If Only The Romans

[Mudhammam]

I mean minus being an authoritarian one-party state, and their record on human rights, China is ideal.

[Minimalist]

So, uh, we should instead want a tyrant on earth who instructs us on which beliefs are allowed and which are not?

When last I checked we are in the midst of our own struggle to keep those same xtian fuckwits from turning our country into a mindless theocracy. If you are asking me if I resent the Chinese looking to prevent that sort of a cancer from spreading the answer would be 'no.' Religion is about earthly power....not 'beliefs.'

[Anomalocaris]

Chuck, you never did answer my questions as to whom you'd assign such power, or the basis on which it would be exercised. You're repeating your earlier objection without answering my points embodied in those questions.

I do not have any specific all purpose answers. But the general answer is a group of people who are well versed in the details of social structure and interaction in their own societies, well versed in the details of the history of their own governance, has good grounding in the range of governance and social interactions elsewhere in the world, and have had demonstrated considerable aptitude in getting things done in different levels of leadership position.

You may call them well educated bureaucrats or professional and highly qualified civil servants if you like.

Also, these are people more closely resembling who actually rules china than who nominally, AND actually, rules the U.S.

To the inevitable objection of who watches the watchers: Have only the watchers themselves watch the watchers is a necessary and inevitable consequence of having an well organized society in which only those who know what they are doing actually dabble in the doing. This is why you don't get to vote on who wins the Nobel prize in physics.

To the objection of potential for abuse, yes, there is. But it is greater, certain, and continuous abuse to allow the unqualified an equal voice as the qualified.

[Lek]

So, uh, we should instead want a tyrant on earth who instructs us on which beliefs are allowed and which are not?

When last I checked we are in the midst of our own struggle to keep those same xtian fuckwits from turning our country into a mindless theocracy. If you are asking me if I resent the Chinese looking to prevent that sort of a cancer from spreading the answer would be 'no.' Religion is about earthly power....not 'beliefs.'

This is what scares me about atheists running a country. It happens every time. They decide to try to wipe out religion and it leads to mass persecutions and executions. I thought you guys were for freedom of expression. This sounds like Stalin all over again.

[Anomalocaris]

I mean minus being an authoritarian one-party state, and their record on human rights, China is ideal.

Their human right record is 800 million people given real choices in life where as they would otherwise have been bound to crawl miserably through life hand to mouth along a grinding and often short trajectory fixed to not very fertile dirt since the late Iron Age.

That trumps a billion votes not cast, or a billion mouth not allowed to say some of the things that might have come to their mind.

That is vastly more to real human rights than what we feel would entice other people to think in a way we would find comfortingly confirmatory of our own, not all together sincerely held, political philosophical views.

[Thumpalumpacus]

To the objection of potential for abuse, yes, there is. But it is greater, certain, and continuous abuse to allow the unqualified an equal voice as the qualified.

The idea that some people are "qualified" to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech is far, far too authoritarian for my taste. Where such a design has been adopted, the abuses far outweigh anything seen in a country where free speech allows the polity to warn of and gather against such abuses.

Thanks, but no thanks. History shows that despots remove free speech first for what I hope are obvious reasons.

[Anomalocaris]

To the objection of potential for abuse, yes, there is. But it is greater, certain, and continuous abuse to allow the unqualified an equal voice as the qualified.

The idea that some people are "qualified" to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech is far, far too authoritarian for my taste. Where such a design has been adopted, the abuses far outweigh anything seen in a country where free speech allows the polity to warn of and gather against such abuses.

Thanks, but no thanks. History shows that despots remove free speech first for what I hope are obvious reasons.

That despots always do this doesn't mean it can not therefore be necessary to do it for reasons other than securing despotism.

I think Cultures with long and well remembered historic experiences is in better position to judge what sort of speech likely leads to harm to their own people all out of proportion to the touted benefits of free speech than the individual tastes of outsiders based on one's embrace of political-philosophical views born much more recently, that is founded upon no reasonably similar experience, and that really lacks credible fundamental predictive power for its own consequences and relies to a large degree on emotional evocativeness that are perhaps more specific to particular cultures than to human experience in general.

I personally would like to live in a society where interference in personal conscience is minimal. But I do not take the view that it is for the greater good to impose norms designed to support this preference as a universal value. I would like cultures making different choices than I would like my culture to make, because they had different experiences and different mechanics of social interaction, to have the opportunities to demonstrate the efficacy of their choices and thereby make their experiences more instructive also to those who didn't have them. This enables all cultures to actually learn something more fundamental than what might be learned through the act of conjuring up straw men in order to seemingly better secure one's personal preferences.

[Thumpalumpacus]

The idea that some people are "qualified" to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech is far, far too authoritarian for my taste. Where such a design has been adopted, the abuses far outweigh anything seen in a country where free speech allows the polity to warn of and gather against such abuses.

Thanks, but no thanks. History shows that despots remove free speech first for what I hope are obvious reasons.

That despots always do this doesn't mean it can not therefore be necessary to do it for reasons other than securing despotism.

I think Cultures with long and well remembered historic experiences is in better position to judge what sort of speech likely leads to harm to their own people all out of proportion to the touted benefits of free speech than the individual tastes of outsiders based on one's embrace of political-philosophical views born much more recently, that is founded upon no reasonably similar experience, and that really lacks credible fundamental predictive power for its own consequences and relies to a large degree on emotional evocativeness that are perhaps more specific to particular cultures than to human experience in general.

You seem to be under the impression that I am prescribing for the Chinese what they ought to be doing in their own country, when in fact I'm deprecating that "solution" as being applicable here in America, as was touted by others in this thread. I certainly think that such power would be abused here in America, given our history.

However -- the fact that China has a State Administration for Religious Affairs indicates the state's desire to not cede that area of authority to nongevernmental organizations or people. That implies that the state regards it as a threat to its power, and in that sense they are indeed using this power to strengthen their despotism.

My personal leaning is that even in China, free speech would do much to empower the individual, at the expense of governmental authority. I'm pretty sure the Chinese government sees it that way too ... which is why free speech is derogated there.

[Anomalocaris]

I think the historic and repeated experience in China is many more people die when central power is successfully weakened. Individual political freedom gained at expense of central authority is transient, and inevitably degrades and disappears with the rise of fractionalism, regionalism, and eventually warlordism. The overall prosperity and security of China, as well as the maximum of economic freedom, is seen to be highly correlated with the ability of central power to muzzle or crush forces seeking to weaken central authority and prevention of fractionaism and warlordism. So By and large highly effective central authority is much more important to overall welfare of its people than specific details of the form of that central authority. This is why many Chinese thinks western preaching of the ills of their forms of central authority is a "sugar coated poison", because it seek to exaggerate the less important and the impermanent in order to deprive China, to its devastating harm, of the far more important.

[Mudhammam]

[quote='Pickup_shonuff' pid='829390' dateline='1419653242']
When last I checked we are in the midst of our own struggle to keep those same xtian fuckwits from turning our country into a mindless theocracy. If you are asking me if I resent the Chinese looking to prevent that sort of a cancer from spreading the answer would be 'no.' Religion is about earthly power....not 'beliefs.'

That's very noble and all, but you're simply promoting the installation of a different authoritarian power. And obviously you cannot do so with any concern for human liberty. The "members of a rural Christian congregation in eastern China welded pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of a worship hall," as in, they didn't harm anybody or try to suppress others' rights as you're suggesting theirs should be.

---

Their human right record is 800 million people given real choices in life where as they would otherwise have been bound to crawl miserably through life hand to mouth along a grinding and often short trajectory fixed to not very fertile dirt since the late Iron Age.

That trumps a billion votes not cast, or a billion mouth not allowed to say some of the things that might have come to their mind.

That is vastly more to real human rights than what we feel would entice other people to think in a way we would find comfortingly confirmatory of our own, not all together sincerely held, political philosophical views.

Ha, please. A bunch of flowery, irrelevant, words strung together to basically say: I'm happy to trust an autocrat to tell me how to live my life. Well, I agree with Bertrand Russell: "I think all the great religions of the world---Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism---both untrue and harmful."