President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment
purdueexponent.org
purdueexponent.org
That includes making your substantive points without degenerating into nationalistic flamewar, ideological flamewar, partisan flamewar, or any flamewar. Edit name-calling and swipes out of your comments. Don't attack other users. Comment in the spirit of curious exchange, not smiting enemies. The latter is tedious and uninteresting, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
The most jarring comment came from a Chinese student at Emerson, who made Hui’s personal Facebook posts public. In one post, he wrote a comment that translates to: “Whomever opposes my greatest China, no matter how far they are, must be executed.”(2)
The student should have been expelled and Emerson should have an unequivocal statement condemning this sort of harassment over any topic.
Emerson did nothing.
1) https://berkeleybeacon.com/person-of-color-column-i-am-from-...
2) https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/05/28/frances-hu...
The British also have excellent game, but they work a lot with film and news. The Chinese have managed comparable results without.
Granted, someone saying the latter should never be met with death threats, just like the former!
Saying you are from Hong Kong gives you a ton of information that would be lost versus China
Six flags theme parks are quite literally named after the six different flags that have flown over Texas as a nod to it being an independent entity regardless of which larger nation currently lays claim to it.
I agree that the mainland government acted rashly. The forced implementation of the national security law definitely violates the spirit, if not the law here, and understandably a lot of people were alienated by this move. That said, the Basic Law does provide a provision for the implementation of such a law (Article 23), and there's ample wiggle room for the governments involved to argue that they haven't yet demolished the "one country, two systems" approach as yet.
Same for Catalonia, Hong Kong or any other.
Not saying it is a thing that should be done lightly, but also not impossible.
Countries exists for the people, not the other way round like China likes to think.
China's priority is national security, and given the track record of western liberal democracies it is not unreasonable. As I recall we had a civil war the last time states tried seceding.
I’m not American, I don’t agree with the Vietnam war and I think the civil war was an ethical difficult decision. That was 150 years ago so not really sure why it is relevant.
Hong Kong was given to the Britain by three treaties in the 19th century (1842 Treaty of Nanking, 1860 Convention of Peking, 1898 The Second Convention of Peking), and the true copies of all treaties are in the hand of Taiwan, which were brought to Taiwan by the KMT government during its retreat to Taiwan before 1950.
If the declaration behind Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China (the Sino–British Joint Declaration of 1984) is revoked, arguably it could be contested if Hong Kong should belong to the holder of the bearer shares of the three treaties, Taiwan. (See previous discussion [1]).
And in the most recent six-monthly report on Hong Kong published on 14 December 2021 [2], the UK government stated that China is not complying with the Sino-British Joint Declaration:
With China now in a state of ongoing non-compliance with its international obligations under the UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration, the UK will continue to work with international partners to hold China to its legally binding obligations on Hong Kong. Upholding the promises it entered into freely is in the best interests of Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23260934
[2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/six-monthly-repor... " Six-monthly report on Hong Kong: 1 January to 30 June 2021"
I don't think so. Just look at what Americans buy. Money talks. Lip service doesn't count.
>on an individual level, I don't think it's that's dramatic.
the frog just doesn't notice the boiling. For example how discussing Chinese origin of covid got branded as racist in the public mentality - i think that branding is a great PR success pulled by China which as a result turned public attention away from and severely eroded public support for covid origin investigation especially in the earlier days of pandemic when evidence/witnesses may have still been available.
Yes, if you accuse the waitress at a Chinese restaurant of being responsible for COVID, you are racist.
The firm association in the public mind between the attacks and origins, as your comment for example demonstrates, is the part of that great PR success by China.
Yet even just bringing up the leading consensus in science as to the origins of Covid and its transmission to humans is all but taboo in "educated" circles. Same goes for discussing the role the WHO played and all evidence we have as to why it played that role. Any discussion of why this pandemic happened and that the nation where it originated has blocked all independent investigation to investigate this; bringing it up is not done.
Yet this conspiracy theory is discussed ad nauseam in the American press, contrary to what you're saying.
The reason why this theory has become so popular in the US is that it distracts from the disastrous response to the pandemic in the US.
China essentially beat the virus by April 2020, and has had almost no cases or deaths since. Yet nearly two years later, the US is still struggling. As it says in Matthew, "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
China has paid a huge economic cost for its zero COVID policy, not many other countries could or would afford such a solution. They aren’t the envy of the world (let alone America) in this regard.
The Chinese economy did well because of the zero-CoVID policy. The policy allowed China to reopen businesses in March-April 2020, and to avoid widespread lockdowns since.
Much of that GDP growth was still tearing down and building apartment blocks. It isn't real. Again, they are completely closed up now. They are "locked down" even if they aren't stuck in their houses anymore. I wouldn't want to be living in Beijing right now (where I was from 2007-2016), it isn't a very fun life these days.
> They are "locked down" even if they aren't stuck in their houses anymore.
Beijing is not under lockdown. Pretty much everything is open, and has been for more than a year. There are testing requirements to enter Beijing (which is something that's particular to Beijing), but that's it.
China admits that a large part of their GDP is building and tearing things down. There is no "fakeness" about it, it just is what it is.
> Beijing is not under lockdown. Pretty much everything is open, and has been for more than a year. There are testing requirements to enter Beijing (which is something that's particular to Beijing), but that's it.
Beijing is not under lockdown, it just isn't an open city right now.
Please point to any major media discussing the Wuhan coronavirus GoF research involving human subjects (the EcoAliance's approved by NIH grant application is pretty clear about it).
Given the latter half, I think that's *wary (cautious) rather than 'weary' (fatigued, fed up)?
I'm not American, but something I've noticed on YouTube is that 'import' is a euphemism for 'Chinese crap' - probably more prevalent because there's more of a US manufacturing base to begin with, but the funny thing is when it's imported from somewhere else that's respected it's a German tool, or Japanese for example, but 'import' seems to mean 'imported from China', heh.
(I'm not claiming I'm above it nor offended by it, just caught my attention because 'import' isn't an adjective to me and the usage amused me. It wouldn't really catch on in the UK I don't think, because so much is 'import' to begin with, whether Chinese or not.)
I remember when Vizio made garbage tvs. This is more of a delayed and earned reputation thing. Also product market fit.
Sure, I'm absolutely not saying nothing good's made in China nor especially that that couldn't change. Just noticing others' usage/implication.
This comment is not intended to praise or support the CCP, but just to provide some context. I think the US government should be staying out of content as well.
China's managed to lift a huge number of people out of poverty and deserves credit for that. They did it at a terrific cost in human life and rights and they deserve opprobrium for that, in particular for the continued and now increasing level. We have plenty of examples from history that such an approach is not sustainable.
Regardless, if you look at the numbers the odds of significant further growth are dubious. China remains quite poor on per capita GDP, even on a PPP basis it is in the lower half of countries. It has an enormous unemployment problem, and a huge demographic overhang. Corruption, false statistics, and cronyism remain dominant in the economy and government, more reminiscent of a small state than a massive one, and all of which make it very difficult to manage large shocks.
I'm not saying the PRC is some benign kumbaya entity. But they have deep structural weaknesses that are not discussed much because it's more useful to various people to point elsewhere.
This is exactly why China has such a huge growth ahead. Just to get to the level of countries like Australia this will make their economy several times the size of US.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/04/china-one-child-policy-...
Moreover, the US is changing its immigration policies exactly at the moment they need it most, which seems to be another tragic mistake.
It's terrible but, it's brilliant too. Like, I don't like it but it's also amazing. It makes a confounding effect on how I should feel about these things.
It's like, don't hate the player, hate the game? I do hate the game tho.
You A) don't know that, because stats coming out of China aren't to be trusted and executions and disappearances are common B) are conveniently ignoring the well documented reeducation/concentration camps where the only crime is being a Muslim minority.
China is modern day Nazi Germany, they're not even really communist, they have government controlled corporations and operate in a capitalist system. In many ways they're fascist and even revere Hitler in their school teachings. Taiwan at least has socialized healthcare, in China you have to pay for it. If they are "communist" they're doing a shit job of it.
"In my world there's always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however
In your world there's no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn't it?"
It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?
There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.
But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.
Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.
In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.
Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."
Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).
This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.
(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)
But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?
The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.
I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.
The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.
I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.
I suppose it's not surprising when someone's when someone adopts their parents' culture etc. despite being born abroad (e.g. self-describing as Indian without being a citizen/born there) - so makes sense, I just hadn't realised.
- a state (the PRC) - an ethnic group (Han) - a culture
The government of the PRC will gladly conflate those things serves their interests.
Most people in Hongkong would definitely identify as culturally and ethnically Chinese. That third item is ... a point of contention. I expect the situation in Taiwan is similar.
On the other side, it is possible to be nationally Chinese but neither culturally nor ethnically so -- see the Tibetans or Uighur for examples.
If they were born in HK and raised there, they would call themselves a HKer (香港人) from Hong Kong. It's highly unlikely they would say they are from 'China' because in their eyes China is Mainland China (大陆/中国) and there is negativity associated with it.
Confusingly, my friends whose parents are from Hong Kong and were born in the UK identify themselves as 'British Born Chinese' rather than 'British Born HKer'.
I use Cantonese or English when in Hong Kong. Speaking Mandarin there, when you look East Asian, is just asking for trouble if you are in wrong part of town.
> Zhihao Kong, a student at Purdue University, posted a letter online in 2020 commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Shortly after he received a call from his parents, back home in China, saying they had been contacted by China's Ministry of State Security—the department responsible for national intelligence and managing domestic dissidents. Kong's parents told him the Ministry officers said he needed to cease his activism or he and his family would face trouble with the Chinese government. Other Chinese students at Purdue then began harassing Kong and threatening to report him to the Chinese government for his activism, which could potentially endanger both his life and the lives of his family.
There is a lot of reading between the lines necessary because of the network of reporting from other Chinese that’s worldwide.
Note: those actual opinions are not necessarily “life is baaaad what a niiightmare”, they can be quite nuanced just like anywhere else. Something as simple as “I kind of liked that unsanctioned rendition of the Chinese national anthem” could have the same consequences for them and their family as a total denouncement of the Party.
Single party control, coupled with a constitution with articles that undermine all the other parts of the constitution, can really impact the experience to express anything.
The nearly non-existent line between public and private sector in China really derails all possible discussion and comparison to equivalences outside of China, but regardless I just don't find what goes on in China to be different enough when we tolerate the same things from the private sector that runs our daily life. It isn't different enough for me to draw the line at "but our government isn't doing it".
On the other side, you have a single entity which answers only to itself, and makes the law. There is no-one "above" that entity, even in principle. If you don't like the things it's doing... tough.
Is it really that different in America (or the "west" in general)? Most of us have become very guarded in what opinions we share in the past few years.
The difference is that expressing an opinion to another American abroad just means you cant sleep with them. It doesn't cause the federal or municipal police to track down your family for intimidation, or the private sector to galvanize excision of them either. For the individual that voiced there is just a small risk of being disassociated with the person you said something to, and if it was digital there is a small risk of getting fired or disassociated from institutions you were a part of. Very small risk. Maybe greater over the following decade, for something you said now.
Of course us western, middle-class white people think we're free, we think what we have is normal. Nothing's prodding us to question the status quo.
I think you extrapolated waaaaay more than either of us were talking about beforehand. We're talking about the comparisons to what happened in the article.
Its a tricky discussion since many of us want to make these comparisons between the countries, its very tempting to, but without narrowly tailoring the conversation it just derails everything.
Single party control is effectively party-less control, and the due process is not necessary, but there is a future convenience to making decisions seem less arbitrary while getting the behaviors they want from all persons.
The identities of the bullies is well known and the extent of abuse is borderline criminal. There should be only one remedy: imediate expulsion of any agent of repression of the Chinese state.
The statement clearly fall short of what is required, it simply wants to appease those outraged by threatening with vague punishments, without risking the large revenue from Chinese students.
Students are not being (considered for) expelled for their views of the Tiananmen Massacre one way or another. Taking any stance on that, in this context, would muddy those waters and make Prudue look like it was doing a political purge.
The problem that produced the statement was harassment. Not political views.
In the meantime, debating without harassing each other is the best way forward.
A debate has different facets - political or not political - fact or not fact - harassment or not harassment.
In this case the problem that needed to be addressed by Purdue was the harassment.
Students debating different understandings of Tiananmen Square (regardless of either sides merits) was not the issue that required intervention by university leadership.
There should be the same remedy that is provided to any other bully. These are still kids. There is a learning opportunity. If they refuse to learn, yes, expulsion should be in the cards.
Agree there is pressure, but the more admins cave, the worse it is for everyone.
I think a bigger problem is two-fold:
1) Universities are addicted to Chinese student tuition funds, and they don't want to rock the boat. I doubt they care as much about the students themselves. My university totally half assed their program (eg. some Chinese students would have questions that went unanswered, professors tended to pay them less attention, etc.), and I felt so sorry for the students.
2) Chinese students tend to stick in groups together rather than be integrated and mixed amongst the other student populations. They're assigned the same dormitory blocks, do shopping/dining together, and they don't really get to experience America in the same way that other international students do. Not sure if this is due to design or negligence.
Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed. If they're coming out of a brainwashed environment, they may never have been explicitly told that this is wrong; they deserve a second chance.
> message needs to be received in Beijing, not merely Indiana
I agree. My vote would be for a new foreign-student visa ban on the children of CCP members until Beijing commits to quit being petulant. But hit Beijing, the people commanding spooks to harass the parents of a student in a different country telling historical stories that scare them.
US universities are famously litigious and take a hard line stance when it suits them. See Aaron Swartz. So, I don't buy the 'they are still kids' line. That is, I don't condone it, but I don't agree that universities are motivated by this sort of reasoning.
MIT was not a party to the lawsuit against Aaron Swartz, nor was even JSTOR. It was brought entirely by the US Attorney for Massachusetts.
To quote:
> Opting not to pursue a civil lawsuit against him, JSTOR reached a settlement with him in the summer of 2011 in which Swartz turned over the downloaded data to them. It was never released to the public. Neither did MIT take any civil action against him.
The lawsuit was a purely Justice initiative.
[1]: https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/law-and-legal...
The problem with referring to the official record is that one misses what isn't in the official record.
If they are mature enough for the Chinese government to shoot them in the head for peaceful protesting, then they are mature enough to understand that some democratic cultures have strong objections against the CCP and those who do their bidding.
It's one of those things where the real world is too dangerous to allow kids to be kids: you must tell 5 year olds that magic capes can't help them fly, and that they should run away from strange men who wish to touch their peepee, even if, for an ideally happy childhood, you shouldn't have to.
I really don't think we do have such a consensus. The post-high school (for those who graduated) 18-year-olds from my old neighborhood who committed offenses didn't get this consideration. They went to jail. Knowing their home lives growing up, it was no surprise to anyone that they committed the offenses they committed. It's difficult to see how they could have done otherwise. They weren't explicitly brainwashed, but they grew up in an environment that warped their world view as thoroughly as any Chinese propaganda could have done.
In the United States, we've also tried children as young as 11 years old as adults.
I think there is a social consensus to give college students a pass.
It's bizarre how some societies have lowered their expectations of young people over the past couple centuries. When Horatio Nelson was that age he was captain of a warship, leading hundreds of men in combat and doing a pretty fine job of it.
If it were up to me people would get voting rights a few years after they get treated like an adult in all other capacities, I don't care if you move one up or move the other back.
Universities should treat students like adults but these people have no practice being adults so it's gonna be messy.
https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
> In a rush of adrenaline last year, the graduate student posted an open letter on a dissident website praising the heroism of the students killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
> The blowback, he said, was fast and frightening. His parents called from China, crying. Officers of the Ministry of State Security, the feared civilian spy agency, had warned them about his activism in the United States.
I'd say harassment falls into this category, so no proof of collusion with the CCP is needed.
I doubt Purdue (up to now) has any policy saying it’s illegal to report someone to authorities for something they did. Even if those authorities are not popular right now and the thing they did is ok at Perdue but not at home.
Is it a ‘dick move’ and offend our sensibilities? Sure.
But that doesn’t mean it’s any different than if a bunch of folks from the US were at a French university during the 50’s and someone called the FBI telling them that Bob was saying a lot of scary things about communism and just got a Russian Girlfriend and maybe they should look into it.
If it’s true, then of course the FBI is going to look into it. If true, it’s also unlikely to count as harassment. It’s also pretty terrible from 5 different angles.
Yes. Having the right to say or do something doesn't mean it isn't harassment. But more importantly, the 'students' making these reports/threats are acting as agents of the CCP, projecting the CCP's power into an American university, and should be ejected from the country for that. What they were doing was espionage.
I’m sorry, but is this supposed to be a counter point? This kind of behavior would have been ridiculous and unacceptable as well, unless said US citizen had access to state secrets or something of that nature.
And yes, it is taught this way even in semi-rural high schools in southern US states as well (I attended a high school like that myself in GA about 10 years ago). It's like saying "well, US did the whole Trail of Tears thing centuries ago, so we can do a soft-genocide in 2021 as well with Uyghurs".
That type of an argument doesn't sound convincing in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already support what China is doing or some very vocal radical left minority (aka tankies and adjacent groups) in the west. For an example of the latter, just check r/sino, it feels like reading into some parallel universe.
What is happening to the Uighurs is easy for me to point out as crossing the line. But something like Hong Kong? As a westerner I was to support democracy and self determination, but by the same token, Hong Kong is indisputably part of china’s sovereign territory and it seems like a lot of people in the US think it’s ok to promote separatism in another country just because it shares our values. Why don’t I ever hear anyone apply that to our allies? ( cough cough Saudi cough)
I find myself sympathetic to the talkie rhetoric not because I believe in communism, but because I grew up in a generation that was lied into the Iraq war, and see similarities with the mind of nationalism that swept the country in the early 2000s. America never really atoned for abu ghraib, gitmo, cia black sites, signature strikes etc. and to me that is way more relevant to anything that we did in the 19th century.
reflexively I am just repulsed by the nationalistic rhetoric on these issues.
You can harass someone with legal activity, making it illegal. If I show up outside your house everyday and stand on the sidewalk with a concealed weapon that is obviously illegal harassment. Standing on the sidewalk might be legal, carrying a concealed weapon may be legal, harassing someone with either is not.
> But that doesn’t mean it’s any different than if a bunch of folks from the US were at a French university during the 50’s and someone called the FBI telling them that Bob was saying a lot of scary things about communism and just got a Russian Girlfriend and maybe they should look into it.
You're right. This is something we will all need to worry about in the event that we time Travel to the 50's. When that happens, I'll criticize the US government, and encourage the French university to expel the American students. I guess we will need to settle for dealing with today's problems until time travel is possible :(
> If it’s true, then of course the FBI is going to look into it. If true, it’s also unlikely to count as harassment. It’s also pretty terrible from 5 different angles.
Why? I think your false assumption here is that everything the university should care about, the FBI should care about to, which is simply not true. You can outright break the law and the FBI not care depending on the law. I don't know that this falls into the category of things the FBI would deal with.
And you seem to be rather completely misreading my comment.
I’m not saying anything that the CCP, the students, or the university is doing is RIGHT.
I’m saying it happens, and it happens a lot, and it’s happened here in the US recently, and it’s not as illegal or clearly stoppable as people here seem to think.
So watch your ass, anyone that thinks that some moral right to speak truth is going to save you without some serious planning or thinking ahead (like the student who spoke out) - because you may very well be a martyr for a cause you did not plan to.
Because I’m one of those who likes to speak out, and I’ve almost been steamrolled by something before. So watch your ass.
Care to point out which?
> I’m saying it happens, and it happens a lot, and it’s happened here in the US recently, and it’s not as illegal or clearly stoppable as people here seem to think.
Harassment is clearly illegal. It has a legal definition and everything. That being said, it is hard to prove, which is where the complications actually lay. In this case, it seems like there is plenty of evidence though.
> So watch your ass, anyone that thinks that some moral right to speak truth is going to save you without some serious planning or thinking ahead (like the student who spoke out) - because you may very well be a martyr for a cause you did not plan to.
I don't see where this fits into the conversation. Are you saying people shouldn't speak out? Are you saying reporting harassment to the police is bad?
> Because I’m one of those who likes to speak out, and I’ve almost been steamrolled by something before. So watch your ass.
That's pretty vague.
Edit: actually not sure if they are foreign nationals. Maybe someone knows if same applies?
This is a false statement. The only regulation here is title VI and title IX. The administration of a public university is not legally part of the government.
Nope, you are wrong. There have literally been supreme court cases about free speech rights of students.
And yes, the supreme court has found that it is possible for a public school to break the 1st amendment rights of students.
The issue is of harassment and continued education at Purdue; not constitutional rights. It sounds like the pro China students were harassing Zhihao Kong. Purdue can decide what constitute harassment. 100% it's part of of every contract the student signs and agrees to as a part of their acceptance.
Students arguing politics, even if uncivil, isn't something you want to be "no tolerance" about. There are lines though, and this is one.
Emotions are good, but excessive emotions without deep understanding is something very different.
Only time will tell what actually is done.
What's nonsensical are the allegations that politically engaged pro-PRC/CCP Chinese national students must be state agents. And the disproportionate media attention it gets in the west whenever there's diaspora drama between PRC students and HK/Tibet etc. CCP doesn't need to instruct nationalists to behave like nationalists. Rich Chinese kids with social media are playing the same cancel culture game against the out-group and that just happens to be aligned/exploitable for PRC censorship.
So? It's a crappy game and we should stop letting them play it. Making up accusations of being a CIA agent is not better than making up accusations of being a PLA agent.
No, because at least one (edit: two!) incidents like this has already repeatedly happened elsewhere. Chinese students sabotaged a panel at Brandeis University about Uyghurs ("Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem." - which is pretty clearly harassment), and an Emerson College student was subjected to doxxing and death threats[2]. Given these incidents, and that the university president released a letter about this (so it's not just an unverified social media post), the reasonable assumption is that the students did engage in harassment.
Moreover, yes, students in a foreign country reporting an incident legal in that country to their repressive home government is definitely "collusion".
> Freedom of speech in west =/= freedom from consequences
Um, no, that's incorrect. "Freedom of speech" means that you have the ability to express the opinions that you want to without consequences, by definition (the two components of freedom of speech are the ability to express opinions and the protection from "consequences" (which is a misleading way to say "active retribution") of that expression).
In the United States incarnation, the First Amendment is a specific instance of a law protecting freedom of speech that prevents the federal government from punishing you from saying what you want, modulo a few edge cases (most of which aren't restrictions on freedom of speech/expression so much as restrictions on particular utterances (e.g. yelling "fire" in a crowded theater) or knowledge (disseminating classified information)).
But, beyond the government (which is the only entity that the First Amendment applies to), other organizations or individuals can take pro-free-speech or anti-free-speech positions, which (again) means freedom from consequences due to that speech.
The CCP here is clearly taking an anti-free-speech position by threatening the student through his parents due to an opinion that he has expressed about Tianamen Square.
> Rich Chinese kids with social media are playing the same cancel culture game
Also completely false. "Cancel culture" means that you're attacked by the culture specifically, which includes just about everything except the government.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
The legal argument behind that concept isn't that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is about the particular utterance but that it was a metaphor for the government's legal ability to restrict free-speech when it presents a "clear and present danger".
The legal case where the metaphor was introduced was a unanimous decision allow charging some under the espionage act for pamphleteering against the draft in WWI. It considered among the worst Supreme Court decisions, has been partially overturned and is an odd example to reference when arguing that these "edge-cases" don't amount to real restrictions on speech. This particular "edge-case" decision upheld the criminal prosecution of anti-war activists for their speech.
That it could also (in an extreme case) cause many employers with Chinese ties to avoid alumni with Perdue ties to avoid backlash from China is an outcome they can’t ignore either.
CCP is not known for rational, reasoned responses in situations like this.
That global campaigne makes an even handed response for Purdue important, both for this context, and helping set an example for wider contexts.
We need to maintain/develop a strong and even handed culture - standing up for everyone's right of expression without harassment.
It definitely cuts down on the number of sane people being willing to be seen doing whatever it is that typically causes that response.
You realize the 89' protestors were trying to overthrow the government (thats how you establish the Democracy). No surprise that celebrating failed-revolutionaries is contentious.
A country which improves its behavior through self-criticism from its citizens is not a tyranny. It is just a government that makes serious mistakes.
No form of government has managed to avoid that yet.
Democracy and freedom don't guarantee the majority will behave well all the time. But they systematically leave the door open for improvement - even if it takes a lot of effort.
China, on the other hand, just bashed Hong Kong liberties, and to my horror, media already forgot about that.
And when you get to name a country that doesn't respect human rights, that still doesn't justify you to do the same
Ahh, the classic whataboutism prevalent in threads about China. No excuse, especially because almost all the bad stuff that those governments did are decades in the past, whereas China is doing those things now, accelerating them, and being defended by its citizens (and people like you).
Moreover, you can't just lump together governments like that? The UK is a completely different world than the US - for instance, their freedom-of-speech laws aren't comparable to ours.
And, if we're talking just about the US (which is the topic of discussion, not the UK) - the US does not "block freedom of the press, block and censor the internet, [...] push other democracies to overwrite their history, and commit genocide..." and the other things that we have (shamefully) committed are an order of magnitude not as bad as what China is doing now. The last time the US did something remotely similar to the million+ Uyghurs in concentration camps was the Trail of Tears in 1850 (which, as terrible as it was, involved less than a 10th of the number of victims as Xinjiang now).
You're sure making a lot of fallacies and bad arguments to try to excuse the behavior of a murderous, tyrannical government...
The perpetrators may be known, but even so that has to be formally established before the school can do anything about them.
It's unfortunate that there isn't a greater response from the student body in defense of free speech.
If we’re both at a bar we have a right to be at, and you keep saying you think I’m a jerk and should get kicked out - is that harassment?
If you follow me there every time I go? Probably. If you don’t, probably not.
Proving one way or another can be difficult.
From the article:
> If those students who issued the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action.
It sounds like they don't know who the students are yet, so they can't punish anybody. Anyway, I'd rather they say "appropriate disciplinary action", because it implies they'll actually try to find out the full story, which is how I want an administration to behave.
The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary sanction." Have the threateners been reliably identified in, for example, press accounts? It seems very possible that in some communities on campus "everyone knows who it is" without the administration actually knowing, or being able to reliably prove, who it was.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, pregnancy, or *national origin*.
Honestly, students need to understand that if they are perpetrating this violence (yes, harassment and intimidation, whether or not it is physical, is a form of violence) they will face severe disciplinary action. Also, they need to understand that they are breaking federal law.
Unfortunately, Purdue University likely will not be taking this as seriously as possible. There are so many other public universities that have better formal administrative policies towards this kind of behavior.
What is it about Purdue that makes them unlikely to take this seriously?
Ok, say Purdue eats the acquisition cost to replace the 200 students. Those new students now need to be replaced by whatever school they would have otherwise attended, they have to come from somewhere. There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.
> There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.
Perhaps, but again 200 students is inconsequential to Purdue as I stated. They have the ability to replace instantly and they have a > $2.5 billion endowment.
The system would unravel due to overextension of loans and people deciding it's not worth it to take the debt on that they have been doing. That's the unravel risk. And it would hit the low tier schools anyway.
What Purdue or others with similar challenges cannot do, is nothing. Not everyone gives a shit about appeasing China. Maybe LeBron, the NBA and some other organizations care because it has been all about the $ for them. But things are changing. Women's Tennis is standing up. Biden making a statement regarding Olympics. Not many examples out there but they're becoming more frequent.
The point at which it becomes beyond the pale, as Kong himself stated" was when the pro-ccp students "weaponized" the CCP/state. IE, called chinese secret police and arranged for an intimidation visit to his parents.
The reality that Americans are unwilling to accept is that PRC nationals are agents of the state by default. Even if a PRC national doesn't fall into one of the above programs, they are still incentivized by China's social credit system to act in the state's interests, even while abroad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Front_Work_Department
We need a MORE impactful response form this side, but it does not have to be instant.
And you are correct that it has to be carefully investigated, soundly based, and measured for maximum effect.
Ultimately, if you are a "student" here and are participating in state power projection, spying, or abuse of anyone merely participating in protected activities, we need to expel you not only from the school but from the country.
Would China tolerate US "students" on their land spying, attempting to project US power, or abusing others on their land? Not for a second, and we shouldn't either.
Moreover, stronger actions need to be taken to provide consequences to the CCP for attempting this kind of nonsense.
The CCP also needs to stop it from home, because the repeated spy cases of Chinese ppl in academia have already tainted the reputation of ALL Chinese students. I'm sure it is already shutting them out of interesting internships that might also use even CUI (Controlled Unclassified Data) in unrelated parts of the business.
China is the worlds weird abusive ex-boyfriend.
That is so extremely far from the case that I think it may be a classic example of the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It has just jumped out at me how consistently and reliably items on that topic generate those responses. It's also consistent with available open-source info on ops of the CCP and Russian govt. which include social media trolling to promote their POV, undermine rival POVs, and/or sow discord (and considering the ROI on such ops, they'd be negligent to not do them considering there's no resistance).
In any case, I'll take a closer look before commenting.
I don't mean to pile on, but this is exactly the point: what jumps out at each of us is precisely the stuff that we find most disagreeable. If you had the opposite preference, opposite stuff would jump out. The effect that this has is very strong, and the conclusions it produces are completely unreliable. (I'm talking about all of us here, not you personally!)
>>but this is exactly the point, what jumps out at each of us is precisely the stuff that we find most disagreeable.
Yup, that is a good point, so I should be looking more strongly for that effect and contrary indicators as well.
Thx for being persistent enough to clarify.
1. Unify the country around the People's Republic of China generally, and Xi Jinping specifically
2. Damage or destroy any alliances with western powers that China's neighbors might have
The absolute worst thing we can do right now is knee-jerk our way into blowback, and a lot of the reaction here seems to be that we should. In fact, I even read a report[0] stating that a lot of the recent government attempts to fish out Chinese spies have devolved into fishing expeditions against Chinese grad students in America. I'm tempted to say we're doing it wrong, but it could also be the case that we're just making the least-worst mistakes right now.
[0] which I absolutely wish I could find!
People don't realize just how much the rules are stacked in favor of bullies.
Chinese law requires Chinese citizens and companies to spy when asked. It's literally a law.
https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corpo...
Even without a kinetic confrontation, current trends indicate PROC will dominate the world economy, ocean navigation, the African and part of South American continents, near Earth orbit and the Moon because of technology they've already stolen, downloaded, misappropriated and bought from the West --and they're known to be creating bioweapons that kill only non-Chinese people while operating concentration camps that harvest organs, rape and murder millions of racial minorities!
Let's see Purdue prove they are not feckless by leveraging this to terminate Chinese investments and expel all members and family members of the CCP that refuse to surrender their Chinese citizenship, become naturalized Americans and (civilly) agree to lifelong warrantless monitoring of their loyalty to America.
…I’m unfortunately assuming the poster is making a bad-faith reference to COVID-19. Some conspiracy theorists have been labeling it a bio weapon and ignoring the deaths from the initial outbreak.
Different ethnic groups carry different genes. You know how you sometimes see headlines like "DNA of 2,000-year-old corpse in the Himalayas analysed; he turns out to be Greek"? So apparently some ethnicities have some genes that others don't; otherwise they couldn't know that.
Make a bioweapon that targets people with genes that your ethnic group doesn't have, and you've made a bioweapon that targets only people of other ethnic groups.
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/china-tibet-student-e...]
If Canadian universities take too tough a stance against this kind of behaviour they could find themselves, either individually or collectively, on the Chinese government's naughty list. Perhaps the degrees they confer might lose their recognition in China, or perhaps students will be discouraged from attending "naughty" universities.
If you look at Daniels' response, note that it deliberately skirts around the fact that this kind of targeted harassment is directly encouraged by the Chinese government. Even just mentioning China by name in his statement is flirting with trouble.
It's chilling to observe that academic freedom of North American universities can be so negatively impacted by a foreign power.
The pattern of leadership is the same everywhere; the "academic freedom being negatively impacted by a foreign power" you mention is a rot that pervades nearly all American instutions, be they academic or commercial. Have you ever read the biography of Phil Knight, founder of Nike? His incredible business insight was to take shoes made cheaply elsewhere and undercut American labor with it. We're led by Phil Knights in every sector.
He's also run Purdue differently than most administrators. He famously froze tuition, and he's using the name for an online school Purdue bought.
How is the governor of Indiana closer to dealing with international relations? I suspect the president of Purdue does it more, given the international nature of academia. How does Mike Pence affect Daniels' experience?
> he's using the name for an online school Purdue bought
Is that good?
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/purdue-global-got-irs-sta...
Its programs are among the top in the nation.
https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/AboutUs/FactsFigures/Ran....
Close in the sense that his successor as Indiana Governor was Mike Pence. I almost want to say the only reason Daniels wasn't in that spot was timing.
I've read this several times but not sure what it means - what "name"?
They bought an online school (Kaplan University), then renamed it to Purdue University Global. It's one of the worst schools in the country. The only reason to do that is to cash in on the Purdue brand, and it will likely dilute it over time.
“Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”
China doesn't have enough power and influence for that to happen today, but what if/when their GDP per capita reaches the same level as US? At that point every big company has to adapt or get outcompeted by the companies allowed to operate in the Chinese market.
(Which isn't to say I believe in letting corporations off the hook.)
It has been for years. You can find many stories of it, including companies firing employees who are critical of the CCP and CEOs apologizing. Look up stories of Disney, most of Hollywood, the NBA (a firestorm, though I don't know about apologies), etc.
Pose of indignation struck; commitment to follow-through with actual investigation, nonexistent.
For instance, I (in Europe) don't "lightly suggest" things in the US are difficult when it comes to guns/Trump/abortion/etc to American colleagues because these are sensitive political topics and nothing good can come out of that. You mentioned it was in South America so maybe another example would be to mention drug cartels and Pablo Escobar to Colombian colleagues.
I can imagine your Chinese colleagues thinking "here we go again..." and politely stirring the conversation to another topic.
"Lightly suggesting" something is "difficult" is a conversation starter. Not arguing.
Maybe we're getting into "cultural differences" area and we should probably agree to disagree.
I wish people were more charitable on HN, on the internet, and in life.
Separately, plenty of good relationships can discuss politics without issue, and to not do so would leave the world only to their information bubbles.
She was not visiting from China, she literally had been in Europe for more than a decade, and still.
The owner, a Chinese expat, greeted us enthusiastically and personally sat down to serve us tea. The conversation was lovely; she was explaining the source of the tea, the preparation and serving method, etc. and I was just enjoying the experience when she offhandedly asked where he was from.
When he responded, "Taiwan," she immediately frowned and made some terse comment in Mandarin, to which he retorted, also in Mandarin. There was a tense exchange, and then she abruptly turned to me and started asking me questions again in English, changing the subject.
I had not yet learned of the One-China stance, so when we left I asked him what happened. He told me that she admonished him for not saying he was from "Chinese Taipei", and apparently some other nasty remarks he decided not to translate.
It was such a shock to see that level of nationalism exhibit itself in real-time. She was genuinely offended and angry, not annoyed. I suspect if I hadn't been there, she'd have told him to leave immediately.
No-one ever says "Chinese Taipei", certainly not among Chinese, which is just some political compromise, mostly in the Olympic Committee.
The only issue I can think of is if the question was specifically about the country of origin, in which case some people may indeed object to "Taiwan" and argue that it should be "China" instead (but not "Chinese Taipei"...)
I've been asked many times in mainland China where I was from, and I say "Taiwan" without any issues.
Sorry if there is confusion; it was several years ago and I don't remember it word-for-word -- you're probably right about Chinese Taipei. The student was very, very gracious and anglicized a lot of things when translating. He even used an English name in addition to his normal name.
I imagine, for example, the hostess caught some nuance I missed, or followed up in Chinese to confirm his opinion on sovereignty. I was really just following tone and facial expression.
I could call and ask him if he remembers, but from my understanding, he unfortunately has to have difficult conversations like that quite a lot, and I don't know if this one would even stand out.
Read Koba the Dread by Martin Amis for a powerful, extremely well-written account of it.
Not because it's sensitive everywhere, but because it's very sensitive in some places.
I think what you're referring to what is socially appropriate. Most of these topics would be poor taste to discuss in public, but the mere act of doing so wouldn't land you in the back of a windowless van, which is the difference.
No one, naturally, would blog about it or openly shout on the street but families and friends (from what I've heard) do talk about these political issues.
You said "people", "they", and "them" -- all plural. Did you talk to them separately, one-on-one, or were they afraid of being denounced by each other?
Here is the probulica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
The wealthiest billionaire athletes are afraid to lose millions of dollars and don’t even speak up.
I wonder if this is how your average American would have felt at the height of McCarthyism? I hope one day Chinese people feel more free to speak their minds about their government.
(Note that people with beliefs on the other side of the spectrum do not feel the need to make pseudonymous accounts to post their opinions. Frankly this should tell you all you need to know. I call this liberal privilege.)
- because they were LGBTQ
- because of their ethnicity or race
- because they were female
- because they spoke out on issues regarding any of the above
In all of these cases not only would those students already have been suspended from the university and on their way to expulsion (and rightfully so), the university would have acted within days of it being reported.
In some kind of ridiculous reverse-mccarthyism we currently have known agents of a foreign government harassing US residents and institutions are afraid to do anything about it for fear of reprisals from a foreign government!
https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
> At Brandeis University near Boston, Chinese students mobilized last year to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.
> U.S. universities have received more than $1 billion in donations from mainland China — from individuals, companies, government organizations — since 2013, according to the Department of Education. That doesn’t include tuition paid by Chinese students, whose numbers in the U.S. reached 370,000 in 2019.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/international-students-impa...
From:
> Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students from his own home country. Worse still, his family back home, in this case China, was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.
To:
> Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students. Worse still, his family back home was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.
Reading the letter as a whole, it seems harassment and free speech was the main focus. "China" is mentioned once, and "Chinese" is mentioned once.
It’s a dichotomy that leaves me confounded and unsurprised.
Source: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/the-au...
I came to know several of them, though not to the point of knowing any of them well. Tiananmen was such a serious event for these students. I know there was pressure on them to avoid any discussions related to the event and especially to to avoid any statements supporting the students who protested and died.
I had a conversation with one of these men that I knew best and whom I studied with and after all the geoscientific things had been beaten down until we felt we had achieved a deeper understanding of the topic, talk turned to world events. I didn't steer it in that direction, he brought it up after looking around to make sure that we were alone and especially that there were no other Chinese students in the room that might overhear. We discussed Tiananmen Square for a few minutes and at the conclusion he mentioned the fear that he had of discussing that subject with anyone. He had to be careful who he studied with and talked with as some of his fellow students were known to be strong supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and they would report anyone they determined to be supportive of the dead students. He told me that their families back home might suffer as a result. His absence of trust in those with whom he had the most in common - language, culture, etc really drove home the depth of the fear that he felt. Discussing that event with any of them was just not going to happen since he feared for his family back home.
You had to be there. There was so much positive change in the air back then with dictatorships under threat, communism being exposed and challenged, young people full of the knowledge that they could effect meaningful change in their lives if they were willing to take a stand or to fight for it.
Thirty years is a long time. It has certainly been plenty of time for the Chinese Communists to rise to their current status by adopting the things most useful in other systems while imposing an iron hand of control over the parts of the system that maintain their own power.
A number of these students stayed in the US or moved to the EU for employment in the industry after grad school. Others returned to China to help develop their domestic oil and gas industry.
So is it just a fake threat or are they really taking action?
So, I figure there's a chance he means it. Time will have to tell for sure though.
Chinese points of priority are going to continue increasing in relevance. "Is the CCP good?" is not an acceptable conversation topic, in chinese, even in Purdue. Superpower superpowers, so to speak. The US has some of these too.
Still, this is a state effort. The state/ccp made of people. The other students, the chinese officers.. the parents who got a visit in China. This is not all that different from how college "censorship" works in china itself..
Only a matter of time before the Chinese invasion comes on the disarmed West coast - Fallout style. Freedom of speech - which is mostly a joke in the US now will then be given its final burial. You will now be thoroughly re-educated and get the Freedom of Glorious Mao. Only the armed gangsters will do some basic resistance before being promptly eliminated.
No nation lasts forever and I guess its USA's time to fade out into the twilight. Time to kneel down to your Chinese overlords soon Americans! All Hail God-Emperor Xi!
It reminds me of a fellow student at Wharton. Whatever the question was in classes (ethics, economics) his answer was ALWAYS "I really feel strongly both ways". My friends and I even gave him a price for his answers/behavior at the end.
Years later he was a CEO of major corporations. That served him well to never take the stand.
Life is full of people who "really feel strongly both ways". It seems that Purdue is taking that route. We have seen that with other Universities: cheating on exams? Don't do that again (=we need to keep the money flowing).
This is awful. President Daniels should resign. Or the Board should advise him to step down "in the interest of the University".
Don't do business with Chinese companies, or companies that are even affiliated with Chinese companies. Don't accept funding with ties to China. Etc etc.
And more importantly, we need programs for Chinese citizens that allow them to immigrate and live in Western countries provided they renounce their Chinese citizenship. The people aren't at fault here, naturally, it's the system that is corrupt and is using the population to further its own corrupt ideology.
> If those students who issued threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action.
I TA'd for an anthro program a bit and the 'free thought' people were usually finding out that they'd been abusing terms of art or needed to switch contexts and were struggling to reframe their perceptions.
The difference between "you can't do that" and "that's not what we're doing here" evaded some people for a while.
Knowing that they made to the USA makes me believe that the first one is improbable and the last reason is so convincing.
⇐ Arne Klingenberg
If a group follows around a student it seems like harassment, but if they follow around a politician it would likely be called a protest. What if the group was following a professor? Or the president of the university? It seems like it's a matter of how much power the person holds if it is a protest or not, but the line is still somewhat murky.
Protesting is relevant when it occurs towards someone holding an office or a public role/responsibility (even if temporary).
Protesting someone repeatedly or in their private capacity (which is the case for any student at the university): that becomes harassment.
Threatening: that's a whole other level.
And narcing on someone in the hope that whoever you narc'd to then goes on to threaten that person's family or friends elsewhere is another several levels beyond that.
If they go against the grain too much, China will not sponsor students to go there and pay the high premiums for international students.
Current Chinese students will be afraid to speak out, and have to swear more allegiance to the Chinese State because dissent is now precedent.
https://www.change.org/p/purdue-university-call-for-mitch-da...
If I had the relevant Presidential powers, I'd offer citizenship to every one of the threatened students, and the rats would be sent packing home to China the second they were identified.
The 50 cent lackeys of Pooh-Bear[1] are not welcome here in America. Go home, scumbags!!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-win...
More seriously, it's also interesting when you think back to how asylum worked during the cold war. Migrants, even explicit economic migrants, were encouraged to emigrate from communist countries (cuba, east germany, etc), while asylum seekers in imminent threat of torture and death (say, 70's era Iranians, 80's tamils, etc) were blocked.
As far as Czechoslovakia goes, the success rate was WAY beyond 1:10000, that is why people still tried.
About 400 people were killed on our militarized border with West Germany and Austria. The # of people who succeeded was actually over 10 thousand, especially in the earliest phase (1948-51), when the security of the border was far from perfect.
You could also escape in less dramatic fashion, for example by going to Yugoslavia (a non-aligned country) for a vacation and defecting.
Of course, whoever was caught and their families would face serious repercussions. In the Stalinist era, Gulag, after it, less pronounced bullying (loss of jobs, forbidden from higher education, forcibly moved to rural regions).
Trust me most students in US nowadays are family financial support. They are already rich. And the US do not often give enough working position for them (outside of tech, which h1b is not particularly friendly)
> better quality of life
This definitely is wrong. Those kids enjoyed a far better life in China than US.
> more personal freedoms.
Well, for what they want to do, they'll have more freedom...
they can stay there then lol
For most companies figuring out if they violate a foreign privacy law like GDPR and remaining compliant with it isn't a technical question, it's a legal one.
Attempting to hand-wave this away is likely what led to the decision to geo-block in the first place (tech person says "there's no risk", board says "prove it", lawyer says "pay me", tech person blocks the EU).
Possibly it'd be nice to have some boilerplate and possibly config tweaks for some of the most common default server configurations though. (Eg. for a standard Wordpress site).
This is really just scaremongering. Usually there are exceptions to a rule but here I feel fairly comfortable saying: show me a single case where someone got "hit with some fines" and then they needed a lawyer to "explain" things in a lawyery manner and then suddenly everything was fine whereas it wasn't when the site owners responded to an inquiry in normal human language.
If you don't do tracking for no reason and aren't blatantly invading privacy, you'll get a warning if anything -- and for a USA-only site, no country's DPA feels responsible anyway so I'd be highly surprised if they even got to the warning phase even if you were doing something wrong.
I know there are technically some requirements in every privacy policy, e.g. mentioning which rights the user has (I'm not in favor of having those, citing the law in every policy makes them much longer than necessary to read and dilutes the real content, and also it makes it so that you can't have a legal website without complying with the EU's specific laws -- that won't scale if all ~190 countries in the world try to pull that crap), but that's not the same as needing to lawyer up to wave away fines that you got hit with out of the blue as a website that had nothing to do with the EU in the first place.
If you do not need opt-in consent just to view the page, then no coercive wall is ever required.
Literally every single one of the sites with so-called cookie walls can be divided into two categories: site owners that have no idea what the law actually says but they think it's trendy or something, and sites that have no legitimate interest or other legal reason for processing some data and therefore need to seek your "freely given" opt-in consent. If they already had a legal grounds, they wouldn't need to ask for it.
That's not to mention that what's much more likely here is that a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN likely just considers the EU out of scope of their audience vs the cost of figuring out if they're GDPR compliant.
I for one am a little tired of EU citizens telling me something doesn’t have compliance costs when I’ve been in the room when outside counsel couldn’t agree if a brochure ware site was compliant because the logs contained IP addresses.
You may wish that the regulations didn’t make the choice of blocking EU citizens the more palatable but that doesn’t make it true.
At times it seems like the common sense behind the GDPR is not -in fact- entirely common to American (lawyers) somehow.
That can't be entirely true though, since some US states seem to have been considering similar laws recently.
Color me confused by it all. (see also an earlier comment I made in a similar conversation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29126413 )
To trigger GDPR, you need to be collecting PII (of EU citizens).
What interest would a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN have in people's PII (let alone the PII of European Citizens) in the first place, and why would they be collecting it?
Bad assumption. Maybe an unpopular fact, but many sites simply block EU access to avoid potential legal pitfalls of navigating foreign laws. Getting the site compliant would require review from legal teams and work from (likely contracted) web developers, which is almost certainly not in the budget for a side site like this.
Not every website is backed by a corporation with on-staff web developers and corporate counsel to double-check everything. Their audience is primarily a local one, so allocating the budget to do this and maintain it isn’t worth it.
• A static site without JavaScript;
• with all images / external resources hosted on the same domain;
• where the logs are default configuration, don't leave the server (except as GoAccess reports), and are deleted / anonymised eventually;
is GDPR-compliant. Sure, there are other ways to be compliant, but this works, and is basically the default way of setting up a website. It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
You can get this knowledge with just the first 7 articles.
It's not the default way of setting up an online content management system to which student journalists can post articles without going through some convoluted command-line build process ("...then you do a git commit and push, run the Hugo script, and rsync the files to the server"... yeah, no.)
> It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
Since they're using a third-party content management system, they most likely neither know nor even care how the website works. Why should they? They're journalists, not system administrators.
As others have noted, this is an independent student newspaper. Their normal readership outside the Purdue community is probably in the low single digits on a percentage basis, and their EU readership is likely close to non-existent. They (or, more likely, the people who run the CMS for them) have concluded that a full audit of their system to ensure GPDR compliance is simply not worth it for the minuscule number of additional readers they'd gain. And they're almost certainly right.
I collaborated with some EE and ME students on personal projects, but they were 1) more interesting than GDPR and 2) friends.
You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
This involves legal teams, contracted developers, and constrained budgets that are already stretched thin on operating in their core business. It’s not reasonable to demand they invest tens of thousands of dollars (or demand equivalent free labor from CS students and lawyers) to serve a population that almost never visits the site.
But the issue isn't "international law" in the general case (which, indeed, would be very hard), it's the specific case of the GDPR, the solution to which (for this particular site, which only serves static content) is mind-numbingly trivial: don't collect personal data, don't set cookies. That's it. That's all you have to do.
Though I'm not sure if a local US newspaper even needs to be compliant, since it doesn't target EU residents and thus might be out of scope.
Parent comment is convinced the site is doing something that would be illegal.
You are convinced that the site’s GDPR risk is non-existence.
It’s amazing how many people sitting on the sidelines can be so confident about GDPR while having entirely opposite opinions.
But my point stands: This stuff is complicated and requires sign-off from the lawyers in any large institution. If you don’t have a reason or budget to go through that process, you don’t do it. It’s not virtue signaling or anything silly like that. It’s basic corporate legal protections.
In fact this is the first one I’ve seen that isn’t being done as a protest.
For example, I still receive a lot of commercial spam that advertises in-EU businesses.
GDPR-related 451 is quite widespread in my experience, but that is what VPNs are for :-)
Zealots make great cannon fodder, and the more cannon fodder the higher the chance of winning.
It bodes poorly for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and any other country with a coastline along the South China Sea.
~ George Orwell, 1984
The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
Have you read 1984? Neither are the Party members. (And also, the quote doesn't mention the people.)
The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
The (Chinese) people are the victims in this.
Neither were inhabitants of all the other nations where totalitarian regimes seized power, but it did not help them.
Totalitarian systems are really adept at controlling people. It is a matter of survival for them.
Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while.
One and a half billion is still a big number though.
Can Chinese people freely communicate with each other? The ability to do so is critical for unimpaired mental faculties of the collective.
My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty.
My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family.
All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example.
While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages).
Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say.
One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force.
To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level.
Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way.
The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...
Every country has it to some degree, authoritarian regimes typically go crazy with nationalism since it's the most powerful tool they have to force their victims on the side of the aggressors against the evil foreigners.
No country is innocent, some are, however, free (moreso, at least, enough to matter, enough to choose if the need arises).
As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.
Second, the USA/EU is not perfectly innocent wrt to propaganda, but still... it could be much worse.
The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.
Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.
That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.
Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).
Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.
O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.
[0] https://www.defense.gov/News/Inside-DOD/Blog/article/2062735...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-mi...
Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.
Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.
Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?
Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.
In some ways, I think this can actually serve to make people believe that real events were fictional - after all, movies are generally fictional or at least with a good dose of artistic license.
I also must point out that some western governments will go to extreme lengths to bury bad actions as deeply as possible - if it wasn't for leakers, there are a whole host of Western war crimes and atrocities that would never have surfaced to the public. Even when they do, government and media propaganda machines are very efficient at convincing the general populace there is nothing to see here.
We like to berate China and others for bad actions (rightly so), but in many respects Western governments are appalling hypocrites.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Equity loving" sects applaud disregarding national boarders, easy release of multiple time offenders, shouting down those who disagree, and the death of any vaccine protester.
Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.
What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of
what kind of example can the west be to the world
Who is this?
> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp
https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.
>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia
If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...
Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.
I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.
This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.
If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.
It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency
0 - https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-us-officials-who-now-...
Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.
But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.
This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.
Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.
I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.
One of the things I've learned in my years on this planet is that propaganda works. It works very very well. That's why governments, corporations, and special interests spend so much money on it.
In case anyone is curious, the group fka the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2005, they won a Grammy award. In 2007, they won five Grammies, including all three overall major categories (excluding "best new artist" from the four general field categories, because they weren't new). They are also the first female band in chart history to have three albums debut at No. 1.
In 2020, the group dropped the word "Dixie" from their name ... because of cancel culture? In any case, the Chicks then performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
It seems like the summary of their story is that at worst they "switched sides", attracting fewer fans from Texas (though their tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_%26_Accusations_Tour still finished with a couple shows in Texas) but more from the rest of the country, something they had struggled with. Harvey Weinstein even produced one of their films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks:_Shut_Up_and_Sing
Regarding the Dixie Chicks, I'm not sure that's a good exemplar to support your main point. (See sibling comment that suggests they did quite well.)
Plenty of groups of Western folks get super amped up over any threat to the continuity of their chosen self destructive, unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. Because freedom!
You can bring a horse to the library, but you can't make it read
Many US universities have a Chinese Student & Scholar Association and it's not like they try to hide that they are arms of the CCP. (Just for a random example https://myinvolvement.org/organization/cssaatualbany - "The Chinese Student and Scholar Association at the University of Albany is joined and organized by the Chinese students and scholars at the University of Albany of their own record. It is a nonprofit organization that is supported and guided by CCP through the Consulate-General of the PRC in New York.")
Mass organization can do incredible things -- a group of people is much more effective than the individuals.
It'd be an effective way of control, "Hey why didn't you come to our student org meeting last week?".
I speculated last year that the CSSA was also involved in the arrest of Chinese student Luo Daiqing from the University of Minnesota. He was arrested when he set foot in China for Xinnie the Pooh meme tweets he made while in the states.[0]
[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/university-of-min...
Imagine a US college student studying overseas commenting about the US failures in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War over nonexistent WMDs. Would other US students harass that individual, and if so, would they report the individual to US "authorities" to make sure a message was passed on to the individuals parents?
I get riled up about bad opinions, but I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable or report them to authorities. Fuck man, I've got shit to do of my own.
But things like that often happen in the US, like, for example, in the case of people who spoke against the invasion of Iraq. This can even escalate further, I will never forget the “freedom fries” or “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!”
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but usually that level of zealotry requires a few years of career and relationship failure that's out of reach to the average student.
China is not a global power, it is a regional power.
Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...
Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]
Don't get confused with the CSC who mainly give scholarships (tuition, accommodation, stipend) to non Chinese nationals to study in China.
Escaped? Lolololol.
If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.
Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.
Of course, the situation in Russian popular forums is not better in the slightest, and the relevant patterns of conspiratorial thinking are reproduced at even the smallest of scales all the time. It has become a bit of a trope on 4chan that some contingent of posters will, if more than one post disagrees with their viewpoint, immediately claim that the two posts were actually made by the same person sockpuppeting; and last time I checked the recurring threads for some video games I play (still among the best sources for real-time information and gossip about updates and what-not...), they were all getting torn apart by mutual accusations of off-site conspiracies (usually on Discord) to push some viewpoint or meme or another.
These are people who are simultaneously calling for America to be dissolved on the grounds of repaying for slavery while also arguing that the youth of Hong Kong are confused and mislead.
And it isn't only happening in the US. It's global.
Tibetan-Canadian student politician, Uyghur rights activists come under attack by Chinese students in Canada
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/tibetan-canadian-studen...
Just another example. I'm sure others have many more.
Universities are a place of learning. If someone is misunderstood in their worldview or something else. That's the place to learn where you're wrong. Therefore all viewpoints must be allowed.
WOW.
I think they do a really good job at creating a narrative of victimhood and inculcating a sort of unhinged teenage belligerence. Not that threats don't have their role, or that they aren't keeping folks under observation, but they get a lot of mileage without those tools.
You don't need to be brainwashed, you just need to be afraid.
Afraid of being reported yourself, if you don't report others. You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported. Reverse prisoner's dilemma.
I am worried about the authoritarian turn my country (not China) is taking. But reading and contemplating these words sent a shiver down my spine.
Does this really matter in the age of the internet?
I think there are some bad trends and some very vocal and nationalistic exceptions that make for some sensational news stories. Like most college students, everyone is mostly just concerned with homework and getting along with their roommates.
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country
belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call
765-743-1111.Commenting on geoblocking isn't exactly what I would call navel gazing there is literally nothing more for me to take away from this content :^)
For example if you have ads or external analytics (practically 100% of websites) you need a cookie banner. Best to restrict access than to annoy your innocent users.
It is not about ads or analytics and about collecting private data without consent. Just to remind americans GDPR does not specifically target the Internet, it apples for real world places with physical paper (like you got to a lab and want to do some tests they are forced to tell you what they will do with your private data and you have to agree or not).
You can have no tracking ads or analytics that do not record private data just fine, you can also have non tracking cookies without a popup. But honestly it makes sense that there is a big rich group that spread a lot of FUD about this stuff so many places will just decide not to server EU. If you never seen such GDPR popup maybe you should try to have a look at some of them, see how many "partners" this people share your tracking data with and how scummy the UX patherns they use are.
Btw I am 100% fine with some US resources blocking me, I can go read soemthing else and for sure not try workaround for accessing this people page.
Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom and myriad less famous individuals will be relieved to hear it.
Says the guy frantically moving goalposts. :)
If you do collect personal data, with permission, it's only slightly more complicated. Let the individuals control their data, including deletion. Don't do anything with it without permission. Again, not hard to understand.
The "morass" is for people who are gonna try anyway. "Well, what about if we bury the permission under exhausting legalese?" No, that's unlawful. "What if we collect it but obfuscate it?" Not without permission. Etc.
So, "compliance morass" is not an argument. It's an extremely simple law.
Imagine they locked out afrika there'd be a huge amount of screaming about injustice and isms...
You can identify users by geoip and ASN surprisingly well, don't pretend supporting that has to annoy ameri-land, it's the same as arguing lock off California, it's a bad argument.
It would be great to have a web page that you could send them to that explains what they can do.
[0] I don't know, I can't see the site.
I am surprised it's blocked in the EU. My first guess is that this student newspaper doesn't have a lot of technical folks on staff and didn't see much point in investing in being Europe-friendly. Their hosting site, https://townnews.com/, doesn't look super legit at a glance but perhaps someone else knows more.
If you do insist on tracking, make it opt out by default.
If you keep permanent logs with information about users, then yeah that is a problem. But it should be a problem, that is a big potential security/privacy issue.
Students! Learning! (Continents!).
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to parse this. Maybe the “continents” is meant to be a correction from “countries’ laws”, but that would be a mistake because the EU isn’t a continent but rather a union of sovereign nations, and “countries’” is plural possessive so the original wording is correct.
But as a general web consumer myself, all I've noticed is that nearly every website I visit has a banner at the bottom saying "We use cookies, click Accept". Very rarely is there some kind of "Please Don't" button. It's just tacit acceptance, or else close the browser tab to opt-out.
How does a nontechnical user with little knowledge of GDPR know if he needs to display a cookie popup (he may not even know what a cookie is or whether or not his software uses them or in what capacity). What about email addresses in user accounts? Is he now collecting private information and making himself culpable for expunging that information on request? He may not even know how to expunge in the case of log files or other artifacts. “Not much harder” my arse.
I assume they're blocking it because they don't care about user privacy. Their choice, but not a good sign.
'members or ex-members of the EU' would be the actual correct wording.
They have just fallen (or not bothered to look into) for FUD.
1. I didn't know about 451. 2. What is so important that they cannot allow to read behind a GDPR?
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
I vehemently disagree with that stance, but I do want acknowledge the CCP's actual stance.
The better argument is against utilitarianism itself. Humans deserve some rights even if it means less utility.
https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-take...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...
Tom Brady is usually a good guess.
The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.
This is a legitimate comparison between the CCP and the government of Oklahoma. It is a bad comparison in terms of responses. China fears and represses discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience.
In America, we should discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experiences. And we do, a lot of the time. But not always.
Bullshit. There is not one.
It may not be the best example of the U.S. remembering its failures, but it's nowhere close to what China does to force people to forget.
It's more than one. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=legislature+bill+crt&t=h_&ia=web
Which bills are those?
Is the claim the United States is not having a discussion, in public and politics, reckoning with its racial past?
Well, some do. The anti-CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that. Do you suppose they'll be teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma high schools in the near future?
ETA I think people were taking me the wrong way. I added "anti-" above. The brouhaha is all the people trying to prevent their kids from hearing anything in history class that makes them feel bad. To the extent that they're putting the force of law behind suppressing the discussion of ugly events in US history, I would say this is pretty analogous to the policy of the CCP.
There is no human group in history that holds the moral high ground. Trying to convey anything else is tribalism.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/us/texas-critical-race-theory...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-sta...
Yes, because "learning from our experience" is yet another form of oppression according to CRT pushers. And "discuss and debate" are routinely dismissed as "White" values.
I don't understand. Are you saying people who discuss critical race theory are opposed to learning from our experience? Could you characterize what these people are doing? I'm genuinely curious. I don't mean to be aggressive, I just don't understand your point.
I'm not claiming that some people in America would like to live under a totalitarian regime. I'm saying that's not what we have, and that most Americans don't want that.
We can look at China, get scared, and note the similar systems in our own. But we shouldn't be lazy and conclude that, because bees and birds both have eyes they are fundamentally the same thing.
Attempting to scrub it from the internet and all of human consciousness is a whole new level of tyranny.
If I google "Tulsa Race Massacre" I immediately get results and information. Try searching for "Tiananmen square massacre" in China and see what kind of results you get.
One is subjectively more egregious than the other. There isn't even a real comparison here.
Personally I'm strongly on the side of remembering history so we can learn from it and not be doomed to repeat it.
You are free in America to talk about the Tulsa race massacre as much as you like. You can look it up on the web, you can buy books about it. The government won't threaten you for doing so. It is taught in some schools and universities. In Oklahoma, it is required by law to be taught in schools. Every year at the end of May there are articles published about how no one knows about the Tulsa race massacre.
That is not equivalent to the way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square. Those two things are not the same at all. America is not China. Freedom is not slavery.
These are things to be wary of, and not be complacent about.
Vs
The Tiananmen Square massacre which is censored to even mention digitally in China, and state agents intimidate citizens outside China just for mentioning it.
Also note that Tulsa was 100 years ago. Around the time of the birth of the CCP, which has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since that time. Tiananmen was in 1989.
Any attempt to equivocate these two is utterly intellectually dishonest.
Or 100 years after the Tianamen Square massacre in China to see if its easier to talk about it then
great. very productive.
The idea that it is OK for it to take another 50 years before the Chinese can talk about Tiananmen without fear of state reprisal, seems to be an apology for totalitarian oppression.
Alternatively its just not an apt comparison.
And yes, there was state sponsored anti-communism in the 50s, but it is not even close to comparable. Nobody was being intimidated for mentioning communism, or even advocating for it.
People were targeted for group membership. This is still wrong, but please stop trying to make it seem equivalent to what is happening today in China. The fact that you have to go back 50 years to find an example shows how different the two countries are today.
The KKK was a defacto paramilitary arm of several states and municipalities during that time. Many sheriffs, and more than a few high level state government officials were members. Folks got killed and programs of terror were instituted against ‘uppity’ populations using the KKK as the instrument.
There was widespread state supported suppression (as in literal FBI members harassing and destroying peoples lives) for anyone who even SEEMED to POTENTIALLY support communism, even if they literally had no idea what the FBI was talking about.
If you dared publicly support communism, many folks got deported, disappeared, or worse.
To claim it was is a lie.
The KKK was a terrorist organization bent on violently oppressing Black Americans. It was never part of the state.
Or do you think the gov’t of Alamance and Caswell counties just somehow lost the paperwork?
Why do you think the Federal government sent in federal Marshalls (and more) so James Meredith could attend Ole’ Miss? Could it have something to do with the Governor himself taking over as registrar to block it, and numerous threats of violence, including from the KKK? [https://aas.olemiss.edu/documenting-the-african-american-exp...]
If you want to talk First, Second, or Third Klan, then sure. But if you want to spin the Klan in the south as a bunch of radicals running around in the woods? That’s just false.
It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’ - and were aided, abetted, and in many cases actively led by members of various state and local governments. When Lincoln was assassinated, reconciliation or follow through post civil war mostly stopped, and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm. And it was very effective. Ask any black man or woman living in the Deep South.
Now they’re mostly a bunch of loser types (Third Klan or post Third Klan depending on where you draw the line), but they’re still somewhat dangerous. And to not remember the history is even more dangerous.
Which means it wasn’t ever a paramilitary arm of the state. You just want to pretend it was because that way you can act as if the KKK and the state were part of the same thing, which they never were.
> It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’
Yes, because there were a bunch of racists who were operating a secret paramilitary organization…
> and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm
As you admit here.
Nobody is denying how bad the KKK was. It simply not true to say that it was ever part of the state.
Try this quote from Wikipedia:
“Organized in the Southern United States, it was suppressed through federal intervention in the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secret as to membership and plans. Its numerous chapters across the South were suppressed around 1871, through federal law enforcement.”
It was a terrorist organization which attempted to overthrow state governments and which the state suppressed.
That is about as far away from being an arm of the state as you can get, ‘defacto’ or not.
Since HBO's Watchmen, I've heard and read about the Tulsa race massacre quite a bit. It's frequently mentioned in the media now.
I was shocked that this was almost totally unknown and unspoken about prior to the show, but I guarantee you that it won't remain that way.
That's the difference with Tiananmen.
Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
But for what it’s worth, laws regarding public alcohol consumption are a local thing. There are plenty of places in the United States where public alcohol consumption isn’t a crime. And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.
I would say it's a much more relevant metric than the ability to own a shitload of guns, or to drive a black smoke diesel truck, the latter of which is honestly bafflingly antisocial behavior. The definition of "freedom" should begin with the freedom from others pushing their negative externalities onto you.
While I (European) generally agree with you, this could also be a point against public consumption of alcohol ;)
So your statement “If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor”
Please find a different example, or, if you believe in the goal of improving human society, please revise that statement. Belligerence and other disruptiveness involving alcohol should be tracked, because it can reveal the deeper problem that is present in some (honestly, many) cases of public belligerence and disruptiveness once a trend is established. Saving lives is important all on it’s own.
How so? It seems to me that the people's ability to use and enjoy public spaces as they fit (of course unless they intrude on other people's freedom) is at the very heart of what I consider freedom.
> And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
And of course you're free to express your opinion privately, at home, when no one's listening. See the problem with that kind of 'freedom'?
Anarchism is based on freely agreed rules and organization. It denies rulers, not rules. I find this to be a necessary condition for freedom. So yes, one can find something to complain about pretty much every country if arguing from freedom. The status quo is not a good excuse for lack of freedom, that's just circular reasoning.
I urge everyone not to fall into the trap of the "Us vs Them" rhetoric that almost always leads to more oppression and violence. Trying to quantify freedom is moot. The enemy of freedom is corruption, fear and hate.
Many, many things are an infringement on our individual freedom, but it's revealing what people actually choose to rally around, and when. It points to how certain issues have become politicized and have organized, well-funded opposition.
To all the people up in arms about masks -- why now? Why this easy thing? Why weren't you protesting restrictions on voting age, driving age, drinking age, restrictions on gay marriage rights? Those are all very consequential restrictions, as opposed to wearing a bit of fabric on your face. Something that snow-sports enthusiasts routinely do without complaint or consequence.
Not really much substance to my argument, just sharing. Also I'm not criticizing these countries, their culture is just different than what I was brought up with. Where I live if you start correcting everyone around you you will be the one corrected eventually. That's why where I live looks much worse than Germany I guess.
The issue with that comparison is Americans can easily search about Tulsa and find a bunch of information about it. People in China are restricted from getting information about Tienanmen Square.
While a lot of people in China know bad stuff happened in Tienanmen Square, they can't so easily confirm their suspicions. They can't hear people's take on it and fully understand what happened.
>How many Americans don't know about it?
Just because Americans don't know about a topic doesn't really matter. Americans don't know about a lot of historical events, especially ones that happened 100 years ago.
I would guess a lot of Americans don't know Harding was President during Tulsa. Does that mean Harding is like Tienanmen Square?
I would go as far as saying people don't even know about Tulsa shows people aren't really moving on, but just forgot about it. On the other hand, everybody knows slavery occurred.
The Tiananmen Square massacre killed off the Chinese democracy movement which challenged the CCP for national power. It set a new course for Chinese government, that it is still more or less on.
The Tulsa massacre was a local race riot, with little impact outside Oklahoma.
Just switch to injecting heroin in public spaces. The police will leave you alone and you might even become a celebrated person.
Having grown up in Germany and now living in the US I think in the US you can have more freedom if you are willing to live outside the boundaries of the life the average citizen has. If you are willing to live off the grid you can be pretty free. Some people think freedom also means the right to not have health insurance.
But if you live the life of the average citizen with a regular job I feel the US citizen is less free. You constantly have to worry about the cost of health care and education. I also feel people are less willing to voice their opinion in order to not offend others. You have way less rights as an employee. Police is less predictable and may do weird stuff. I also feel less free when I get into a confrontation with somebody and have to worry about getting shot.
I'm in my 50s and have lived in the US all but 2 of my years, and have never been concerned about getting shot (in the US or abroad.) In what kind of situations have you found yourself that you've actively had this worry?
When i told this story to some people they told me that I would have had a real problem if he had had a gun. That’s probably true.
In Germany you usually can assume that even bad guys don’t have a gun but in the US you have to assume that every idiot has a gun. This brings confrontations quickly to a dangerous level.
To oversimplify quite a bite: As a citizen of the United States, and Arizona, I’m allowed to get together with a group of citizens, draft law, and bring it to vote during the next election.
As long as it’s constitutionally valid, and we get a majority vote, it becomes law.
Several cities have changed their ballot box from First Past The Post to Ranked Choice Voting through citizen lead initiatives. Ending the full prohibition on Marijuana in my state was a citizen initiative.
I’m sure they exist - but I don’t know of other countries that have this kind of freedom.
We’ve gotten it wrong in places (gerrymandering is a big one) - but we’ve been one piece of citizen lead legislation away from improving it for a long time. And that gives me hope.
Here's the thing: Laws about where you can smoke and drink vary from place to place in the US but in every part of them you are free to complain about them. The laws were passed by elected officials. You can start a petition to change them. You can run for mayor on the platform of changing the rules about where you can smoke or drink.
I agree that it is a sad commentary that many Americans don't know about the Tulsa race riot. Yet here we are discussing it. A popular TV show in the US (The Watchmen) depicted it quite graphically. Could those things happen with Tiananmen Square in China?
In this case however I didn't say what about, I did suggest an alternative to Ops comment which in itself may have been what about ism.
You can drink outside in some places, like Las Vegas. The fact that you can't drink outside most places just illustrates that the overwhelming majority don't even want to do that.
Drugs and booze are cheap freedoms that don't do anything to avoid repression.
My experience of the US is similar to yours.
Note that the USA is rather special in how it encodes freedom. There is, after all, literally a big list of guaranteed freedoms. In practice, if something's not on there, then every government and quasi-governmental entity assumes you are not free to do it, or at least, they believe they can decide to stop you.
This is the inverse of almost every construction of freedom that went before it, and your experience arises from that difference. The notoriously vast & byzantine scale of the US Code is another emergent property, it being essentially a salami attack on its own fundamentals.
There are a remarkable number of comments that fall into the same vein, and at least one is a username I recognize from previous threads about China shilling very hard in a pro-CCP way. I wonder if @dang or HN have any processes by which to identify bot / shill accounts and limit them, because it's obvious there's a far larger contingent of these accounts on the site than I originally expected. I guess HN is no longer an unnoticed corner of the Internet where folks can just have normal conversations like it used to be.
I'd never heard of it until I watched Watchmen. So, I'd lived nearly half my life before hearing of it.
I spent my entire childhood in states bordering Oklahoma, and, for a while, in Oklahoma itself (though not in/near Tulsa).
This shows a common misunderstanding of the US legal system - the federal gov't couldn't make public consumption legal or illegal even if it wanted to. I go to local festivals in my town multiple time s a year with thousands of people milling about drinking freely - because my city and county don't prohibit it.
You come to the US with the assumption that the federal government has authority over these things, but they don't - constitutionally they are largely forbidden from creating laws like that - it's up to the state, county, and city to do so.
If that were a valid comparison, your comment wouldn't still be on this site.
It's true that many in the US don't know about it but many in the US cannot find China on a map so ignorance of the thing might be explainable by something rather more benign than the oppressive and punitive way China handles things.
In recent years information and documentaries on the Tulsa race massacre have been popping up with regularity. The information is easy to find, there are multiple documentaries you have easy access to, the government (in the form of the Tulsa Historical Society) has a very through website exploring what happened, etc. More importantly no one is punished for exploring and discussing this topic. Quite the opposite lately, it is of growing interest to many in the US. Now compare that to China and the Tiananmen Square massacre. As I said at the top, no comparison at all.
I'm not a rah rah "Murican", either. I am very critical of my own country (as I think we all should be.. you can't improve if you don't learn from the bad) and the US has many problems that should be addressed but to compare China and the US on these points is not even a little reasonable, in my opinion. It shows a lack of knowledge of both China (someplace I have lived for years) and the US (where I grew up and currently live). Also, your example of drinking in public is just a generalization and of all the things you could have picked that would be valid arguments, is not a good one. In my community in Ohio you can drink anywhere in the downtown public area, for example and it is several square miles in area.
Not being allowed to talk about Tiananmen Square massacre is society being told what to find worthy of attention.
While the ends may on occasion align, I think it’s an important distinction.
But it is also worth considering “practical” freedoms.
I think HN tends to assume nobody has any freedom because most of HN lives in "nice" suburbs or "nice" parts of cities where law enforcement is being used in a backhand manner to enforce conformity and also comes from a life where obeying basically all the laws basically all the time is considered default behavior. The lower classes are far, far free-er on a day to day basis than HN is. Nobody cares if you smoke weed on your porch in any neighborhood where a Ford E350 is a more common driveway adornment than a Mercedes E350. I walk my dog beer in hand two days a week. Kids ride dirt bikes on the street. The section 8 people play loud music in languages I don't speak. Nobody gets hassled by the powers that be, as far as I can tell. And this isn't some rural area in a small government red state, it's working class neighborhood in a blue state.
Let's be clear: the reason the Chinese government wants to forget and move on from Tiananmen Square is because it threatens their power. The scariest thing for an autocrat is the people realizing that people hold the real power, and that all systems of government only exist because of the consent of the governed (implied in China's case, explicit in a democracies).
"At least we can talk about it..." Yes, talk, and talk, and talk. This has come about over decades. How many decades of "freedom" will it take to actually bring change? Could it be that endless debate on Twitter is our modern bread and circuses that will amount to nothing?
For example, I think the best way to interpret the pandemic isn’t through ethical systems, it’s through state capacity and competence. America didn’t fumble the pandemic because of deontological ethics, it fumbled because the federal government was just straight up incompetent. Without the federal government coordinating the crisis, every state was left to try its own strategy, which really does not work during a pandemic.
Furthermore china might have eventually taken a “utilitarian” approach, but only after their first strategy of denial and repression failed. Like many authoritarian regimes China’s first interest is in their own stability, not prosperity per se. In cases where the prosperity of the citizens and the pride of the party are in conflict, China will clearly favor the latter over the former.
Then you get 60-80 million killed by their own government in the great leap forward.
I think you're building a fake dichotomy: as a politician in France once said, borders are the only hope we have to escape if we dont like what we have. It's fine to have many models and important we can move in between them. I agree China cares about the result now but it's probably temporary: once the middle class is proportionally more important, priorities will shift, they already have somewhat. Xi Jinping announcing in glorious pomp a new stock exchange in Beijing is, for all the flaws of the communists, sort of different from what Mao would have done.
Tiananmen is not something the Chinese want to forget, but that the communists want to hide, it's a bit different. But, since there's always balance in everything, rather than throw themselves wave after wave on their bullets, they make the most of what they can get now and bide their time. If that can give you some sense of relief, I never met a pro communist Chinese, never one, who would defend the party: they only ever say stuff like "bah, we had an emperor before, it's the same with another name", hardly a support of the ideology you'll agree lol.
In America your Tiananmen are the civilian deaths and war crimes in Afghanistan, and see, you forgot about them and prefered to talk about someth you reformed already, like a Chinese would say of nobility and servitude under the empire. Face your demons, if you dare :)
> you accuse people of this while you do that
Assuming this is right (and even if it's not), do not confuse the values and actions of a government with the values of its people. The CCP has gone out of its way to remove Tiananmen from history. Many bureaucrats in the US government wish they had the power to erase points in history as what the CCP wields.
You’ll get a lot of head scratching if you ask questions like “What if it turns out that the correlation between government policies and the policy preferences of the population is stronger in some supposedly ‘undemocratic’ countries than in major Western democracies?” After the head-scratching you’ll usually get some kind of argument that strips the former population of agency, like “oh well they’re just brainwashed.” Kinda ironic for supposed proponents of democracy to strip people of their agency.
However, understanding the pro's and con's of any type of government, including autocracies, is a worthy pursuit. We can learn something from anyone.
But you would need to show that they are actually being stripped of their agency. You can't just say "I declare that their government doesn't represent their preferences, and when they say that the government actually does represent their preferences, that's because they can't think for themselves." Having different preferences than you is not sufficient evidence of brainwashing. That's pretty circular, and you could just as easily say "Western democracy is bad, and anyone who lives in a Western democracy who says they like it is just brainwashed."
... that's all you need to know. That is a situation designed precisely to stay in power despite not responding to a freely informed public's preferences.
If an autocratic leader actually asked its citizens for their preferences on whether the autocrat should stay in power, and abided by the result - it would not be an autocracy.
I think a centrally controlled society’s IQ is the sum if it’s leaders. A free society’s IQ is the sum of its people. That makes me optimistic about the prospects for the US.
Meanwhile China built thousands of miles of high-speed train in the last 10 years (while US built basically none), is about to have more navy ships than the US and so on.
China has profited greatly by allowing its people more economic autonomy, but even the most successful are subject to State control of whatever the State wants to control, whenever the State wants to control it. See Jack Ma.
No, actually we cannot see that "having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics." But then, we don't have police welding people's doors shut, either.
I don’t think that Tiananmen Square is their slavery. When I was in high school we had a guy visit from China and I dragged him to the school library and showed him the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen Square. He’d never heard of it. Same experience when I discussed it with Chinese friends in college. It’s not because Chinese society wants to get over it — China does not have such a thing as public opinion. Don’t look at China with rose colored glasses in the context of their 2021 economy, you have to remember how backwards and broke they were just 20 years ago. It was a totalitarian regime and it’s still a totalitarian regime, just a more wealthy one.
In summary, I agree that it seems like “consequentialism” has won, but it’s not the case that the two are battling it out to see which is better. Both countries independently chose consequentialism, and maybe it didn’t have to be that way.
In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.
> just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China
Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.
The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controve...
This is not a two sides issue. It doesn’t matter if the students were radicalized etc. the Chinese Govt murdered thousands of people who questioned it. Completely barbaric system of govt but in line with their current use of slave labor and concentration camps.
9/11: Clear foreign involvement.
You’re comparing these two things because they both have foreign involvement?
The free world developed the vaccine, and virtually the entire R&D and manufacturing infrastructure that made vaccine development possible.
Also, response to the pandemic has been highly regional, suggesting that we don't have a single unifying "ethical system." There are also two polarized camps related to the presentation of information to the public, such as the effects of carbon dioxide, the results of elections, and so forth.
I wonder if there's a better example than the pandemic for supporting your hypothesis.
A problem I’ve noticed with philosophy nerds is that they have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of their niche interest by hallucinating the influence of philosophical reasoning in human affairs and historical events. Most people in most times don’t think about this stuff at all. It’s completely irrelevant.
The philosophers of thousands of years ago instructed by which they lived: drinking to excess in bathtubs if you were a hedonist or meditating in the woods surviving only on the food which others gave you if you were a Buddhist.
We’ll see. Due to it’s Zero COVID strategy and ineffectual vaccines China has a highly immunonaive population just as the virus gets so infectious that other Zero COVID countries have abandoned that strategy. However, New Zealand, Singapore etc have the much better mRNA vaccines. I hope the terrible cost of losing their basic human rights was worth it for them, but I suspect the worst days of COVID are ahead for China.
It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.
Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.
Whose fault is that? China only has one voice as a policy. I'll take Western media's reporting over what the Chinese party is saying more often than not. The media has its own problems but still.
I think the problem with Western deontology is that it is no longer rooted in consequences and has become a parody of itself. Take US foreign affairs, for example. We used to care about limiting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The most efficient way to do so was to support anti-communist dictators that could be bought out. However, this was sold to the people as "spreading democracy". A generation later, those in power genuinely believed that America is supposed to spread democracy, which is why we spent trillions of dollars trying to do so in the Middle East to little effect.
I have a number of Chinese friends from college and they universally view this event as a CIA fraud with no actual basis in historical reality. I really would like to know what your basing your logic here on.
Can we? I have no idea how many people in China have died from covid, and neither do you. All we have to go on is what the state-run media says.
American alarmism over communism has, at times, led them down a similar pathway.
China wants to be a “great power,” but that’s more deontological than consequentialist.
For example, is China’s current naval expansion creating good consequences? An increased GDP? Higher life expectancy? Higher literacy rates?
Not really.
How about the Belt and Road project? Is it increasing GDP?
Truthfully, I don’t have a good answer here myself beyond, “uh, something in between willful forgetting and never ending cross-group animus.”
A touch over dramatic, verging on smug given that it’s a nerd in-joke.
(If you didn’t know, this HTTP status code is a tongue in cheek reference to the dystopian sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 where information is outlawed.)
I could elaborate but unfortunately due to our safety and security policies I am unable to comment further. Your wellbeing is my number one priority.
I don't see how it's dramatic or smug at all.
451 is an improvement on the vague 403 forbidden status code, and is specified in RFC 7725, a standards track document:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7725
This isn't an inside joke that someone just made up, other than someone (Timothy Bray?) choosing this particular constant out of the remaining unused 4xx series.
In other news, a friend of a friend's mom's tennis partner's cat sitter knew someone whose website was taken down by socialist European lawyers, so what harm is there from banning them from the village? It's not like we want them here anyway!
Only for the record, the message I get from EU:
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
Maybe it is just me, but the "therefore" is not consequential.
AFAIK, if you don't gather data, you don't have to protect them, GDPR or not.
CORRECTION: As other have pointed out, the publisher is actually the student newspaper, which is independent from Purdue University itself.
Also, it’s not really censorship — they have to deal with the GDPR headache, one way or the other, just like everyone else. Simply blocking the EU is a blunt but simple and effective way of doing so, and makes decent sense for a site where the interest is 99% local.
What headache? A sensible solution: when EU visitor is detected, don't set cookies. Purdue solution: when EU visitor is detected, block them.
The headache is convincing someone to pay a lawyer to agree that this is the solution when serving content to the EU is outside your publication's mission.
Also: The Exponent isn't Purdue, it's independent. Purdue chose email as their publication medium.
Fortunately there exist a very simple solution: don't gather personal data. Note that it does not necessarily applies to cookies: they are considered personal data only if they can be used to identify the individual.[0] There is exactly zero chance anybody would go after you if you don't set cookies or set them for reasons other than making personal identification possible.
[0] https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/how-the-gdpr-affects-coo...
How do you know that somewhere in the stack of things the server is running isn't something that would set a cookie for some valid reason, and thus trigger the EU's stupid laws?
A positive stop, the redirect to a text page, is far better than a hope and a prayer.
[0] https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/how-the-gdpr-affects-coo...
This started happening even before the GDPR was finalised.
Yep, and - also ironically - the root of publisher is the same as public, so you want to make something public but you restrict the access to a whole subset of the public.
Besides that, if they had written (without recurring to http 451[0]) a simple message like:
"We are sorry but we cannot serve this content due to the possible non-compliance of this site with EU Laws (GDPR)"
it would have been (IMHO) much more correct/polite.
I read the message "as is" more like:
Hallo, stupid visitor from Europe, you are denied access to the contents because you voted stupid people that wrote stupid laws that we won't respect.
The page served should be reachable even from non EU countries:
https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_aa3e67de-5de9-...
and it has some interesting html keywords in "base":
<meta name="keywords" content="mitch, daniels, mitch daniels, purdue, central intelligence agency, chinese embassy, tiananmen square, zhihao kong">
<meta name="news_keywords" content="mitch, daniels, mitch daniels, purdue, central intelligence agency, chinese embassy, tiananmen square, zhihao kong">
[0] the example on Wikipedia is a good one:
If you're small and running ads, I'm pretty sure you don't want to risk dealing with the significant legal pitfalls of GDPR. They EU isn't your audience, and lawyers that confirm you're in compliance (or not) are expensive.
The GDPR is one of the easiest pieces of legislation I've ever read. And the answer is: no, basically nobody is in compliance.
I do find the propaganda against GDPR annoying though. As an EU citizen (and someone who had to make sure we were compliant on multiple projects) I am happy about it. Is it perfect? No. But it's still waaaay better than nothing.
Of the parts of the web I frequent? Sure. Most people will never leave the GDPR-violating web most months.
Everybody, also in the EU, are storing IP addresses. Everybody. Even the company who bragged they don't store logs for privacy reasons was caught storing them. It is important, it is necessary, and in many cases required by law.
Is anything being prepared for that?
I find the use of the 451 status code almost offensive in this case. They're invoking one of the most famous literary treatments of censorship, when really what's happening is that the citizens of the EU are being protected from an assault on our human rights.
Because even if a website promises to obey GDPR rules, I have no way to verify if they actually do.
The added legal complexity from the GDPR for small-time operations has made me skeptical at times, but geoblocking due to the GDPR seems surprisingly rare and not a reason for that skepticism at all. I'd frankly have expected it to be much more common than it's turned out to be.
I did that so the latter could be pinned to the top of the thread without being offtopic.
I am French so I do care very much about privacy, just do not understand these blocks.
then they came for antifa, BLM®, BDS, and... oh, no they didn't, I guess deplatforming is still safe on campus