China blacklists millions from booking flights as 'social credit' introduced

On a different tact, the US is just as guilty of this with the over the top of punishment of those convicted of sex crimes where you can be publicly embarrassed by law enforcement after you served your time. Where you can be told where you can live and not live or even go. Considering the power it gives over one group of people it is not hard to see how it will expand to other crimes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man

Secret no fly lists: impact a very small slice of the population. Try to find more than a few instances of legitimate travelers being blocked, which is something you can do with freedom of speech and freedom of press. I think less than 2000 are us citizens. The program in China is going to disenfranchise entire slices of their population and further limit their social mobility.

Secret kill lists are for terrorits. We don’t kill our own citizens. I’m an Enlightenment since everyone deserves due process, but in a defending our national interests sense, that can never be the case and never has been.

Our systems aren’t perfect, but every first world nation has some system to track your financial behavior and it impacts you negatively if you don’t make your payments. I just don’t see any strong relationship to the oppression in China and what happens in the US. Our systems aren’t perfect and your criticism has merit, but not as a comparison to China on this topic.

As for no-fly: agreed that is a stain on our democracy.

Think of all the gamification bullshit we've dealt with, and realize that it's now going to be deployed on a massive scale to shape the behaviors, incentives, and punishments of the whole populace, wielded by a government known to persecute subsets of it.

And I'm sure it's going to be used for some good. There will be a lot of good results that's come of it, and that will be its selling point. But it undoubtedly will also be used to suppress specific ideas and people. It will be a massively effective too for that. Think of the coded racism used in the Southern Strategy in US politics as explained by Lee Atwater. By abstracting away everything and converting it to whatever statistics you want, you have total plausible deniability over any targeted oppression you want.

There’s “what China is doing is no big deal, we do it all as well so why are we hypocritically making a fuss?”.

Then there’s “this is appalling and should be condemned absolutely, but let’s be careful here because we’re already exposed to some problems like this ourselves”.

You don't need social credit system to prove that you can take a plane. We all can takes a plane, there's no special social skills to takes a plane. This is literally punitive.

Inherently Life already have some kind of social credit system that act like our credit system. That's called reputation, or having contacts, or in slang, street's cred. I can't make a call right now to many celebrities, yet someone with enough reputation, wouldn't have trouble getting in contact with some. In a more realistic context, someone that want to become lawyer NEEDS contacts to make it, that's just the way it is, theses contacts are way, like in our credit system, to prove that you know what you are doing and can do more.

Works does the same with experience.

Regardless, there’s a world of difference in me considering a rental application with bad credit and the government forbidding me to rent to someone, not because of their prior ability to handle credit responsibly, but because they didn’t follow the political wishes of the government in power. I seriously can’t understand how anyone can compare them with a straight face.

The credit system (and a lot of other things) in the US is a mess, I agree. Howecer, this rampant whataboutism that’s reflexively thrown out when discussing truly horrific human rights abuses against millions or even hundreds of millions is intellectually bankrupt. It makes me worry that too many of us no longer value our freedoms enough to protect them like we should.

And the West has nevertheless kept quiet for long 28 years.

Sure, and you and your wife were perfectly free to book a hotel as opposed to an AirBnB (which is NOT a hotel).

It seems like you can strike "erroneously" from that sentence, since the source it cites doesn't imply it was a mistake at all.

Collective punishment is worth criticizing.

As per usual, when implementing some Orwellian scheme, there will be a crowd that states there's nothing to worry about, and that people are over-reacting, and that it's really not so bad after all.

I wonder what the social credit score of Chinese dissidents will look like.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-affects-...

https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/2174564/facial-...

Bad record on human rights doesn't exactly cover it when the full stupidity of that fathoms on you. Jaywalking in itself is a manufactured crime.

It doesn't force people to not behave like a jerk, it could just as easily lead to a nation of jerks. It forces people to strictly act within a tiny zone at the center of the Overton window[0]. At scale, it means that natural ideological progress will significantly slow down.

Any ideas or actions outside the norm will be culled. It's a move to homogenise the masses and allow the party to more easily set the general direction of 'desired' behaviours. This is pretty clearly the goal first and foremost. Stopping people from being jerks is just the marketing label.

The set of measures used to determine social credit will change over the next two decades and will become an ever tighter definition of what the party wants its citizens to be. The current criteria are just the entrée that was determined to be palatable to the masses.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Xi must be thinking "hey, it worked for millennia, why stop now?"

In China, when you break some rule or law, the police are much more lenient and forgiving. First time offenders (of minor crimes) always just get warnings. Even if the law requires a fine or some punishment, most cops will let you go after a stern lecturing.

But in the US, once the bureaucracy kicks in, then you have to follow the letter of the law. There is very little compassion. It’s about punishment, not re-education.

Perhaps it’s different in Europe, but that’s my experience in China and the US.

-- Walter Benjamin

So we're repeating the Nazis now, gladly, because that's easier than learning from those who made all that effort, saw and went through so much atrocities and suffering, to to learn from that, and to relay that to us, to impress the importance of it on us? I'm so not onboard with that.

> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it.

-- Hannah Arendt

You (like many) are kinda saying yes, it's unpopular and horrible, but "it would happen anyway". Notice how this is exactly the logic of totalitarianism, an abdication of personal responsibility. Saying "I won't fight it because it will happen anyway" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> [The method of infallible prediction] is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive – since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.

-- Hannah Arendt, both quotes from "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

And by the time you find out there's nothing to be glad about because it's just a spiral of control and fear and anti-intellectualism, with abusers and sadists having free pick of the litter, that won't matter anymore. There will be no allies to defeat the Nazis from the outside this time. There might be no "after".

As for societies seeing "outcomes", as you observe "results" (these are people we're talking about here), keep in mind how much of what the Nazis did didn't go to plan. The death camps were supposed to be completely removed from the face of the Earth, just like many villages they razed. If Hitler hadn't started a war, or had limited it, the world still wouldn't know. It's not like we know everything that's going on in China, by a long, long shot. Just like we don't know about the Abu Ghraibs about which we never heard, and so on.

To play with fire to learn about fire, let's leave that in the early 20th century, I beg of you. We have books and other documentation.

We already know.

This is just modern technology applied to things already experimented in history, two of them being: East Germany, until 1989. And USSR before its downfall.

Doesn't matter that London is one of the most camera-surveilled cities in the "Western" world while Bucharest has almost no cameras, all it matters is that there are more people in London ready to physically and verbally harass a person walking on the street all by her/himself compared to a city like Bucharest. I have no idea on how one would change those social norms, I'm just saying that adding cameras hasn't solved the issue and will probably not solve it.

Why wouldn't she?

If you've installed a nuclear bomb inside a person's home and tell that person the bomb will keep him safe, he will probably feel safer either. That is as long as you don't tell him about the fact that the detonator is controlled by a nasty monkey.

In China, you can only see the positive news about the system. Even when a journalist are trying to tell you the danger, on the surface the writing will eventually boil everything down to privacy protection, not the system.

So, don't be surprised.

Of course not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

Can people on the list leave the country?

The idea is that social credit discourages behaviour which is bad for people (e.g. traffic violations and small-scale tax evasion) and that makes things better for people. I think it's easy to see how this could be effective, but the criticism is really about fairness (due-process). Proponents would probably argue that the consequences are relatively small compared to traditional criminal justice (going to jail; execution) so it doesn't matter, and the streamlining of justice outweighs the disadvantages.

As I understand it, this notion only really came into vogue during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. For much of human history, government served as a way for monarchs, emperors, and the ruling elite to maintain -- and expand -- their hold on power, regardless of what was best for the governed. Indeed, we still see remnants of this in pretty much every government on the planet -- some just are less subtle than others. Arguably, we've spent the last 3 centuries trying to subvert this process and bend it toward, as you put it, making things "better" for all.

This is just me assuming, but is guess that China is OK for quiet, well behaved unquestioning citizens.

Generally I think it's a great idea to have a diverse and multi-polar world. I have no idea whether the Chinese system of government is a good idea or an idea that will lead to the implosion of their society. And really I can say the exact same of the current system of government in the United States. By having various nations trialing out radically different systems, we can hope to see which is ultimately more effective by measuring varying sorts of results over time - and then learn and improve from our successes and failures.

There are very few absolute wrongs in the world and it's not clear that this would be one of them.

That's to say, of course people can be on the decline.

Just take a look at the death toll of these wars: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloodiest-conflicts-in-chine...

25 Million casualties, and that's in the 17th century. Compare that to the absolute carnage of Syria, which has had less than half a million casualties.

This is such complete nonsense. I think it's hilarious how totally and completely misguided about China that Westerners, and Americans in particular, actually are. It boggles the belief just how much complete nonsense is spouted here on reddit and in the Western press. This is the very essence of people being disconnected from reality and constructing a new reality in accordance with their ideology.

Reality check: go to China and actually talk to the Chinese themselves. Radical idea! Social credit is extremely popular in China [1]. The social credit system is also not new. Anybody who understands how Chinese society has always worked would understand that this is the application of new technology to ideas that are nearly three thousand years old.

Anyways resume your ideological freak-out.

[1] https://www.merics.org/en/blog/chinas-social-credit-systems-...

1. "Don't waste your time with explanations. People only hear what they want to hear."

2. Don't get triggered by downvotes. They are just virtual numbers. They won't change the reality and facts. In the future, you will be able to come back and laugh at them.

3. It is not worth your time to explain the facts to them. Eventually people will face the reality no matter how hard media paints it. Just give it some time for the world to sort itself out.

Edit: If you really want to comment, try your best to be civil and substantial. I know it is hard with all the emotions, but not impossible.

The Chinese government abused and oppressed their people so hard for so long they accidentally lifted 740 million people out of abject, 3rd world poverty. But don't let that get in the way of a good rant.

As pointed out in another comment : "Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online."