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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>We don't get "admonished" or sent to work camps for being insufficiently or even anti-nationalistic.

Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL for kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance. Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks:

> On March 10, 2003, during a London concert, nine days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines told the audience: "We don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas," which garnered a positive reaction from the British audience but led to a contrasting negative reaction, and ensuing boycotts, in the United States, where talk shows denounced the band, their albums were discarded in public protest and corporate broadcasting networks blacklisted them for the remainder of the Bush years.

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It is a genuine human accomplishment that in the west, we hold being left unemployed by a sports league or uncovered by broadcasting networks comparable to state level abuses of human rights.

It’s not often I feel “pride” for where I was randomly born, but your comment brought a bit of it out through this shift in perspective, thank you.

Okay, how about these examples?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

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

Do you feel like you are risking your livelihood, reputation, or personal safety for publically posting comments critical of the U.S. government and/or U.S. culture? Because I guarantee the average Chinese citizen does. That's the critical difference.

Corruption exists in the U.S. but thankfully authoritarianism does not (yet).

> I guarantee the average Chinese citizen does.

How do you make this guarantee? The average Chinese citizen I know expects critical comments to be deleted, but getting a visit by the police is rare. I know one person to whom that happened, in the early 2010s. He didn't suffer any major repercussions beyond being told to stop posting like he did.

Decades of red-baiting propaganda warps people's ideas of what these countries are actually like.

My wife is Chinese and I know from her and her family exactly what it was like for them. When my father in law talks about the hardships inflicted on their family he tears up. You clearly have absolutely no idea what it's actually like.

Equating arbitrary detention, re-education camps and political executions to being boycotted by some TV stations is a shameful farce.

Yes in the west things can go badly wrong, innocent people can get chewed up and hurt much more than a trivial example like the Dixie Chicks. Good grief, that's the best you could come up with? But the Chinese system is based on knowingly trashing people's lives systematically on a massive scale.

There are millions of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who will tell you exactly what it is like to live under an authoritarian socialist regime.

Life in other countries can be very different from what you've experienced in the U.S.

Kaepernick landed as the face of Nike with a massive endorsement deal for his trouble, which I guess is sort of like being sent to a a work camp.

This is "don't piss off half the customers", not top-down censorship.

Though true, it needs clarification why this difference is important. I’m not entirely convinced that it is.

Edit, to paraphrase: Why is it any different that control comes top down from a government or from a board of directors of a company?

You can buy things from a different company or work for a different company or lobby your government to go after the company and stop their behavior.

It's much much harder to move countries, if they even let you.

Though I agree that there is a difference in scope, I’m not entirely sure what you say applies to the NFL. I guess Kaepernick would have to move to Australia if he wants to keep playing professional football.

This supposed option of choice only applies if there is non-monopoly and there is an equal power dynamic between consumers/workers and heads of company. Neither is true of the NFL.

So being governed by corporations is superior to a government of the people?

Was anyone in either of your two examples imprisoned because of what they said or did?

Also, I don't think most people cared about their political beliefs. And that's why it blew up, in both cases. They cared because they were customers, who were paying for entertainment, but receiving a lecture/statement on politics.

When you're an entertainer, you risk your livelihood by upsetting your fans. That's not government censorship; it's a bad business decision.

Does the punishment need to meet a certain severity level to be "bad"? The parent comment I replied to made it sound like criticizing the government is free from any consequences in the West, which is patently false.

It's not about the severity of the punishment so much as who administers it.

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