Hey, it’s the Internet. You can aim higher.

Say you’re the CEO next time.

i dont have them so they can’t

“Please provide any social media as part of your application”

“Haha. Well, guess what, dipshits. I don’t have any. Checkmate!”

Sound of resume hitting the bottom of the trash can

In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing.

…

Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”

So, I am not going to dive into the raw numbers, but I’m already a little turned around at

• relatively satisfied

• highly satisfied

• very satisfied

I’ll simply note that local governments are also run by Communist Party officials. So claiming the CCP has 99.5% approval (even considering how this is a decade out of date and how “relatively” and “highly” satisfied suggest a bit of a gulf in opinion) is a serious fudge of the real public view.

That said, yeah. Much higher domestic view of the state than in the US/EU block. Definitely a problem for all those NAFO-heads who pine for Regime Change in Beijing.

And why should it need to suppress its own citizens, anyways?

The goal of the modern CCP is largely understood to be economic growth and steadily improving quality of life for domestic citizenry as a means of discouraging domestic upheavels (Tianamen and the Falun Gong lead movements being two classic examples).

That’s going to come with some level of suppression due to friction between what any subset of the population believes/wants and what the central government believes/wants.

But this isn’t - at it’s root - a Socialist policy. It is a Confucian policy, with Socialist Characteristics.

The CCP has a 95.5% approval rate.

I hope you’re joking.

There’s no shortage of dissatisfaction with the CCP from within the Chinese polity. There’s no shortage from within the CCP.

But what westerners don’t like to talk about is the Mass Line approach employed by Chinese political leadership, which legitimately seeks to minimize conflict in pursuit of maximum economic benefits.

You don’t have gonzo gunmen storming Beijing in hopes of winging President Xi, right now, because you don’t have a public openly at odds with the mission of the chief executive.

I definitely want Chinese tucker Carlson and Alex jones

I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun.

I think this is a great illustration of the kind of propaganda we see online wrt any “Evil Foreign Country”. In this case, it was the British Press reporting hysterically about a father hosting his daughter’s family for Thanksgiving, bragging about being a Trump supporter, bragging about owning a gun, and then accidentally shooting his daughter (literally a room away from the rest of the family) because he’s the exact kind of dipshit that doesn’t know how to handle a firearm professionally. Grand Jury threw the charges out precisely because it was so obvious that he’d been negligent rather than willful. The rest of the family confirms it. But the Brits report it like it was an Honor Killing that the local government endorsed and facilitated.

We see this kind of manipulation of events in US media - wrt China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, France, Mexico, Antifa, Immigrants, Brown People, you name it - any time national news organizations decide they need to flog a particular government or demographic group.

Hardly unique to the US. But when you’re getting the full Clockwork Orange, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be an outsider looking in.

Falun Gong have allied with foreign intelligence services, but they weren’t created by those services. Originally, the organization was allied with the Communist Party and on generally good terms. They only ran afoul of the Chinese Communists when Falun Gong leaders became embroiled in increasingly noxious financial and abuse scandals. Not unlike how the Catholic Church’s status soured across Europe and the US East Coast following the slew of child sex abuse allegations.

That’s when Falun Gong officials started fleeing to the NATO block and issuing increasingly hysterical allegations about the conduct of the CCP towards its members.

if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US

The UK has some of the most repressive speech laws on Earth. Germany isn’t far behind. Given the groundswell of fascist tendency across the Scandinavian bloc, I would not bank on them serving as a model much longer. An uptick in Muslim immigration has kicked off a tidal wave of Islamophobia, which now dominates their domestic politics.

There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me

I hear an earful about how horrible and repressive the Chinese state government is to its citizens from the outside, largely by national media talking heads and Big Data surveillance company flaks. Meanwhile, the consequences of talking shit on the Chinese internet - account suspension/deactivation, getting in trouble with your employer/school possibly with the threat of firing/expulsion, periodic investigation by state police for threats of violence, possible restrictions on business/travel because you’ve been added to a “watch list”, potential for arrest on some bullshit charge - seem to be all the same kinds of consequences periodically doled out to western citizens.

I’m told Americans have “free speech”. But then the Supreme Court lays so many caveats down that even a silly toothless joke is strictly prohibited under US laws. I’m told Chinese officials are brutal and draconian and mean-spirited, but they don’t have anything approaching our prison population. I haven’t seen evidence of any kind of mob-rule social media gang dedicated to doxing Chinese dissidents, either. So they manage to stay ahead of Canary Mission and Project Veritas in that regard.

I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.

I want to know what that’s supposed to look like in practice. Where can I find the Free Speech that the Evil Foreign Country is supposed to one day get?

Because if the dream is an American style system of free expression… What are we pinning for, really? Chinese Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson? Uyghurs given the Palestine Action treatment? An independent Taiwan that enjoys all the diplomatic kindness we afford to our neighbors down in Haiti and Cuba?

What are we even asking for?

It’s a race to the bottom in either case. What comes of living under a fascist regime crippled by it’s fealty to an even bigger fascist regime.

Industrialized nations are experiencing significant population decline driven by fertility rates falling below the replacement level of 2.1, caused by increased urbanization, female education, and high costs of living. Over 90 countries face shrinking populations, with major economies like Japan and Italy projected to halve by 2100.

Yes, but primarily in countries with little to no internet.

Probably just tied up with global population decline, or maybe infrastructure failure of ISPs, at this point. Facebook has the digital market super-saturated. Nowhere to go but down.

The top 10% of profiles: heavy desktop users — generate 43% of all advertiser value

Helps explain why Microsoft has started injecting ads into the OS so aggressively.

Na bro social media is nothing like credit score.

You might want to talk to folks in recruiting or HR. Everyone checks your social media history when they’re evaluating you.

he made a specific point of praising a demented rapist and lauding the pedophile party as heroes

He made a point of praising a President’s pick for the Antitrust Division of the DOJ. He didn’t praise Trump and he certainly didn’t praise pedophilia.

Slater’s tenure at DOJ was short-lived and unremarkable. So feel free to mock Yen on those grounds. But this has dick all to do with Epstein. It has nothing to do with the bloated ICE budget (which received bipartisan approval) or the assorts nightmarish cabinet appointments, many of which enjoyed supermajority support in the Senate (Rub’em All Out Rubio was appointed unanimously ffs).

he jumped head first into the cesspit for no reason other than he believed it.

He’s a Tech Goon and Trump had a ton of Tech Goons on his team. These people aren’t partisan, they’re corporate lemmings. By 2028, I’m sure Yen will be lining up to brown nose the incoming Dem administration. By 2032, he’ll be back on Team R, shocked at how the party that did everything Tech wanted has betrayed his customers again. Oh, and incidentally, insisting that the only way to protect yourself from Mean Old Big Government is by upping your Proton License to Double Super Secure.

And so, even though our opinions on age verification coincidentally align, he can fuck right off.

He’s endorsing the poison so he can sell the antidote.

The nightmare trap of the Two Party System is that you can look at one party cozying up to Big Tech (Obama in 2009) and conclude the other party must be reflexively in opposition.

Trump was fully surrounded by Thiel goons before he’d even left office in '21. And the relationship only got tighter with his Elon Musk Bromance. But hey, if you’d just elected Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney Tim Walz to the White House, I’m sure nobody would be talking about how much of their cabinet was stuffed with Silicon Valley cutouts.

It’s not like a cartel of trillionaires can buy up both parties at once, right?

Social media functions as a kind of gatekeeper for public interactions, not unlike credit scores, driver’s licenses, and college degrees. The absence of a presence on social media is not only socially debilitating (you’re cut out of the information stream for local events and public amenities) but a red-flag for college recruiters and employers. It’s much like how not using a credit card regularly in your teens/20s impacts your ability to access low-interest lending in your 30s/40s. Or not having a driver’s license interferes with your right to vote.

State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages. Linking your online presence (a thing that you need for a myriad of daily tasks) to your ID becomes a pathway to this goal. Universal, non-transferable digital ID becomes a wicked two-edged sword as it both exhaustively tracks the “documented” individuals and neatly severs the “undocumented” from society.

Every time I deliver a pizza to the posh kid’s neighborhood, there’s inevitably a pair of 19 year old twins wearing lingerie, covered in whipped cream, whom I’ve interrupted in the middle of a pillow right. And I have to tell them “No no no, there’s no other way to pay me. I only accept cash or plastic.”

This feels like one of those “I’ve never kissed a girl before, but I’ve watched a lot of porn” fantasies that works great in your head and horrible in practice.