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Comment by toomanyrichies | Hacker News Reader

Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures. China is a huge market for Paramount's films. Paramount has previously explored a 49% sale to China's Wanda Group, and they currently have extensive financial backing from the Shanghai Film Group Corp.[2]

If they wanted to, it's well within the purview of the CCP to apply pressure to Paramount's ability to finance its films or distribute those films in China (a huge source of international box office receipts), until such time as Paramount reigns in Trey and Matt.

Note that I wouldn't support such a move, and they strike me as the type of creators who would happily walk away from their cash cow rather than self-censor. I just mean this is one possible endgame.

[1] https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/viacom-explores-sale-majori...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/paramount-pictures-gets-a-1-bil...

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Interesting corporate taxonomy there.

On the other hand, if China is willing to cancel something as big as the NBA at the drop of a hat (or tweet, as it were), it really highlights the risks of doing business with China in a very stark way. Nothing is to big to fail if you offend the party. You operate at their whims. Transgress, and its lights out. Too many of these kinds of reactions could backfire (one would hope).

I thought all that was common knowledge.

FWIW I hadn't heard of the NBA thing until this. Maybe because I'm Australian and the NBA isn't as huge a deal here.

They used to think that economic freedom would be the trojan horse for social freedoms. Quite the opposite I see.

Having been in China around 1983 and recently there are more social freedoms now but still a long way to go.

There may progress inland, but that's no excuse to let regression happen outside.

Agreed. But it's reins in, not reigns in.

Right: reins control horses. Reigns are what kings have. (And rains make flowers.) Those are nouns, but they all verb.

Whoops, good catch. Also technically I should have said “until Viacom reins them in”, not Paramount.

Why does South Park need Comedy Central anymore? Just distribute it online.

I agree South Park could probably move elsewhere after their contract is over (goes through 2022). They were disallowed from showing a cartoon depiction of the muslim prophet Muhammad by Comedy Central in the past and did not leave, they did however make an episode poking fun at the censorship which included a cartoon Jesus deficating on a burning American flag.

They also have an older episode with Muhammad in it from before it was considered controversial to have such a thing (It's been censored since then)

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

I would be surprised if the team has the rights to continue elsewhere.

Self-censorship is still censorship. If these companies crater to the least common denominator, then free speech in the West is also doomed. We can't allow that to happen. Putting profits ahead of everything else is a sure way to go broke because it sacrifices quality and every other good for the sake of short-term profit. We saw Disney do this with Star Wars, trying to pander to Asian audiences and failing miserably. Now Disney has alienated their original fan base. Soon, nobody is going to care about anything Star Wars. Disney needs to smarten up.

Every company that thinks they can do business with communists needs to smarten up. Realize that you compromise your ethics completely and whatever short term gains you think you are making are eventually eaten away by the sheer clown world lunacy that is communism. Places like China can never right themselves simply because basic truths are banned from being discussed. How do they then move forward as a society? They don't, they can only move backwards.

If it is more profitable for free speech to be doomed, then it will be doomed.

More accurately, we shouldn't rely on corporations to ensure free speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

What did Disney do with star wars to pander to asian audiences?

Gave an Asian actress in a minor role "too much" screen time. Apparently.

That entire plot and her in ep 8 was pointless. Obvious pandering

What show are we talking about?

Gave actor Donnie Yen a starring role.

The decision has nothing to do with China being communist. It has everything with both being capitalists.

You said it yourself: "Putting profits ahead of everything else.. because it sacrifices quality and every other good for the sake of short-term profit."

A blanket fear of communism is not productive.

Its scary how much communism is affecting our daily lives, even if we live far away from it...

That not communism, it's dicratorship

Is it really communism at this point? There definitely is a lot of capitalism and fascism happening there. It's really about the party and it's leaders and they'll adopt whatever economic or social policy to further the party and its leaders' power and riches.

“State capitalism” is a term I’ve heard used which makes sense to me.

propaganda is a term i've heard too

China is as Communist as North Korea is democratic.

Isn't that what communism in practice is? Or are you on the "real communism has never been tried" side of things?

USSR and its sphere of influence was communism in practice. You couldn't create a company, you weren't allowed to do anything for money without state permission (and mostly there was no permission). Prices and number of things produced were decided by the ruling party.

It failed almost universally.

China today is less "communist" economically than most of EU.

China is still kinda like that. To make an internet company you need a license (not allowed without state permission) and that company is still in reality owned by the state. It may do whatever it likes to it at any moment, like insisting party members sit in the officers and control decisions ... and does. It will often also be literally owned by a state bank too.

Yes, China has less economic planning than the USSR did, that's true. But communism isn't defined by that, trying it out is just a natural consequence of Communist beliefs. Indeed Marx laid out almost nothing of how actual communist states were meant to operate. Communism is ultimately about building a totalitarian system in which the ruling classes must be loyal devotees of Marxist social theory. China certainly qualified.

> But communism isn't defined by that [central planning]

> Communism is ultimately about building a totalitarian system

I really don't want to be advocate of communism, but it seems to me you're cherry-picking the defining characteristics of communism to suit you. After all:

> Indeed Marx laid out almost nothing of how actual communist states were meant to operate

So why demand it must be totalitarian? Also

> Communism is ultimately about building a totalitarian system in which the ruling classes must be loyal devotees of Marxist social theory

Communist party in Poland at least certainly wasn't that. They were the first to become devote capitalists in 1989.

Marx didn't specify many details about how a communist society was meant to be run, but he did specify quite clearly how it was meant to be created. See the numbered list at the bottom of the Communist Manifesto:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

Observe that he prescribed:

1. Abolition of private property

4. Confiscation of property of all rebels and emigrants

5. Centralisation of all credit in the hands of the state

6. Centralisation of all communication and transport in the hands of the state

9. Forced mass population transfers out of cities into the countryside

How can anyone implement such drastic policies? Marx was under no illusions about this and spelled it out quite clearly, which is why the fact he's not perceived as being as evil as Hitler is an unfortunate stain on our society:

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads ...

So he literally stated in his manifesto that creating a communist state would require despotism, or in more modern language, totalitarianism. That was just one of many calls Marx made for violent revolution rather than democratic means.

Given this starting point it's not a huge surprise the Soviets tried to implement a fully planned economy. Marx didn't specify that as an end state per se, but he specified very similar things as a means to get to communism. China still has a largely planned economy despite successfully whitewashing itself as "capitalist", hence all the stories about staggering piles of non-performing debt, zombie banks kept alive by government fiat (centralise all credit in the hands of the state), and massive overproduction of things like steel.

As for Poland in the late 80s, yes, by the end of the 20th century a lot of committed communists had realised how foolish they had been. But did they really understand the true root cause of the problems? Or did they mistakenly conclude the root cause was central planning? Sometimes when I look at the behaviour of the eastern European states I have to wonder.

> So he literally stated in his manifesto that creating a communist state would require despotism, or in more modern language, totalitarianism

Your whole argument hangs on equating despotism with totalitarianism. But it's not the same, these 2 characteristics are orthogonal.

For example European absolute monarchies were despotic but not totalitarian (mostly because there was no technology to exert absolute control over the society).

> That was just one of many calls Marx made for violent revolution rather than democratic means.

Again, violent revolution doesn't mean the state is totalitarian. Many democracies started with violent revolutions, many totalitarian states started with democratic elections.

> Marx didn't specify that as an end state per se

Thank you, that's my point. You're defining what is characteristic and accidental in communism arbitrarily.

I don't really recognise a significant difference between a (real) monarchy and a totalitarian dictatorship, to be honest. Words change over time - North Korea isn't normally described as a monarchy but it has hereditary leaders with total power. China doesn't have hereditary leaders but the way power is passed between leaders is still pretty incestuous. The USSR selected rulers through various court intrigues and assassinations, much like many monarchies did.

You seem to draw a distinction based on how much power the ruler had: "absolute" control or less than that. But all despotic rulers exercise as much power as they possibly can. Modern tech arguably makes it easier to exercise more and more power (probably ... I haven't really thought about it). But if Henry VIII had the ability to censor information by flicking some switches he'd have certainly done it.

My point about violent revolution was that if you build an organisation capable of doing all the things Marx said was necessary, you've built a totalitarian state. Yes, in theory a violent revolution which centralises all power in the hands of the revolutionaries could work out great and turn itself into a democracy, but in practice this never actually happens. Instead the state sticks around and stays despotic, it doesn't go "right! job done!" and dissolve itself like Marx imagined it would.

Given Marx's preconditions for creating communism, eternal totalitarian rule is the only plausible outcome. People don't just give up total power once they killed people to obtain it.

> I don't really recognise a significant difference between a (real) monarchy and a totalitarian dictatorship

It's not my distinction, it's the definition of totalitarianism (as opposed to other authoritarian forms of power).

> Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian regimes. The latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. "[The] authoritarian state [...] is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty". Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature". In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens. [1]

Absolute monarch doesn't care what peasants think, what ethnicity or race they are, and in general it leads to much less cleansings and pogroms than totalitarianism.

> Yes, in theory a violent revolution which centralises all power in the hands of the revolutionaries could work out great and turn itself into a democracy, but in practice this never actually happens.

why all power? Where did you get that all from? Again, I hate to play the devil's advocate, but I find myself pushed to do it - Marx wanted to change the ownership of means of production. It's not all the power, and it's not unprecedented. Most revolutions change the top dogs. In very few cases in history that change led to totalitarian state.

Romania had a violent revolution. France had a violent revolution. USA had a violent revolution. Poland had violent revolutions every 20 years for over a century (BTW several of the Polish uprisings wanted to free the serfs and give them the land). All of them are now democracies :)

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

I was wondering if we'd end up in argument by Wikipedia :)

We're discussing language here, maybe we're not making fine distinctions a political scientist would make, but let's check a thesaurus:

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/totalitarianism?s=t

Synonyms for totalitarianism: despotism, authoritarianism. In common language they're the same thing.

Perhaps an English-speaking political scientist would be unhappy at those thesaurus entries and claim the differences are critical, I don't know, honestly, don't really care. If you wish to draw a distinction, and argue that it's really important that Marx was merely authoritarian and not totalitarian (or whatever), that's fine by me. I concede the point through apathy. Does Polish draw the same distinctions as English, I wonder?

Anyway. It's a distraction. The point is, communism always ends in being a dictatorship like the USSR or China, it must through its very foundational assumptions, and whatever you call the resulting system that will always yield very heavy state control of industry, information, etc. You can't have a Marxist system without it.

As for top dogs: that's one of the primary logic errors in Marxist philosophy. He divided the world into exactly two camps and then pitted them against each other: labour and owners, workers and capitalists, proles and bourgeoisie. But this world existed only in his mind. Even in the 1800s there were many people who didn't fit that neat classification, including himself. Marx spent his entire life producing words and ideas; his "means of production" was a pen and paper. He was able to do this because he was supported by a factory owning friend. So was Marx a top dog or oppressed prole? What would it mean to seize his own means of production? Have a government official steal his pens? Marx failed to notice that his own existence didn't fit his own theories, because he was an idiot whose thinking had no value due to his staggering lack of real world experience. Indeed in Das Kapital he was forced to engage in various kinds of fraud to make his own arguments work, for instance, by citing decades old English factory inspector reports as evidence of contemporary problems without observing that those same reports led to changes in the law and improvements in factory conditions. If he had remarked on that, it would have undermined his thesis that capitalism couldn't self-improve and needed violent revolution to improve worker conditions.

A good introduction to just how isolated from reality he was can be found in the book "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. The relevant chapter has been reproduced at this link (ignore the weird picture and lack of attribution, the words are the same):

http://thekbh.org/marx2.htm

> Does Polish draw the same distinctions as English, I wonder?

It does, and propagating totalitarian ideologies is banned by law, while propagating for example monarchy - isn't.

That sounds like a recipe for entertaining case law!

"I plead not guilty your honor, for whilst it's true that we wish to overthrow Polish democracy and install a supreme leader for life, we would call him King! Long live the king!"

"Oh, that's alright then. Not guilty!"

Advocating/preparing/performing a coup is punished no matter what system you want to change into. But propagating totalitarian systems is illegal even if you don't want to do it with a coup.

Also we don't do case law here (if I understand what "case law" means).

On related note we've got hilarious court case where neonazis from ONR were explaining to the court they weren't doing "heil hitler" salute to propagate nazism, but to celebrate Roman traditions. SS signs were for reenactment and swastikas as everybody knows are Hindu symbols of good luck.

Capitalism, communism, fascism, they are all distractions from facts on the ground. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia resembled nothing so much as one another.

Yeah, distraction indeed. In the end people argue about which "ism" it is and not the fact that some people are being oppressed, with varying degrees of horribleness.

This is not a coincidence, given fascism was a mutant heresy of syndicalism (which itself is one of the many marxist flavors). Look into D'annuzio and the various other ideological influences on Mussolini and it's not hard to figure out why Fascists loved totalitarianism and central planning as much as the mainstream marxists in Russia did.

The story is not much different in Germany. Same fruit of a poisoned tree.

EU today is less “communist” economically than most of the US.

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