This is bad. But before judging China, people need to ask themselves if the hold their own government to the same standard of criticism. As an American, I feel if the US government had similar plans and someone had leaked them on Wikileaks, there would be more conversation about the leaker's girlfriend than outrage about the plans themselves.
Countries such as the US and Australia already implement much of what the article describes: credit rating, criminal record, financial assets, standarized test scores, educational and employment records, residential history, searchable online presence, with the greatest weighting given to financial assets of course because how much money someone has trumps all.
The main differences with the announced Chinese plan are:
* it will aggregate many various ratings and makes them available publicly on all citizens, something that's done only privately for some residents in the US
* it extends the system to social criteria, something only done privately through sports clubs, religious groups, etc in the US, and dilutes the importance of a person's financial assets in calculating a person's "worth"
* it's using technology from the ground up, intead of slowly automating a paper-based system that's already been developed over the years
The social criteria is questionable. If the Federal Government cares, do you not think they can dredge your social media interactions? Do you not think that they do this for presidential candidates and those applying for top brass positions? Do you think they don't have numerical indicators to prioritize and sort the hundreds of millions of profiles they have on American citizens? They very near most certainly do.
Where do you imagine that this system is applied? What China is working on is more akin to credit ratings in that it is openly part of decision making processes for non-shadowy actors. The NSA might have such a system internally but there's not evidence to suggest it would affect your life in any way (if you are a US citizen inside the US).
Definitely the flags and scoring systems the US has in place are not part of a public conversation in the United States, are not used by US employers (for example) during job applications, etc. I agree that this makes the system very different in kind despite similarities in form.
I imagine that the US currently uses this to prioritize domestic investigations for the FBI and law enforcement.
I imagine that the US currently uses this during the process of vetting membership to the intelligence community, other sensitive positions, political leadership (I forget which NSA whistleblower mentioned the targeted surveillance of then president-prospect Obama), and for security clearances.
I imagine that the US currently uses this to find and disrupt politically minded groups and to deal with narrative challenges inside the United States.
The reason why people are not interested in the alleged US government over reaches is because we still fundamentally trust our government to do the right thing.
Americans just don't give a shit if the government has access to your data, because so far it doesn't use it.
This is why the John Oliver segment a few weeks back showed that when people thought their sexts were actually able to be viewed, they were outraged.
Our government already has the power to literally end humanity.
Right now, all the NSA stuff and other spying is just has the potential to be abused. No harm, no foul writ large.
You can believe that is wrong or shortsighted, but it doesn't mean the American people don't care about anything.
Please speak for yourself, instead of relying on what "we" or "the people" want for apparent authority. Sexts are actually able to be viewed, and have been in the past:
You are right that people generally do take offense only when presented with gross and abject violations of their privacy, but to say that people shouldn't care about what the government is doing because the government doesn't (currently) do anything with it, is passing the buck along to future generations. Why even allow for such a massive potential for abuse to arise in the future? And again, documented abuses have already occurred, to say nothing of ones swept under the rug. Why collect the data in the first place if the government "doesn't use it" as you put it?
Most people trust USgov; apparently just last year we were only 2 points behind Japan. My impression of Japan is that most people there are very trusting of their society/rules/system/etc, so for USA to be just 2 points behind Japan is a significant(and disappointing) bit of info.
I take no issue with making it a sourced statement of fact, e.g., "75% of Americans approve of the X, Y, Z programs in a 2014 Gallup poll." But to vaguely reference the current state of public opinion and use that as a basis for a normative statement that approves of the government's actions is frustrating. It dodges a discussion of the merits of the programs in favor of a "the public approves it, and no harm is being done, so no one should take issue" sort of stance.
I don't know a single person that doesn't have a very low, highly critical opinion of the US Government already. That includes essentially universal skepticism of Congress.
So yes, I think Americans criticize their government almost as a professional sport. Non-stop 24/7, everywhere. Even for things the government isn't responsible for.
I'd argue the only thing Americans are guilty of is too much complaining and criticizing of their government, and not enough doing to change it as a follow-through.
Now you know (of) a single person. Our public servants are largely fine people. We get stuff that's weird because of people being dancing monkeys for campaign finance. This is actually, in my opinion, overt, specific and designed entertainment product. It's very rarely an attachment to principle or thought out - one reason Reagan did so well is that he pretty much believed a lot of what he said ( not all - you have to be tactical too ) . He said, not what people around him, said.
Clinton wasn't as much of rigid principles, but you got the feeling he was, outside of being very charismatic, genuine. Even Dubya, I more or less trusted.
Use your anthropic principle - there would not be people saying things like what, say Ted Cruz says unless there was positive feedback for it.
I don't think nationalizing campaigns works, either. Huge public choice problem and a slightly different set of incentives.
I've worked a bit with actual government employees, and they were uniformly great except for one clot of them. Total observer bias, though.
All in all, I think the shear between what we actually want and what we say we want is the cause, and is an excellent example of revealed preferences. Why else would there have ever been some policies we've seen, like racial laws in the post-Reconstruction South? How does that ever make any sense at all, yet so much energy and time went into it?
To misquote Walt Kelly ( of the Pogo cartoons ) - "we has met the enemy, and it is us."
I have many fairly right-wing friends, and most of them, when pressed a bit, will clarify what they are afraid of. It's not nothing. They have their bias, I have mine. I'm able to talk to them about these things without much ugliness.
Our public servants are not fine people. They kill unarmed civilians in their custody, they kill Americans without cause nor due process, they torture innocents, admit they torture innocents, and then do nothing. Our public officials state on record that financial institutions are too big to jail then proceed to use the law to terrify and ruin the lives of those who dare defy their agenda.
So there are bad people who are public officials, and there are people who are in over their head.
The vast majority are dedicated professionals.
"Too big to jail" happened because we tried to use mortgages for this bizarre social welfare hack. A conservative economist and writer - Charles Calomiris, with his coauthor S. Haber - picks this apart pretty well.
Emphasis we, though.
The few cases where I can think of "using the law to terrify and ruin..." are pretty complicated and there's plenty of "WTF?" to go 'round.
> "Too big to jail" happened because we tried to use mortgages for
No, it didn't.
Too big to jail happened because money drives political influence, and the people responsible for the collapse of Wall Street have the latter because of the former.
If you mean the collapse itself happened for that reason, that's not true either. To the extent the "social welfare hack" thing is true, it was being done for decades before the bubble even started building. The frauds that lead into the buble and collapse didn't happen because of that, they happened because of the regulatory structures put into place designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing after the Great Depression were removed; at the time that occurred, critics warned that doing that would lead to exactly the kind of shenanigans that, in fact, occurred.
The decades of bubble building is exactly the root cause.
The regulatory framework - I presume you mean Glass-Steagall - has never been shown to have been capable of preventing this sort of thing. Even people who advocate for it - mainly Paul Vocker - admit this. Keeping investment and deposit banking separate had nought to do with it. There might have been other "firewalls" but I've yet to see a proprosal that has been identified as sufficient to prevent this sort of thing.
Fraud was fraud; whether policy to push lousy mortgages came from Fannie/Freddie/Congress or not isn't all that controversial to me - I am sure it is true because of the evidence. But it is controversial to some.
The ideas behind the mortgage buildup were just that - ideas - that were accepted by a broad spectrum of people.
And neither you nor anyone else can show that money driving political influence has one thing to do with it. It was the style of the times. There was a cycle of deregulation beginning with Jimmy Carter.
Might be that Dick Armey was bought and paid for, but I am pretty sure he would have advocated for deregulation regardless out of ideology anyway.
The only idea I am aware of that may have made a difference is that Brooksley Born wanted CDOs/CDSs on exchanges, and we simply don't know what would have happened. It is bad that she was shouted down, but that has more to do with certain foibles in how things like the regulation that is there works, and with how the Fed interacts with those.
She was, in effect, a heretic, a Jeremiah who was not listened to. And it's a black mark on us. But we don't know.
Greenspan's mea culpa covers it - he did not know that banks really weren't doing the proper risk analysis.
But we just do these things. We have bubbles. There will be more before it's over. "Nation of Deadbeats" is quite the book.
Our public servants are not good or evil. They are merely people responding to the incentives that they are faced with.
This means that they are incentivised to behave by fear of losing their jobs, by financial contributions and kickbacks, by legacy, by moral sentiment, by haste and convenience, by duty. There are very few to no public servants who feel that what they are doing is wrong - and you might agree with some of their actions even when it blurs lines (assassinating Osama Bin Laden without due process of law).
What's happening now is that America's post WWII order is fracturing and weakening. There are new players on the stage. The theater of global politics and finance is shifting from Europe to the Asian Pacific. The borders fixed to prevent another great European war had also been fixed to provide energy security from the Middle East - but this freezing has prevented those people living there from having a great or fully modern society of their own. The technology backing nuclear weapons has exceeded the defense capabilities of all nations at a time non-proliferation treaties expired (the Bush administration did not renew them). Russia and China are rushing to create a Eurasia that can compete with Europe and Europe is trying to create a United States of Europe to ween away from NATO and to achieve a regional hegemony that provides it security and an opportunity to be a global player. Frought with both politicization, financial warfare, general gamifiedness, and brittleness global finance has brought financial redistribution, bubbles and busts to both hemispheres.
In response the US is building oil pipelines across the Americas, coup'ing Venezuela to open up its oil to US investment, settling new bases and rigs into the now contested (for geostrategic military reasons) the artic north.
The internet through all of this was supposed to allow a marketplace of ideas to exist across the world - but instead has been used by nations to propagandize, spy and sabotage one another.
In this turbulant time of America losing its grips, huge changes and bets will be made and American leadership will kill, torture, surveil and censor to ensure its own survival. That is to say we can't think of this as good versus evil but dog eat dog. The world has never been about good and evil, though men are compelled by it before they stand in trenches and need to survive.
The sad part is that during a time on Earth where there is more of everything for more of everyone that changes and fluxuations and opportunity mean the prospect of violence.
To be clear you, not me nor the parent, but you introduced good and evil into the conversation. We were discussing fine, as in decent or humane.
But if the words good and evil are to mean anything then the torture and murder of innocents must qualify as evil. Spare me your grad school real-politics analysis, none of which justifies torture because it categorically cannot be justified.
Thank you. Yes I introduced it as terminology because I felt it was present in content without the terminology before I spoke my piece.
You misunderstand me. I am neither justifying nor trying to justify torture. I am trying to show why nations convince themselves that torture is justifiable. The calculus of nations - their realpolitik - exists in a world where an analysis of torture makes it seem sensible (entirely tangential to its being reprehensible).
To add more here: what I'm saying is that if every modern nation actively participates in these behaviors we must go beyond good and evil to understand the behavior - there only appears to be relative good rather than an exaggerated excluded middle. A realist, realpolitik analysis affords us a way of understanding the points of contention and the contradictions that incentivize those nations and their representatives to participate in reprehensible activity.
Wherein comes 'constructive realism': if it is incentives and power conflict that incentivize reprehensible acts then we can fix the acts not by voting for new representatives but by changing the conditions that lead to contentions. The realpolitik analysis is not a cynical analysis or one that is doomed to justify behavior: it is instead one that places the responsibility on conditions and context as much as specific actors.
That was a mostly joking jab ... but seriously, have you looked at a demographics map of the US? In between just about every blue city/urban center, there are broad swaths of rural red. Many of these folks are of the opinion that what the government does is right, and we shouldn't question cause they know best. Which is ironic given their love of "small government" ... but when the police, military, or otherwise "security" related organization is concerned, it's all yes all day.
In my 34 years I've never met someone that had an overwhelmingly positive view of the US Government. Not a single person. The only thing I've seen is very selective, mostly partisan focused cheering, on the rare occasions when a party does something its partisans like. The next minute they're back to griping about government, for one reason or another.
Tune into the news, and you're all but guaranteed to see non-stop anger, criticism, and rejection of government actions, policies, and politicians in general from the population of the US. That is true whether you're talking about Jon Stewart spending half his show mocking the government for something, or the right wing at Fox News.
Every poll that gets done comes back with Congress having epic low ratings. That has been the case for a long time.
This goes back before the time of Mark Twain mocking the US Government, it was a very popular sport even then. For 200 years, there has been a consistent bashing of Congress and its actions in the press and popular culture.
Most Americans do criticize the government, but only on a few party-aligned talking points. Few agree on what is worthy of criticism, and many miss the important issues because they are preoccupied by relatively inconsequential hot button issues.
"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."
I am surprised the page is still up!
disclaimer: I am not American but like a lot of Americans I know I am disappointed with Obama too, mind you the politicians here in Ireland are also lying and power-grabbing scumbags :(
like the saying goes
“democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”
:( It saddens me that such an obvious joke gets downvoted. It would be nice if people could reply when they downvote. Was the joke not received as such, what is not funny or does the community hate jokes?
Or if the leaker was a traitor or a patriot before issuing ad hominem attacks against him in order to bolster popular opinion when he or she is whisked away to Gitmo in the name of "national security."
* But before judging China, people need to ask themselves if the hold their own government to the same standard of criticism.*
Not really. We should judge China immediately as bad and then go on to look at our own states (which aren't terribly good). The "let's get perspective on this repression" argument is always a sham, whether it is made by China, by the US or whoever. We need to look at all governments but never to say "the badness here makes this other action OK".
I want to go further with this idea. What we need to do is understand why both nations are doing this. What reasons do they have? Why does it seem like a good idea? Are they the same reasons? Are they somehow fundamental? How much choice is there in how these behaviors are implemented? Are there alternatives with other tradeoffs that appeal to the underlying reasons and if so why was this solution chosen?
Sometimes this leads us, especially if we feel the urge to repeat standard bylines, to conclude that "The People's Party are just evil, and that's why they do it." But if the reason for doing it were merely evilness, then we might also conclude the US does it for evilness - something that isn't as much of a goto by-line.
I don't really fully understand why all major governments surveil, censor, propagandize and profile their (and other) citizens - but comparing history with 21st century challenges give us pretty good hints. First, it seems fairly natural for countries to exercise some forms of control of their populations, both to provide a common security and stability (something citizens for the most part benefit from) and to preserve its own institutions (something every government is compelled by).
Specifically in the 21st century it is common practice to utilize international propaganda to disrupt and destabilize opponent populations, foment revolutions by exporting dissent, and to misinform foreign citizens during diplomacy and geostrategy efforts. Indeed, both democracies and countries that mimic the machinations of democracies, need to gain of appear to gain public support for initiatives based on complicated, centralized or even secret initiatives do actually benefit countries as a whole. In many ways autocratic institutions need to control their people less than semi-democratic institutions since ultimately some king or body of diplomats make decisions without the input of citizens.
Digressing further it is doing this sort of analysis that can show why a state engages with the practices that it does. If there is a large desire to reform practices it is these end reasons that must be challenged if the behavior is to alter.
> Specifically in the 21st century it is common practice to utilize international propaganda to disrupt and destabilize opponent populations, foment revolutions by exporting dissent, and to misinform foreign citizens during diplomacy and geostrategy efforts.
This was all common in the 20th Century, particularly the latter half, as well.
Yes. With a matured and global internet anonymous bloggers, leakers, sources to journalists, news agencies, targetted ads, twitter campaigns, social media experiences and search rankings are fabricated and altered to assist in these ends. The social analysis used by corporations to get branding and commercials to 'go viral' are used by governments to target individuals that disseminate social influence to wider audiences. The techniques and capabilities have grown over time and the access and affordability means more of it is done by more actors.
