Slashdot Mirror
China Censors Social Media Responses To Proposal To Abolish Presidential Terms (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Negative social media reactions in China toward the government's interest in abolishing presidential term limits have sparked a crackdown on memes since Sunday evening. China's constitution currently restricts the president and vice-president to 10 years of leadership, meaning that President Xi Jinping would have been out of power by 2023. The Party's Central Committee proposed removing a phrase in the constitution that stated the two leaders would "serve no more than two consecutive terms," according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Authorities will vote on the proposal in March. Many took to social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo with Winnie the Pooh memes, as the animated bear resembles President Xi Jinping to some degree. Winnie the Pooh has been associated with Xi for years and this week, he donned a crown and sat on a throne, enjoying his honey pot. These memes and social media posts were then taken down, hours after the Committee's announcement, signaling that the public's reaction was more unfavorable than authorities predicted. An assortment of phrases have been filtered out by new censors, including "constitution amendment," "re-elected," "proclaim oneself as emperor," and "two term limit." The lag time between the censorship and the initial proposal indicates authorities expected the public to react less critically.
...and sharks shit in the ocean. It's a totalitarian regime. How is any of this newsworthy?
Life is not for the lazy.
I welcome our new chinese "Winnie the poo" emperor overlord.
Abolish term limits.
That last word is important.
Though if you meant they were going to do away with Presidential elections, TFA's title would be correct....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
they are an international banner of confidence in your ruling party and the structure of your government. See, they act as a sort of tacit checks-and-balances against entrench-able things like perpetual rent-seeking, cronyism, and the types of long-running blood feuds that plague monarchical institutions like Saudi Arabia. Your best case scenario is that the policy your party seeks to advance is carried through without the dependency of a figurehead. Candidly, Nixon hated blacks and jews, but public policy for medicare and construction funding didnt become contingent upon an antisemites judgement of 3/5ths of a man.
Once you abolish the term limit, you quietly acknowledge that any policy now has an implicit dependency on a single person. You have created a choke point in the governance of your nation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You want to torture the undead?? It'd probably be like a spa treatment for her...
Yes, there are some nightmare authoritarian possibilities; but , it is unlikely he would be able to serve a third term.
As far as the nightmare authoritarian possibilities, people have been prediction those for every president from Clinton onward.
No doubt we will see the paid trolls come here today and defend Chinese gov on this . Mao, part 2, here we come.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What do you think will happen at the end of Trump's second term?
That's what Republicans said about Bill Clinton. That's what Democrats said about George W. Bush. That's what Republicans said about Barack Obama.
I guess it's a "scary" question if you are too young to remember all the other times people have asked it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Really?
http://news.gallup.com/poll/16...
Polls suggest they are on the side of the majority on gun control.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
He's doing what all Communists do. A Right-wing regime may jail you for attacking the regime, but the Leftists will jail you for not being enthusiastic enough in your support of the People's Revolution.
Alternative Right.
The guy who exposed the Russian troll farm in 2015 thinks the hysteria is overblown. If you report on that you get your live streaming ability cut.
https://youtu.be/m6IeEldlcFE
Found the dumbass
And what is so wrong with One Child policy? Is it better to handle overpopulation by creating wars and sending people to die in them? While there are many things in which one can argue that the left doesn't make sense (equality no matter what, welfare, etc), it is a simple matter to understand that something must stop the breeding humans. It will either be a war or careful planning, and frankly, I'd prefer the second, because I want some people to be left.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Hey. If the Chinese people have any backbone they'll stop this from happening. It's not like they'll be gunned down, run over and turned into a flesh pie if they object.
You did learn that polls aren't to be believed after the 2016 election, right? Especially when it's about an unpopular view within the media that people are worried about being stigmatized for.
The polls were pretty accurate in 2016. Much of the analysis and narrative around the polls turned out to be incorrect, but the polls themselves were not bad. There is little evidence that the polls had significant issues with people unwilling to state their true preferences.
What many western people do not understand that in China's politics, often the true leader does not have to be the "official" leader. That is why I do not think Xi will have a third term, he does not need to be official the still maintain control. One reason for Xi to have a third term is "war". China would need a popular and strong President to be able to maintain social order is rough times.
This action of removing term limits may be an indication that China is expecting a confrontation in the 2020s and they are preparing the government for the possibility.
Efficiency wins in economics. So which governance model is more efficient? Corporations fight to control the government or the government controlling the corporations? Which is America and which is China?
Xi is the rebel now?
become totalitarian?
System falling apart == 30+ years of rapid growth bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Series of disastrous wars...
Chinese population needs motivating...?
You must be the most uninformed person on the Internet. Congratulations.
It is well know fact that google are to be working with deep state to destroy conservative values in our america. The NSA and FBI and CIA are all working against amazing president trump and WITH clinton and soros to bring about a global new order of extremist liberal leftist rule and poeple who speak out are branded as russia citizens and ignored. We honest americans are being destroyed too.
What a shock.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
And what is so wrong with One Child policy?
Apart from halving your countries population every generation...
Him going for a second term? Could you point to anyone who wants that?
Trump? He didn't even want a first term. He wanted a scandal to promote the media outlet he planned to spawn from the hype around it.
Republicans? The GOP wants to get rid of Trump more than the Dems could even want to, the problem is they can't simply say that they want to get rid of the annoying orange.
So who would want to see him a second time? Let alone a third one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I recommend you open a history book and read up on what was wrong with the one child policy if you don't see what was wrong with it.
I'll give you a hint, in Chinese culture, boys are greatly preferred over girls, so if you're only allowed one child, and it was a girl, want to guess what happened to them? It was one of the biggest humanitarian crisis in history.
Now, of course I think it's stupid to prefer boys over girls, but when creating policies like this you have to step outside of your own morals and values and consider what others are likely to do. It's great that you wouldn't do that, but many others did. And good policy has to accommodate people, not force them in to your values.
The majority of people blame Government for the FL shooting.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Holy Fuck.
You just made the AC's point.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?
A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.
https://www.npr.org/2016/1https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/502014643/4-possible-reasons-the-polls-got-it-so-wrong-this-year1/14/502014643/4-possible-reasons-the-polls-got-it-so-wrong-this-year
And I didn't hyperlink it for a reason, I don't like hidden links for fear of phishing/drive by malware/etc.
So what? I don't mind having only one child as long as me and that child are not forced to enlist into the war while AC is.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Ok, then two child policy after population becomes small enough or unlimited child policy if there is a natural disaster. What I'm trying to say is that I think it is better to have society limit birth instead of society having to cull out people with wars.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Also if you look at the polls, they said pretty crazy stuff like Hispanics were voting for the libertarian party at a 15% rate and Blacks were voting at a 9% rate.
They undersampled and oversampled some demographics.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
You are free to do what you want.
You are not free to impose such a policy on others.
In China, that policy has been responsible for infanticide.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I've met a lot of native Chinese who, when the topic drifted to systems of government, insisted that they were OK with the Communist party's monopoly on power in China. That yeah it had a lot of downsides, but they were ushering in a lot of improvements too. I had a really hard time trying to convince them that those improvements probably would've happened even without the Party.
A move like eliminating term limits lays bare the truth about the motivations of the people in power. And will probably do more than any outsider ever could to convince the people that single-party control is wrong.
To quote the old Battlestar Galactica series: The opposite of war is not peace. The opposite of war is slavery. Democracy just tries to keep the fighting confined to verbal attacks in a legislative building. And a move like this could convince a lot of Chinese that they're living as slaves instead of at peace, spurring them to fight for their freedom.
You are free to do what you want.
You are not free to impose such a policy on others.
In China, that policy has been responsible for infanticide.
See my sig below for my reply.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Could you point to anyone who wants that?
Depends entirely on the state of the economy and whether or not he slows or stops the 'race to the bottom' that is trade deficits, immigration/work visas, etc.
Countering a strawman with projection, I see.
Very original...
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
And what is so wrong with One Child policy?
Are you stupid?? That question has already answered itself.
Just reading from your link,
"In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sales of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are?"
47% - more strict
52% - less strict (or kept as they are)
That's a very misleading representation of the data on that page. You were not using the most recent poll in the list, and lumping together 13% "less strict" with %38 "kept as now", which are not the same thing. The most recent was 60% "more" and only 5% "keep same".
That's a very misleading representation of the data on that page.
Not really. I look at that poll data and say, "This isn't an issue democrats can win on." Events of the past two decades seem to support that (ie, gun control issues haven't won). If you look at that poll data and think, "wow, democrats can really win some seats in congress with the gun control issue" I'd like to hear your reasoning, but I'm not very hopeful.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But what do you need Trump for to get that?
I never would've guessed that playing golf can solve all the problems in the world. Silly gramma thought it's chicken soup that can.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Society already limits it via education. People in educated countries realise it's too expensive to have too many kids so they don't. Even in China, they removed the policy but not as many people as they had anticipated had the second child. It's too expensive and most people are smart enough to realise.
Population goes *Boom*!
Seriously, their constitution has that limit put in there so that the people would only have to deal with a lunatic for maximum 10 years, thus protecting them from this kind of thing.
If their not careful, there's going to be a large-scale revolt on their heads!
Him going for a second term? Could you point to anyone who wants that?
Er ... the people who voted him in for a first term?
Trump? He didn't even want a first term. He wanted a scandal to promote the media outlet he planned to spawn from the hype around it. Republicans? The GOP wants to get rid of Trump more than the Dems could even want to, the problem is they can't simply say that they want to get rid of the annoying orange.
So who would want to see him a second time? Let alone a third one.
And yet ... it moves. -Galileo
Vladimir Putin left a deuce in my shoe!
The more the running dogs of the Establishment hate and slander Trump, the more the masses of working people love him.
The Repuglican and Demonrat parties were long able to pursue blatantly anti-worker public policies. Monopoly control of broadcast media by the financial interests that own both Establishment parties enabled them to steer the narrative of public discussion. Now that they've lost that monopoly on mass media they have likewise lost control of the narrative.
In China, creimertards are lined up and shot at dawn every Monday and Thursday.
leftist = rightist = centrist = authoritarian financialist
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Tiananmen Square 1989
limit Jintao
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?
A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.
The link you posted ( https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14... ) does not seem to match your statement. In fact point #1 is basically what I was saying. It states as point #1 that the polls (at least the Real Clear Politics' final polling average) in 2016 were closer to the vote results than they were in 2012, when they were off by about 3.2%, well within the stated uncertainty ranges. The polls were indicating nothing like a "landslide", and just like "Brexit", a single "polling error" away from deciding between choice "A" or choice "B".
Then, after basically saying, "the polls were within their measurement capabilities", the author of the article goes on to look at reasons why the polls might have been wrong. But they were not "wrong"! They were correct within the published accuracy of their measurement! Might there be ways to increase their accuracy? Sure, but it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, even if you somehow were able to actually poll every voter in the country and get their true feelings about how they would vote - some of them will change their minds, and some of them will die before the polls even open. The polls were "better" in 2016 than 2012. Hopefully they will be better still in 2018.
In any case, maybe I just wasn't reading widely enough before the elections and maybe there was a widespread narrative that Clinton was winning by a wide margin - I was mostly looking at poll aggregators. So maybe I had less of a feeling that the last few months before the election had Clinton with an insurmountable lead. I went into election night thinking that Trump had about a 20% chance of winning, as reflected by the polling and various models derived from that. It made the morning news that he had won a surprise, but not something amazingly unexpected. I think the betting markets had similar odds.
Here is a postmortem from late January, with slightly better data than the mid-November NPR article linked above:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."
Yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC. Had polls weighted a person's per-capita electoral value, Trump was obviously winning in a landslide.
What does that mean "but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC"? Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes, sure. I am willing to entertain that there are two districts in LA and one in NYC that had an imbalance of 2.9 million votes in Clinton's favor - but so what? To deny that Clinton won the popular vote nation-wide because one or a few regions had particular voting patterns is similar to questioning the validity of Trump's electoral college win by saying something like "Yes, Donald won the electoral college, but from just one state (Texas)."
Nobody who has any knowledge of the electoral voting system thought that the popular vote total has any direct bearing on the winner of the election. However, national popular vote polls do give useful input to models of how individual states' electoral college seats are likely to be assigned. As fivethirtyeight.com pointed out - there was a lot of spotty journalism out there in regards to recognizing the complexity of the electoral college and how to interpret polls.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
Looks like politics is a dead end for conversation. What's your favorite classic death metal band?
Alternative Right.
The joke here is that there is hardly anyone in the free world that is more "Establishment" than Trump. How it's possible that someone who is a billionaire with zero regard for his workers could be seen as the advocate for the "little man" is really beyond me.
Personally, I find it highly amusing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're more Establishment than Trump, politically at least.
It is indeed an interesting flavor of our times - and a powerful testament to the corruption of our political system and the villainy of our elite culture - that a silverspoon capitalist like President Trump has become tribune of the people.
If anything, it's a declaration of bankruptcy of our political system. How much do you have to hate a system to think that something like Trump is the better choice?
If I told you 20 years ago that Donald Trump becomes the president of the USA (remember, it was a joke in the Simpsons back then and it was a good one, nobody thought that would be possible), and if I then told you that he won because he's actually the lesser evil, I guess you would have asked me whether he was running against Cthulhu.
And all I could have done in reply was nodding.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.