Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

The degree that China goes to censor things reminds me of kindergarten. Pull the shades down, and kids won't want to go outside? Is it simply a reminder to their people of who's in charge, at this level of pettiness?

I think it is petty.

At the same time it's a good gauge for them to figure out what else they can do.

Start with "hey man don't show that one pic" and the company figures "it's one pic, whatever we're not really compromising our values".

A few more steps and then it seems less dramatic when it comes to "give us that information on that one user"... and so on.

Personally I would expect an external social credit score coming soon too. It doesn't have to be all encompassing like the social credit score, but good luck getting a job with a company who wants to work with China if you're on the list...

This is a fallacy, stop with this kind of logic. At whatever point where the requests become unreasonable is the point at which to raise issue, not because of some arbitrary "precedent setting" bullshit.

The frog, in reality, just jumps out of the pot when the water gets too hot.

If most people operated rationally, it would be correct to disregard slippery slope arguments as fallacies when analyzing the spread of ideas in society. However, most people do not operate rationally most of the time -- they use rough heuristics and perceived social signaling of others to arrive at (usually irrational) conclusions about most issues.

Empirically, slippery slopes have always been an extremely common way change is driven in mass social thinking. This has been formalized as the "Overton window": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window