gitrog

Again, no one is making Bill Gates overlord. But he has actual data and experience backing up his side of the debate. What exactly do you have? Where are these sources that offer insight into the economic ramifications of keeping an economy open during war or during a global pandemic?

Where did he argue that Bill Gates has never made a bad judgment call? You still have zero evidence for your take on this, no matter how practical it may seem. You are going on your intuition and common sense on how to solve this crisis for an entire country?

Your mothers' hospital should be running tests with that other 50% of unused utility right now. Conduct trials on patients found to be positive, etc. That's literally the second point Gates made.

> It's not practical any more to try to contain the outbreak. The idea at this point is to limit the number of cases at any given time to prevent overburdening the local community's medical resources.

Lockdown is the most effective way of limiting the number of cases.

The only thing your intuition and experts agree on is the knock that the world economy is going to take. I challenge you to provide models that show that your "practical" handling of this situation won't have the same disastrous effects on the economy when instead of 3% of a smaller number of the population die, 10% of a much larger portion of the population die. These numbers are in line with countries that implemented lockdown early or have very strong government influence versus countries that implemented lockdown too late.

> There's no such thing as hate speech.

There most certainly is, you just don't like any of the definitions of it.

You're also confusing dealing with personal psychological problems and causing duress to another person based on your own fears and biases.

> Humans can't survive without property in nature

This is a loaded statement. Humans can absolutely survive without property, they did so for hundreds of thousands of years before the concept of property was defined.

What is speech that harasses covered under, if not hate speech? I would argue that the only reason why hate speech came into being was because so many harmful remarks didn't qualify as harassment in the same courts you question the fairness of.

Let me be clear and say that I don't doubt that any of these things are tough to define once you really start looking at possible edge cases. My problem with your statements are more about how you think things are black and white, but hate speech is all grey. If I sing lyrics of a very violent song directly at a passer-by in the street, is that not threatening? Do you think that action should fall under harassment?

> Courts, judges, and juries do not seem to make the process fair.

If you don't trust courts, judges and juries (and I'm not saying I do), then you really can't rely on them, nor politicians, either to define what is lawful and what is not, and that includes theft, murder or whatever other offenses.

You haven't demonstrated why theft is bad for society though? If Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, is that bad for society simply by virtue of theft being seen as generally wrong?

You really can't see how hate speech is bad for society? You don't think calling minorities racial slurs affects society negatively? The difficulty of separating it from "regular speech" or satire really isn't important for there to be laws against it, that is why there are courts and judges and juries to settle cases and set precedents.

I also think you're highly overestimating how easy it is to separate theft from non-theft. Again, not that the complexity in separating a crime from a non-crime should in any way be a deciding factor in whether a law against said crime exists.

You're basically criticising leftists for pointing out how power structures in the world are abused and phrasing it as somehow being maternal and therefor... questionable?

Or is your problem only with the causal chain? Which leftist cause that condemns an abuse of power has incorrectly assumed a causal link?

I would say the biggest issue that has stuck against Trump is by a wide margin the alleged Russian collusion, but are you trying to say that people - nevermind leftists - _shouldn't_ be collectively upset about children being separated from their parents and kept in cages?

This seems like a ridiculous oversimplification for finding good alternative forms of government.

A small community of people could come up with the greatest governmental system we could ever dream of, but if the leaders of the current system believe it to be a threat they could wipe out its adherents before it is ever properly understood by the wider population. Or spread misinformation about it to dissuade people from finding out more about it for themselves.

I'd suggest you read and/or watch a little more of Chomsky before making the claim that he doesn't call out governments.

That may be the official policy, but I think you only have to glance at the US to see that it doesn't always act on this. Of course, at some scale, government would be forced to act, but there is a lot of space in between where allowing violence to play out could even be beneficial to a ruling party.

> The effect is most certainly not the same, the fact that we are able to carry on this conversation on an American news site is evidence of that.

I believe this study is stating exactly that we could carry on this conversation, up to the point where we all agree on something in enough numbers and possibly decide to take action about it.

For the record, I posted this specifically because I feel that it provides a clearer picture of what censorship in China really is like, as opposed to the cartoonishly evil portrayal that most of Western media paints it in.

Although I don't condone censorship overall, I do find it interesting and identify that governments will always find it necessary to impose some form of societal control.

From this study, it seems to me that the Chinese government chooses to prevent events that may cause conflict and violence. That is almost noble, were it not for the fact that it also helps the government maintain a firm grip of control in all situations. I think there is also something to be said for the Great Firewall and how it manages to keep gigantic companies like Facebook and Google from interfering with foreign countries and how it spurs local companies to come up with similar solutions. The drawbacks are all obvious and I don't think it's necessary to repeat those here.

The way that political dissent is managed in the West is so much more chaotic, and generally more violent. The public is split in two (usually) and played against eachother which often results in violence on the streets. Although being able to protest is at least symbolically a good thing, I often wonder if it isn't mostly just another tool used to create the illusion of freedom. If the public is constantly bombarded with misinformation and fear-mongering tactics it's highly unlikely that any sort of unified protest could convert to real, regime threatening change.

So I agree with you that we should be critical of the West, and honestly this post wasn't a jab at Chinese politics in favour of the West, it was more of a learning experience for myself.

Politicians stealing money isn't solely an African phenomenon, and in many "first world" countries the lower and middle classes suffer due to lobbying which politicians can use to enrich themselves and their cronies.

Elon Musk does manage to make time to write a bunch of drivel on Twitter from time to time though.