruption hunting (which is amazing), so they're starting to police themselves.

I'm not really familiar with how the government in China works (though I've heard it essentially has a fake democracy).
Are you talking about checks and balances?

brimstoneSalad wrote:You will see many European countries also in gridlock in terms of social reform.
Private money is also just one issue; special interest groups and lobbying by the majority against minority interests are also very big problems, even if you keep corporate money from directly interfering. You can't block entirely the influence of power or strong dogma.

Are any of those European countries actually behind China, in terms of social reform?

Lobbying, as in with money?

Why would a one party system be immune to dogma? It seems prone to it.

EquALLity wrote: They often are tortured and sometimes killed when they go back. It's not a minor thing.

How many people?

Consequence isn't just about degree, but also volume of violation.
North Korea's entire population is only 25 million people -- the population of a very big city, like Tokyo.

The internment camps are located in central and northeastern North Korea. They comprise many prison labour colonies in secluded mountain valleys, completely isolated from the outside world. The total number of prisoners is estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea

Sounds like a lot, but it's really a trivial number when you consider global issues. And that's certainly not the number of people China is sending back each year.
Are we talking about a few dozen people a year?

EquALLity wrote: I'm not sure what you think the world should do about the crisis in North Korea. Don't do anything, even if not violent, because it might start a war with North Korea?

The main reason North Korea is stable is because it has a relationship with China. If they lost that, they would have nothing left to lose and would become much more desperate. At that point, I would no longer be so confident about the future of the region.

Sanctions are what caused the severe problem N. Korea is experiencing now in the first place. Look at the history there.

The way to fix North Korea is to open trade back up, allow investment there, and let capitalism take over. The leaders will get greedy and open the country to trade and investment completely when they get a taste of it, and that means making a business friendly environment. Companies like rule of law, and aren't too keen on war.

The same is true for individual human beings; it is relationships, not isolation, that change hearts and minds.

EquALLity wrote: I thought you said the leaders of NK are ultimately rational? So wouldn't they, by that logic, try to avoid war when unnecessary?

They will try to maintain their relationship with China. They have something to lose. If you took that away, then the rational choice might be to attack South Korea as a last ditch effort, and use their nuclear weapons to make hostages from the entire population of the region.

EquALLity wrote: Well, that's what they are. I think that it should anger people.

They're not mass execution factories, and the extent of their facilities are not clear, but they're usually in large valleys.

Why do you want to piss people off by reflecting the Nazi concentration camps (which were far worse), and make matters worse in terms of international rhetoric and conflict? We can't DO anything about them this way.
The angrier people are, the more irrational, and the more likely to just start a war.

It's fine to get angry about animal agriculture. Not only can people do something about it personally by not supporting it and sharing the information, but the industry isn't about to start a war. Neither of these things hold in international diplomacy.

Anger has its uses, and this is not one of them.

EquALLity wrote: You say 'work camps', like they're largely benign or something. I'm thinking you must not have heard of all the stories from defectors of North Korea who were imprisoned in these concentration camps, or read about the UN report on them.

I'm familiar. Wikipedia calls them internment camps, that's fine, and quite accurate. The U.S. has done the same shit to Japanese.

EquALLity wrote: It seems like you support banning certain ideas... How can there be a real discussion if certain ideas are banned?

Some ideas are not reasonable.
It's a tricky balance. You need a little disagreement to have discussion, but not so much to cause gridlock or make discussion pointless.

EquALLity wrote: I agree that the United States has a pretty bad foreign policy in regards to the Middle East (ie constant bombing that creates more terrorists), but that doesn't justify China's foreign policy of "screw people being tortured in North Korean concentration camps if it benefits us economically to not give a damn".

They are different sides of the spectrum, China being completely non-interventionist. It's not that they don't care, it's that they stick to a rule about not violating the sovereignty of other nations. You don't seem to understand what that means.

As a fictional example, are you familiar with the Prime Directive in star trek?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive
That might help.

China is following a principle of respecting national sovereignty regardless of what that means to the people of those countries, as opposed to the moralistic world police that the U.S. tries to be (a position that comes with its own problems).

Aside from military action against them, there's not much to be done. Sanctions are rarely helpful. They need closer relationships to the rest of the world, not more isolation.

EquALLity wrote:China doesn't have to invade North Korea or something to stop the horrible human rights violations that go on there, and the least it can do is not to support them.

It doesn't support them, it just doesn't do anything. All countries deport illegal immigrants back to their home countries, some just grant sanctuary as a special case. China's behavior is the default behavior.

North Korea also has to return Chinese criminals. Imagine what would happen if they didn't. Corrupt Chinese politicians could steal millions of dollars, and then just hop the border to North Korea to live rich in impunity from the anti-corruption hunt. Not to mention all of the other crimes people could get away with easily.

EquALLity wrote:Ah, I see. So it's not bad in and of itself, it just exaggerates the badness.

If it is bad. But that has yet to be seen. Don't make snap judgments on these things based on sensational media reaction.

EquALLity wrote:It prevents discussion and creates resentment.

Does it create resentment?

Why is it a bad thing to prevent discussion about how Jesus is god and if you don't believe him you will go to hell and burn in torture forever but if you believe you can do whatever immoral things you want and just ask him for forgiveness and everything will be OK?

Ignorant people are like Children. You don't understand that some people don't have the critical thinking skills you do, and are very vulnerable to cults and irrational ideas like this that will scare them into believing them since they don't know anything else.

The spread of cults is a big problem in China today.

EquALLity wrote:What?
Seems like a very counterproductive way of addressing an issue to employ policies that promote the problem.

Watch the video miniboes posted. This is a fundamentally different mechanism from government force, and is using peer pressure through gamification instead.

Nobody can really say if it's good or bad, or how people react to it in this context, because this is the first time something exactly like this has been tried for such an application.

Maybe it will be good, maybe it will be bad. We have to wait and see what happens.

EquALLity wrote:It supports them by being an ally of North Korea, by trading with North Korea, etc..

It's like the LUSH situation. That's not support. Sometimes there aren't any better options.

EquALLity wrote:They're concentration camps because they systematically abuse and kill people, and take away their freedoms for non-crimes.

They do not systematically abuse or kill people; they are prison and work camps. You don't really know anything about their policies (nobody does -- they aren't public knowledge). We know there are abuses, but they are not designed for torture and mass execution, the're designed as internment camps.
Compare them to prisons in the U.S., and they don't look much worse -- abuses there are prevalent too.

EquALLity wrote: Yeah, they're technically crimes in North Korea, just saying that they shouldn't be by calling them non-crimes.

Again, political rhetoric. This is just harmful to our potential to promote peace. You're knowingly lying about them here. How is this kind of language supposed to be seen?

I'm not fan of North Korea, and even I find it offensive to call them "non-crimes", it's not accurate, and we don't know enough about the situation to even pass judgement on it anyway. We don't know what these people did.

EquALLity wrote: Remember... "everything Hitler did was legal".

Correct. So it's wrong to call him a criminal, even if he did do terrible things. Law does not map to morality.
Monster? Sure. Criminal? No.

EquALLity wrote: So what if they think that they're the best policies for the people (but do they, or do they just care about their own power?)? That doesn't make them right.

No, but you were ignoring the intentions.

EquALLity wrote: And even if they are the best policies right now, there's a huge potential for corruption with only one political party that penalizes differing opinions etc..

I mentioned that. Currently, there is a culture of witch hunting corruption -- this is what allows us to be hopeful about the situation. Reform has been astoundingly fast.

EquALLity wrote: I don't agree about the democrats and the republicans, or at least when it comes to a lot of them. A lot of them are pushing policies that are best for their donors.

Why? Because they need to win elections. No mass elections, no advertising, no big donors, no money in politics.

EquALLity wrote: Why do you think that a one party system would be more flexible?

Because they don't need to win elections (or they do in smaller groups, but not in the mass publicity context of U.S elections, and the party itself will always be in power). They can just follow the advice of experts, from scientists to economists.

EquALLity wrote: Yeah, I don't agree with republican warmongering etc., but I'm not going to support destroying free speech.
It's a slippery slope. How do we decide what speech to ban? Why? What stops us from banning good speech? Who decides what is good speech and what is bad speech? What if we change our mind, and do we even have the right to voice that if we do? Who decides, and why? Etc.

Those are important questions to ask, but be careful of making the slippery slope fallacy and insisting these consequences must come to pass. Just because we don't know the answers to these questions, doesn't mean they don't have reasonably good answers.

EquALLity wrote: But China's program declares them all bad people.

Maybe they all are. How do you know?
And what if 99% are bad, and banning them all does more good than harm? You just don't know.

EquALLity wrote: A benevolent dictator wants the best for the people? Sure, but I find it hard to believe that there are benevolent dictators.

Is it impossible?
What if the Chinese community party is evolving into the first one?

EquALLity wrote: I'm not really familiar with how the government in China works (though I've heard it essentially has a fake democracy).
Are you talking about checks and balances?

Checks and balances, yes, and just larger groups with varying opinions and internal systems of politics. There are other parties and minority voices, too, they're just not in direct opposition.

China has a "one party" system in terms of control, but that's not the same as a fake democracy. By some accounts, the U.S. is said to have a fake democracy too, since the two parties hold a monopoly and have very few meaningful differences, mainly controlled by corporate interests and the Christian right.

You may find positions on many issues within the single communist party and its allies to be broader than the differences between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.

In order to represent different segments of the population and bring in technical expertise, the CCP does ensure that a significant minority of people's congress delegates are either minor party members or unaffiliated, and there is tolerance of disagreement and debate in the legislative process where this does not fundamentally challenge the role of the Communist Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections ... rty_system

It's not an echo chamber, but an attempt of balance to avoid political gridlock. There's plenty of disagreement, it's just not fought out in public with shaming and deceitful rhetoric. It could not help but be a more sincere and open minded discussion than what's happening in the U.S., which represents possibly the worst case of political rhetoric and dogma in the world.

Politics are rarely as simple as the media makes them out to be.
Read a little more about the structure, and the limitations. Misrepresenting China is popular, and it makes a big scary Bogeyman, but the sensationalism that sells papers just doesn't bear out in reality,

EquALLity wrote: Are any of those European countries actually behind China, in terms of social reform?

In some respects, sure. But China is a developing country, and their main issues are infrastructure development, education, and providing jobs for the people. Chinese cities are very modern, but many people living in villages may not even have running water.

EquALLity wrote: Lobbying, as in with money?

You don't need money to lobby, you need organization. You need a voting block who will dogmatically follow and promote whatever recommendation you make; that has power.

EquALLity wrote: Why would a one party system be immune to dogma? It seems prone to it.

Because they are secure in their power, and security means they can change their positions on things with the evidence without losing their voters by looking like "flip floppers", or failing to pander.
Look how hard it is for the more liberal Republicans, and the bulk of the party is still clinging to the anti-choice and anti-gay-rights position when those ships have sailed.

The heated political rhetoric of U.S. politics often forces people into more entrenched positions, rather than opening minds. China doesn't have that, and it's a surprising virtue of a system that would otherwise seem problematic based on our assumptions.

An adversarial system has a lot of important benefits, particularly when we're dealing with natural conflicts of interest and need to create compromises, but it's not without its problems, particularly in a longer game like politics where empirical matters beyond public opinion should be more important.

brimstoneSalad wrote:How many people?

Consequence isn't just about degree, but also volume of violation.
North Korea's entire population is only 25 million people -- the population of a very big city, like Tokyo.

I can't find information about how many North Koreans that China has sent back.

Twenty-five million people may seem like a small percentage of the global population, but in reality, it's still a massive amount of people. And even North Koreans who are not imprisoned often have shitty lives that end in starvation (because the North Korean government cares more about Mercedes-Benz cars than feeding its people), and China is supporting that by being an ally with North Korea etc..

brimstoneSalad wrote:Sounds like a lot, but it's really a trivial number when you consider global issues.

150,000-200,000 people isn't necessarily trivial just because it is a small percentage of the global population.

Where else in the world are things worse than this happening?
The Middle East? I'm not sure if that could be considered worse.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Are we talking about a few dozen people a year?

I'm not sure, maybe.
It'd be much higher if North Korea didn't shoot people on the spot (no questions asked) for trying to escape to freedom (well, China, at least).

brimstoneSalad wrote: Sanctions are what caused the severe problem N. Korea is experiencing now in the first place. Look at the history there.

The way to fix North Korea is to open trade back up, allow investment there, and let capitalism take over. The leaders will get greedy and open the country to trade and investment completely when they get a taste of it, and that means making a business friendly environment. Companies like rule of law, and aren't too keen on war.

I don't see how that would work. The leaders are already extremely greedy, and are living 'the good life' currently.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-korea ... OF20140217

North Korea "continues allocating a significant amount of the state's resources for the purchase and importation of luxury goods", the report said.

Such imports are in violation of Security Council sanctions and have included high-quality cognac and whiskey and equipment for a 1,000 person cinema, it said. There have been attempts to import Mercedes-Benz vehicles, high-end musical recording equipment and dozens of pianos, it said.

"Luxury good expenditure by the DPRK rose to $645.8 million in 2012. Reportedly, this was a sharp increase from the average of $300 million a year under Kim Jong-il," it said, citing a British newspaper report in October 2013.

North Korean authorities also engage in legal and illegal activities to earn foreign currency, channeling it into "parallel funds" outside of the regular state budget, it said.

"They are kept a the personal disposal of the Supreme Leader and used to cover personal expenses of the Supreme Leader, his family and other elites surrounding him, as well as other politically sensitive expenditures," it said.

Revenue from criminal activity including drugs has been estimated at up to $500 million a year in 2008, amounting to a third of North Korea's annual exports at the time, it said.

A former North Korean official, not identified in the report, provided information on the "illegal activities of DPRK embassies around the world. They were engaged in activities such as the illegal sale of alcohol in Islamic countries or the internationally prohibited trafficking of ivory from African countries to China," the report said.

What problem specifically are you referring to?
North Korea has a lot of issues.

brimstoneSalad wrote:They will try to maintain their relationship with China. They have something to lose. If you took that away, then the rational choice might be to attack South Korea as a last ditch effort, and use their nuclear weapons to make hostages from the entire population of the region.

They just put out a statement that they wouldn't use nuclear weapons unless there is an invasion on their national sovereignty.

brimstoneSalad wrote: They're not mass execution factories, and the extent of their facilities are not clear, but they're usually in large valleys.

Why do you want to piss people off by reflecting the Nazi concentration camps (which were far worse), and make matters worse in terms of international rhetoric and conflict? We can't DO anything about them this way.
The angrier people are, the more irrational, and the more likely to just start a war.

It's fine to get angry about animal agriculture. Not only can people do something about it personally by not supporting it and sharing the information, but the industry isn't about to start a war. Neither of these things hold in international diplomacy.

Anger has its uses, and this is not one of them.

Well, I really don't think they are much different from Nazi concentration camps.
They both involve imprisonment on religious grounds, they both involve systematic and gross human rights violations (like torture and extermination). The world largely ignores North Korean concentration camps, like it ignored Nazi concentration camps, and both countries worship a cult leader.
The more I examine it, the more similar North Korea seems to Nazi Germany.

Anger inspires passion, which leads to awareness, and since North Korean concentration camps rarely get any attention, I think that the good done may outweigh the potential harm.

brimstoneSalad wrote:I'm familiar. Wikipedia calls them internment camps, that's fine, and quite accurate. The U.S. has done the same shit to Japanese.

What? The US didn't systematically torture and rape Japanese-Americans in those camps.
They did murder people, but it wasn't nearly as horrible as what happens in North Korea.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Some ideas are not reasonable.
It's a tricky balance. You need a little disagreement to have discussion, but not so much to cause gridlock or make discussion pointless.

Of course they aren't, but that doesn't justify banning them, and in doing so you prevent real discussion.

In the long run, if we have the free exchange of ideas, the rational ideas will prevail. They are right, and real discussion exposes that. But if you prevent those discussions, you stifle progress.
Discussion should be encouraged, not repressed.

brimstoneSalad wrote:China is following a principle of respecting national sovereignty regardless of what that means to the people of those countries, as opposed to the moralistic world police that the U.S. tries to be (a position that comes with its own problems).

Again, I never suggested that China should invade North Korea, or anything like that.

I'm just saying that China should stop supporting North Korean concentration camps.
Putting economic pressure on a country (etc.) is not necessarily violating its national sovereignty.

brimstoneSalad wrote:It doesn't support them, it just doesn't do anything. All countries deport illegal immigrants back to their home countries, some just grant sanctuary as a special case. China's behavior is the default behavior.

Why are you calling people who are literally running for their lives 'illegal immigrants'?
They're not just people crossing borders; they're refugees by definition. They're escaping a tyrannical regime and risking their lives in doing so.

If it's default for nations to send back refugees, then that is a problem. That is supporting evil regimes.

brimstoneSalad wrote:North Korea also has to return Chinese criminals. Imagine what would happen if they didn't. Corrupt Chinese politicians could steal millions of dollars, and then just hop the border to North Korea to live rich in impunity from the anti-corruption hunt. Not to mention all of the other crimes people could get away with easily.

Those people aren't refugees. There's a difference between sending back evil people and sending back innocent people who are running for their lives to their deaths.

North Korea is a unique situation here, also. That would be a problem (obviously), but the solution doesn't have to be supporting an evil country.

China could secure its border to prevent those people from leaving, or something (while allowing in North Korean refugees).

brimstoneSalad wrote:If it is bad. But that has yet to be seen. Don't make snap judgments on these things based on sensational media reaction.

They're not 'snap judgements', and all my information about this issue is from that video that miniboes posted.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Does it create resentment?

Of course stamping out the free exchange of ideas creates resentment... You're taking peoples' basic freedoms away.

If you kept deleting meat-eaters' or religious peoples' posts because you thought they were full of shit, you don't think they'd be extremely resentful and irritated?

And you acknowledged before that type of stuff is currently creating resentment in China.

Before, I wrote:And I don't think it's really sustainable to force people to conform like that. Maybe in the short term, but in the long run, it's going to build resentment.

In response, you wrote:That's what has been happening to an extent, and that's what this is trying to address.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Why is it a bad thing to prevent discussion about how Jesus is god and if you don't believe him you will go to hell and burn in torture forever but if you believe you can do whatever immoral things you want and just ask him for forgiveness and everything will be OK?

Because you can't prevent that discussion without preventing reasonable discussion, and because it creates resentment.
And because preventing discussion about it won't make those ideas go away. Discussion, revealing those ideas as crazy, will.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Watch the video miniboes posted. This is a fundamentally different mechanism from government force, and is using peer pressure through gamification instead.

I did watch the video.

Soon, it will be government force. And it's force that attempts to make people give up their freedoms because of peer pressure.
How could that address the problem of resentment built because of conformity to peer pressure?

brimstoneSalad wrote:Nobody can really say if it's good or bad, or how people react to it in this context, because this is the first time something exactly like this has been tried for such an application.

Maybe it will be good, maybe it will be bad. We have to wait and see what happens.

I think it's reasonable to say that it's very bad based on what I've been arguing (punishes people for sharing facts, harms freedom of speech which creates resentment, etc.). The pros don't seem significant enough to outweigh all the harm that will likely be produced.

brimstoneSalad wrote: It's like the LUSH situation. That's not support. Sometimes there aren't any better options.

I think there are better options (economic pressure).

brimstoneSalad wrote: They do not systematically abuse or kill people; they are prison and work camps. You don't really know anything about their policies (nobody does -- they aren't public knowledge). We know there are abuses, but they are not designed for torture and mass execution, the're designed as internment camps.

According to the UN report, and that story from the North Korean defector, they do systematically do those things.

North Korean Defector wrote:We are supposed to think there’s an imaginary motorcycle and we are supposed to be in this position as if we are riding the motorcycle. And for this, we pose as if we are airplanes ourselves. We are flying. And if we stand like this there’s no way that you can hold that position for a long time. You are bound to fall forward. Everybody in the detention centre goes through this kind of this torture.

The United Nations wrote:24. The commission finds that systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In many instances, the violations found entailed crimes against humanity based on State policies.

The United Nations wrote:76. These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. The commission further finds that crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.

You seem to be diminishing the horrors of these camps in North Korea. According to the report you're familiar with, the camps systematically commit gross human rights violations, many of which can be classified as crimes against humanity.
If you're familiar with the report, why were you and are you denying these things? Do you think the UN and the North Korean defector are lying, or something?

I mean, you basically denied that North Korea tortures people (saying it was an inaccuracy in a sentence I wrote, and changing it to 'punish').

brimstoneSalad wrote:Compare them to prisons in the U.S., and they don't look much worse -- abuses there are prevalent too.

I agree that the prison system in the United States is horrible, but it is not nearly as bad as the system in North Korea.
People aren't imprisoned solely based on beliefs, they're not starved, and the torture isn't as common. There is much less systematic abuse.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Again, political rhetoric. This is just harmful to our potential to promote peace. You're knowingly lying about them here. How is this kind of language supposed to be seen?

In my context, it wasn't lying.

I pretty obviously wasn't literally saying that these things aren't crimes in North Korea. Of course they're crimes in North Korea; but North Korea is crazy for making those things crimes. That's all I'm saying.

brimstoneSalad wrote:we don't know enough about the situation to even pass judgement on it anyway. We don't know what these people did.

...Are you saying that we don't know enough about North Korean concentration camps to pass judgement on them, and that they may be justifiable in certain respects because 'we don't know what these people did'?

brimstoneSalad wrote: No, but you were ignoring the intentions.

I question their intentions.
Why do you think the leadership of China is so moral?

They don't seem to care at all about the future of the planet.

brimstoneSalad wrote: I mentioned that. Currently, there is a culture of witch hunting corruption -- this is what allows us to be hopeful about the situation. Reform has been astoundingly fast.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... cials.html
Interesting, but it seems to be largely about hunting corrupt officials who go against government.

But the real task of Wang Qishan's scent hounds was not simply uncovering corruption but also "sniffing out those who aren't real believers", in Xi Jinping's vision for the country.

Seems reasonable to speculate that they may simply be using corruption as an excuse to capture those who are against government policies.

After all:

Top leaders are unconstrained by the rule of law.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... le/394325/

brimstoneSalad wrote: Why? Because they need to win elections. No mass elections, no advertising, no big donors, no money in politics.

Are you against elections (so, democracy)?

You say this like it's either tyranny by politicians or tyranny under corporations. Corporate money in politics is not necessary to have a democratic system. America hasn't always been run by corporations.
We need (and can get) an amendment to the Constitution that gets money out of politics. It's difficult, but the end result will be better than the situation in China.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Those are important questions to ask, but be careful of making the slippery slope fallacy and insisting these consequences must come to pass. Just because we don't know the answers to these questions, doesn't mean they don't have reasonably good answers.

I don't think we should proceed in essentially destroying freedom of speech without answering those questions.
They don't seem to have good answers.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Maybe they all are. How do you know?
And what if 99% are bad, and banning them all does more good than harm? You just don't know.

I do know that they don't distinguish innocent from evil dissidents, because they punish people (on Sesame Credit) for simply posting articles with facts about the economic situation in China.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Is it impossible?
What if the Chinese community party is evolving into the first one?

Communist Party?

I don't think so, based on their support of North Korean concentration camps, and because of their apathy towards the planet.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Checks and balances, yes, and just larger groups with varying opinions and internal systems of politics. There are other parties and minority voices, too, they're just not in direct opposition.

China has a "one party" system in terms of control, but that's not the same as a fake democracy. By some accounts, the U.S. is said to have a fake democracy too, since the two parties hold a monopoly and have very few meaningful differences, mainly controlled by corporate interests and the Christian right.

You may find positions on many issues within the single communist party and its allies to be broader than the differences between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.

What do you think of this?: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... t/1987659/

Tie, 20, also gets to choose China's next president, a right in this country exercised not by the hundreds of millions of voting-age Chinese but by 3,000 handpicked "deputies" to China's legislature.

I agree that the US essentially has a fake democracy on the federal level, but at least we can push for change here and not be punished.
In China, those who speak in favor of a government with more than one party are punished.

brimstoneSalad wrote: It's not an echo chamber, but an attempt of balance to avoid political gridlock. There's plenty of disagreement, it's just not fought out in public with shaming and deceitful rhetoric. It could not help but be a more sincere and open minded discussion than what's happening in the U.S., which represents possibly the worst case of political rhetoric and dogma in the world.

Politics are rarely as simple as the media makes them out to be.
Read a little more about the structure, and the limitations. Misrepresenting China is popular, and it makes a big scary Bogeyman, but the sensationalism that sells papers just doesn't bear out in reality,

So all the debate happens behind closed doors, without involvement of the people of China?

brimstoneSalad wrote: In some respects, sure. But China is a developing country, and their main issues are infrastructure development, education, and providing jobs for the people. Chinese cities are very modern, but many people living in villages may not even have running water.

Oh? In what respects?

brimstoneSalad wrote:You don't need money to lobby, you need organization. You need a voting block who will dogmatically follow and promote whatever recommendation you make; that has power.

Ah, like the NRA.
But essentially stamping out democracy is not a solution to that. We just need the right organizations, which we can get in a democratic system.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Because they are secure in their power, and security means they can change their positions on things with the evidence without losing their voters by looking like "flip floppers", or failing to pander.
Look how hard it is for the more liberal Republicans, and the bulk of the party is still clinging to the anti-choice and anti-gay-rights position when those ships have sailed.

The heated political rhetoric of U.S. politics often forces people into more entrenched positions, rather than opening minds. China doesn't have that, and it's a surprising virtue of a system that would otherwise seem problematic based on our assumptions.

An adversarial system has a lot of important benefits, particularly when we're dealing with natural conflicts of interest and need to create compromises, but it's not without its problems, particularly in a longer game like politics where empirical matters beyond public opinion should be more important.

Sure, it does have problems. But in the end, I believe it is more sustainable because the people feel like they have the power, and because it can in theory represent the views of the people very well (it just doesn't as much as it should at the moment on the national level because of corporate money in politics).

EquALLity wrote:And even North Koreans who are not imprisoned often have shitty lives that end in starvation (because the North Korean government cares more about Mercedes-Benz cars than feeding its people),

That's not what's causing the starvation. Look into the history and economics. Trade sanctions are causing this. Are the leaders shitty? Sure.

EquALLity wrote:and China is supporting that by being an ally with North Korea etc..

That's not how it works. China wants stability in the region; and I believe they get a lot of food from their trade partnerships with China. If you cut them off, all of the people would die -- or more likely, they would attack South Korea.

EquALLity wrote:150,000-200,000 people isn't necessarily trivial just because it is a small percentage of the global population.

It is in a global sense. Compare it to the death toll of WWIII because the region is destabilized if China breaks ties.

EquALLity wrote: I'm not sure, maybe.

So, weigh that cost against the benefits in terms of regional stability, etc.

EquALLity wrote: It'd be much higher if North Korea didn't shoot people on the spot (no questions asked) for trying to escape to freedom (well, China, at least).

North Korea is shitty, but China isn't shooting anybody down.
The US has worse allies than that -- look at the shit going down in Saudi Arabia, and the proxy support of terrorism.
Treaties and respecting the sovereignty of even shitty countries are unfortunate necessities in politics.

EquALLity wrote: I don't see how that would work. The leaders are already extremely greedy, and are living 'the good life' currently.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-korea ... OF20140217

It's dumb, but it's not really that important.

EquALLity wrote: Revenue from criminal activity including drugs has been estimated at up to $500 million a year in 2008, amounting to a third of North Korea's annual exports at the time, it said.

That's how you destroy the North Korean government; end the war on drugs, and neither the North Korean government nor terrorists will have any source of income. The power structure will collapse. Then open up trade so you can get legitimate investment in the country and open factories so the people can have real work.

EquALLity wrote: Well, I really don't think they are much different from Nazi concentration camps.

They are very different. Nazi concentration camps were extermination camps. This is basically just slavery, like the plantation days in the states.

EquALLity wrote: They both involve imprisonment on religious grounds,

Religion is a choice; Nazis imprisoned secular Jews on genetic grounds.

EquALLity wrote: they both involve systematic and gross human rights violations (like torture and extermination).

Why do you think this?

I don't think the Nazis even tortured.

EquALLity wrote: The world largely ignores North Korean concentration camps, like it ignored Nazi concentration camps, and both countries worship a cult leader.

This was done for a reason. National sovereignty.

EquALLity wrote: Anger inspires passion, which leads to awareness, and since North Korean concentration camps rarely get any attention, I think that the good done may outweigh the potential harm.

Why? Why would it be good to make people aware and give these more attention? How is that going to help?

They need trade, not more sanctions.

EquALLity wrote: What? The US didn't systematically torture and rape Japanese-Americans in those camps.
They did murder people, but it wasn't nearly as horrible as what happens in North Korea.

I would say it was worse in the U.S., since it was done on the basis of their nationalities alone, and they lost everything they had.
Of course the Japanese in those camps were raped -- why would they not be?

None of it is systematic, though.
And I don't think you have any evidence of systematic torture or rape anywhere -- not the Nazi concentration camps, or North Korea.
Nobody made rules for the soldiers to rape their prisoners; they do that on their own.

EquALLity wrote: Of course they aren't, but that doesn't justify banning them, and in doing so you prevent real discussion.

No so -- some ideas are not conducive to real discussion, but instead distract from it.

EquALLity wrote: In the long run, if we have the free exchange of ideas, the rational ideas will prevail.

Are you sure of that? And what's the consequence in the short term of letting those irrational ideas run rampant?

Rational ideas will usually win in the right context, but the liars don't play fair, and they can make up shit faster than you can debunk it much of the time.

Look, for example, at the anti-vaccine movement. How many lives has it cost already? And only now is it losing a little steam. And what has it cost to do that? How many resources have we spent fighting this, that could have been directed elsewhere?

Everything has a cost.

If the government had stepped in and just banned promotion on mass media of anti-vax positions, and imprisoned the main proponents as a danger to public health, we could possibly have prevented most of this and saved the lives of many children who have died now from easily preventable diseases.

EquALLity wrote: Again, I never suggested that China should invade North Korea, or anything like that.

What caused the civil war in the U.S.?
Are you familiar with the fugitive slave act?

EquALLity wrote: I'm just saying that China should stop supporting North Korean concentration camps.

It isn't supporting them, at the very worst, it's ignoring them.

EquALLity wrote: Putting economic pressure on a country (etc.) is not necessarily violating its national sovereignty.

And maybe it will in the future -- it probably already is applying pressure behind closed doors that you aren't even aware of (Chinese leadership are human beings) -- and just not shaming them publicly like the U.S. does. This is part of Asian culture (to not shame people).

But in order to close the profitable internment camps, they would need to be replaced by something else -- like factories that give people work and produce GDP/GNP, which means lifting sanctions, not imposing more of them.

EquALLity wrote: Why are you calling people who are literally running for their lives 'illegal immigrants'?

Because, they're illegal immigrants... refugee status is VERY controversial in terms of international politics. Many countries consider it a violation of their national sovereignty to grant refugee status to its citizens (or prisoners), and a profound insult.

Again, Asian culture.

EquALLity wrote: If it's default for nations to send back refugees, then that is a problem. That is supporting evil regimes.

That's politics. It sucks. It is an oversimplification to say this is just supporting evil regimes.

EquALLity wrote: Those people aren't refugees. There's a difference between sending back evil people and sending back innocent people who are running for their lives to their deaths.

Who defines what qualifies a criminal, and what qualifies innocence?

Korea or China? It's violating national sovereignty to impose your definitions on another country -- or can be seen as doing so.
In the very least, it's a serious insult, and would create major tensions between the two countries.

EquALLity wrote: North Korea is a unique situation here, also. That would be a problem (obviously), but the solution doesn't have to be supporting an evil country.

What's the solution? Do you have an alternative?

EquALLity wrote: China could secure its border to prevent those people from leaving, or something (while allowing in North Korean refugees).

That's way worse!
Most of the people who escape probably actually make it to freedom through China, or just stay in China, get married, and live their lives.

Think of police officers who look the other way.
China also has a huge population. It's very easy to hide there.

Officially, China has to send them back if they catch them. But they're not trying very hard to catch them. This is why the numbers are so small.
Most of those who have been sent back have probably been returned because they were arrested for committing crimes in China (like theft).

I would be surprised if more than one in a hundred are found and sent back any significant distance past the border unless they've been arrested for criminal behavior.

EquALLity wrote: They're not 'snap judgements', and all my information about this issue is from that video that miniboes posted.

I watched the same video; it seems fine, but they had very limited information.

EquALLity wrote: Of course stamping out the free exchange of ideas creates resentment... You're taking peoples' basic freedoms away.

How do you know? Watch the video again. See how they gamify it, to do it through peer pressure rather than through government force. This is more likely to make a person feel like it was his or her own idea to change his or her opinions. In terms of psychology, it's brilliant.

EquALLity wrote: If you kept deleting meat-eaters' or religious peoples' posts because you thought they were full of shit, you don't think they'd be extremely resentful and irritated?

That's what this is for though: so they don't have to do that anymore. Instead, they just give the good people points. This is to fix a broken system that was creating resentment. Now, you can have your revolutionary opinions, but you don't get points... and fewer people will want to be friends with you... and you'll change your mind due to peer pressure rather than government force.

It's genius.

EquALLity wrote: Because you can't prevent that discussion without preventing reasonable discussion,

Of course you can.

EquALLity wrote: and because it creates resentment.

Not with this system. You only discourage it, not outright ban it. And it ends up in practice being prevented by peer pressure.

EquALLity wrote: And because preventing discussion about it won't make those ideas go away. Discussion, revealing those ideas as crazy, will.

Or peer pressure, ridiculing the ideas as crazy and not being friends with people because of it... they'll change their minds on their own.

EquALLity wrote: Soon, it will be government force. And it's force that attempts to make people give up their freedoms because of peer pressure.
How could that address the problem of resentment built because of conformity to peer pressure?

Very different psychological mechanisms. Peer pressure makes people resent their peers, but they like their peers and want to be liked by them, so they end up resenting their own views instead, and thus abandon them.

EquALLity wrote: I think it's reasonable to say that it's very bad based on what I've been arguing (punishes people for sharing facts, harms freedom of speech which creates resentment, etc.). The pros don't seem significant enough to outweigh all the harm that will likely be produced.

Those are arguments, not facts. See above about how this works differently (so we can't compare it to old methods where there are facts available).

Whenever there ARE serious pros and cons, you need data to weigh them against each other. They may seem to you very outweighed, but that doesn't mean they are. It's not reasonable to say it's bad without that data.

EquALLity wrote: I think there are better options (economic pressure).

Economic pressure is what caused the problems (starvation, poverty, extreme government power concentration, etc.)

EquALLity wrote: According to the UN report, and that story from the North Korean defector, they do systematically do those things.

We don't know. Anything out of North Korea is hearsay.

EquALLity wrote: You seem to be diminishing the horrors of these camps in North Korea. According to the report you're familiar with, the camps systematically commit gross human rights violations, many of which can be classified as crimes against humanity.

It's not clear what is systematic and supported by the government, and what is prison guards being assholes; which is common in U.S. prisons too.
Look at the Stanford prison experiment -- abuse in these situations is basic human power psychology.

It's a problem in North Korea, Western prisons, Nazi camps, U.S. internment camps, Guantanamo, etc.

Imprisonment itself is rarely anything short of a crime against humanity.

Impunity is a serious issue, and it's an issue with these systems, but that doesn't mean these behaviors are part of official policy -- we have no idea what those are.

EquALLity wrote: If you're familiar with the report, why were you and are you denying these things? Do you think the UN and the North Korean defector are lying, or something?

Nobody has the inside scoop.

EquALLity wrote: I mean, you basically denied that North Korea tortures people (saying it was an inaccuracy in a sentence I wrote, and changing it to 'punish').

The difference between punishment and torture is mainly rhetoric in these cases. The people in these camps are being punished for their actions, or the their parents/grandparents are. Whether those punishments are just is another matter, but one which is kind of irrelevant since these systems are in place for a reason right now and probably can't be changed without serious economic reform.

EquALLity wrote: People aren't imprisoned solely based on beliefs, they're not starved, and the torture isn't as common. There is much less systematic abuse.

The abuse in the U.S. isn't systematic either, it's a quality of human psychology. U.S. prisons are arguably much more violent though.

One could easily say that nobody in North Korea is imprisoned for beliefs; people who are are imprisoned for the action of expressing those beliefs. Everything is action too.
The U.S. imprisons people for as little as speaking, if they say the wrong things (particularly if they're not U.S. citizens), like implying terrorist sympathies and drawing suspicion.

Nazis and the U.S. are the only ones in these comparisons who have imprisoned people for their general heritage.
North Korea only imprisons immediate families (children and grandchildren).

EquALLity wrote: Of course they're crimes in North Korea; but North Korea is crazy for making those things crimes. That's all I'm saying.

That's fine to say; yes, they may be crazy. But the U.S. is crazy for making drug possession criminal too, right?
The U.S. war on drugs is actually mainly responsible for the continuing state in North Korea too (and terrorism); and the sanctions, which were originally put in place for ideological reasons (being against communism).

Every problem in North Korea can also be legitimately traced back to U.S. behavior.
Of course, "it takes two to tango" and the leadership of N. Korea is corrupt and also to blame, but the situation now simply begets itself, and missing the fact that this is far more complicated than just the North Korean leadership is not helpful.

EquALLity wrote: ...Are you saying that we don't know enough about North Korean concentration camps to pass judgement on them, and that they may be justifiable in certain respects because 'we don't know what these people did'?

They are internment camps. And yes, we don't know what all of those people did. North Korea was recently at war, internally and externally. Many of these people are prisoners of war, or their children or grandchildren.

The three generation policy of imprisonment is questionable, but we also know that the children of revolutionaries are very likely to be the same when their parents get imprisoned. It's not entirely irrational, just cruel.

EquALLity wrote: I question their intentions.
Why do you think the leadership of China is so moral?

They don't seem to care at all about the future of the planet.

They care about the future of China, and the stability in the region. China has serious problems with emission because it's a developing country. People still cook and heat their homes with coal. Infrastructure development takes time, and the political act of wealth redistribution is very delicate.

China has also been doing a lot of work on carbon capture, and they're at the forefront in that sector AFAIK.
The Chinese government does not have the ability to stop or curtail most of the emissions there, so they're trying to focus on capture which is more practical for the country right now, but requires some technological development.

EquALLity wrote: Seems reasonable to speculate that they may simply be using corruption as an excuse to capture those who are against government policies.

Like anti-corruption policies?

EquALLity wrote: Are you against elections (so, democracy)?

Money in politics makes Democracy a bit of a farce (as it's practiced in the U.S.), so it's a bad comparison to say the way it works now is better.

EquALLity wrote: We need (and can get) an amendment to the Constitution that gets money out of politics. It's difficult, but the end result will be better than the situation in China.

Maybe, but that's something we've yet to see. Currently it's a mythical creature.

I'm skeptical that it's even possible. Like the idea that we can take the dogma out of religion; it's worth a try, of course. I will refrain judgement until there's proof that something better exists.

EquALLity wrote: I don't think we should proceed in essentially destroying freedom of speech without answering those questions.
They don't seem to have good answers.

Saying that it is destroying freedom of speech by limiting it slightly (it's limited in the U.S. too) is a slippery slope fallacy on your part. There is something to be said for balance. And the way this new credit system works may be an interesting way to obtain that balance without rigidly restricting speech.

EquALLity wrote: I do know that they don't distinguish innocent from evil dissidents, because they punish people (on Sesame Credit) for simply posting articles with facts about the economic situation in China.

We don't have details on this. But something about economics you have to understand (like the stock market), is that talking about the economy in certain ways actually affects the economy.

Look into stock market crashes, and how they work.

Economic predictions don't act outside a bubble, but are often self fulfilling prophecies, since belief about economy affects action of the agents in the economy which affects the economy negatively or positively.

By posting about how the economy is crashing (true or not), you can help crash the economy. By posting about recovery and inspiring confidence in the economy, you can help recover the economy.

Economics functions on fairy logic, sort of. Belief becomes action which becomes fact.

EquALLity wrote: Communist Party?

I don't think so, based on their support of North Korean concentration camps, and because of their apathy towards the planet.

Yes.

And again: Politics on N. Korea. There is no support there.

And they are not apathetic to the state of the environment. They definitely want other developed countries to curtail emissions. Air quality has also been improved in some Chinese cities by strict policy changes (developed cities).
Look at China's "war on pollution".

These people have a scientific worldview, and they understand the risks. They are weighing the importance of economic development and lifting their population out of poverty against the harm done through climate change and pollution, and it's something they're exploring different options on. This is why they call for different standards for developed and developing countries.
Look at where their emissions are coming from, and the consequences of cutting those.


It sound sickeningly optimistic, but most human beings see themselves as the protagonists in this great narrative, and ultimately want to be good people (as long as they're also comfortable first). When people have a science based world view, it's very hard to hide from the harm certain policies cause. The Chinese government is not the Republican party; there's no denial going on there, just a weighing of costs and benefits.

EquALLity wrote: What do you think of this?: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... t/1987659/

Tie, 20, also gets to choose China's next president, a right in this country exercised not by the hundreds of millions of voting-age Chinese but by 3,000 handpicked "deputies" to China's legislature.

I don't see the relevance. 3,000 people voting on something is a substantial sample size.

EquALLity wrote: I agree that the US essentially has a fake democracy on the federal level, but at least we can push for change here and not be punished.
In China, those who speak in favor of a government with more than one party are punished.

Chinese can push for policies. This isn't really different. Chinese were upset about pollution in cities affecting quality of life, and they pushed for that, and the government made that a new focus.

You have to look at policies rather than parties. China has one party -- there's no need to question that -- you just need to encourage different policy decisions by that party (again, without shaming the party -- this is an element of Asian culture which can be hard to understand from a Western perspective [not saying it's a good element, but you have to consider that context]).

EquALLity wrote: So all the debate happens behind closed doors, without involvement of the people of China?

Pretty much. But the government looks at what people want, and what's going to make people happy and improve quality of life.
Remember: They see themselves as protagonists, and they actually DO want to help their people. Rarely are people deliberately evil, and certainly not 3,000 or so of them in collusion.

A constant march of progress in improving living conditions for the vast majority in China is what keeps people satisfied, and keeps the government in power. And it makes the human beings in government feel good about themselves, the families proud of them, etc.

The chief problem with these kinds of systems is the tendency toward corruption, but I'm not convinced that problem is more serious than corporate control of politics. I suspect it's better, since there's a limit to personal corruption (how rich can that number of people get before they hit a point of seriously diminishing returns, and start caring more about the positive regard of their peers than acquiring more money?).

A corporation will never reach a limit to its greed, since it's not a human being.

EquALLity wrote: Oh? In what respects?

I don't know what you're asking.

EquALLity wrote: But essentially stamping out democracy is not a solution to that. We just need the right organizations, which we can get in a democratic system.

The point is that I'm not convinced of which system is really better. I don't think there's enough evidence on it, and because of that we should reserve judgement until we have more information.

EquALLity wrote: Sure, it does have problems. But in the end, I believe it is more sustainable because the people feel like they have the power, and because it can in theory represent the views of the people very well (it just doesn't as much as it should at the moment on the national level because of corporate money in politics).

This is an issue of belief, not evidence. Whenever you feel yourself just believing something, that's a great time to challenge yourself to look more into it and consider the opposite assertion.

Yes, this would be a big problem in the U.S. because people would get really mad if you took away the illusion of democracy... but Chinese don't care as much about that illusion.

And in terms of theory, not really. Chinese officials are just as capable of taking surveys of public perception and responding to that.

The difference has two parts, one good and one bad:

1. The difference between what people think they need and what they actually need. Chinese have the ability to provide what people actually need based on expert evaluation, rather than human whim (people can vote against their own best interests)

2. Not being forced to do it. We have to rely on the desire to do good for Chinese -- but as I've said, there are more limits to individual greed than to corporate greed. I think it's a safer bet.

And finally, "at the moment"? This is just how politics works now. It may not be possible to "go back" to some idealized antiquity. Too much mass media, internet, etc. and spreading information always costs money. Taking money out of government may be a fairytale that in practice is truly impossible. This is yet to be seen, but not something to hang all of our hopes on and judge other systems by failing to uphold an ideal we have never reached either.