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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: 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.