The Peng Shuai Affair

I'm sure we can all rest assured her latest statements were made of her own volition, with absolutely no coercion, and that the original claims of assault was a hoax.
 
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Skeptical Greg said:
I'm sure we can all rest assured her latest statements were made of her own volition, with absolutely no coercion, and that the original claims of assault was a hoax.
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Absolutely. It only took her a month to directly contradict everything she had previously claimed (along with an acknowledgement of the danger she was taking on by making those claims public). There is no chance whatsoever the Chinese government had been trying, and failing, to intimidate her into making this retraction from the very start, until the WTA threatening to boycott convinced them to play hardball. No chance at all.
 
God it's so weird when conservatives insist on calling them the CCP.

Can't really see "United Russia" being interchangeable with the Russian government in casual discussion. Guess some people just want emphasis on the Communist part.
 
Venom said:
God it's so weird when conservatives insist on calling them the CCP.

Can't really see "United Russia" being interchangeable with the Russian government in casual discussion. Guess some people just want emphasis on the Communist part.
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Russia and China aren't really analogous.

And seriously? You don't get how people who don't like a thing will attach a pejorative epithet to the thing when referring to it?

What I find weird is the constant insinuation from progressives that it's somehow wrong or unseemly to dislike the Chinese regime.
 
It's 2021. You can't pull a Stalin-Trotsky retcon anymore, and that's assuming you ever actually really could, which is debatable.

Yeah we're firmly in a post-facts world but "No you said this. It happened. You can't just go 'No I never said that'" still works most of the time.

Old school Cold War Censorship seems almost quaint in a day and age where disinformation is so much more provably effective.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It's 2021. You can't pull a Stalin-Trotsky retcon anymore, and that's assuming you ever actually really could, which is debatable.

Yeah we're firmly in a post-facts world but "No you said this. It happened. You can't just go 'No I never said that'" still works most of the time.

Old school Cold War Censorship seems almost quaint in a day and age where disinformation is so much more provably effective.
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Por que no los dos? China seems to be going all-in on both strategies. Censorship internally, and disinformation externally (backstopped by internal censorship that prevents competing narratives from forming and being transmitted externally).
 
theprestige said:
What I find weird is the constant insinuation from progressives that it's somehow wrong or unseemly to dislike the Chinese regime.
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I'm certainly not in that camp. I think China is an authoritarian hellhole, but that's the primary grievance and what they do is little different from other authoritarian states. I just find the red-baiting from media in 2021 ("call them the CCP!") really amusing.
 
You don't get passes on your evil because you've been unfairly stereotyped or because there was a hyperbolic panic about you in the past.

The Red Scare doesn't make Communism a good thing.
 
JoeMorgue said:
You don't get passes on your evil because you've been unfairly stereotyped or because there was a hyperbolic panic about you in the past.

The Red Scare doesn't make Communism a good thing.
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Who's saying that Joe?

As you mentioned in another thread, these power hungry goons would likely operate similarly in non-communist-in-name regimes.
 
Venom said:
Who's saying that Joe?

As you mentioned in another thread, these power hungry goons would likely operate similarly in non-communist-in-name regimes.
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Depends on the regime. State communism, as a regime, tends to enable oligarchic kleptocracy in a way that liberal democracy does not.

(Yes, liberal democracies do have their own wealth-related shortcomings and failure modes, but these are nothing like - nor anywhere near as evil and inhumane - as the shenanigans that one-percenters get up to in communist regimes.)
 
Culturally the Chinese have been molded differently since imperial times. The moral code that drives many of their unrefined, often reprehensible beliefs is pre-communist.

Forced labor as political repression or criminal justice was a common feature of Qing China. Mao's "reeducation through labor" didn't come out of nowhere. The CCP invokes Legalism and a bit of Confucianist rhetoric to justify its methods, and most of the population goes along with it. They don't have to be comprehensive about it, no more than people who cherry-pick parts of the Bible. This is how they get away with justifying mass executions for what we'd consider relatively minor crimes in the West. Animal rights isn't a thing either and communism had nothing to do with it. Chinese citizens are apparently okay with mass surveillance and the Social Credit system.

I think using CCP as a snarl word misses the mark.
 
theprestige said:
What I find weird is the constant insinuation from progressives that it's somehow wrong or unseemly to dislike the Chinese regime.
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You’re making the same category of error as mixing up ‘it’s unseemly to dislike Some Absolute Immoral Bastard’ and ‘it’s unseemly to call Some Absolute Immoral Bastard fat and ugly.’
 
Venom said:
I'm certainly not in that camp. I think China is an authoritarian hellhole, but that's the primary grievance and what they do is little different from other authoritarian states. I just find the red-baiting from media in 2021 ("call them the CCP!") really amusing.
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Is there something wrong with the term "CCP" that I'm missing? Because I thought that was just a bog-standard neutral term for the party that controls China's government. It isn't even necessarily a pejorative, unless I'm mistaken.

Fwiw:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party
 
Skeptical Greg said:
The fact that she has essentially disappeared is a clue..
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No. The fact she disappeared is an event you are trying to explain with a theory about why (she is being restricted).

The explanation for the event needs evidence. The event itself is not evidence for the explanation.
 
Venom said:
God it's so weird when conservatives insist on calling them the CCP.

Can't really see "United Russia" being interchangeable with the Russian government in casual discussion. Guess some people just want emphasis on the Communist part.
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These are not equivalent. Russia is not a complete one-party state. "United Russia" is certainly the dominant party, and will use its power to make sure none of the other parties becomes very powerful, but other parties still play a role (even if only minor) in government.

China only has the Communist Party. There are no other parties, even in name, within government. The CCP truly is synonymous with the Chinese government.

And what's so strange about using a commonly understood abbreviation for something?
 
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