This is why the racists don't want Stone Mountain blown to shit.
My first introduction to this type of thing was "Killing Time" by Caleb Carr. In some ways it's stereotypical sci-fi of the type that prompted Sturgeon to coin his law: bad characters, unbelievable motivations, poor writing. I don't think I'd recommend reading it, even though he pretty much nails this aspect of the electronic information age: technology makes manipulation of the information that people get to see incredibly easy, and when it's done in a way that reinforces the kinds of things people want to believe it's nearly impossible to counteract.
bad characters, unbelievable motivations, poor writing.
Every post turns into a post about the Trump administration.
2 last: One of the striking things about the censorship is that it's not just doing the echo-chamber thing, but by its omissions actively sculpting a narrative apparently in support of current policy goals; aiming actively to change perceptions of reality, rather than just reinforcing pre-existing positions.
1: I can parse that to make sense several ways, but I don't know which you mean.
It's been a few decades since I've read 1984, but this was literally a plot point, isn't it? Except Big Brother's minions had to go replace actual paper instead of rearranging electrons on a hard drive.
I think I last read 1984 when it was a dystopian novel set in the future.
7: Yes, it was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth.
7: It's a big "except" there. Much faster, partially automatable, in principle non-destructive of original sources.
Chinese behavior in Xinjiang is way underreported. The best piece I've found is from buzzfeed (!). They've confiscated everybody's passport, and (according to Voice of America) demanded everyone turn over their Korans to be checked for extremist content. No follow up on that last story; it's tough to perform journalism in Xinjiang right now.
So, they only want you to have a bowdlerized version of the Koran they made or they want to check to be sure there are no notes saying things like "This verse is why you need to kill communists."?
Just watching the drama surrounding the Uighur prisoners at GTMO from the sidelines was frightening enough.
(If folks don't recall, the US government was desperate to get them out of the prison before the Supreme Court could rule in their case, so the diplomats had to find a country that was not afraid of China's threatened retaliation.)
13: Here's that link. The review stuff I think I might have just heard from friends.
They added passages to the Koran! Now I wonder what they do to the Bible?
15 Wasn't it Oman? Oman plays the broker in a lot of deals like that.
They're in a good niche and it's paying off.
I mean, sure, but how many sought-by-multiple-great-powers prisoners in legal limbo can there possibly be?
They've been the go to brokers for many things dealing with Iran. Also Yemen including securing the release of prisoners held by various factions that usually fly under the Western press radar because they're brown people from brown people countries (most recently an Indian priest who had been doing relief work in Yemen).
I bet there's an interesting historical-ethnographic literature tracing that back to the Omani Sultanate and Indian Ocean merchant networks before that.
That article on the Chinese journals being censored digitally is great. It's going to be one of my go to examples in cautioning about over reliance on the digital in my own institution. Not that we're getting rid of paper, quite the contrary, but it is a mentality I've come up against.
26 Yeah, I'm beginning to get into some of that. Omanis in general are just incredibly friendly people.
28: Reading recommendations always welcome.
I liked what I read of this book a lot, but I'm not remotely a specialist, or even a generalist.
Brag time: lourdes managed to get paid for a small amount of labor with $800 of books from a major university press. It was better than Christmas when the box came on Monday. (Sadly, we cannot hook any of you up. I can't even hook myself up with a steady supply of free academic books.)
32: Thanks! Ho's paper on Hadramauti clerics and proto-terrorists is great.
The paper about Chinese journals gets at a real problem with digital access, but I'd be curious to know what libraries with print copies of those journals are actually doing with them. There's definitely been a shift to digital access and many individual libraries have gotten rid of many print journals, but it's more complicated than simply replacing print with digital. "Shared print" is the big thing now in a lot of libraries which means that a group of libraries might get together and pool their resources to keep a smaller number of print copies, generally at least two, of a journal that they all hold, and then make the print available if someone really wants it. If most people use the digital, then there won't be a huge issue of people not being able to look at the print (i.e. you won't have a lot of people trying to check out the same thing at the same time), and the libraries will save on storage, which is not cheap. There is a lot of pressure on libraries to replace stack space in central libraries full of important but not heavily used material with study space, which is in high demand.
But doing this well relies on libraries doing a really good job at identifying when duplicates are really duplicates - are page missing? are there subtle differences? - and signaling when print and digital are different. I think they're putting a lot of work into the former, but possibly not so much the latter, unless the library digitized it themselves. My guess is that rare Chinese journals are not on the pulping block, but because of the rights issues the article mentions also can't be digitized and put online in conflict the copyright and license restrictions. But they could flag the omissions and explain how to see the "digitally" missing articles using direct requests for copies, which probably fit under interlibrary loan.
Isn't library management exciting?
I read a really interesting in-progress dissertation chapter years ago by someone who'd done research on Soviet school education. History textbooks were routinely being re-edited and re-written to match the current line. And it was way beyond reinterpretation based on new evidence.
I never read the finished dissertation and author doesn't seem to have published anything from that chapter - and no book based on the dissertation - so no cite for you.
Both those comments are really interesting, fa. The shared paper copies thing makes me sad for our lost physical world, but I guess I can't really be surprised. Blech though.
35: OP link 1, or maybe a podcast it refers to, describes a teacher at a Chinese international school getting a text from the school telling him the history curriculum his students were at that time being examined on had been prohibited.
35: I presume you've seen The Commissar Vanishes by David King?
Identifying semantically significant content changes between editions seems an interesting machine learning problem that could be employed against this kind of thing, combined with good OCR.
I'd love to know more but for the moment must bookmark the thread. You haven't closed the great cycle of parenthood till you've helped change your mother's nappies.
17: Extra dystopian that apparently people got official notifications via WeChat to turn in their Muslim paraphernalia.
42: That is right up there with the app (in UAE? Saudi?) that ties into passport control, so you get an alert on your smartphone whenever one of your female possessions tries to leave the country without you.
Different people have different ideas about what the 21st century is about. Trump is clear about what he stands for: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/25/trump-inauguration-protest-j20-trial/
Different people have different ideas about what the 21st century is about.
Some people want it to be about unrelenting horror. Others want small breaks.
This is more like the 21st century I would like: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/10/steven-rattner-new-york-times-wall-street
This is the 21st century I expect: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a37vya/will-democrats-like-trump-in-2029-probably
43 Haven't heard of it but that would have to be KSA and not the UAE which while having a long way to go is nothing like KSA with restrictions on women (women drive, can leave the country at will, own their own businesses, etc.).
48: yes, thinking about it, would have to be Saudi.
Roger: I'm not an FPP, so I speak merely as a community member. This is not a general politics thread, throwing "21st century" into your posts doesn't make them on topic, and it's annoying, 40 comments in or no. If you want to post random politics links there will assuredly be a general politics thread in the near future.
Re 1984 references: One of the things OP article link 1 points out is that this Chinese censorship works in a particularly pernicious way. It doesn't just restrict information available to Chinese citizens (though that presumably is the main purpose) but also does its best to keep that information from foreign observers; and does so not by obvious black-bar censorship but by quietly making stuff disappear. In so doing, scholars worldwide can in good faith be fooled into implicitly accepting or promoting the Party line, just because the contrary evidence isn't visible to them. I don't recall any such subtlety in Orwell, nor any interaction between totalitarian and non-totalitarian societies.
And I hope things better, NW.
I'm more worried about Trump's EPA doing that kind of thing than I am about China. Because baserates or something.
I don't see why the EPA would even know NW's mom.
NW's mom exhales carbon dioxide, an alleged contributor to fake-news global warming.
51: no, the Party was pretty subtle in Nineteen Eighty Four; part of Winston Smith's job was retconning the news archives to make Party speeches and forecasts match what actually happened.
Assuming 53 to 51: Trump's EPA would have senior political appointees concealing internal research by junior non-politicals, who would in due course leak it; and Trump being Trump, the suppression would presumably be utterly transparent; and even EPA competently gaming its own data wouldn't give it the reach to censor already-published research. Of course what's possible in China is also possible in America, but it doesn't look immediately likely to me.
56: I'll take your word for it, I read it long ago. However the free-unfree dynamic remains. IIRC all the the superstates in 1984 were totalitarian (as far as Smith knew).
57: But there are many journalists who will happily report what those senior figures say as being the result of "EPA findings" without any critical thought. Doing that will be much more persuasive than before. Plus, just the fact that someone like Trump was able to appoint their bosses will have a chilling effect on that research. People want to finish a career will want to be in a place where they won't be fired when the next oil executive is put in charge.
59: Sure. I'm saying China has a different kind of bad going on.
Undoubtedly. But they seem to be about stable in terms of their evil (or maybe even upward if you figure it's been many decades since they starved a considerable portion of their population) and we're clearly on a very steep downward trajectory.
61: stable in terms of their evil
This has been my assumption for years, but things like this make me worry. Apparently Xi seems to be digging in for lifelong dictatorship, he's dialing up nationalism, picking fights on multiple borders; and internally the double-digit boom decades are over. The journal censorship indicates a regime that remains profoundly insecure, utterly incapable of admitting error or relinquishing any power voluntarily.
Has Xi considered going on TV and reminding every one that we has very large hands?
62: That is somewhat worrying. If he'd been planning to step down on schedule, he should have put a successor in the standing committee and he didn't. And they're committed to a really major military modernisation.
But this is all more of a long-term concern; Trump will be gone by the time the Chinese start really throwing their weight around.
Trump won't be gone when Trump is gone.
This is not a general politics thread, throwing "21st century" into your posts doesn't make them on topic, ... there will assuredly be a general politics thread in the near future.
That reminds me -- thanks for the OP. I don't have anything intelligent to add, but it's an interesting topic.
||
For some reason today, people have been pushing blockchain utopianism in front of my eyeballs:
Blockchain will save journalism! (This one is well-intentioned, but I have doubts.)
Blockchain will purify all social endeavor! (There is a lot to blow your mind here, but I think its "the territory is LITERALLY THE MAP" naivety is the most impressive thing. Dishonesty and exploitation are impossible! "Smart contracts execute the exact code provided, ensuring zero errors"! Computers don't make mistakes, that's what so great about -- uh, hang on, why are none of these tests passing? Shit, can I call you back?)
I realize this sort of thing is old hat for some of you, but I don't usually see it. I am nonplus.
|>
61: China is most definitely not stable in terms of their evil. They've been upping the evil at a steady clip since 2013 or so in a frog-boiling sort of fashion.
20 Bermuda for a few. Then Palau for most. Then Switzerland for the rest. Except those who refused Palau: their refusal was enough to get the Supreme Court to drop the case, but they eventually ended up in El Salvador or Slovakia.
I'm not counting the guys sent to Albania to moot an impending DC Circuit argument. Because that was a different episode of desperate struggle to avoid accountability.
69: Another thing menioned in the podcast is that the censorship, and tightening of restrictions on foreign scholars, started around 2007, under Hu. At the time a lot of people figured it was on account of the Olympics, but it never stopped.
|| The Google News alert for "ekranoplan" continues to bear fruit; my main lesson so far is that the Vietnamese are really, really interested in ekranoplans. About half the ekranoplan stories seem to be in Vietnamese. What with that and their coffee and banh mi and pho, they are really succeeding on the hearts-and-minds front here. |>
I realize this sort of thing is old hat for some of you, but I don't usually see it. I am nonplus.
You're very lucky. I get this stuff every single day. Christ, there was an ad on the tube the other day for bitcoin contracts for difference (basically FX gambling).
"Tube" as in broadcast television?
OP link last actually mentions blockchains for maintaining distributed journal repositories, but doesn't go into it.
"Smart contracts execute the exact code provided, ensuring zero errors"! Computers don't make mistakes, that's what so great about -- uh, hang on, why are none of these tests passing? Shit, can I call you back?
I'm actually kind of curious as to whether anyone's studied the proportion of contractual disputes that are fundamentally about outright non-performance of an agreed term versus differing interpretation of the term. I suspect the former are relatively rare other than in case of financial default, which wouldn't exactly be ameliorated by a smart contract.
Tube as in London Underground. I'll snap a picture next time I see it.
I got s pitch the other day for s piece on how the blockchain would solve health care
Blockchain utopianism is utterly hilarious to me.
How could 78 even theoretically be a thing?
[urlhttps://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/10/27/2195358/this-is-the-dumbest-thing-weve-seen-in-a-long-time-whens-the-crash/]Pertinent.[/url] Well, not to the OP, but to the diversion.
That was quite some fail. Not html, not even correct UBB code.
I bet that company will fail even harder.
I don't think traveling underground by rail will catch on.
A rail in a tunnel is even more vulnerable to close-in enemy action than a rail above ground. I don't even think it would help much to armor the engine.
80: here's a report that Deloitte did for the US government last year. https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/4-37-hhs_blockchain_challenge_deloitte_consulting_llp.pdf
Basically it's about using DLT to handle problems of patient record keeping, viz. how do I make sure that everyone who is entitled to see my records can do so, and everyone who is entitled to amend them can do so, but nobody else can do either?
Here's a Wired article on it from earlier this year
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/moving-patient-data-messy-blockchain-help/
I'm not a blockchain expert, but it doesn't seem ludicrous on the face of it.
More accurate and accessible records will be a great help to insurance companies once they are again allowed to not pay for pre-existing conditions.
Important as patient records are, there's quite a big gap between solving a filing problem and "solving healthcare."
It's not ludicrous, but it's not exactly necessary. Centralised databases also have permissioning. Indeed, the thing that is supposed to be good about blockchain is you don't need permissioning. I've never quite understood the use case for a permissioned distributed ledger.
I think the idea is: it's permissioned so no one can read it or alter it except people who are authorised to do so. It's distributed so that the records survive a single failure or attack.
What about just using permissioning and an off-site back-up?
That is a growing problem, apparently. But it might be easier to solve than getting a distributed database to meet HIPAA requirements.
I mean, you don't need to invent a blockchain health records database to avoid WannaCry. You could just, for example, use an operating system that is still getting security updates.
That isn't very disruptive, Ginger.
Speaking of disruption, I guess Trump didn't release the JFK files. Makes you wonder if the CIA really didn't do it.
Has anyone checked them for Ted Cruz's dad?
More to the point, has anyone checked them for Donald Trump's dad?
Projection, remember...
But wait! What possible motive could an extremely wealthy, ultra-right-wing slum landlord who was best friends with Roy Cohn possibly have for killing Kennedy?
I've yet to see a blockchain-for-records-management piece that made me want to learn more about blockchain for records management than I learned from reading it.