Can't go allowing Western propaganda about "personal liberty" to interfere with our grand plans. But we're definitely not authoritarian. You will grow to love the options we give you.
Can't go allowing Western propaganda about "personal liberty" to interfere with our grand plans. But we're definitely not authoritarian. You will grow to love the options we give you.
There are issues with privacy in both countries, but for different reasons and in different ways, just mindlessly going "Both sides bad" or "China worse because state" is libshit.
So take a stand, make a statement and regale us with what wonders you know about China's respect for personal privacy. Feel free to share sources, too. I'm here to learn.
Its a tradeoff for security and stability, the dreaded social credit system(Which is actually a non centralized set of unrelated systems in some regions that target specific things) has generally been met with positive attitudes for punishing people that act carelessly or disturb others, but of course Americans shriek at the thought of not having the freedom to ruin everyones day on the train or to run across roads without a green light.
Note that the U.S. has plenty of stuff like this, too. It's not a scary totalitarian thing that only The Other would impose on their citizens; it's your credit report, it's Verizon "firing" customers who aren't profitable, it's a cop ticketing you for littering.
This is the best example of why the terminology of authoritarianism and totalitarianism is liberal bullshit, its literally "When the government does the bad stuff" combined with liberal idealism about rights.
I wouldn't say those terms are entirely liberal bullshit. Imagine whatever socialist utopia you'd most prefer; it doesn't involve the police unnecessarily intruding on your daily life. It's also applied at aspects of the U.S., like our policing.
I'd say those terms are sometimes used as propaganda shorthand, like many terms are. They're not inherently bad, as they describe real situations we want to avoid, but when applied to one of The Bad Countries they're often tossed around at fairly ordinary stuff and any sort of explanatory context is ignored or stripped away.
I mean the point of marxism is to not deal in utopias, obviously anyone would prefer to not have to take measures to control information and keep track of people but thats often necessary as a consequence of the real world.
The reason they become liberal bullshit is that they essentially describe these things as ideologies in themselves, that they are the end goals from the start, and that basically paints any socialist that is ok with previous states as a distinctly evil person to the core and someone who wishes harm and torture upon innocent people.
Marxism involves an end goal of a moneyless, classless, stateless society. It absolutely has some utopian elements, even if subsequent Marxist revolutionaries were justifiably more practically oriented.
This is liberal bullshit, yes, but I would argue this use of "authoritarianism" is not the only use of the term. In addition to (occasionally) being directed at the U.S. police state, it's also directed at Nazi Germany and the various fascist dictatorships we propped up during the Cold War (e.g., Pinochet). The term has a real, useful meaning outside of its propaganda use.
You literally used the actual ideologies of those dictatorships though, using authoritarianism and totalitarianism is nothing but an attempt to generalize between socialist states and fascist states and to both sides them into either radical centrism or anarchism(lol).
That's a fair point.
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Littering is a shitty thing to do though. Fuck you if you litter.
It is, and that's part of the point. When people talk about the multiple polices that are collectively referred to as China's "social credit system," some of it is tracking genuinely undesirable activities like littering and penalizing people for it. This is exactly the same as getting a ticket for littering.
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