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The campaign involves not just promoting pro-Beijing information, but discouraging negative reports. Censorship extends into social media, and is strengthened by Chinese platforms' suppression of content that authorities deem negative. For example, some U.S. citizens have recently had messages or entire accounts censored on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, owned by the firm Tencent.
"It's quite shocking to me that China's Great Firewall is coming to the U.S. in digital form," says George Shen, a technology consultant from Newton, Mass., who had his WeChat accounts banned last month. "It's a very stealthy, sophisticated censorship. ... They are filtering out your messages without even telling you," he says.
Bankrolled with billions of dollars of government funds, the strategy goes beyond establishing Chinese media entities abroad, to leasing or purchasing foreign news outlets and hiring foreign reporters. This tactic, known as "borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean" – or buying a boat, as the case may be – is aimed at offering a cloak of credibility.
Even as China expands its channels to American audiences, it is increasing restrictions on U.S. media in China. Last month, Chinese authorities blocked several more U.S. media outlets from the internet in China, including the websites of The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and NBC News.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @07:20PM (15 children)
Nonsense. Millennials are the biggest threat to western liberal values.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Monday July 08 2019, @07:59PM (14 children)
Millennials aren't creating a huge police surveillance state [nytimes.com] and implementing and enforcing a "social scores" [businessinsider.com]. Nor are they creating brainwashing "reeducation" prisons [wikipedia.org].
But that's ok. Keep on getting worked up by right-wing agitprop media men telling you the bigger enemies are our own children, college professors, and feminists. If you live long enough, maybe you may wake up when learning mandarin becomes required for american school kids to ensure a good job.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @08:52PM (13 children)
Have you looked at the US fertility rates among well educated liberal individuals?
Many of these individuals are millennials and they are literally going extinct. This is happening at the same time that people of low education, low income, and high religiosity are continuing to reproduce like there's no tomorrow. While the latter has, more or less, always been the case in times past the lack of welfare meant there were strict limitations on its impact. And just as importantly, the former is an extremely new thing. Go back just to the 70s and our fertility rate was was nearly double. We're now having fewer children than people did during the great depression -- that's just so absurd. And why, why might this be the case? Raising a family is the literally single most valuable thing a human can do - it is the one and only action that perpetuates our species. But due to social idiocy we've now started to praise 'go earn some money' as something that should be seen as superior.
Don't take this the wrong way. I am fully in support of liberalism, but what does all the progress matter if 100 years from now liberals have failed to reproduce and Islamic individuals, and their amazing views on a liberal society, have multiplied themselves 15x over? This isn't just a hypothetical. Pew [pewforum.org] forecasts that by 2050, just 30 years from now, Muslims will increase their population size 73%, unaffiliated 9%. And that is not just 'over there' growth. Islamic individuals are, very contrary to expectations, not only retaining their traditional culture and values within host nations - but also their corresponding fertility rates.
Oh god he's being Islamophobic. No, I am illustrating how liberalism is literally killing itself, and this new-speak where inconvenient truths are met with spurious allegations of phobia are a part of it. Tomorrow is ruled by whoever is alive tomorrow. Kurzeweil notwithstanding, we're all probably going to be dead within the next 100 years and if our children make up an ever diminishing share of the world population, expect an ever diminishing share of world influence - especially as we seem to be [highly arguably] starting to hit a technological plateau which, if is the case, could give less developed nations time to 'catch up' and erase the influence we've gained from technological superiority.
Zaijian, Allahu Akbar!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday July 09 2019, @01:15AM (7 children)
>We're now having fewer children than people did during the great depression -- that's just so absurd. And why, why might this be the case?
two words: The Pill (and friends). Birth control at least 10x more effective than anything that had came before, placed firmly in the hands of the women who bear the greatest part of the cost of having children, and completely out of the sight and mind of their partner(s). But it didn't exist until the 60s.
>Raising a family is the literally single most valuable thing a human can do - it is the one and only action that perpetuates our species.
For the species, yes. But individually, raising a child is one of the single most expensive choices you can make. When most people were farmers, children beyond toddlers were at least a useful work force. Even after the industrial revolution they could at least mostly earn their keep in factories, offices, and other venues. But the creation of child labor laws (and better automation) made modern children a largely unmitigated financial drain on their parents until they nearly reach adulthood.
And the thing is, we *need* negative growth rates to be responsible denizens of this planet - we're way beyond the point of ecological sustainability and are "spending the capital" at an alarming rate, reducing the carrying capacity of the planet further every year. The problem is not that we're breeding ourselves to extinction - negative population growth is a healthy reaction to overpopulation. It's that certain parts of the world are *not* doing so. But we're actually having great luck turning that around - it takes acclimating the women to the concept of family planning, and giving them cheap and easy access to birth control. Possibly without their husband's knowledge - I understand discreet quarterly injections are popular in many communities where the men are resistant to anything that impairs their proof of virility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @07:07AM (6 children)
We're not going to get negative growth rates. Something people conveniently ignore in these dynamics is, once again, population replacement. Imagine you take a society of 100 couples. 99 of them have a fertility rate of 1.5 and one of them has a fertility rate of 3. What's going to happen? You will of course see a population decline but it does not stabilize or nor does it keep declining. What happens is that that one group with a fertility rate of 3 starts to grow larger and larger. And they gradually replace the population that is not replacing themselves, and suddenly you're back to a growing population. So long as any group within a population has a fertility rate in excess of replacement, that group will eventually overcome and replace any and all other groups that do not. Let's see this in action. This is numerically by generation. We'll call the populations Bob and Mo.
1: 99 Bob 1 Mo = 100
2: 74 Bob 1.5 Mo = 75.5
3: 55 Bob 2.25 Mo = 57.25
4: 41 Bob 3.34 Mo = 44.34
5: 31 Bob 5 Mo = 36
6: 23 Bob 7 Mo = 30
7: 17 Bob 11 Mo = 28
8: 13 Bob 17 Mo = 30
9: 9 Bob 25 Mo = 34
10: 7 Bob 38 Mo = 45
11: 5 Bob 57 Mo = 62
12: 4 Bob 86 Mo = 90
13: 3 Bob 129 Mo = 132
That's really quite remarkable when you look at it. I used extremely conservative numbers starting with a 99:1 ratio and using quite practical fertility rates of 3 vs 1.5. Yet even in this highly conservative case, it only took 7 generations for population replacement and to return to an increasing population, and just 5 generations after that to reach a new world population record with further exponential growth ahead. Keep in mind a generation is not a lifetime, but a 'fertility time.' In practice the replacement happens much faster since 'Mo' will tend to be reproduce earlier than 'Bob'. By the time 'Bob' has gone through 2 fertility cycles, 'Mo' has gone through 3.
In practice today we're at stage 6 already since the world Islam population is at about 25%. Developed nations tend to be around stage 3-4 with ~4% Muslim populations. So "negative growth rates" unless something dramatic changes with Islam, are going to be the briefest flicker of a thing. Instead what you're going to see is liberalism simply being replaced, by sheer numbers, with Islam. All the while decrying any focus on this as some sort of phobia or ism.
Incidentally those numbers also bring to mind another thought. Why are there no successful historical civilizations that have been regularly led by women? We know, thanks to Africa, that small groups have tried such things. I don't think it has anything to do with any sort of inherent inability. Instead I think it's simply due to the above numbers. A culture where women start placing a priority on things outside of raising families, would see itself rapidly fade from existence. Each and every woman needs to have more than 2 children, just to keep a population going. And this happens during the prime of their lives. Career and family end up running into direct conflict. Choose the former, lose the latter. Choose the latter, lose the former. Misogynistic cultures end up becoming similar to an anthropic principle. [wikipedia.org] And that is in no way an effort to condone or endorse such things, but simply an observation on the nature of life. Certainly seems vastly more likely than all the self loathing hogwash sociology concocts to try to explain such things.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:24PM (2 children)
You're missing the point - we already have negative population growth amongst most of the developed world populations, it's only immigration keeping it positive. And we *need* to achieve negative population growth amongst *all* populations. Anything else is a death sentence for vast swaths of humanity, and quite likely for civilization itself as burgeoning billions strip-mine the ecosystem at an ever accelerating rate to feed themselves, until we've damaged it so badly that it can't feed enough people to support a modern civilization.
That's the only realistic option I see if we maintain positive population growth. Space won't help, just as Europe colonizing America didn't have a significant impact on the population of Europe, colonizing space won't have a significant impact on the population of Earth, and emigrating off-planet is going to be a *much* more expensive option.
Either we spread birth control and negative population growth to the cultures still growing (including the subcultures within those cultures that are overall declining - e.g. Catholics and many other christian sects), or civilization collapses.
> Why are there no successful historical civilizations that have been regularly led by women? ... A culture where women start placing a priority on things outside of raising families, would see itself rapidly fade from existence.
Why? It's not like they're going to stop having kids. Historically the only way to do that is to stop having sex, and outside a few really uptight western cultures that engaged in centuries of brainwashing, women enjoy sex as much as men do.
And in fact several woman-led cultures have thrived historically, even the Iroquois, from whom we drew much of the inspiration for the U.S. constitution, were a matrilinial society where women held prominent roles in government. It was a thriving and old society before it was destroyed by Europeans - and that wasn't due to cultural differences, it was due to the fact that the Americas had no surface metals to let their technology advance beyond an extremely advanced stone age, and thus couldn't militarily compete with the invaders. (The fact that the Americas had recently suffered a string of plagues that wiped out 70-90% of the population also didn't help anything)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @02:27PM (1 child)
The point of the numbers is that there is not going to be any sustained reduction in world population in the longrun. All we're seeing right now is a replacement of one population with another. And the most ironic thing is that the people conceding to replacement, through gross lack of fertility, are the very ones who do care about things such as environmental sustainability. And they are voluntarily letting themselves by those who, for the most part, could not care less because Allah all mighty will guide the world by his will alone. People reducing their birth rate like to imagine themselves engaging in 'responsible fertility.' Yet all this is doing is guaranteeing that the world enters into an unsustainable condition. It creates this paradox that 'responsible fertility' becomes an oxymoron as those that would even consider such things are the ones that need to be pumping out half a dozen children a piece to ensure that these ideas and visions persist into the future instead of dying alongside a generation.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 09 2019, @07:24PM
That assumes that as the quality of life and access to birth control in these fast breeding cultures doesn't improve. At this point, basically all the cultures with strong birth rates are the ones that were beaten down or colonized and strip-mined by Europe and/or the US, so that they're suffering from systemic poverty and often colonial-style "governments". And as I already said - when they're offered access to education and free birth control they typically fall to near-zero population growth within a generation. Doesn't make much difference whether they get that access by emigrating to a wealthy nation, or via government or NGO outreach programs in their own. It's a real simple equation: fewer kids = greater personal wealth, and the effect multiples from generation to generation. Only those people who don't have access to birth control, or have been heavily brainwashed to resist such
You seem to think we can outbreed them and everything will be okay. We can't - if we breed as fast as them, we rapidly become as poor as them (kids are expensive), and die of starvation alongside them as the Earth's ecosystem collapses. The *only* way we survive is if global population growth goes negative.
On the plus side - they're poor. They can't take us on in a military conflict. Worst case scenario all we have to do is defend our borders and stop providing food aid, and they'll starve themselves out very rapidly - mostly their nations can barely support the existing populations. Of course that requires us to be pretty hardhearted, especially since our nations mostly created the problems that they're now suffering from. E.g. the middle east was once the pinnacle of civilization before Muhammad rose to power, and was finally rebuilding again before the western nations decided to overthrow their democratic governments and install puppet dictators to make them vassal states during and after WWI/II. And of course we (and China) are almost entirely to blame for global warming and the ecological problems that are now beginning to plague so much of the developing world.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:34PM
It's also worth mentioning that significant population growth is a modern phenomena - global population only started growing significantly about 5000 years ago, about 5000 years after the invention of agriculture. And it's only since the mid-1900s that it's really taken off. Probably due mostly to modern medicine dramatically reducing infant mortality - our natural reproduction rate evolved in a world where most children never reached puberty. As the benefits of modern medicine extend into older cultures we create a major problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:31PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @12:57AM
Amazing, we seem to agree that mutts are the way to go. Get rid of all these high strung purebreds.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @05:12AM (4 children)
You also have to consider whether Islamic individuals have Islamic individuals as their children. When they don't, then the high fertility is a one time thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @06:26AM (3 children)
The answer there is a resounding yes. This was again one of the many surprises about their lack of integration. Many thought that as is typical in western societies the children would push back against the conservative nature of their parents and trend towards becoming simply e.g. British. Instead the exact opposite seems to be happening. One of the first signs something was going really wrong is over a decade old now. Back in 2007 there was a wide ranging poll [bbc.co.uk] of British Muslims. Among British Muslims age 16-24, 36% felt that a Muslim who converts to another religion should be killed. By contrast "only" 19% of older (55+) Muslims felt this way. 74% of 16-24 would prefer women wear a burqa, only 28% of 55+. 13% of 16-24 admire organizations such as al-Qaeda that are "prepared to fight the west", only 3% of 55+ agreed with this, etc.
A more recent (and much more extensive) survey was conducted as part of the channel 4 documentary, "What British Muslims Really Think." You can find the documentary on YouTube. [youtube.com] That documentary is quite interesting in many ways. One being that it is presented by Trevor Phillips. Phillips was was the head of UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and the person who penned the original paper which brought the term 'Islamophobia' to the forefront. Suffice to say, he now he acknowledges he got almost everything wrong. In any case it also reveals a similar trend. Young Muslims are ending up even more radicalized than their parents.
And, unless its trajectory radically changes, Islam is set to rapidly become the world's largest religion. And the next milestone after that will be having a world population where the majority of our species are Muslim. The interesting thing here is that people leave and join Islam at about the same rate resulting in a net-zero change from conversion. They are winning the fight for the ideology of the human species simply by rapidly reproducing. At the same time we try to shove women into careers they'll hate in 10 years (if not 10 months), see them end up childless and increasingly alone in their 30s and 40s, and call it being progressive. This makes no sense whatsoever to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @06:58AM (1 child)
Meanwhile, Brits who were asked if someone who converts from CofE to another religion, especially Jacobite Catholic, should be killed, answered in the affirmative to almost 98%. So they are even more radical than the Muslims, in that CoE is not a real religion, but only royalty worship wrapped up in a bunch of Teutonic invader Saxon crap with the Angles thrown in, who had to be forcibly converted in the reign of Albert the Great, anyway. So cry me a river, you pansy lily-livered allegedly white Christian who has undescended testicles! Go and just try to control what your children think! They will look upon you as old, stupid, and old. Nothing you can do about it. I recommend reverse-migration to Poland! But, you know, they are mostly Papists!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @07:47AM
Your snark assumes an inherent direction and movement towards progress. I don't see any real reason to think that this is the case. There are just so many uncontrollable actions that lead to social changes. For instance the black death reshaped Europe in so many ways. It emphasized, for those of belief, that the church clearly did not have the favor of god. And showed everybody that nobody how much they prayed or self-flagellated or whatever else, their god did not care. Beyond this the mass die off also brought forward an era where the huge increase in demand for labor started laying the foundations for the movement away from feudal systems altogether. It does not seem a coincidence to me that the renaissance, and its hinting at previously taboo philosophy, really began to spring to life not that long afterwards.
For some sort of contrast imagine an earthquake ripping through Mecca not only taking the great mosque into its bowels, but also thousands of worshipers. This would reshape Islam in a completely unimaginable way and, in my opinion, would likely set the religion on the path that Christianity followed. But there is no reason to think that such things inherently happen, or happen naturally. Indeed there's no reason to think Christianity could not even return to militancy in the future. Viewing history and change as directional is very dangerous because it, in many ways, removes agency and urgency from issues. If people of the past were more convinced 'things will work themselves out', paradoxically - they probably would not have.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:28PM
I notice you only cite "British Muslims". The UK is not the only "host nation" in the world and many other countries have figured out how to integrate immigrants. The US, for example, is very effective at integrating Islamic people and has been doing it for a while.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen.
And that will work up to the moment where they have die-offs. Then the same characteristics that led to them being hypothetically the "ideological dominant" population will lead to them doing the dying.
We're not operating according to the laws of evolution. Technology has gone beyond that.