All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)

The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.

Exactly. Even if you don't buy into western biases, it's heavily reliant on subjective perception surveys. Hardly proof of anything

Ok? The same can be said about the US

Same goes for every country on earth?

How totalitarian is exactly totalitarian? I asked chatgpt and it gave few points

- Control goes beyond politics

- A single, all-encompassing ideology

- No meaningful private sphere

- Mass mobilization and propaganda

- Extensive surveillance and repression

Seems like China is ticking all the boxes.

Just as long as you don't openly mention the "three Ts".

EU

tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.

Trump's smarter than he lets on. He plays the buffoon in public, but he's smart enough to have gotten elected twice. Which is two times more than I've managed to.

Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.

During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.

My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.

Edit: also, I'm not from the US

>Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent.

You do know that Chinese people do go to other countries and that we all can see how insanely racist they can be right?

> they are homogenous society

No, China is not homogenous.

> racial problems are nonexistent

Ask a non-Han about how they feel about that statement.

Your take is about as ridiculous. China isn’t at all how you described it.

> they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent

Riiiiiiiiiiiight:

https://ipvm.com/reports/hikvision-uyghur

Guess they solved all the "racial problems" by deploying surveillance cameras to help shove all the undesirables into camps. /s

I am not telling that imprisoning the criminals is a bad things, but the conditions in which this has been done and how they're treated in prison is against human rights by any measure.

The person you responded is agreeing with you.

Parent was being sarcastic

They also don't care when done by their allies.

[dead]

Where are you? Are you doing anything at all? Is commenting on Hacker News and taking a paycheck and maybe donating to some politicians all you're willing to do?

I think you're being disingenuous with this sort of definition gerrymandering. "No Kings" is obviously a demand to stop the authoritarian behavior.

zero _immediate_ results. hate is a powerful motivator and hard to overcome, and the political machinations also don’t really allow for immediate feedback. we will see what happens this midterm cycle. polls show repudiation of the current administration across all dimensions.

It's just that mobility is still too easy. Anyone with slightly above-average intelligence and a bit of drive can join the oppressors, their arms are wide open. Fraud/corruption is rampant and accepted, all you have to do is open a daycare or homeless shelter and "bend the knee" by claiming some sort of disabled/minority/veteran/woman status. CA has raised over $80 billion for "homeless" and the money is getting spent but very little on the homeless.

This provides a pretext to murder people and lock shit down. Violent behavior maked the general public prone to accept and even welcome authoritarian behaviour and policies.

We need to fight it on the streets non violently with actions that disrupt not destroy and resist in the courts and ultimately in the ballot box where we can win.

Breaking shit is the path of most resistance. Do not do this unless you're young and poor.

The way to win is economic resistance. Stop spending and stop paying taxes. Crash the fucking economy so deep into the ground that the country self-immolates.

> but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth.

No, not really. I mean for me, yea, sure, easy. But in the general case? It depends on who you are.

The reason I trust CNN is because when a Dutch news source reports more or less the same thing, I can easily see the reporting matches with that of CNN. Because of this, I personally have some built up trust with CNN. When I look at Fox News, oh deary... it's nothing like what I see on the Dutch news.

This is not something I do consciously, it's simply that I happen to watch Dutch news sometimes and I happen to see American news sometimes and it costs no effort for me to compare. Combine that then with that on HN I also sometimes see BBC and similar British venues (e.g. The Economist is also British I believe?), and now I suddenly have 3 countries worth of news sources.

Many Americans don't really know that the UK exists other than that they rebelled against it. Many Americans almost haven't left their 20 mile radius world (many also did of course). But it's these people that I tend to have a lot of in my in-law family or however you call it (schoonfamilie in Dutch). I'm quite exotic to them in that sense, and definitely foreign. Thank god they have some Dutch roots.

Point being: with that mindset, you're not checking out what the BBC has to say on a topic. You're checking American news, not because of patriotism but simply because of that's all you know and going outside of what you know costs effort. And you already have a job to do, come home late, just want to watch your shows in the evening and that's it.

I am by no means saying that this is representative for all Americans, it isn't. What I am saying is: I see this a lot in my slice of the US. The reason I'm sharing it is because what my in-law family is saying is definitely at a much more personal level than whatever conversation I've had with some random, but lovely, person from a hacker space or hacker house in San Francisco.

Yet, I don't see this view a lot on the news. Nor do I hear Dutchies talking about it, they are simply out of the loop when it comes to a view like this. I don't know how prevalent it is, but if many people of a family of 50 to 100 people is in a situation like this, then my bet is that they aren't the only family.

Getting people to have an undifferentiated distrust of news organizations in general is an important aspect of technofeudalism.

One issue with factual reporting is what facts are getting reported, given that public attention is a very limited resource. People consistently extrapolate from data without knowing if that data is good or bad. So if I show you news with 100 stories of people doing awful things on channel A and 100 stories of people doing awesome things on channel B, both will be factual, but one will have you living more in fear of everyone while the other will inspire you. These are still biases.

One of the least (to the extent possible given the topic) political examples is stranger danger. Kids are safer than ever before, but due to the way stories are reported when bad things do happen to kids, parents are less trust of strangers than ever before (and this is despite the evidence it isn't the strangers who are the risk to kids). The sum total experience that media provides now leads to parents being far more fearful and restrictive of their children than past generations, all without needing to tell any lies.

If all the police reports and research into stranger danger being a false narrative can't combat it, how will ideas with far less evidence to the contrary be countered? Should parents trust the news when it comes to the topic of stranger danger?

The core problem with the news is that they know how to lie by telling the truth.

You can string together true statements that lead to a false viewpoint very easily. _This_ is the bread and butter of this awful media empire we have nowadays.

Vaccines contain cancer causing agents. Vaccines have crippled people for life. Vaccines have lead to children dying. Do you still want to get a vaccine?

All of those are true statements. But the whole thing is a lie.

Will ask, can't promise an answer, but will post it as a child comment here (or edit this one if it is within one hour).

I think the collapse of public trust was very intentional, and the result of a much longer term effort than social media.

The most famous examples are likely the tobacco industry spreading misinformation through self-funded studies and experts, and the fossil fuel industry doing the same to seed doubt about climate change. But of course we can think of countless examples of entire industries and individual large corporations pushing out misleading bullshit, threatening or outright killing journalists and activists to cover up their catastrophic fuckups and their chronic conscious excretion of negative externalities.

This has all of course been going on since the dawn of time, but to focus on the last century in the US, we've seen all sorts of corporations and coalitions of rich and powerful people push misinformation into nearly every sector of our society - universities, science, journalism, politics, etc. in order to undermine confidence in shared facts, corrupt people's ability to discern whether or not something is fundamentally true, and sow confusion so that they can continue to operate in perpetuity in this chaotic maelstrom of doubt.

Lots of capture of government towards these ends as well, we can look at the concomitant constant cuts to education in order to weaken people's understanding of the world and ability to think critically. The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine was probably a step change, and Trump represents the sharpest recent escalation of all this.

From day one, he's done everything he can to shred any collective notion of shared objective truth. Anything he doesn't like is fake news, and the idea that the media is lying, scientists are lying, experts are lying, and institutions are lying, he has spread so fucking successfully through society, to the point where Americans no longer have anything like a shared sense of reality.

It seems like we're being reduced to tribes who are organized primarily around faith in various charismatic individuals.

I think this is fundamentally the worst thing he's done, because it lays the foundation for virtually every other conceivable and inconceivable abuse. If people can't even agree on what is happening, we're fucked. People and institutions in power can do anything they want to whoever they want, because the public has lost their ability to even recognize the danger posed to them collectively and thus mount any resistance based on a shared sense of reality.

Social media has definitely famously accelerated aspects of this like the fragmentation and the spread/magnification of fringe worldviews through echo chambers, but I think it's just one (and maybe this is controversial, but I'd be willing to be generous enough to think the 20something year old creators were too stupid to conceive of these long term consequences at first, but who knows, maybe not) element in a much longer and more intentional, malicious war against the many for the benefit of the few.

Teach Americans to look at news sources in other countries?

Shooting from the hip here. Feels like a duct tape hack on first thought.

I mean that's what I do, subconsciously. I think a lot of Europeans do this because a lot of Europeans tend to speak English and then their actual native language, or something similar (e.g. I wonder how Swiss people experience this).

Other countries don't directly pay for the pensions, but France is staring into a giant fiscal abyss because of their low retirement age (and other generous social benefits). Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.

At some point France will be in too deep shit and will look to the EU to cover for them. We will all pay for that. And it is deeply unfair because other countries their citizens have accepted later retirement and more frugal benefits to keep their countries fiscally healthy.

France could cover the fiscal hole in other ways, but taxing corporations and wealth at a higher rate also consistently ends up being blocked. And each year the hole gets deeper.

It’s not bs. France is lobbying for “Eurobonds”, debt they can take at German interest rates and with Germans etc holding the bag, for about two decades now.

https://youtu.be/tMd7EfFsPIc (Video claims France is against them, but if they ever were they are not anymore)

As a middle-class American, I don't feel like I have much input into the Iran war. I've voted, I've signed a few petitions, and I'm open to more suggestions for how I can stop the war, but I don't really think I can do much else- protest somewhere I suppose and hope that's helpful somehow

As a European, how do you influence your government?

OP needs to read up on war history and the US. Spoiler, it's been this way since WWII.

Ukraine?

How would you solve it ? Alarm bells don’t work, half the time we do walkouts and protests they frame us as violent and just focus on some kids doing something stupid as if that’s what the protest was.

> This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.

Of course if the USA was an actual democracy, electing it's president by popular vote, then this would not be an issue - every vote would count to tip the balance in favor of who the people wanted to elect, not just the votes of the 20% fortunate enough to live in a "swing" state.

> A lot of votes vote one way or the other because they would simply never vote for the other.

This, for me, is the crux. Politics is treated like a team sport in the US, you pick your side and cheer them on no matter what. And team sports in America are even more bananas - you grow up supporting the Brooklyn Dodgers and a few years later they're 2.5k miles away with a new name. This seems a perfect example of what's happened / happening to the Republican Party - it's not the same party any more, but everyone who tied their entire personality to cheering for the red team is still cheering for it as it burns the country to the ground. I predict that inside ten years it will have also had the name change and probably be run out of Florida or somewhere.

Parliamentary systems with more coalition involved instead of two party first-past-the-post can foster extremes too, like we're seeing in Israel.

you're right, I shouldn't compare the "eradication" rhetoric back then to the "eradication" rhetoric now. I shouldn't compare the concentration camp rhetoric then to the institutionalization rhetoric now. I shouldn't compare the systemic rape then to the prison rape now. I shouldn't compare the ambient risk of being arrested on the street then to the risk of being arrested in day to day life in unsafe States now. I shouldn't compare the ugly, antisemitic propaganda posters then to the ugly, transphobic propaganda posters now.

and I certainly shouldn't compare the moral panic then to the moral panic now.

I offer two hypotheses on why my original comment has been so heavily downvoted:

1. people think it's not that bad, or not going to get that bad, and/or

2. people think my people deserve it, while yours didn't.

Not like the 1930s, no. But there are similarities in the discourse to how jewish people were demonized in the decades (well, centuries, in that case) previous. Your comment seems to suggest that no one should speak up for themselves until they face literal genocide. Care to walk that back?

This is a thing that has never happened.

Concern for children's safety should be thrown towards the Catholic Church [0], and arguably even more towards various Protestant churches [1], which have remained in the midst of a decades-long rampant unchecked child sexual abuse crisis.

[0] https://www.bishop-accountability.org/category/news-archive/...

[1] https://snapnetwork.org/arresttracker/

I suppose this could be rage bait, but would you justify the violence that the poster is afraid of also if someone is “ilk” of the other side of the aisle? E.g. white nationalist types?

Does being “extreme” justify extra-judicial violence?

You should seek counseling

Peasants also would accept to part of the king's court. Why not be the king even.

Doesn't change OP's point on contempt.

Yeah, it would specifically be in instances where global conflict is afoot. Aka what people are thinking about when they think about national security risks.

> Isn't there a difference between the models output reflecting the mean of public discourse and the active adjustment of information by the government?

Not as much a difference as you would wish, as mean of public discourse is very actively managed, to our collective detriment, by a very small group of powerful people, which often includes the government. It's the nature of mass media, and the incestuous relationship between power and reach.

They Thought They Were Free, and all that. By the time the 'mean of public discourse' centers on something incredibly stupid or awful, nobody can be arsed to figure out who planted that idea in our heads.

> When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.

i don't agree with the hyperbolic nature of the op here but if you're sincerely interested in the question this is what chomsky and herman (imo quite persuasively) argue in Manufacturing Consent. attaching a profit motive to the distribution of new information, particularly in an economy that tends towards centralization of, necessarily biases what news is printed.

it's certainly not as visually dramatic or directly controlled an effect as the prc's top-down model, but markets are effective.

Taiwan: nothing happened. Iran: