“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply.
One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk.
The NSPCC children’s charity has described encrypted messaging apps as the “front line” of where child abuse images are shared, but it is also seen as an essential security tool for activists, journalists and politicians.
Microsoft reacted furiously when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) chose to block its acquisition of the video game giant Activision Blizzard.
Also, we shouldn’t confuse “pro-innovation” with “pro-Big Tech” warns Professor Neil Lawrence, a Cambridge University academic who has previously acted as an advisor to the CMA.
Professor Alan Woodward is a cyber-security expert at Surrey University whose has worked various posts at GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency.
As a Canadian I’ve sent a formal letter to the CBC asking them to do the same. I’d suggest other Canadians join me and send formal letters to CBC on their site if you want something like this here in Canada. Personally, I really like how BBC did this and would love others to follow.
This is pretty crazy if true. I wonder if it has any connections to the alleged “ghost” CCP police stations that were reported around in Canada. I believe it was being claimed the stations were being used to bully Chinese people that were in Canada.
I don’t know man. The RCMP has recently charged one of their officers for allegedly putting pressure on people of Chinese origin. Now, I’ll admit this a pretty different situation than the “secret Chinese police stations” and, as far as I know, no charges been brought up in their cases or anything found during their investigations. However, China does appear to be putting pressure on its citizens from abroad using clandestine methods. Is the West likely doing much the same? shrug I haven’t heard about that myself but regardless this kind of practice shouldn’t be done by any country.
Anyway I found this National Post article which has more details:
Anyway, I appreciate the source but I gotta say I don’t find it very credible. It starts going down a rabbit hole that this all part of some CIA backed psyop, but I don’t really believe that. These types of stories have been popping up around the world and I doubt the CIA has that kind of reach in some attempt to… what… make China look bad?
These types of stories have been popping up around the world
Can you specify? How many cases do you know? And in which countries? Otherwise its hard to guess if the CIA can fake it. But I’d say if it is up, say to a hundred then: Yes totally something the CIA could and would do.
and I doubt the CIA has that kind of reach in some attempt to… what… make China look bad?
To influence public opinion and manufacture consent for a wide range of political actions against the only threat to US hegemony in existence
“Last December, a report from NGO Safeguard Defenders said it had identified 102 Chinese police stations operating in 53 countries, including five in Canada.”
To be fair, the article you posted claims that NGO is some kind of CIA backed organization. I don’t know if I really buy that, but I suppose it is possible. Antcedotally, I’ve heard other stories of China doing stuff like this (particularly when there were a lot of Hong Kong protests) but I’ll admit I don’t have much first hand evidence myself. It’s just, on a balance of probabilities, I’m much more likely to believe that an authoritarian regime like China is capable of doing it.
Also that example about the “Devil Eyes” dolls is bit disengenious to bring up. Your own source states that they only ever built a few prototypes. Granted, it does say an anonymous Chinese source says hundreds were shipped to Pakistan, but again I don’t think we can really trust China’s take on this.
The CIA has lots of looney plans (likely a product of Military-Industrial complex), but not many come to fruition becasue they are not practical.
As I obviously have not read yours. I will catch up on both. Thanks for quoting that anyways
NGO is some kind of CIA backed organization
I wouldn’t be surprised. The CIA has a history of backing NGOs like this dating back to the Congress for Cultural Freedomwhose goal it was to purge leftism in europe of communism. Nowadays they usually use the NED for that though
… “Devil Eyes” … is bit disengenious to bring up. … they only ever built a few prototypes. … I don’t think we can really trust China’s take on this.
Whether or not it is true they only ever produced prototypes I don’t think its disingenious as my point was not the impact it made but how the CIA operates and this is a good example as it simultaneously needs to be: somewhat recent, yet not too recent so its publicly known (declassified or uncovered) and ridiculous.
I wanted to push back on your notion that something sounds too ridiculous for the CIA to pursue, which generally is just not a framework in which to understand the CIA.
The Chinese source was not “China’s take on this” it was a source of the washington post in China where the CIA allegedly commissioned the dolls (which they did not dispute according to wapo).
But since you brought up the trustworthyness of a take: I wouldn’t trust the CIAs take on this, which is the source claiming “too their knowledge” only 3 dolls were produced.
But personally I think its clear these dolls never got into the hands of many customers, its just such a dumb plan.
Antcedotally, I’ve heard other stories of China doing stuff like this
Historically many narratives about China have been proven false or misrepresented too (social credit system, authenticity of tiananmen papers,…) thats why I am sceptical.
Thanks to the illusory truth effect this anecdotal gut feeling is terribly vulnerable to manipulation. It happens in media all the time, i.e. some rightists believe the LGBTQ community is full of groomers bc its what they are told all the time (not sure if this is a good example, I just wanted to pick a partisan one)
If the targets voice is not represented its even worse bc the claims stay largely uncontested and false claims can stack up (one misrepresentation giving you the feeling “this is totally something they would do”, strenghtening your misconception), creating a gut feeling in the population that is wrong. A fairly uncontested example for such a deconstruction of a foreign target through the media would be Iraq pre invasion. You can look up polls from around the time and correlate it with the reporting of the time. This is also the effect of filterbubbles of course filtering out the opinions you lose the corrective
Whether or not the CIA was/is involved in influencing public opinion like this (personally I have no doubt), this is absolutely what is happening WRT reporting on China ATM, there is no corrective and false claims just stack up.
Look at the histeria that an off-course weather balloon caused: people would line up at an event to scream at Biden about the balloon, even though the initial press release of the pentagon clearly states that this was not an uncommon phenomenon and that there is no threat associated with it (granted its longer than that and one can have a discussion about some of the wording, but this comment is long enough already)
Fair enough. I appreciate the detailed response. I agree there’s lots of reasons to be skeptical of claims made against China. At the same time, I think we can still be critical of China’s actions and not merely dismiss everything against China as some CIA backed plot.
I agree, the best thing is to not jump to conclusions neither the conclusion “Everything is 100% CIA lies” nor the conclusion “China bad” and be patient with individual topics before stepping onto the emotional roller coaster
I’ve listened to a podcast (“Silk and Steel”) by a Chinese living in the US and he describes the media coverage of China in the West as skewed, but he describes it as narrowed onto a certain slice of Chinese reality that is there just blown out of proportion.
I don’t remember his exact words and I am not an English native so I might not transfer the nuance precisely. But along those lines is what I remember. And even IIRC its just the opinion of one person, but it stuck with me. Tbf that was years ago though and narrative has certainly picked up since then
Thank you for the appreciation, I have to say I have yet to get used to the discussions on lemmy being seemingly way more good-faithed than on reddit!
Hard to be too upset about this. Everything’s getting more expensive, and I’m assuming music rights holders have been squeezing Spotify more and more. I’d love to go back to music piracy, but having an enormous library available at a moment’s notice is worth the extra dollar to me. I do have a pretty huge collection of video game music since the big N refuses to license their music
Be a fossile fuel company and lobby the government: Police protects you despite all the climate genocide.
Be a citizen paying taxes and protesting harmlessly to bring the government to action: “OMG U r dangerous! We need to protect the companies your fellow citizens from you!!11”
Probably far less than it is. Number sheets coming from any non easily verifiable, complicated reporting made in China are an estimate in the favor of the reporter. Cheating one another and especially the system is a national sport.
What a fucking racist sinophobic thing to say after the North Atlantic has experienced the LIBOR scandal, the Madoff scandal, the Enron scandal, the 2008 subprime scandal, the Theranos scandal, the FTX scandal, the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal, the drug money laundering scandal, the WorldCom scandal, the Wirecard scandal, the Hurricane Katrina fraud, the multiple COVID profiteering fraud, the revelations in the Panama Paper, the revelations in the Swiss Leaks, the revelations in the Paradise Papers, the revelations in the Bahamas Leaks, the revelations in the FinCEN files, the revelations in the Pandora Papers, the revelations in the Suisse Secrets, the Qatargate scandal, the WeWork scandal, the Jack Abramoff scandals, the kids-for-cash scandal…
And this doesn’t even get into the bog standard behavior of market manipulation by hedge funds, the theft of property from citizens by police rivaling and sometimes exceeding the annual theft of property by criminals, the billions in annual wage theft, the behavior of the North Atlantic multi-national oil companies, the behavior of the North Atlantic coal companies, the behavior of the North Atlantic weapons manufactures, the behavior of the North Atlantic war-chasing reconstruction consultants, the behavior of American monopolists, the insider trading of American politicians, the billions in legal bribery we call lobbying, Forbes literally writing an article that it was impossible to keep up with all the corporate accounting scandals so they tried to make a running list and just stopped updating it in 2002.
You do realize that there is a financial sector that invests both domestically and internationally? If literally everything was unreliable, it would be nigh impossible for investors to turn a profit.
Not every sector of the economy is questionable, but where data heavily overall metrics like GDP, there have been well-documented issues of data integrity. For example, population counts.
The “discrepancies” you refer in this state-sponsored research paper published by a hostile, violent, authoritarian, genocidal, regressive, and oppressive regime that has held power in its country for decades is hardly to be trusted at face value. This authoritarian country has a cultural history of lying, cheating, and manipulating the truth for their own personal and racist objectives. It’ll take a long time before a country like that will be civilized enough to be trustworthy. That said, if you actually READ the report, it talks about primarily logistical issues, 2 political events (GLF and Tienanmen) that have absolutely nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the their data but rather are quite literally propagandistic elements to make the reader BELIEVE that Chinese reporting is somehow more untrustworthy than the author’s of the paper when when the number of examples of falsified data coming out of their own country could fill multiple volumes.
Meanwhile, most of the report is about potential discrepancies, not actual discrepancies, with very few examples peppered throughout to make it seem like they’re saying more than they are.
At the same time, China literally publishes five-year plans, executes on them, reports on them every year, then publishes new five-year plans. How much more transparent than literally every other nation on the planet could China be before you admit you’re wrong? Do they need to build a massive surveillance project and ghettoize all of their lumpen so they can get you accurate population counts like the North Atlantic countries do?
Nope. Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans? What makes it “more transparent” instead of simply “more accurate”? Who are the publications for? Private investors trying to make a profit? Is it possible that China isn’t willing to put as much effort into reporting for that purpose? Why can’t the US, UK, and Australia publish 5-year plans?
Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans?
Because a plan is just an intention or wishful thinking. Inflation data is an actual, measurable result.
Inflation data is one of the most common economic measurements and it can be reasonably expected that every country should be able to not only report on the inflation metric itself, but provide details on the measurement and the methodology used so that every country, globally, knows that the metric reported by each country is transparent and credible. Understanding the methodology then allows analysts to investigate the underlying drivers of the inflation result, confirm its accuracy, and compare it between countries by using similar methodologies.
Simply put, if a country can't provide detailed explanations on how they determine an important metric like inflation, then what does that suggest about other metrics or results that they share?
Inflation is pretty fraught. No one seems to have a good grip on what to do with it. There’s multiple ways for every country to measure inflation, most them have to do with the prices of specific categories of goods. How does that work when most of the goods used for an index are price controlled? How do you measure such a thing when prices are driven by both market dynamics and public policy?
Harping on inflation is sort of like saying China should be paying attention to yardage gains on the gridiron while they’re busy playing baseball. China is playing a fundamentally different game than the North Atlantic. Part of that game is trapping capitalists by incentivizing them to invest without it being in the capitalists’ long term interest. Of course there’s going to be a difference between Chinese financial reporting and European - China is trying to undermine the European world order using European money freely given by Europeans (and their settler descendants).
That doesn’t mean they are fudging numbers and completely incapable of getting accurate information. It just means their focus is different and they’ll only put in the effort they have to in order to attract investment. The rest of their efforts are going towards building and executing 5-year plans that actually contribute to their society and preventing the North Atlantic from infiltrating, invading, starving or nuking them.
But yeah, ok. They could report inflation numbers better. Why don’t you go talk to people who moved their businesses to China or invest billions in China and see if they think your complaint matches their reality. Until then, you’re literally picking at nits.
Also, the 5-year plans are tracked and reported on. They are consistently delivered on. When there is variance that variance is analyzed and the learnings are incorporated into future plans. They’ve been doing this for decades. It’s not wishful thinking.
It sounds like it’s going through because Sweden and Turkey have worked together to address legitimate concerns about Turkish national security? But I don’t see any mention of the EU talks; the article neither dismissing them or addressing them at all (unless I’m just dumb right now and am mis-read something. So I’m still wondering if those talks are “off the table”, or if someone could please correct me about my misunderstandings
Nah. Sweden doesn’t seem to have given any firm commitments about security beyond “We work on it together”, which can mean exactly as little or as much it fancies Sweden after they are in NATO.
To me this is simply “Erdogan has decided he has seen this bargaining to completion and it would look really bad, if this thing wasn’t resolved by Vilnius. Pressure started to mount with This is starting to be embarrassing Recep from rest of NATO” and he simply called it good.
Nothing needs to have been changed on this exact moment, He just decided he has tried long enough and has exhausted the concessions and no point dragging it on. Instead of benefit, it started to be more hindrance in his calculation to keep this going.
He can now tan in the limelight in Vilnius as the leader who saved the situation at last minute. Mind you the problem was of his own creation, but hey those are the best kind of problems. You have exact control and can “solve the problem” at exactly the most suitable last minute moment. Actual problems are harder for “last minute saviour” credibility collection. You might actually fail to solve the problem and thats not good.
I think the US congress would veto Biden’s approval (or already has), if I’m reading correctly? But I can’t find any follow-up as to what actually made the deal go through.
I also wonder if the EU is going to reopen talks about Turkey joining. But seems like Sweden has also done a lot of legwork already to jibe with Turkish security concerns, so maybe that was enough? I’m curious too
Talks weren’t suspended because the EU hates Turkey (national politics and sentiment nonwithstanding Berlaymont just doesn’t care about those things) but because the accession procedure went nowhere, and in some areas backslided.
As such reopening is contingent on nothing but Turkey actually taking its prospect of joining seriously. I wonder if Erdogan understands that “Sweden reinvigorating Turkey’s application” pretty much means Sweden giving Turkey private lessons in how to be less of a shithole… in any case it doesn’t surprise me that Sweden agreed to such language.
I feel like you guys don’t understand how the laws work in sweden, you can’t just pick and choose who you charge (I expect that it’s like that in any non-corrupt country)
Even in relatively corruption-free countries, there are often shadow mechanisms the governments uses to decide who they charge with a crime.
Prosecutors can just say they don’t have a case, or they can fumble the case purposefully in the initial stages to give credence to the “no case” idea.
We don’t have to look any further than how police charge themselves to see how the laws don’t fairly apply to everyone. And a simple google search will reveal that Sweden is not immune to police corruption, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
“Disobeying police orders”, which is what Thunberg was charged with, is one of those catch-all laws that are purposefully vague in a way that allows police total discretion over how to enforce it.
I guarantee in this case that calls were made all the way up the top of the Swedish government before police decided what to do here.
Basically, my point is that there are so many strings to pull, even in developed countries, that it’s often possible to suss out the motivations of the administration just by examining how charges proceed.
What this says about Thunberg getting charged for her actions? Probably nothing significant. Sweden cannot allow activists to freely disrupt their economic infrastructure, especially those involving energy. So they charge her as “normal” regardless of her celebrity status. Though they will be very careful to do everything by the book with so many eyes on the case.
You talking about the same government that allowed two different people to burn the Quran, one Infront of the Turkish embassy, while being blocked by turkey to join Nato? I don’t think you guys understand, sure there is corruption in Swedish politics, but if any of them tried to influence the rule of law? They’d be unbelievably fucked
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