You’re focused entirely on a vague ideal over what has a concrete impact on benefiting the working classes

Focusing on the “benefitial” and abstract morals too much would be a subjective idealist direction.

What im focusing more on is the objective balance of power when it comes to media control.

you can’t speak freely in the EU

I specifically was talking about protecting peaceful discussions about local governance.

I can link you to Marxist communities in the EU. Here’s one: https://www.eurcomact.org/

There, an European communist organization. Still waiting on the Chinese capitalist organization.

And to be clear: it’s not like I’m particularly fond of the way EU does things.

I was not talking about “the speech of capitalists”… this is why I was telling you that you don’t suddenly stop being a worker just because you had the wrong thought… and that the “capitalist class” is not a state of mind… I was always referring to “capitalist speech”, particularly when it comes from regular citizens.

the ones that would undermine socialism and restore capitalism are censored or shunned, as they should be.

Ah thanks, so you confirm that the working class is not allowed to spread anti-system speech.

This is not what we do in the EU, where being able to discuss peaceful orchestration of changes in our government is explicitly protected. As it should be.

Ah really? can you link me a true main-China capitalist group organized by the working class? and I mean proper capitalist, not some pro-market CCP-friendly commerce, give me a CCP-adverse one.

Let me know where is the Chinese social media group (ideally with a .cn domain) where the working class can discuss alternative forms of government and are allowed to organize discussions about how to peacefully orchestrate a change of system.

Categorically different situation, that was before the US empire was firmly established as the hegemon.

The situation was: people having a need / cause of suffering “imposed from the outside by factors outside of the system’s control”.

Whether the outside oppressor is an “hegemon” under some third party point of view is not necessarily relevant if the consequences are the same. If I’m pushed to the limit, I don’t care who it is that makes me go past my breaking point or threatens to murder me and my family, hegemon or not, they would get the same reaction from me.

What’s worse: being forced into american “freedom”… or death?

But either way, our answers to that don’t matter. Cos my point was that this is a decision for the working class of that country to make. Not for you, not for me, not for any political leader, not even for the political leader that governs that country.

The government & the country are there to serve the workers, it’s not the workers the ones that have to listen to what the “leaders” say, it’s the other way around.

I’m not an idealist, my politics are not based in ideas but on history. I understand that, without censorship, you get counterrevolution and imperial domination and slavery and death.

Do you think the counterrevolutionaries, the imperialists, the slavers and the killers don’t use censorship and manipulation as tools?

I’m not an idealist, my politics are not based in ideas but on history. I understand that, with censorship, you get counterrevolution and imperial domination and slavery and death.

So far, there has not been in history a system that was fully transparent and allowed their citizens to be aware of everything that goes on, owners of their own decisions.

A strong form of slavery/domination to me, would be getting connected to a matrix-like machine that constantly supplies me with chemicals to keep me happy, but renders me unable to take decisions by myself, just left in a state of happy comma, at the mercy of a benevolent machine dictator … would you agree with that being undesirable? …or is it compatible with your ideal state?

If you think a benevolent dictator acting with good intentions and keeping people happy is enough, then you are the idealist… in Marxist materialism, that is still a form of alienation, where the masses are robbed of real agency over their own material lives.

“The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”

To Marx, any freedom granted by a ruler (benevolent or otherwise) was fragile and fundamentally anti-revolutionary because it kept the people in a state of passive “political childhood.”

For a Marxist, “benevolence” is just a subjective idea that masks an objective and real power structure.

I think history can conclusively answer this for us - it’s always better to repel the US. No one benefits when the US comes bringing “”“freedom”“”.

Do you think Japan should have continued to attack the US after the H bomb?

I agree that no one benefits when the US enacts terrorism, but US not attacking is not an option in the outside invader scenario.

And China is doing fine

This is not what I was contesting, even the most authoritative and controlling state can “do fine” and get 90% approval. But by principle, controlling and manipulating the working class is against the idea of letting the working class be the ones, in community, who decide their own destiny on their own will. As mature people who have “come of age”. As Marx put it, "censorship is a most reasonable means of hindering the human race from coming of age.”

But this can be imposed from the outside by factors outside of the system’s control, such as if there’s a global hegemon that can blockade the economy and make people suffer.

I think this then becomes a question of seeking for the route that is best for the working class…

Is it better for the working class to starve/defend against the outside factor or to capitulate to the outside invader?

My opinion is that this is something for the working class to decide. Not by some overprotective elites that want to control public opinion in order to keep the system running even if that’s at the cost of the lives of its own people.

If you really want to fix this, you need a more global / international solution.

By your logic the “undercover censorship the existing system is exerting” should actually make anti-system reforms from a left-wing perspective easier to push for, because by your logic the censorship should be helping.

Yes, I explicitly said “undercover” because the minute the censorship is exposed then it becomes counterproductive. China has made censorship “business as usual”, you have a whole system of public officials doing the work without it being at all something that is “undercover”.

Every time the manipulation from the elites gets exposed, it’s a win for anti-system sentiment. Because it makes the system less and less defensible.

The only “useful” censorship is so subtle that the one being censored does not even have evidence of it.

However, undercover censorship being “useful” does not make me stop despising it by principle… since it’s a method of control used against the workers.

people are hungry for answers that reaction pretends to provide

This is exactly the problem. Fascism can only rise in situations where people have a need that has enough importance to silence reason.

The biggest enemy of Fascism is offering populist answers from a more rational perspective.

In the same way you can push for anti-system reforms from a right-wing perspective, you can also push for anti-system reforms from a left-wing perspective…

Reforming things is something the left should be more open to do, imho. Otherwise fascists will be the ones attracting the attention of the masses. And you need to be able to criticize your own system to be able to reform it.

Of course gathering support is much harder to do in a system that already is right-wing tilted… but that’s precisely because of the bias and undercover censorship the existing system is exerting.

If you don’t silence them they can recruit. Fascists are friends of censorship because silencing your enemies works.

If you silence them they will recruit in the shadows and now with an extra argument, since them being silenced is gonna reaffirm their position about the state being unable to take that “hunger for answers” seriously.

The reason they get power is because those positions benefit those in power, so the powerful naturally adopt reactionary positions.

It’s not that their speech is somehow flawless and logical.

Fascism is friend of censorship for that reason.

Reactionary, feudal-revivalist speech is so easy to defeat that I personally would rather see it exposed so that it can be openly dismantled…

Hiding/censoring it would only make it stronger.

I think this might clarify things:

• Capitalist speech in a communist system is “anti-system” speech.
• Communist speech in a capitalist system is “anti-system” speech.

I want to defend the right of the working class for spreading anti-system speech without fear of oppression from any elite.

To me, this (along with transparency) is more important than the economic system, because it establishes a basis for the workers to be able to react and mandate change… if a fully transparent system were put in place properly, I believe ultimately the rest of the pieces will slowly fall into place.

Marx talking about censorship in the context of 0 existing socialist states

Ok, so you are saying that Marx has never had a context that allowed him to make the statement you just made about him before.

This implies you admit Marx never said what you attributed to him. You can make hypothesis of what he would say, but I can make mine too. I don’t necessarily think he would be ok with censorship in a mature communist state, he’ll see that as a means to keep people from “coming of age”, a form of oppression. Free workers don’t need an elite to to tell them what they need to think.

whether or not the capitalist class should be given free reign and control of the press

But that was not the point. Where did I say that the capitalist class should be given free reign and control of the press?

You talk as if any thought that’s anti-system must automatically make the person who had it part of the capitalist class.

The “capitalist class” is not a state of mind… it’s a real oppressor with economic power… one does not become “capitalist class” just because they have a wrong thought. For me, as a materialist, “thought” is not really relevant when it comes to modelling the economic power structure.

I can despise that choice while recognizing its strategic advantage for capitalists

Then that’s our difference. I despise that strategy because it’s fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I provided before.

equating the oppression of capitalists by the working classes with the oppression of workers by the capitalist classes

I did not say or imply that, this is another strawman.

A worker is not a state of mind, it’s a real person at the bottom of the hierarchy… you don’t suddenly stop being a worker just because you had the wrong thought.

Marx didn’t also believe that it is necessary for the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie and strip them of their political power, including their speech:

Marx believed the bourgeoisie must be stripped of class power, but he was a lifelong opponent of state censorship.

One quote from him (source):

“If the immaturity of the human race is the mystical ground for opposing freedom of the press, then certainly censorship is a most reasonable means of hindering the human race from coming of age.”

As for capitalist countries censoring the speech of communists, they already do this. Always have and always will.

You are avoiding the question: do you think it’s wise or not?

Personally, I despise when capitalist states censor communist speech… just as much as I despise it when socialist states censor capitalist speech.

If you think I’m a sympathizer or glosser of the way capitalist states operate, you are wrong. I’m highly critic of them, systemically. And I’d rather continue being able to openly criticize whatever system I find has systemic problems.

For me, transparency is more important than the economic model. I’ll openly embrace a fully transparent communist country, in the same way that I might embrace a fully transparent capitalist one (provided there’s still agreed-upon social control, I don’t want a wild west situation).

The thing is that, as things stand, China would not be as happy to have me criticize it as the West does. And that tilts the balance to one of the sides when in comes to that principle.

Is the system so fragile that it can be undermined just by speech?

Marx had a strong belief that communism was inevitable. I’d argue censoring capitalist speech shouldn’t be necessary. Do you think it would be wise for capitalists systems to openly censor communist speech? I disagree.

In fact I feel directly going after “anti-system” propaganda might actually be counterproductive, for more than one reason:

1. It makes the population more vulnerable to that rhetoric as soon as they leave the protective environment, since they will now be exposed to propaganda they were being shielded from.

2. Censorship and transparency are not exactly compatible, and in my mind, transparency is the best defense against corruption… there’s a reason why many right-wing dictatorships have been heavy censors, transparency is the enemy of elitist authoritarianism. The reason why China can act on local officials is because the criticism to local officials in particular is one thing that’s not being censored… but the minute you start organizing a form of collective expression that’s critic with the system, then it’ll get shut down (there’s a University study about this).

3. It just gives ammunition to the capitalist side, since it helps spread the idea of China being a state very close-minded towards different opinions at a level that is not seen in other nations without explicit censorship, so one could argue that this undermines the image of the Chinese Government just as much (or maybe more, depending on the ideals of the person judging).

4. Given that the information people receive is explicitly filtered and curated (and one’s opinion is necessarily influenced by the information they have), then it follows (using cold logic) that the filter influences the opinion people have. This is true of any subgroup with any level of propaganda (ie. all nations) but in nations without open censorship the filter is more decentralized, allowing for pockets of conflicting opinions / subgroups to emerge that allows routes to challenge the status Quo.

While RFA’s funding is American, the evidence they present (videos of floods, leaked documents, interviews with locals) is often corroborated by non-Western sources like Al Jazeera, The Straits Times, or CNA (Singapore). If the “bad news” is happening, the source’s funding doesn’t make the flooded house or the frozen bank account any less real.

If you know people from China, then you’d know they are very critic of the local level, they are ok with criticising the local landlord, a corrupt mayor, or a lazy bureaucrat. But the “criticism” stops the moment it touches the systemic level (e.g., “Maybe we need a different party” or “The top leadership made a mistake”).

If the government is truly doing a “good job at addressing real problems,” then why is censorship increasing? If 90% of people are happy, the government shouldn’t need to delete videos of a flood or a bank run. The fact that they do delete them suggests the government itself is worried that the 10% of “bad news” could quickly erode that 90% support.

How can the account holder violate the title when the title is not demanding anything of them? the whole document is about what the developer and OS distributor “shall” do… there’s no responsibility attached to the account holder. There’s no “shall” attached to the parent. At most all it says is that the OS provider shall offer an interface that requires the Account holder to enter their age… which again is a mandate directly addressing what the OS provider shall be responsible of doing, not the parent. I think it’s pretty clear that the document is targeting the OS providers & devs.

In fact, it even says that the developer should correct the age themselves, as if the account holder signaling the wrong age was already an expected situation, business as usual:

(B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.

But sure, that’s only for the AG to interpret… until it happens, it seems to me that it would be silly to assume that parents are gonna start to get fined, all these years the pressure has always been put into the service providers, with the parents often being given relative freedom to decide what to do (and that mentality is specially big in the US, where many states allow you to even home school your child, California amongst them…). Targeting something as “local” as an OS level question seems to me like a bad choice if they actually wanted to suddenly start putting pressure on the parents about age restrictions with this new law.

No, this law is not placing penalties on the parents. It’s placing them on the OS distributors.

If you come to my house and get sufficient proof that my child is having an account in a web service it should not, and you go to the police with it, do you think they would punish me with a fine or anything? (and you don’t even need any sort of special authentication technology for “age attestation” to start penalizing that, btw)

It is exactly because we cannot trust parents to moderate what their children do online that these laws are coming up.

I disagree. The reason we cannot trust parents is because we are not making them responsible in the first place… there’s not a system in place to assign them responsibility regarding the child accessing places it should not (if we do really think they should not).

So if by “trust” you mean “blind” trust with no accountability, then well, we can’t “trust” NOBODY, not just parents.

The problem is that instead of controlling the bad parent, we are trying to control everyone else to try and child-proof the world.

States require that you get a license, take a test, follow road rules, get your vehicle inspected, and many more requirements. We have these requirements because we know that we should not let an untrained driver on the road.

The reason I removed it is precisely because I expected this kind of misunderstanding. You are assuming that in my comparison getting a license is comparable to a sort of age limit permit, but the way I framed my comparison, the equivalent of “getting a license” would be educating the parents and keeping a “parental license”. The parent is the bad driver.

That’s true. The way China treats people as if they should be protected from bad news that could be perceived as negative or destabilizing (at least without some “massaging” of its statistics), is the reason why they have always good news and high approval rate.

Personally, I feel that being in either of the extremes when it comes to reports of satisfaction is a bad sign. I feel a healthy relationship always requires acknowledging the failures of its own government and being critic on the things that are not being done right… and there’s always something not being done right…

By “this mess” are you referring to Ch. trafficking? I’d say the responsible people for that are the ones running the criminal rings… but the responsibility for prevention (beyond just plain law enforcement) should still ultimately be with the parent, imho. Since they are the ones with the most power and control over the environment the child is exposed to (I mean, it does not matter how many authentication layers you add, ultimately a child can pass it if they use the parent’s ID…).

If by “this mess” you mean the risk of leaking private information that everyone is concerned about, I don’t think that’s really caused by the “leave it to parents” mentality… if anything, that’s caused by the “parents shouldn’t have the responsibility” mentality, which is pretty much the opposite…

only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

That’s already smarter than most of my relatives.

I’d argue that controlling / monitoring where a kid goes should already be responsibility of the parent.

If it’s all in the browser then the unprivileged user is at the mercy of whatever rules the installed browser establishes for allowing them access to. So it’s a battle between the parent (helped by the OS) being smarter at setting up local restrictions / monitoring history and the kid being smart enough to break them / act undetected.

I think the idea here would be that the OS would be able to tell the browser (or any app) that the user is only allowed content of a particular target age group, and then the browser (or whichever app) would apply any appropriate restrictions (which could include restricting virtualization primitives like WebVM, other js APIs or even network-level filtering if that’s what it takes).

You can also advocate for making use of the “guest wifi AP” many routers already provide to ensure the access to the internet for their kids is done in an allowlist basis. To the point that the kid would have to be “smart enough” to break through the WPA encryption of the main wifi access point (or find out some other social engineering way to get access to that wifi) in order to have fully free access to the internet and visit websites that allow them to circumvent age restrictions.