I mean surely we're not going to lowkey argue that the CCP doesn't censor media or that they're not an oppressive authoritarian presence that acts as the default within which all things must operate at their peril.
Look, regarding the Hugo awards, the CCP is great, they didnt censor or pressure anyone from the awards organization.
If you want to talk about the general state of censorship in China, that is valid, no one is going to tell you it doesnt exist. In in the context of the conversation about the Hugo awards debacle, the CCP is just not responsable for the censorship. But those are two different conversations that I think you are conflating.
This goes right to my core point though - within China, it's not possible to make the second statement. The context of conversation about Hugo exists only as a subset of the broader context, one in which people get persecuted for their speech in arbitrary, unpredictable ways. My argument is that you can't separate them because average people in China must necessarily live in fear of the government's response to any speech, always trying to guess what might bring the hammer down, what they can get away with, never really knowing if some speech is OK or if it just hasn't been noticed or if the lack of response is a honeypot.
It was never possible for the Hugo awards to be held outside the context of violent, unpredictable CCP censorship. Everyone involved knew this. Their behavior in the face of it was disgraceful, but their instinct that it was an inscrutable authoritarian censorship regime they needed to fear was entirely correct.
I'm intensely skeptical of the idea that any censorship in China can be considered to happen without provocation by the CCP. It's not really possible for them to be a legitimately injured party with regard to any act of censorship inside China.
I recommend you read the report listed above, spool. All of this fuckery was done by Western leadership without any actual provocation, which is what makes it so fucking insidious, and why the CCP gets to play the victim.
I thiiiink the point spool is trying to make is that even without directly provoking calls for censorship, the CCP has fostered an atmosphere where it is understood that they prefer it.
That's exactly the case. And you can see it playing out later in the post, as they talk about Chinese fans unwilling to go on the record and discuss the situation.
it's not "sinophobic" to accuse someone of self-censoring because they believed actual censorship that does actually exist might impact the awards. It makes you a coward and a quisling to do that, at best, but doesn't make you a racist.
It does when it's based on racist conjecture with no actual anchoring in the real world. Again, you had works openly published in mainland China being pulled over concerns of "censorship", with no involvement by the actual Chinese members of the convention committee. Turning the CCP into a boogeyman to justify racist goosery is not only a rationalization for said goosery, but serves to cloud understanding of how Chinese censorship actually works.
"China has harsh policies around censoring media in China" is not racist conjecture, it's literal fact. The movie industry deals with this shit all the time and pretty publicly.
The movie industry also hits on the core of the problem here: it's no secret that hundreds of US movies have been altered for Chinese acceptability, nor that those changes very often go out to the western audience as well. It's also true that Disney, WB, Paramount, and others do this with extremely little Chinese input, because in most cases there is no input, only denial, and many denials are permanent and blanket.
If you want to say the CCP is responsible for none of the Hugo censorship than you also have to say that they are responsible for none of the censorship for that market in films or video games or even the books of authors (including a few of those censored here) who have said their western publishers demanded specific changes for the international market as a condition of publication. Because it's all self censorship, the only successful censorship in the Chinese market is self censorship.
It's actually even crazier then you are implying because it's not about individual films either. The Chinese government would ban one of your films because of what another one did. Release a smaller scale film that you aren't even trying to get into China that is in some way upsetting to China? They can go after your big tentpole blockbuster that is scrubbed clean for CCP approval. They throw their weight around to try and get foreign producers to censor all their output.
It's basically the same way the US can use it's economic importance to impose restrictions on governments and companies outside of their reach. Sure, they can't directly stop one country from making deals with another. But they can say "If you do any deals with those guys, you can't ever do deals with us" and achieve the same result.
I'm intensely skeptical of the idea that any censorship in China can be considered to happen without provocation by the CCP. It's not really possible for them to be a legitimately injured party with regard to any act of censorship inside China.
I recommend you read the report listed above, spool. All of this fuckery was done by Western leadership without any actual provocation, which is what makes it so fucking insidious, and why the CCP gets to play the victim.
I thiiiink the point spool is trying to make is that even without directly provoking calls for censorship, the CCP has fostered an atmosphere where it is understood that they prefer it.
That's exactly the case. And you can see it playing out later in the post, as they talk about Chinese fans unwilling to go on the record and discuss the situation.
it's not "sinophobic" to accuse someone of self-censoring because they believed actual censorship that does actually exist might impact the awards. It makes you a coward and a quisling to do that, at best, but doesn't make you a racist.
It does when it's based on racist conjecture with no actual anchoring in the real world. Again, you had works openly published in mainland China being pulled over concerns of "censorship", with no involvement by the actual Chinese members of the convention committee. Turning the CCP into a boogeyman to justify racist goosery is not only a rationalization for said goosery, but serves to cloud understanding of how Chinese censorship actually works.
"China has harsh policies around censoring media in China" is not racist conjecture, it's literal fact. The movie industry deals with this shit all the time and pretty publicly.
The movie industry also hits on the core of the problem here: it's no secret that hundreds of US movies have been altered for Chinese acceptability, nor that those changes very often go out to the western audience as well. It's also true that Disney, WB, Paramount, and others do this with extremely little Chinese input, because in most cases there is no input, only denial, and many denials are permanent and blanket.
If you want to say the CCP is responsible for none of the Hugo censorship than you also have to say that they are responsible for none of the censorship for that market in films or video games or even the books of authors (including a few of those censored here) who have said their western publishers demanded specific changes for the international market as a condition of publication. Because it's all self censorship, the only successful censorship in the Chinese market is self censorship.
It's actually even crazier then you are implying because it's not about individual films either. The Chinese government would ban one of your films because of what another one did. Release a smaller scale film that you aren't even trying to get into China that is in some way upsetting to China? They can go after your big tentpole blockbuster that is scrubbed clean for CCP approval. They throw their weight around to try and get foreign producers to censor all their output.
It's basically the same way the US can use it's economic importance to impose restrictions on governments and companies outside of their reach. Sure, they can't directly stop one country from making deals with another. But they can say "If you do any deals with those guys, you can't ever do deals with us" and achieve the same result.
That's what I meant by blanket bans. In some cases they did this for what a version that wasn't even submitted in China did, which is why we see so many nine dashed lines here in the US while we don't get see the changes made for places like Saudi Arabia.
So basically USC’s administration is saying that if the right people complain about having a student whose social media bio includes links to anti-Zionist statements as the valedictorian, that person will be removed — cancelled if you will — because of fabricated concerns about “public safety,” which as Pope Hat points out is the very definition of a heckler’s veto, assuming it’s the genuine reason for the cancellation, which very obviously it’s not.
While it’s true that nobody has a right to give a speech at graduation, cancelling a speech after inviting a student to give it because the student is a Palestinian-American with apparent sympathies for anti-Zionist views is really really bad. This isn’t in any way like protesting handing a big check to Condi Rice to come and spout pablum while demurely not mentioning any of her own war crimes, and anybody who makes that analogy, given LGM’s official anti-Condi Rice being given big checks to give commencement speeches policy, can step right off.
Between this and the shit over in the sports abuses thread, I'm just feeling really fucking ashamed.
Bartlett declined to say what security concerns drove the school’s decision, saying, “In the interest of safety and security, we don’t disclose specific threats around the assessment.”
For her part, Tabassum harbors “serious doubts about whether USC’s decision to revoke my invitation to speak is made solely on the basis of safety,” she said in the online statement.
The doubts linger “because I am not aware of any specific threats against me or the university, because my request for the details underlying the university’s threat assessment has been denied, and because I am not being provided any increased safety to be able to speak at commencement,” Tabassum said.
When asked if Tabassum will still be permitted to participate in the graduation ceremony and what security measures were in place to secure her safety, Bartlett said she didn’t have that information.
...
Bartlett also did not have information about whether the school considered letting Tabassum share her speech before or after the graduation ceremony, she said.
“To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech,” said the provost, Guzman. “There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement. The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period.”
“While this is disappointing,” he noted, “tradition must give way to safety.”
Bartlett real confident he's safe on free speech grounds, really not seeing the racial and religious discrimination suit about to kick his ass.
Like there is zero chamce this isnt a bunch of donors pushing on this. No way he is willing to walk into jeopardy so blithly, just to stop any sort of anti-genocide message being expressed otherwise.
U.S.C. Cut the Valedictorian’s Graduation Speech. Now, the Celebrities Are Out, Too.
Jon M. Chu, the director of “Crazy Rich Asians,” and Billie Jean King were set to be among the featured guests.
The U.S.C. announcement on Friday followed inquiries by The New York Times as to whether Mr. Chu, an alumnus, might withdraw as the graduation speaker because of the controversy. By the end of the day, the university had removed his name and photo from its commencement website. And it announced that he and other speakers were “being released.”
“Given the highly publicized circumstances surrounding our main stage commencement program, university leadership has decided it is best to release our outside speakers and honorees from attending this year’s ceremony.”
So that part is hilarious but this part lol they are so fucked.
Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said it was looking into the possibility of representing Ms. Tabassum in a lawsuit against the university, citing a California statute known as the Leonard Law, which applies First Amendment free speech protections to private and public colleges in the state.
An A.C.L.U. lawyer in Los Angeles, Mohammad Tajsar, said that U.S.C. has a formidable private security apparatus that should be able to handle such an event, even with security concerns.
“If the university can accommodate speeches by Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos and host President Obama and the King of Jordan at its graduations, surely it can bear whatever burden comes with celebrating Asna Tabassum as its valedictorian,” Mr. Tajsar said.
Must be nice to graduate USC with no debt and no need to ever work again.
The University of Southern California canceled its main graduation ceremony Thursday and dozens of students were arrested on other campuses as protests against the Israel-Hamas war continued to spread.
College officials across the U.S. are worried the ongoing protests could disrupt their plans for commencement ceremonies next month. Some universities called in police to break up the demonstrations, resulting in ugly scuffles and arrests, while others appeared content to wait out student protests as the final days of the semester ticked down.
Other approaches taken by schools included rewriting their rules to ban encampments and moving final exams to new locations.
(For those who don't know, Bovard is the administration building where the president's office is.)
USC has been this way since at least I went there, probably always. It's a school that heavily relies on the tradition of having lots of more well to do alumni and wealthy donors. That's never really going to lead to them supporting the left.
USC has been this way since at least I went there, probably always. It's a school that heavily relies on the tradition of having lots of more well to do alumni and wealthy donors. That's never really going to lead to them supporting the left.
I mean, you're not wrong (it is the school that produced Rob Kardashian, after all) - it's just that I'd like the place to not live down to my expectations for once.
School pride is foreign to me. They're just people that took your money
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
USC has been this way since at least I went there, probably always. It's a school that heavily relies on the tradition of having lots of more well to do alumni and wealthy donors. That's never really going to lead to them supporting the left.
This has been a thing for these protests at most of the universities. Whatever the portion of students protesting want matters a lot less to the administration then the donors keeping the place afloat. And the politics of the donors are much more pro-Israel then the protestors.
School pride is foreign to me. They're just people that took your money
On the one hand, sure. On the other hand, brand loyalty / choice-supportive bias is real and frankly my organic rbGH-free non-GMO ethically sourced fair trade 2% milk from Whole Foods is just better than your Sam's Club 2% that tastes like chalk and despair community college.
School pride is foreign to me. They're just people that took your money
If you got involved with absolutely nothing at your school other than showing up to class, sure.
Nothing about getting involved in activities necessarily engenders school pride. Running a club or the like often makes you more tired of the school and it's bureaucracy.
If you were to put it under a microscope, said pride would probably be more directed to fellow students and faculty. But it all falls under the same general emotional wheelhouse. Are you happy when the school tells nazi's to fuck off? Are you angry when they don't? You're going to feel emotions. We're a species that assigns emotional attachment and pronouns to vehicles. The mechanical box that moves us from point A to point B.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
If you were to put it under a microscope, said pride would probably be more directed to fellow students and faculty. But it all falls under the same general emotional wheelhouse. Are you happy when the school tells nazi's to fuck off? Are you angry when they don't? You're going to feel emotions. We're a species that assigns emotional attachment and pronouns to vehicles. The mechanical box that moves us from point A to point B.
For the love of god watch what you say near the printers! Sure, we all belong to different organisations that we integrate into our identities to different degrees, and some of those may he housed within large stone boxes, but no one here is made of ink! There's no need to assign emotional attachment to boxes before making sure to not hurt their feelings!
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
USC has been this way since at least I went there, probably always. It's a school that heavily relies on the tradition of having lots of more well to do alumni and wealthy donors. That's never really going to lead to them supporting the left.
I mean, you're not wrong (it is the school that produced Rob Kardashian, after all) - it's just that I'd like the place to not live down to my expectations for once.
And pre-OJ one of their most distinguished football alumnus was one Marion Robert Morrison, who used his wife and 3 kids as reason for not enlisting during WW2, while he wasn't even living with said wife and children and spent most of his time in an apartment Fox and Republic pictures furnished for his teenage mistress (and future 2nd wife) Chatta (who most likely was illegally trafficked into the states from a Mexican brothel).
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No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
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This goes right to my core point though - within China, it's not possible to make the second statement. The context of conversation about Hugo exists only as a subset of the broader context, one in which people get persecuted for their speech in arbitrary, unpredictable ways. My argument is that you can't separate them because average people in China must necessarily live in fear of the government's response to any speech, always trying to guess what might bring the hammer down, what they can get away with, never really knowing if some speech is OK or if it just hasn't been noticed or if the lack of response is a honeypot.
It was never possible for the Hugo awards to be held outside the context of violent, unpredictable CCP censorship. Everyone involved knew this. Their behavior in the face of it was disgraceful, but their instinct that it was an inscrutable authoritarian censorship regime they needed to fear was entirely correct.
It's actually even crazier then you are implying because it's not about individual films either. The Chinese government would ban one of your films because of what another one did. Release a smaller scale film that you aren't even trying to get into China that is in some way upsetting to China? They can go after your big tentpole blockbuster that is scrubbed clean for CCP approval. They throw their weight around to try and get foreign producers to censor all their output.
It's basically the same way the US can use it's economic importance to impose restrictions on governments and companies outside of their reach. Sure, they can't directly stop one country from making deals with another. But they can say "If you do any deals with those guys, you can't ever do deals with us" and achieve the same result.
That's what I meant by blanket bans. In some cases they did this for what a version that wasn't even submitted in China did, which is why we see so many nine dashed lines here in the US while we don't get see the changes made for places like Saudi Arabia.
Between this and the shit over in the sports abuses thread, I'm just feeling really fucking ashamed.
Bartlett real confident he's safe on free speech grounds, really not seeing the racial and religious discrimination suit about to kick his ass.
Like there is zero chamce this isnt a bunch of donors pushing on this. No way he is willing to walk into jeopardy so blithly, just to stop any sort of anti-genocide message being expressed otherwise.
U.S.C. Cut the Valedictorian’s Graduation Speech. Now, the Celebrities Are Out, Too.
Jon M. Chu, the director of “Crazy Rich Asians,” and Billie Jean King were set to be among the featured guests.
So that part is hilarious but this part lol they are so fucked.
Must be nice to graduate USC with no debt and no need to ever work again.
(For those who don't know, Bovard is the administration building where the president's office is.)
I think I'm going to cry in shame now.
I mean, you're not wrong (it is the school that produced Rob Kardashian, after all) - it's just that I'd like the place to not live down to my expectations for once.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This has been a thing for these protests at most of the universities. Whatever the portion of students protesting want matters a lot less to the administration then the donors keeping the place afloat. And the politics of the donors are much more pro-Israel then the protestors.
If you got involved with absolutely nothing at your school other than showing up to class, sure.
Nothing about getting involved in activities necessarily engenders school pride. Running a club or the like often makes you more tired of the school and it's bureaucracy.
For the love of god watch what you say near the printers! Sure, we all belong to different organisations that we integrate into our identities to different degrees, and some of those may he housed within large stone boxes, but no one here is made of ink! There's no need to assign emotional attachment to boxes before making sure to not hurt their feelings!
And pre-OJ one of their most distinguished football alumnus was one Marion Robert Morrison, who used his wife and 3 kids as reason for not enlisting during WW2, while he wasn't even living with said wife and children and spent most of his time in an apartment Fox and Republic pictures furnished for his teenage mistress (and future 2nd wife) Chatta (who most likely was illegally trafficked into the states from a Mexican brothel).
~ Buckaroo Banzai