There are not many Chinese names in the signed letter, and I can fully understand. If you are a Chinese H1B or green card holder, and you signed this letter, it is almost certain the Chinese government will contact your family in China.
Can confirm, China watches its citizens abroad, closely, and in person sometimes. Their families can be affected, and if they go back home to visit, there can be problems.
Now with increased efficiency with Dragonfly technology. Find enemies of the state with our world wide database, US and EU results included. All brought to you by the Alphabet platform.
Think about the synergy that this could unlock, Alphabet comes with the citizen tracking service (not malicious, just for ads, obviously) and plug it to their citizen scoring service.
Further research could be done on integrating this new dataset with Project Maven, think about the opportunities of engaging only with end users with score below a threshold.
Can confirm your confirm is fabricated from thin air.
The difference would be: you might not know you are lying while I do. We are doing the same thing, confirm something not conformable. Theoretically that's lying
1989, downtown Cleveland, soon after Tiananmen Square. We'd all seen the "tank man" and people were talking about all the dead witnessed by those present (~10k?) versus the official cover story of 300 and denial.
So there were protests across the US, including downtown Cleveland, mostly visiting Chinese students from CSU and CWRU, and plenty of horrified locals there to support them. There were a couple of Chinese guys not marching but watching from the edges while people walked past. They both had the same sunglasses, trench coats, and SLR cameras with long lenses, and they were taking pictures of the marchers. If you've ever been in Cleveland in June, this is not appropriate attire for cloudy and windy, so they stood out from the locals. The Chinese on student visas told me they were government, often seen at such events, and they were cataloging Chinese there for later study and reprisals to family or when they returned home.
You don't know he's lying, you just assume it because he didn't cite a source. It's not the first time I've heard people make his claim, so it might not be baseless.
Did you see my 2nd sentence which implied I was lying? Which almost means making a baseless claim?
You assumed that I assume he was lying only because he didn't cite source. That assumption is not correct.
Now I can tell you that I originally had 3rd sentence:
the 2nd sentence is a lie. I do have solid evidence that he was lying (unintentionally I believe) but it's too difficult to present the evidence.
Might be less than by analyzing all their searches...
This might not be an exact relation, but my point is that it still may be worthwhile in a longer perspective. Social changes and engineering are nontrivial processes.
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."
By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.
I'm confused by these exact point values. My understanding that the social credit system is not yet implemented, and it's unlikely it will be a number, probably more a set of black lists for different purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Too bad for the Chinese state. If you try to promote a view by threatening others who might express a different one, I'm not going to weigh that neutrally.
The thing is, ideas developed without free criticism are like programs without tests. (Only worse, because most programs aren't core to anyone's social identity, which puts extra pressure on the kind of ideas we're talking about here.)
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.
Well, presumably the ideas we are talking about are political/social/moral views. To base your acceptance/rejection of them, even in part, on your knowledge of their genesis is already quite intellectually lazy. ("John made such and such claim about topic X. When I consider the claim's intrinsic merits I'm not complete sure what I should think, but given these biographical knowledge I have of John I accept/reject the claim" is only acceptable reasoning when X is an empirical topic (say about genetics) but not when it's a moral/political one)
If someone were to say to me, say, "Pot should be legal everywhere", and you tell me it's unacceptable when considering this claim to consider that the speaker is high, then I don't accept your bounds of acceptable reasoning. (Yes, knowing enough directly about pot would screen off this evidence. I think pot should be legal.)
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
To me, that's further proof that this letter is spot on. Why should we ever cooperate with a government that has tens of thousands in concentration camps? It is becoming increasingly unethical to do any business in China.
Part of it is almost certainly due to fear of reprisal, but consider also that many people of Chinese descent simply may not agree with the letter. I grew up in a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, and one thing you come to realize is that while many Chinese expats have very complicated feelings about the Party, they still tend to be intensely nationalistic and are very sensitive towards perceived slights directed at China.
They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.
another possibility is that a lot of Chinese googlers wanted dragonfly to continue because they think that even a sensored Google search would be beneficial for the people of China.
