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Rust Martialis posted:So just to be clear, you're okay with the state denying a kid higher education because one of their parents had an unpaid parking ticket? Seems like you're describing a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation as the norm. Here in America we deny kids higher education for being poor, and many of the ones who do get in are kept in life-long debt.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:34
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's not an analogy, The question was "Can you provide a list of countries on earth where you might get barred from air travel because you were late on debt payments" I see the problem. You replied to the question in a literal fashion, and ignored the context completely. That context is this: in a country the size of China, barring someone from ALL air travel, as well as HSR travel, is quite a severe punishment. It cannot be compared to the way the US makes it harder or even prevents citizens from leaving the country if they have certain types of debts, because for Americans, air travel is mostly domestic, and when they travel internationally, they mostly do so for leisure, in which case it is reasonable to demand that they pay for their important obligations first (such as child support) before they do that. The other reason to want to bar them from leaving the country easily is to prevent them from disappearing to some backwater country with no extradition treaties. cat botherer posted:People get put on no-fly lists in the US for extremely specious/nonexistent reasons all the time. Can you quantify this statement? As of 2016, the USA had about 80,000 people on the government no-fly database. What percentage of these have been put on that list for "extremely specious/nonexistent" reasons? I'm not doubting that it happens, mind you, because it absolutely does. I'm just asking for proof that the mistakes and/or abuses are ubiquitous, i.e. that they happen "all the time". Owlofcreamcheese posted:Agree in that it's basically accepted and people will say "I don't like it" but it's really not that big of a topic in american society. No one is rioting or marching over it, or really talking about it much. it's just vaguely disapproved of if mentioned. It's seen more as suboptimal than anything big and urgant. It's not discussed a lot because the number of Americans on no-fly lists is small, not just relative to the overall population of US air travelers, but also in comparison to the ratio of Chinese citizens barred from flights to the Chinese traveling population (a whopping 2.56 million people, according to China's own National Development and Reform Commission). The US no-fly list is still a bad system, but it's overall impact is pretty small. VitalSigns posted:Well most Americans when polled not only support the no-fly list but want the consequences of being on it expanded Most Americans when polled support the no-fly list, because the no-fly list is a subset of the terrorism watchlist that is maintained by the FBI, and it is generally understood that people who are suspected of having ties to terrorism shouldn't be allowed to fly. Mistakes and abuses do happen obviously, but for what it's worth, there's a formal centralized redress process for attempting to get one removed from the list. I have no idea if China has anything equivalent.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:35
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VitalSigns posted:Well most Americans when polled not only support the no-fly list but want the consequences of being on it expanded I'm tempted to say that most Americans are not serious people, but I guess that would be going into No True Scotsman territory. Fair enough! I'm pretty sure you won't find majority support for immunity-for-running-over-protestors laws, though.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:38
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Best Friends posted:For this specific example, if I were to tomorrow post that I've never disagreed with the moderation in the China thread, and someone quoted my recent posts, they absolutely would not be getting probed. Nor should they. But that's exactly what happened when mikec's post was quoted, and a whole new framework about how posting what people posted is sometimes an unacceptable allegation of bad faith is being constructed to justify it. Okay, you've been at this for a full page now and it's getting silly. Red and Black: 1. Began a derail asking, unprompted, "Out of curiosity, what was the general reaction in this thread 2-3 years ago?" Which was blatant poo poo-stirring for the sake of it. 2. When MikeC exasperatedly invites him to go back and check for himself rather than continuing to derail a thread which had at that point for "two pages devolved into strawman arguments where posters keep talking about some wide spread belief in some orwellian system countrywide when exactly one person (CommieGIR) made that assertion that was quickly shut down by everyone.", Red and Black reposts a comment MikeC made last November, for no other apparent reason than to have a gotcha. 3. When I call him out on this, he says it's fine because "he asked me to do it," which is ludicrous bad-faith. 4. He then goes on to say "and in any case, isn't running in here to declare breathlessly that nobody believes in this or that model of a credit system existing in China, whilst having expressly held that view just a few months prior, something of a sign of bad faith?" This is not punishing a poster for having a dissenting opinion, nor is it punishing them for "quoting someone's own posts." This was an intentional derail Red and Black created for no reason, resulting in more drama for no reason, over a topic which had long since devolved into strawman arguments. It's exactly this kind of nonsense which the thread should be clamping down on because this is exactly the kind of nonsense that turned the D&D Feedback Thread into the China Feedback Thread. Bad-faith posting, personal gripes and trolling should not be permitted in a thread which is purportedly about good-faith, detailed debate.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:38
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Mistakes and abuses do happen obviously, but for what it's worth, there's a formal centralized redress process for attempting to get one removed from the list. I have no idea if China has anything equivalent. I didn't realize there was one; my impression was that in practice, the best way to get off the no-fly list was to complain to the Washington Post. Though even that surely has no Chinese equivalent; independent media have their benefits.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:42
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Both Koos and I have asked folks to take these concerns to PMs (any mod is fine but Koos has specifically been spearheading the new DND moderation and most of us are deferring to him), anyone who continues to use the China thread to debate moderation past this point is going to be given a posting vacation.
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Feb 7, 2022 21:43
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Rust Martialis posted:So just to be clear, you're okay with the state denying a kid higher education because one of their parents had an unpaid parking ticket? No I pretty clearly think it's bad to punish kids because their parents are poor or irresponsible or whatever
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Feb 7, 2022 21:59
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It's also important to note that car ownership is mich more of a privilege than a right in the PRC. There are long wait lists to own cars with a ton of hoops to jump through, as opposed to being an intricate part of life in America. So traffic violations are going to be handled very differently as well.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:04
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Bishyaler posted:Seems like you're describing a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation as the norm. Here in America we deny kids higher education for being poor, and many of the ones who do get in are kept in life-long debt. Is it possible to discuss China without comparing it to the US? Rust doesn't even live in the United States, why does that have any relevance to the current discussion? Based on this post it seems like you'd like to criticize and discuss the United States, and there's several threads in DND specifically for that, in which people are very critical of the US and capitalism in general. There's also quite a few discussion threads about issues not specific to the US which welcome thorough criticisms of issues in the US. Here are some examples to get you started: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3992478 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3989921 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3989892 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3873661 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3946780 Hope this helps.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:09
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VitalSigns posted:No I pretty clearly think it's bad to punish kids because their parents are poor or irresponsible or whatever Oh okay. Just seems to me that US tuition rates are kind of irrelevant to a discussion of China's social credit program, especially since there's a lot of non-US posters here. I mean it's not like university is free in China either - a casual Google says public tuition rates are more than I paid for my Engineering Physics degree (with a B in Marxist Philosophy!) https://www.mastersportal.com/articles/1587/study-abroad-in-china-all-you-need-to-know-about-tuition-and-living-costs.html So if your point was that high tuition fees prevent poor kids from attending university, apparently that's also an issue in China. Rust Martialis fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Feb 7, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2022 22:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:
Yes I think it is true that Americans wouldn't agree with most of the abuses while supporting the system that has the potential for them nevertheless, although wasn't the potential for abuse one of the criticisms of China's system as well. MikeC posted:I can just imagine similar "overreach" or "overzealous" enforcement of the system just like COVID Zero enforcement leading to some awful outcomes for certain individuals. I suppose it might come down to how much one inherently trusts the government. The US government is obviously inherently a moral and trustworthy guardian of its people's well being so cases of "overzealous enforcement" can be safely written off as mistakes from a surfeit of concern or isolated acts by bad apples or whatever. But there are some whacko Libertarians etc in the US that reflexively distrust the government and therefore oppose the existence of a system to track and punish Americans on principle. If you distrust the Chinese government then obviously a no-fly list from them is going to be considered more sinister. Rust Martialis posted:Oh okay. Just seems to me that US tuition rates are kind of irrelevant to a discussion of China's social credit program, especially since there's a lot of non-US posters here. I mean it's not like university is free in China either - a casual Google says public tuition rates are more than I paid for my Engineering Physics degree (with a B in Marxist Philosophy!) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Feb 7, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2022 22:19
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Professor Beetus posted:Is it possible to discuss China without comparing it to the US? Rust doesn't even live in the United States, why does that have any relevance to the current discussion? Based on this post it seems like you'd like to criticize and discuss the United States, and there's several threads in DND specifically for that, in which people are very critical of the US and capitalism in general. There's also quite a few discussion threads about issues not specific to the US which welcome thorough criticisms of issues in the US. Here are some examples to get you started: So this is a thread for mostly Americans to beat a drum about how evil the PRC is for creating an imaginary situation that happens every single day in America. I'm sure glad mods are stepping in to silence any discussions about all these stones being thrown from a glass house.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:25
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VitalSigns posted:
Who exactly in this thread has advocated high tuition as 'freedom' or other good thing, I somehow missed it. Are you maybe mixing up this thread with another one? This thread is about China, you see. Where apparently university education can be quite expensive, a fact of which apparently you, like me, had been shockingly unaware when you raised the issue of tuition.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:35
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Bishyaler posted:So this is a thread for mostly Americans to beat a drum about how evil the PRC is for creating an imaginary situation that happens every single day in America. I'm sure glad mods are stepping in to silence any discussions about all these stones being thrown from a glass house. There was an entire section of this thread that was devoted to a very fruitful discussion of the pros and cons of China's successful rollout of high speed railway infrastructure. If you want to see positive news about China 
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Feb 7, 2022 22:36
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Rust Martialis posted:Who exactly in this thread has advocated high tuition as 'freedom' or other good thing, I somehow missed it. Are you maybe mixing up this thread with another one? This thread is about China, you see. Where apparently university education can be quite expensive, a fact of which apparently you, like me, had been shockingly unaware when you raised the issue of tuition. Actually private education has been banned in the PRC, one of the better changes.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:37
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Bishyaler posted:So this is a thread for mostly Americans to beat a drum about how evil the PRC is for creating an imaginary situation that happens every single day in America. I'm sure glad mods are stepping in to silence any discussions about all these stones being thrown from a glass house. The last thing I will say on the matter is that if you have a need to defend China from criticism you are certainly welcome to do so without immediately resorting to immediately saying "but what about the US," particularly considering that there are many people not in the US discussing China, there are plenty of US posters critical of both the US and China. This is the China megathread, people can be critical of China if they want, similar to how there's constant criticism of the US going on in the US CE thread, where many people are able to do so without comparing the US to China. I know I already said further complaints would be punished, but I'm going to let this one slide as a sign of good faith and offer you one more opportunity to take specific complaints to PMs.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:38
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Actually private education has been banned in the PRC, one of the better changes. Not completely.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:41
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Atopian posted:3: if you want to get your children into a different/better primary or middle school that you would ordinarily do based on your address, your entire criminal record is examined, *including* stuff that wouldn't be considered criminal in the west, like speeding tickets and other minor fines. This *is* explicitly a points system, and although it is not (yet?) tracked nationally, the system is semi-unified in terms of points gained for particular problems. Rust Martialis posted:So just to be clear, you're okay with the state denying a kid higher education because one of their parents had an unpaid parking ticket? Is the first quote what you are using to construct this hypothetical? If so, I do not think this is a good faith representation of the social credit system as described by Atopian, or a valid line of inquiry, as it cherry picks one example from one anecdotal attestation to sensational effect. Apologies in advance if this is not what you were referring to though.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:42
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Rust Martialis posted:Who exactly in this thread has advocated high tuition as 'freedom' or other good thing, I somehow missed it. Are you maybe mixing up this thread with another one? I said that the difference in reaction for restricting schooling because a parent is poor versus because a parent who is poor didn't pay some traffic tickets seems to come down to personal definitions of freedom. Someone can think both are undesirable but also think one is government tyranny and the other not even while disapproving of both. I mean, I think that's pretty common, you don't think high tuition is tyranny on par with factoring traffic tickets into the application process do you? Rust Martialis posted:This thread is about China, you see. Where apparently university education can be quite expensive, a fact of which apparently you, like me, had been shockingly unaware when you raised the issue of tuition.  Nowhere did I say university education can't be expensive in China nor did I imply it anywhere, perhaps you are the one reading the wrong thread VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Feb 7, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2022 22:45
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https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1073793823/china-uyghur-children-xinjiang-boarding-school What a loving insane story. Why is China allowed to get away with these types of atrocities?
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Feb 7, 2022 22:48
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Actually private education has been banned in the PRC, one of the better changes. Apparently *public* universities can charge high tuition in China, never mind the private ones.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:50
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Actually private education has been banned in the PRC, one of the better changes. That's not entirely true. There are private universities in China, although not very many of them,, and there's private tutoring schools in China, although a law last year put a bunch of new restrictions on them, by banning foreign ownership and really limiting for profit tutoring.
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Feb 7, 2022 23:01
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1073793823/china-uyghur-children-xinjiang-boarding-school Same reason any powerful country gets away with poo poo like this - they are too powerful for international intervention to occur. The mistreatment of Uyghurs is a well-known topic by now and this article doesn't really add anything new that we haven't already known or covered for quite some time. I think if we are going to clean up the image of the thread then posts like this also need to be scaled back to respect those posters who think this thread is just a China-bashing thread. VitalSigns posted:I suppose it might come down to how much one inherently trusts the government. The US government is obviously inherently a moral and trustworthy guardian of its people's well being so cases of "overzealous enforcement" can be safely written off as mistakes from a surfeit of concern or isolated acts by bad apples or whatever. But there are some whacko Libertarians etc in the US that reflexively distrust the government and therefore oppose the existence of a system to track and punish Americans on principle. If you distrust the Chinese government then obviously a no-fly list from them is going to be considered more sinister. I agree but one cannot escape the political environment in which the PRC operates in vis a vis the US. Local overreach occurs all the time in the US and all other western democratic nations but there are clearly defined routes to challenge said overreach and people are typically not censored (back the original strand of discussion many pages ago now) when they complain about this. A comparative example between overreach in China vs overreach in the US on the COVID front would be how the Xi'an lockdown produced social media stories about how people couldn't get food that was supposed to be delivered to them and how were have turned away from medical care to the point where two women lost their babies sitting outside a hospital that denied them entry. Clearly, the central government has said that these are overreaches and that local officials screwed up and should temper their enforcement with common sense and compassion (proof linked in previous pages by other posters). But there is no clear legal channel for ordinary citizens to fight back. Weibo posts are censored, there is no way to bring lawsuits against the local government, and media is state-controlled so it is impossible to get the narrative out. Contrast this with the endless parade of COVID-related lawsuits brought on by citizens vs the state, states vs the federal government, and federal government vs the states over what is or is not overreach as seen in the US. This extends beyond COVID to all other matters. You can start a legal challenge and injunctions to stop the government from particular actions can be made swiftly even before judgment is rendered by the courts because it might cause irreparable harm should the contested law/measure/system be allowed to go ahead while the case works its way through the system. And citizens, interest groups, and governments regularly win and lose. The political actors are clearly divorced from the judicial actors in this case. The system for challenges is far less robust in China. The judiciary for example not independent from the party though it may be independent of local officials. According to Reuters, their top judge in 2017 rejected the notion of judicial independence https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-policy-law-idUSKBN1500OF. There are cases where companies and citizens challenge the local authorities and win but there is a lack of a clearly enforced 'bill of rights' style document that is regularly and rigorously upheld like in western democracies. It very much feels like the courts exist to serve the CCP rather than act as a check on the CCP (ie "rule by law"). Combined with the aforementioned censorship of social media and state control/regulation of mass media, I don't think it is unfair for someone to expect excess in an SCS will be much harder to combat in China than it would be in the US or other western "rule of law" nations. MikeC fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 00:09
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Actually private education has been banned in the PRC, one of the better changes. This is an example of the CCP addressing a symptom rather than the root cause of why the demand for private education in China is so high.
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Feb 8, 2022 01:18
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Private education in China is just sending your kids off to Universities in the West. I knew several affluent such people; they were great, they'd always be shocked how much Chinese history I knew and we'd have cool conversations.  And yeah echoing what was said earlier, we get occasionally have very fruitful conversations about China, I brought up China's research into space elevators and how cool it was way back when. I think there's plenty of positive news that can be discussed about China in depth people just need to post it more.
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Feb 8, 2022 01:57
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je1 healthcare posted:This is an example of the CCP addressing a symptom rather than the root cause of why the demand for private education in China is so high.
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Feb 8, 2022 01:57
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The reason private schools are so important in China is because of the importance of the gaokao. If you do well at it, you go to college/university. If you fail, you don't. So, parents will do whatever it takes to make sure their kids do well. A lot of the demand for private education is due to wealth differences, but an even bigger reason is that that's the only factor in college admission. And the thing at issue isn't so much private schools vs public schools. The schools that got cracked down on are private after school tutoring academies that teach you how to do better at the gaokao, both in making sure that the student knows the information on there and also getting them familiar about what the test is like and how to take it. The big concern made in the reforms wasn't about rich vs poor. It was that the schools were exploiting the parents' fears about their kids to make money and putting too much stress on the students which was bad for their physical and mental health. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 02:19
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1073793823/china-uyghur-children-xinjiang-boarding-school Nobody cares about Muslisms bro. Whether you are lobbing smart bombs at weddings, whether you are bulldozing houses, or whether you are doing a pristine Nazi Lebensraum strategy in Xinjjiang, there's always one group of people who make perfectly adequate targets with zero repercussions. It's not just China who gets away with it. China is just not concerned about optics when trying to one-up the Nazis in cold, institutionalized inhumanity. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 02:52
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je1 healthcare posted:This is an example of the CCP addressing a symptom rather than the root cause of why the demand for private education in China is so high. What is the root cause?
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Feb 8, 2022 04:27
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cat botherer posted:You are correct that this doesn't address the cause of demand for private education (wealth inequality being still too high), but this change is nonetheless good in that it helps egalitarianism. Denying additional educational opportunities to some because their parents have more money is false egalitarianism in the same way the society in "Harrison Bergerson" was egalitarian. If the rich parents had to pay taxes to send their kids abroad and that revenue went directly to fund rural education improvement, then it would be egalitarian. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 05:57
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Denying the more fortunate children additional educational opportunities is false egalitarianism in the same way the society in "Harrison Bergerson" was egalitarian. The tutoring industry was extremely focused around networking, as well as driving children into burnout even if we take your statement at face value, additional education opportunities only available to rich children still reinforces class hierarchy
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Feb 8, 2022 05:59
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A big flaming stink posted:The tutoring industry was extremely focused around networking, as well as driving children into burnout I absolutely believe this, but that wasn't the argument I was responding to.
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Feb 8, 2022 06:01
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Centrist Committee posted:What is the root cause? I think it's the immense importance of the gaokao in determining a kid's future.
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Feb 8, 2022 06:25
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A big flaming stink posted:The tutoring industry was extremely focused around networking, as well as driving children into burnout His point was that eliminating private tuition only tries to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator and in his view a 'false' sort of egalitarianism. His proposal or angle is that if you allow for private education but had to pay a tax to access private education domestically or abroad, and then use that tax money to improve the level of public education so that children of poorer background could still access higher quality education than they could have before, is a 'better' form of egalitarianism.
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Feb 8, 2022 06:29
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:If the rich parents had to pay taxes to send their kids abroad and that revenue went directly to fund rural education improvement, then it would be egalitarian. The wealthy excel at nothing better than tax dodging. And loving children. They're great at that too.
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Feb 8, 2022 07:02
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Epicurius posted:I think it's the immense importance of the gaokao in determining a kid's future. I’m sorry I do not know what gaokao means. I haven’t read the whole thread so if it it’s already been explained let me know.
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Feb 8, 2022 07:04
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For some light introductory reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao Basically like the SATs in the US, but more important. Not actually being Chinese I never got quite how much more, but the entire atmosphere around them can get toxic as gently caress. Not just for kids, but for the schools too. It's the same as a lot of standardized testing. The important thing becomes success on the test rather than the nominal level of competence or education of the students. The success of schools depends on how many kids succeed. The chances of future success for the students depends on how well they succeed. So do well on the test.
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Feb 8, 2022 07:12
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Mulva posted:For some light introductory reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao Thank you. If reducing the scope of private education is just addressing a symptom, as claimed below, what would constitute a solution to the root cause (which I assume to broadly be standardized testing)? je1 healthcare posted:This is an example of the CCP addressing a symptom rather than the root cause of why the demand for private education in China is so high.
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Feb 8, 2022 07:30
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Tutoring/cram school/test prep school culture exists also across a swathe of the East Asian and Southeast Asian states, liberal or socialist or authoritarian alike (some of these being once authoritarian and now liberal etc) - this should be a warning against reaching glibly for reasons based in factors that exist only in one of those countries (here one specifically refers to tutoring intended to help above-average students distinguish themselves from the pack, not below-average students achieve whatever level of competencies) Chinese gaokao culture is particularly intense but that could be a function of region and number of places. Its intensity also varies within China itself naturally It's worth observing that for the 'difficult' selective degrees - generally medicine and law - it is also reasonably common for the European countries to also have a private test prep culture; it's not a stretch of the imagination to suppose that there is some similarity there
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Feb 8, 2022 07:32
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Cpt_Obvious would like me to announce that he's threadbanned. That decision can be appealed in a few months, and if he does I'll announce that he's allowed to return.
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Feb 8, 2022 07:58
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