Li Wenliang
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I just hope Chinese people realise that the censorship of their protests about this is exactly the same as the censorship of Dr Li. It’s the same system run by the same people for the same reasons.
It’s crap like this that the HK protesters are trying to keep out of HK. Most Chinese mainlanders swallowed the party line about HK. I hope this gives them cause to reconsider that attitude.
What? No such thing will happen. This is an authoritarian regime. The government will never admit wrongdoing. They'll attempt to sweep it under the rug and continue operating with a "perfect" record.
Authoritarians are particularly good at getting people to take the blame.
Everyone is guilty of something, you can get people to take the blame for things they didn't do even in a democracy.
"Most of the defendants were persuaded that they had repressed memories of the crime."
Was he "fired" or just reassigned? As far as I understand he is still an officer in the armed forces.
FWIW, his brother was turfed out, too.
If we are talking about whistleblower protection, it should be same whether the delivered news is favorable to you/us or not
The question is usually "is it favorable to the CIA/NSA or not?".
Favorable (Vindman/Cia<mare>lla) -> whistleblower
Unfavorable (Snowden) -> leaker
second is a guy who stole secrets he wasn't even supposed to have access to, ran with it and leaked to a russian mob controlled outlet.
whatever
“Former” cia analyst that was directly involved in the events being investigated by the administration is reporting through his friends to an associate in Congress about an “illegal” conduct. Sounds a bit more like covering up former shady deals for his political friends.
We're already seeing it happen with Beijing blaming the mishandling of the virus outbreak on local authorities in Wuhan. The people are rightfully looking for a witch to burn, and the CCP will give them one that doesn't upset their hold on power.
Create a culture where it's clear how you need to exercise your discretion, and refrain from giving direct orders. Voila, scapegoats.
I'll admit, on /r/HongKong the "unify with mainlanders" posts don't rise up. It is not trendy. Probably because a lot of people interact with mainlanders that are against their movement. Which my understanding is that this is a selection bias (mainlanders that support them aren't seen). But this is going to happen in any movement that has a lot of fear in it (there is clear justification for the fear).
Depending on the scale of things we might see some changes at the top. It’s no accident that mr Xi is putting one of his lieutenants in charge of the response (to have separation and also convenient pint to blame —but that only goes so far).
It's not bullshit, it's comeuppance. This is what happens when you just follow orders. The punishment fits the crime.
Disobeying orders on moral grounds was way easier before, but nowadays the people “following orders” are subject to the same surveillance as everyone else so dissent and disobedience is harder and can be squashed easily.
There is a large difference between "orders" that disobedience to results in being fired, or a dishonorable discharge from a military; and "orders" that disobedience to results in being disappeared. The latter is plain-and-simple coercion, no different than being held hostage and being told to do something by your hostage-taker.
Also, being allowed by law does not make stuff automatically justified.
I'm not so sure about this. There are many legal and law-like systems that would agree you've done something wrong by committing the murder, even if you had a good reason.
I'd expect more agreement as to the idea that punishment should be light than that your behavior wasn't wrong in the first place.
Remember niubo, which ran from 2006 to 2013? https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%89%9B%E5%8D%9A%E7%BD%91 It is just a website, there is no technical difficulty to shut it down.
So none of this is really new. As technology and platforms have developed, the Chinese state has improved and expanded it's surveillance and suppression apparatus. I'm no fan of Xi and the situation has definitely worsened under him, but this is how the system works.
http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-a...
Ok, I'll justify them. There is almost no chance that anyone in the saga decided to do the evil thing because they wanted to watch the world burn. Not the government policy makers nor the police who carried out their orders. Every person is doing what they believe is the right thing. Some of the people were mistaken. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Li Wenliang was not mistaken.
How many SARS II hoaxes has the government stomped on that we never heard about. How many doctors or patients in a nation of ~billion people have misidentified an outbreak of the common cold as "the next SARS" in the last 17 years. They aggressively stamp out the embers of a rumor before it gets going and becomes a raging fire of panic. This time the government erred, it wasn't a misidentification, the virus was real. They aren't evil or corrupt or murderous. They are fallible humans and they make a mistake.
More importantly, it isn't that either the government decides to stamp out info, or hoaxes/misidentifications will become a "raging fire of panic".
In most of the western world (among other places), everyone is free to say what they like. The government doesn't get the right to decide what you can and can't say. And yes, hoaxes happen. Misinformation happens. But I don't think there have been these massive problems that you're foreseeing. And what's more, it's not clear that the government has the right to decide what's worse - these kinds of problems, or potentially more people dying.
> the government decides to stamp out info
There are other ways, as you've described, but I believe this is the way the Chinese government has demonstrated that they prefer to handle it. You can argue it is a wrong choice but I can't accept the OP's characterization of it as a corrupt choice.
I look at things like facebook likes and youtube views for US presidential candidates. There are lots of candidates! The amount of attention they get drops to 200 views per video at the green party. Slightly further down they don't have the likes or views to account for direct friends and relatives.The numbers are so incredibly low that we can see non of the journalists around the world even took notice.
The system is perfect, you cant do better than this.
EDIT: Yes, this is satire.
When you get a loaded gun like this that gets passed around, you don't get to control what the next holder of that gun does with it. Just because it is you or your buddy who would want to use it for a good cause (preventing anti-vax disinformation), doesn't mean that the next holder of the gun won't use it in a way you won't like.
And even then, that's assuming you do not believe that anti-vaxers should be allowed to publicly post their disinformation. I absolutely disagree with anti-vaxing, but I do believe in their right to post their info, just like i believe in their right to be publicly beaten into submission with overwhelming amounts of scientifically accurate information.
I don't support internet censorship, but I do support consistency of reasoning.
Is there admin over-ride to what's on the front page and did this get censored?
He didn't identify it, he just told the public about it.
A patient could have come to him with symptoms of a conjunctivitis [1]:
> As explained by Dr. Ignasi Jürgens, medical director of ICR, some reports suggest that the virus can cause conjunctivitis and be transmitted by aerosol contact with the conjunctiva. Therefore, patients who go to the ophthalmologist for conjunctivitis and have respiratory symptoms, in addition to having traveled abroad, especially to China, could be suspected of having the virus.
Not terribly surprising. Not terribly inspiring either.
Managers playing the blame game as usual.
I want everyone to think of this type of stuff when you hear someone advocating for 1st amendment free speech exceptions.
It always starts innocent enough, such as protecting elections against fake news, or stopping false vaccine scaremongering, etc...
but the laws will always, always, eventually be used to silence those who challenge the government. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! KEEP YOUR RIGHTS!
Chine is a global leader in a whole lot of things.
You're going to have a lot of trouble finding any country that doesn't do shitty things. Turns out that's a people problem, not a governmental one.
1) Function as a global policeman. Aside from serving domestic interests with this force projection, they will be expected to protect shipping lanes, offer humanitarian relief in emergency situations, etc. 2) Offer a stable currency of last resort 3) Export cultural values that are appealing to other countries
China has show little interest in any of these.
The UN and NATO specifically, are explicitly chartered to serve as a collective for this function where all have shared interests. In reality most treaties are done outside of the UN.
So I'm unsure on what basis you're suggesting that the political arms of nation states do not regularly seek a globally capable actor to police their neighbors.
I don't like that situation. But I have a strict policy of seeing the world how it really is instead of how I wish it to be.
The idea that our global leaders are some how moral paragons is just bullshit.
Taiwan is an independent country with full democracy system but not being recognized by international society because China is pushing its "One China" policy to other countries. Foreign countries or companies violate this idea would be punished economically by China(France got punished for selling Mirage 2000 to Taiwan)
Chinese system does not have any such valve.
And the results are in.
Would you like to live in 1970s Russia or 1990s Russia as an ordinary Russian?
I don't know, I was born in Czechoslovakia.
China had the disadvantage of being the most populous country in the world.
In crisis, economic or otherwise, Czechoslovakia is much more likely and capable of being rescued by the international community. China will need to rely on itself if only because it is way too big for any kind of help to be substantial and meaningful.
Thus the outcome will likely be even worse than Russia, which only has around 1/10th the population of China and an impressive natural resource reserve.
Unless CCP somehow screws up the economy really BAD, driving everyone to the point of starvation, nothing will change.
And even then: looking at North Korea, people there were driven far beyond the point of starvation, and they still endure these hardships without any discontent against Kims.
Side note: 2013-2014 protests in the Ukraine worked for a simple reason - not only protests enjoyed an overwhelming support in the capital, and had a fraction of parliament supporting it, Kiev is relatively close to western Ukraine, so many active protesters from there just got on buses and drove to join the fight and make the balance more even.
This said, I believe that the bigger the country, the easier it is to control, because government forces are way more mobile, which easier brings local numerical superiority. As for imprisonment, in a bigger country you just need more prisons, that can be achieved without much difficulties.
Take a look who took over the power after a collapse. In 9 out of 15 countries, the people who came to power after the collapse were ex-KGB
Of course, in most republics local elites have cleverly kept the reigns of power in their hands, but those were the Party officials, not KGB officers. I think that Russia is the only ex-USSR country where KGB managed to seize complete control. Others are democracies (Baltic countries and, arguably, Georgia and Ukraine, maybe even Armenia), authoritarian states (Belarus, Russia) and a number of sultanates.
I assume the former but would be curious if anyone can make a compelling case for the latter.
Equating "government subsidized healthcare" with "authoritarian regime" is just arguing in bad faith on your part.
You either have some guys in charge managing things, or you attempt a distributed/mob rules mentality in regards to policies and legislation. Either way in a socialistic system the government is THE governing body, and there aren't really any checks and balances other than the very body managing it. Which goes back to the question of whether or not you can trust the government.
IMHO the debate between the extreme right and extreme left is more about philosophy than policy.
Secondly checks and balances are arguably anti-socialism even, because it would introduce a backdoor/round-a-bout way of enacting rule that wasn't endorsed and driven by the people. So no, the lack of checks and balances isn't just a Soviet Union thing, it's a socialism thing, otherwise it isn't true socialism.
There is no simple solution. The mechanism that allows disinformation to be mitigated also opens the door for abuse.
Our current data tools are nowhere near good enough for us to be so confident in most domains of medicine, such as vaccination.
I get vaccines, but I support someone's write to abstain. It's a bit of a leap of faith and "authorities" have a long track record of giving terrible medical advice all the time. Here are 4 loosey goosey examples: currently 2 million opioid disorders with hundreds of thousands of deaths stemming from "prescriptions"; $100's of billions in revenue to depression drugs which have been terribly ineffective, and only now, after decades of banning them, is USGOV allowing psychedelic trials, which seem to cure people in a session, for next to nothing; the food groups—a lot of good nutrition advice has done; stress is a top of cause of medical problems and the top cause of stress is financial problems from health expenses!
We don't need to "remove actual false statements from the internet". Instead we need to figure out how to actually put true statements on the internet. And no one I've seen is close to figuring that out.
I think vaccines are a good bet and I myself get vaccinated and encourage it.
But I don't think the response to anti-vaxxers should be vilification and censoring their content on the Internet claiming it is "false". Instead I think it should be doubling down on how pro-vaxxers can build better tools to give people access to truer data.
An anti-vaxer is standing in the way of true knowledge. Opiate prescribing was driven by pharmaceutical interests and lobbying, as well as a misguided notion that pain is something to be conquered and abolished. When I was in the US during medical school, I routinely saw people being discharged after simple procedures with bucketloads of opiates, things that I would discharge in Australia on simple analgesia (paracetamol and ibuprofen).
The public health stance on vaccines is not in any way analogous to the opiate crisis, and whilst I understand the layman’s distrust of medical experts arises in part from this, the two are separate issues stemming from different causes
Good on you. I'm sure that's not the only thing amiss you saw in our system :).
> The public health stance on vaccines is not in any way analogous to the opiate crisis, and whilst I understand the layman’s distrust of medical experts arises in part from this, the two are separate issues stemming from different causes
To me the issue is part of the same problem: giving advice (or prescriptions) without giving access to good data.
If it's so important to vaccinate, why not build a much better live data system that concerned individuals/parents can query in real time to see the true numbers behind the gamble they are taking? That would be the scientific thing to do. Not to remove what one deems "false" information from the internet. Of course, what I'm dreaming of is a lot harder to build than a censorship system but I think it would be worth it.
> If it's so important to vaccinate, why not build a much better live data system that concerned individuals/parents can query in real time
I'm not sure what you mean. The evidence behind vaccination has been out there since Jenner in the late 1800s. The idea that this is an argument that needs rehashing every year or so, for what is undoubtedly an invention that has saved more lives than anything humanity has ever invented (with the possible exception of sanitation and sewerage) is in the first instance a victory to those who wish to sow doubt in an area where there is none.
Now, having said that, you can get a bit more nuianced - for example, generally speaking the NNT to prevent a case of the seasonal flu (dependign on the prevailing strains of the year) is around 20-30. Ie. 20-30 vaccinations for one prevented case. Whereas, when it comes to Hep B and Smallpox, your NNT is effectively 1 (depending on the titre response from the vaccine). As a result, we have eliminated Smallpox from the wild and massively reduced the disease burden of Hepatitis B.
But we don't force every person to have the flu vax every year. As a healthcare worker, I consider it my responsibility to have mine, because I am constantly exposed to the elderly and young and others with compromised immune systems, where infection poses a very real risk to their lives. Other communicable diseases (ie the childhood vaccination ones) that are really what the anti-vaxxers are all about being 'pro choice' on, are significantly more deadly than the flu (which, depending on your stats and year of illness, probably rate somewhere around the 0.005% death rate and 0.01-0.02 severe infection/needing hospitalisation rate).
Against the numbers of lives saved and morbidity avoided by vaccinating for these severe diseases, the risks of vaccination are basically the same as that of crossing the street and getting hit by a bus. Let's keep in context that The current wave of anti-vax hysteria was kicked off by (Former Doctor) Andrew Wakefield's false study that claimed that the MMR vaccine caused Autism. The death toll from his bullshit propaganda, just in Samoa in the last 6 months, is 83.
Whilst there is a non-zero rate of harm from vaccination (ranging, at the worst end, apparently 1-2 deaths per million vaccinations for Smallpox back in the day, down to just rashes and fevers on the low end, but including Guillian-Barre Syndrome which may mean a patient needs ventilator support for a while), the discussion around risk-benefit is not an equivocal one - the evidence is literally littered in journals and around the web from publications stretching back over 150 years
I plead ignorance on the specific anti-vax movement and don't know of Wakefield and the events behind it.
I believe the ballpark estimates you provided on the low risks of vaccination. I get vaccines (and my family does as well). I do not have the unfortunate problem that you must have to deal with of convincing folks to make the good bet and getting vaccinated.
I would like to eliminate that problem as well. But instead of the approach of attempting to censor "false" information, I think we need to revolutionize the way we put out good medical information. As you describe it, and I would completely concur with, "the evidence is literally littered in journals and around the web from publications stretching back over 150 years". The problem is exactly that: the evidence is "littered" and even if one works in the field (as I do), it is a huge burden to answer questions with sound data backing.
Imagine if you had a parent express skepticism about getting their 1 year old vaccinated, and you could take out your tablet in front of them and say "show me health outcomes for all babies in the past ten years, grouped by vaccination status" and it would pull up live data on one hundred million patients, that's where I think we need to go.
I mean, even showing the specific data from your example above, you may have long periods of time where the unvaccinated proportion of the population (take for example Australia's Northern Rivers region or areas of California recently) that, for a long time experience declining immunisation rates, with no increase in disease. Then eventually herd immunity falls low enough that they aren't protected and someone gets infected and it rips through a population. For 10 years, the data may have shown no adverse impacts one way or another - the only way to tell the difference between a vaccinated and unvaccinated child would have been to measure antibody titre. Then, all of a sudden, lots of people are sick and a few babies are dead.
You can't convince people to read the 'good' information. I mean, to take another example, the information for healthy eating and lifestyle are all around us but it certainly hasn't lead to a change in average BMI heading anywhere but upwards in the last 30 years.
Literally the first 10 google queries for Vaccines are form the CDC, Mayo Clinic and other excellent resources going through the evidence for vaccines. I'm not sure how a further portal is going to help people who have decided to make decisions contrary to the evidence. It's a quasi-religious belief that is being fought
This is a fair point that pandemics are outliers and one must weigh expected value of a high impact event and not just probability. Making it easy to simulate expected outcomes to inform decision making would be an important component. Similarly, you need to take into account the other low probability event that vaccines may be fine for 50 years and then one year's formulation goes awry for one population group. It seems like VAERS is designed for this latter purpose and really what I'm talking about would in a sense be a much more comprehensive VAERS.
> Literally the first 10 google queries for Vaccines are form the CDC, Mayo Clinic and other excellent resources going through the evidence for vaccines.
This is a good data point. I opened the 10 links and they are indeed good extensive resources about the existing information.
After a number of clicks I was able to finally find 2 really interesting things. VAERS CSV downloads: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html and a WONDER query inferface: https://wonder.cdc.gov/.
Both leave a lot to be desired but definitely a big step in the right direction.
> You can't convince people to read the 'good' information....I'm not sure how a further portal is going to help people who have decided to make decisions contrary to the evidence.
I think the problem is it's really hard to truly make decisions based on the evidence because the evidence is so hard to use correctly. I think we should figure out how to bring the evidence front and center instead of burying it in very slow and hard to use ways (pdfs, clunky complex query interfaces, registration or permission walls etc).
The approach the US has taken to date is to summarize the data and make widespread proclamations that are right for the mean but often wrong for the individual. Instead if we could bring the data closer to the user we could make it as fast for a user to determine for themselves that getting a vaccination is a good bet than it is for them to just accept that based on a blanket statement. The NIH's Precision Medicine Initiative is another step in the right direction but there's still a long way to go.
I think you're conflating things like nutrition with the whole of biology. There are lots of things we understand quite well, and have mountains of data on, and vaccines are one of the best examples of those.
Nutrition science is famously unreliable, but there are reasons for that beyond just the intrinsic complexity of the domain itself:
- It grabs headlines because it's something individuals can control themselves, and because it has a direct relationship to mass-market priorities like physical appearance. So the media jumps at every opportunity to sensationalize a study that may not actually be making any bold claims.
- Billions of dollars are funneled by megacorps into sham studies that pollute the discourse, for their own profit-seeking motives.
All three factors can also apply to drugs, especially mental-directed ones (because the human psychology is a whole other layer of complexity). The opioid crisis had nothing to do with the science, but with greed and addiction. The drugs themselves were safe; you can overdose on anything.
But none of these apply to vaccines. Their relationship to the human body is comparatively simple. They aren't a home-remedy. They aren't (relatively speaking) a big business. They also aren't some new, unproven technology. They are one of the most widely-deployed and successful medical inventions ever created by man. There are few things in the world that we have so much conclusive data around.
There's plenty of true information on the internet. The past several years have made it abundantly clear that true information does not win out against false information rooted in fear. Don't be part of the problem.
Point me to this "mountains of data" in a usable form. There should be a site right, that contains a simple big table of all vaccinations administered worldwide and how the results went? I don't want to see some static PDF with a paltry 10,000 data points. We are all savyy programmers here and know that a relatively simple table could be created so any parent can do a simple single query against all the world's medical live data to see if vaccines are safe, right?
That would be science. That would be Six Sigma.
But I can't do that. So I need to take a bet on who to believe: scientists pushing non-science or non-scientists. I recently talked to some doctors here who recently were in Samoa helping the Measles outbreak there. Two children died from getting vaccines there in 2018 (https://www.immune.org.nz/hot-topic/infant-deaths-samoa-trag...). Clearly those deaths shouldn't have happened. Where's the push to bring Six Sigma to the medical world? Instead it's "vaccines are safe", read the PDF.
We can't be so confident until we actually have clean, accessible, usable databases. Our medical data infrastructure is very very bad.
> They are one of the most widely-deployed and successful medical inventions ever created by man
I agree in the ranks of medical inventions vaccines are amazing. But still, not the best comparison group. How effective was the flu vaccine this year? Surely I should be able to see that information in a single query. But I can't. (the rough answer from doctors I've sampled is about 30%, or 70% ineffective).
People are right to be skeptical of medical advice until some dramatic innovation comes to the space.
And then you'd question who put that data there, and whether it was real.
It's impossible to never take anything on any level of trust. When your scenarios get more and more elaborate (a secret worldwide conspiracy to push vaccines? we can't even cooperate on simple stuff), at some point you have to ask yourself, "Is my skepticism driven by real information, or by what-ifs?" That's how you distinguish conspiracy theories from not: what prompted the question?
Not that an increase in open data would ever be a bad thing. But it's a huge logistical challenge, and it shouldn't be required for something this well-known.
That's a fair point. You're right, you do need to take some things on trust at some point.
I don't know what the solution is. If I knew the answer I would have built it by now :). But I do hope we don't start censoring skeptics and instead overcome them by building things.