China Makes Chat Group Administrators Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages

According to federal prosecutors, only one of the girls would agree tontesitfy against him and that wasn't enough to get a conviction.

If you read about the case in sources that aren't determined to link the whole thing to a Bill Clinton conspiracy, you'll see it wasn't an open and shut case. It's pretty likely prosecutors agreed to a deal because they thoght he'd walk otherwise.

The local DA convened a grand jury and they thought there was only enough evidence to support fairly minor charges. Maybe he was paying off witnesses, but you need evidence of that.

Regardless he still spent time in jail.

So does Greece. That doesn't appear to be doing Greece much good in the modern era though.

Also, large swaths of China's institutional memory were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.

It's definitely necessary to have accurate information to keep things running, but there are certain aspects of the notion of 'accurate information' when it serves an ideological purpose that are pretty unexpected.

For instance, Stalin believed his doctors were part of a conspiracy to kill him, so he would have his doctors and those of all top officials arrested and tortured, to the point of forced confession. The crime was not simply planning to murder, but planning to kill sacred revolutionaries [0].

This example is typical of the Stalinist concept of "objective guilt": it does not matter there wasn't a shred of evidence to the conspiracy. The ideals were used falsely to prove lies as true - not because the ideals were meaningless or because they were there to justifying any whim. But because swifter and harsher punishment would go to the one articulating why it was obvious no one really actually believed the stated rules. That instead they all obeyed unspoken, subjective rules - externally praising Soviet ideals only to avoid causing themselves horrible punishment. That the system they called objective was actually extremely repressive because of its sheer intersubjectivity..

Though upon reflection, it provokes two questions: "Why could the same Stalin who either truly believed his subjective will was the actual manifestation of historical necessity, or merely dictated as if he did, hold office - during some of the 20th's century's more turbulent periods - for as long as 30 years? And why is it that the reimagined "visionary-yet-non-pathological" Soviet Party that followed Stalin - despite its repudiation of his cult of personality - was even less capable of 'making the right mistakes' towards securing its existence?"

Although one may be forced to say a lie, one will hold no illusions as hubristic as 'having made the correct mistakes' in brutal dictatorships - things are shitty. But when you become self-congratulatory, you hold more illusions. If I lack awareness of my tendency to underestimate my (recursive) uncertainty of my uncertainty of my self-evaluations, I would frequently wonder: "Gee! As if by chance - and without any understanding or memory of what they had in common - all these remote events - which I have disastrously underprepared for - just seem to keep happening to me! And with remarkable consistency"!

I'm not sure if or how China's approach will succeed or fail. But China doesn't have the same illusions as the USSR did about revisionism (and its antithesis). And, the Chinese government does have an external system it is both invested in and holds itself accountable to; one that is also a far less uncertain measure of success than any sort of internal affairs department - the entire world economy.

[0] http://www.lacan.com/zizstalin.htm

When that statement gained currency it was about being free to finally be outside of the cage that governments and large organizations made.

Today the old guard have built new tools - mass online commenting - to combat the signal itself.

So while the network may well reroute around censorship - the good censors just use the network to change the signal.

I've been on forums long enough now, and helped moderate enough To know the old naive version of free speech doesn't lead to the exchange of ideas.

It leads to the exhchange of whichever mind virus or meme is most capable of building reactions and structures in brains.

So it's definitely the era of subverting people and mass subversive speech/propaganda.

If I can press the right buttons in a person before you reach them with your facts/truth - what will you do?

That's the question I don't have an answer for just yet.

As I said, there is a difference between law and implementation.

Also, it's not true that the top-scorers have blasphemy laws - most of them don't have one at all at the moment, and the ones that did were mostly used in the early part of last century (and rarely at that). Even Germany's 'blasphemy' law is actually a 'disturbing the peace' law; you're not going to go to jail for saying 'christ' when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

This asks the question - what isn't at odds with human nature? Why do you think that utopian projects are necessarily at odds with human nature? Marx and Engels were sociologists, and in fact many modern sociologists are Marxists too. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's some indication that the "human nature" argument needs looking into.

And it has been looked into. Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School, wrote a book called Escape From Freedom in which he details the investigation of the human condition and attempts to identify what human nature is and to what extent it is malleable. The idea that "human nature" is suited to our current mode of production is as he notes a little fallacy stretching back to Freud's time.

The nature of humans is at least in part influenced by their environment. The mode of production we currently see (capitalism) is part of our environment. Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances? Perhaps Marx himself would agree with both you and I here:

"The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." — Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach, III"

To "human nature" I say firmly: human society.

I used to think that things would improve after the singularity. But Hannu Rajaniemi's novels have disabused me of those fantasies. It could well get worse. The masses become slave minds. Subprograms, basically.

So it goes.