CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

Much of that list predates 1945. You can also exclude any internal repression when considering the effects of US hegemony, which is experienced only by people outside the US.

There's still a LOT to account for. Vietnam and Iraq being the two biggest.

But, on the other hand, 70 years, a couple hundred total countries. When you average it out, "occasionally harmful" isn't inconsistent with reality. It's consistent with a lot of interventions in a lot of places over that timeframe.

Several odd examples fill out that list. A handful of individuals wrongfully incarcerated out a system of millions, when other states don't even have a semblance of due process.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful. But the alternative was, what, permit the holocaust? Acquiesce to an increasing tempo of rockets raining on London from an unchallenged Germany? It was an era where every state was engaged in total war and no one found a way to engage in that fight for survival with clean hands. If there was even a hundredth of a percent chance Dresden would have broken the will of Germany and halted the internal genocide and outward aggression, it could have easily been worth it.

Then that bit is accompanied by criticisms of more modern targeted strikes. By their very design, those are an attempt to limit civilian casualties, especially compared to past weapons that inflict devastation at scale. Concern about Dresden and Hiroshima produces the smart bomb and the drone, it is a straight line. So that leaves, what exactly as the moral recommendation here? Radical pacifism and turning a blind eye to genocides?

A useful question for gauging atrocities is intent. A thought experiment is, if there was a device with a button that could instantly kill every civilian in the territory you're at war with, would the government press it? If they had a separate magic button that would reduce the harms of their actions, would they press it?

Those are hypotheticals, but we actually have evidence to get at intent, and compare the US to other actors in similar situations.

The US has spent billions on technologies and plans to reduce the impact of conflict on civilian populations. It has stayed on when, without the US presence, that population is being indiscriminately murdered at a rate of thousands per month: https://www.statista.com/statistics/202861/number-of-deaths-... Or before involvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein...

In contrast, the Russian approach to war in the middle east featured total war in Afghanistan, killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians with the explicit goal of systematic depopulation. This included raping women, deploying chemical weapons, and scorched earth tactics to prevent the return of refugees, all to break the will of the people writ large, not just combatants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War#Atrocities

Terrorists, dictators, Russians. In contrast to that rogues gallery, actively trying to decimate civilian populations, the US seems like the only power that's ever been in the region with any interest in actually preserving civilian lives.

And this wasn't just the historical Soviet Union. Moscow continues to support these tactics by a Russian proxy in Syria and, to no one's surprise, have once again created one of the largest humanitarian / refugee crises the world has ever seen, one which is destablizing European politics (so a double win for Putin?). The impact of these different approaches to foreign policy and conflict is night and day. Go back to the statista chart. One approach reduces local casualties when there's a heightened presence. The other expands a conflict into a global humanitarian crisis.

If the Americans had a tool to reduce the harms while achieving their objectives, no doubt they would use it. Not a question.

Meanwhile, if the Chinese had a magic button that would promote human rights by allowing their citizens to actually, say, discuss politics with one another? They literally have that capacity right now and have chosen not to use it! They could turn off the great firewall tomorrow!

The most extreme authoritarian basket-cases of the world, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, China, all have the Soviets to thank for providing a model of inhumane totalitarian oppression. Some of those aligned with the US, like South Korea and Chile, went through some genuinely awful political dynamics in order to prevent becoming Communist themselves, but have emerged as some of the most stable, prosperous, and politically free countries in the world.

In the long run, do you want to tally individual incidents which had admittedly serious impacts on individuals, but were nontheless incidental as part of a system that reduced human rights violations overall? Or do you want to take a hard look at totalitarian states that support systemic deprivation of human rights as a core component of their being? No one is saying any state power is harmless, especially when it uses military power to confront inhumanity. But if you want to improve human rights, there's much lower hanging fruit than cherry picking examples taken out of context of larger geopolitical issues.

That's true right now, over the last century, and probably will be into the next.

Most folks that have any opinion on humanitarian or privacy social issues would probably be unwilling to entertain the idea of cost/benefit analysis with regards to whether or not concentration camps (no, not 're-education' camps) provide a societal good.

The same question people used to ask about USSR. USSR had it all - mass prison camps, massive industrialization programs, surveillance and terror state (of course, at different technology level), massive successes in some areas - like space technologies, unconditional love of all well-meaning people in the West, especially in academy and significant part of Hollywood - everything was there. Until USSR crumbled into dust. Turns out enslaving and oppressing people under the slogans of "most free society on the planet" is, after all, not sustainable, and free economy (even the semi-free one we're witnessing now) outperforms the socialist planned one. I don't think China would fare much better - though it may take a long time to see it, and sometimes it would seem like they have won - as was proclaimed many times by USSR fans over the course of 20th century.

No need to pick one or the other. There's plenty of hegemony from both to go around:

"The Communist Chinese invasion in 1950 led to years of turmoil, that culminated in the complete overthrow of the Tibetan Government and the self-imposed exile of the Dalai Lama and 100,000 Tibetans in 1959.

Since that time over a million Tibetans have been killed. With the Chinese policy of resettlement of Chinese to Tibet, Tibetans have become a minority in their own country. Chinese is the official language. Compared to pre-1959 levels, only 1/20 monks are still allowed to practice, under the government's watch. Up to 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. Famines have appeared for the first time in recorded history, natural resources are devastated, and wildlife depleted to extinction. Tibetan culture comes close to being eradicated there."

Source- http://www.umass.edu/rso/fretibet/education.html

It's not just about what you do, it's about the outcome you expect and aim for.

Those stickers sold product!

even though that's basically what the entire internet 'black bar' campaign was about during the SOPA/PIPA crisis.[0]

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

Same with the silly apology tour multiple companies did over merely including Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries from China...in a dropdown menu on their websites: https://www.businessinsider.com/zara-marriott-qantas-apologi...

It's almost becoming a new-normal, which is concerning.

You're just proving grand parent commenter's point.

Saying that capitalism motivates censorship is like saying that money is what causes theft and robbery. It's a meaningless statement based on conflating motivation in one specific case with motivation for a class of actions in general. Not to mention that you're also conflating an economic system with what most people would simply call greed.

Private corporations, public corporations that are still founder-controlled, and “public-benefit” corporations might be immune to this effect, but your average traded C-Corp or S-Corp won’t be.

This was a theme of Clinton's early administration: he interpreted enthusiastic political support for him personally as enthusiastic political support for the sorts of progressive reforms he was trying to enact and ran full-speed into a brick wall trying to pass those reforms. Another example was the attempt to pass universal health care. After Clinton faced one of the biggest midterm electoral backlashes of all time in 1994, he changed strategy and never returned to the issue.

Clinton's legacy on LGBT issues (and many others) has to be addressed within the context of the times. Clinton faced a heavily resurgent Republican Party for 3/4 of his administration after spending the first 1/4 of his administration pushing for progressive reforms that were too far and too fast for most Americans. Clinton is unfairly remembered and blamed for the compromises he made at the time; in the greater context, Clinton's compromises were calculated holding actions that stemmed the tide of conservative reaction long enough for American public opinion to come around on these issues.

Yes, it was a step in the right direction, but folks still couldn't realistically be open about their love life if you were not in a more traditional relationship. Regardless of intent, it was still censorship.

However, if you prefer a more pure anti-censorship change in the past decade, you might look at Citizens United v. FEC.

CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now).

This show is exclusive to the CBS web streaming service, an arena with even more competition.

That doesn't seem like a sufficiently-dominant corporation to me. They are a major player, yes, but at best second strongest in their domain.

I think the fundamental issue in the US right now is not an overall shift in public opinion, but rather a polarization. It's a super weird polarization, because none of the significant poles (I think there are at least four) are ideologically consistent. Nor do any benefit any particular cohesive group. Such is the nature of coalition politics in the information age.

When two sides are so far apart on an issue, it becomes very difficult to have a constructive debate. When something is difficult, it's only human nature to find a different way to accomplish the same goal. Censorship is one way to do that: leveraging resources outside the debate in an attempt to make your opposition less effective.

That being said, I think some of the reaction to this is overstated. People are often quick to cry censorship at someone else's act of using his or her own free speech in response, e.g. the "no-platforming" stuff you refer to. Citizens United v. FEC held that corporations, being made up of individuals, have very similar free speech rights to those of individuals. It's not a stretch to extend this to editorial discretion, which means that these companies do indeed have that discretion.

Yet two of the major poles that I identify largely agree with the no-platforming of hate speech, and disagree with the decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The other two agree with Citizens United v. FEC, and disagree with no-platforming of hate speech. These are based on the same principle, but to a good first approximation, nobody is consistent in that principle.

I'm not totally sure where we go from here, but it's sure to be interesting (in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse).

B) The 'final solution' stuff did not happen until much later ie. i) scale and ii) death

C) That was in 1930. There was barely radio. There was no 'globalism' or 'global news'. There was no global awareness. What 'went on in Germany' might have been going on on mars.

It's 2019 now, China has no excuse, and we have no excuse.

So I think relativism doesn’t help here.

If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.

A publisher, maybe. But I'm squarely in the 'not a journalist' camp.

Ironically, I had to turn off ad block to view it. Does anyone know of a better service like this?

[edit: the screenshot is for a different article, but I get the same spy-wall on the one linked above]

It is wildly inappropriate to be doing such a thing.

[1] https://i.redd.it/nldbz62by4s21.jpg

Edit: forgive the annotations on the image. It's what I found on reddit when I looked around for a source on what GP was talking about.

"Publish and be damned" will quickly lead to you having no-one willing to speak to you.

(Imagine someone who immediately told everyone any secrets they learnt. How long would people tolerate that?)

Reporters act like reporters but often work for massive publicly-traded media companies (CBS). If you want perfect reporting you have to take profit out of the mix, which in turn brings other problems. Don't trust corporations to be the champions of democracy. That isn't their job. Their job is to make money for their owners and we shouldn't criticize them for doing so.

Kyle: That's because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise. You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we've all wanted to show things that we weren't allowed to show, but it wasn't because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That's obviously the only true power. If there's anything we've all learned, it's that terrorizing people works.

Jesus: That's right. Don't you see, gingers, if you don't want to be made fun of anymore, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop.

Santa: That's right, friends. All you need to do is instill fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence.

Stan: Yeah.

— The closing speech, which was censored by Comedy Central[2]

• A story on how large media companies use broad copyright laws to exploit independent artists.

• Multiple stories on data surveillance and privacy.

• Stories depicting injustices in the immigration court system.

By the way, the episode containing the censored segment also had a woman explaining how she was tortured by the Chinese government.

There's nothing on The Good Fight that would be off limits in, say, HBO's Last Week Tonight, but there's plenty I was surprised to see in a CBS drama.

That's a bold assertion, and seems to reflect a (false) underlying assumption that small effects are totally meaningless.

It was a really great show. It's a typical law firm drama but it was very well written and surprisingly tech-savvy. Some of the topics and cases in the show dealt with things like the NSA, Anonymous, fugitives from justice (like Snowden), the haziness of the Constitution at the border, social media, FBI investigations, Bitcoin and lots more.

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/screen-smarts/

I wouldn't get all upset over a bit of 'censorship', real or imagined. CBS is not the government. It's an entertainment corporation.

When a true free market is allowed to operate (which happens all the time in many aspects of our economy), it is the most democratic meritocratic and fair way to exchange goods and services, and accumulate wealth. Pure capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system or system of government in the history of mankind.

Like China?

No, it could also be the society's moral system. For instance, take a hypothetical capitalist society where the shame and stigma of violating human rights is very strong. A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.

Or highlights the relationship between capitalism and censorship when the capital is held by a totalitarian state?

China has quietly sat and waited for the last 50 years while they accrued capital. Now they have it, and they're using it to take control of the same incentive systems that created the developed world. Ignoring the threat that's posed, or ignoring the weakness of those incentive systems is going to be fatal to the ideologies that China has targeted.