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The Big [Censored] Theory

(pudding.cool)
1444 points feross | 3 comments | 29 Aug 22 17:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.504s | source
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Animats ◴[29 Aug 22 23:04 UTC] No.32644673[source]▶
What's more striking is what comes out of China's domestic entertainment industry. There are far too many historical costume dramas. Those aren't as heavily censored as modern ones. More modern content looks like it was censored in accordance with the US Television Code of the 1950s. ("The code prohibited the use of profanity, the negative portrayal of family life, irreverence for God and religion, illicit sex, drunkenness and biochemical addiction, presentation of cruelty, detailed techniques of crime, the use of horror for its own sake, and the negative portrayal of law enforcement officials, among others.")[1] That's close to China's list. China also censors political subjects, to the point that nobody dares get near them in film or TV.

The quality is improving, though. A decade ago, there was "Sky Fighters", which is China's version of "Top Gun". That was produced by a film unit of the People's Liberation Army, and it's as heavy-handed as you might expect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Practices_for_Televisi...

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neither_color ◴[29 Aug 22 23:36 UTC] No.32644887[source]▶
What's interesting is in the US that kind of censorship is attributed to the most mainstream religion but China is officially atheist and does the same. Whenever people tell me that it's only one religion standing in the way of equal rights for disadvantaged groups I remind them that there's an atheist superpower that's even less permissive except for on reproductive issues(although, in their case they do regulate it heavily, only in the other direction with limits on the amount of children you can have and forced terminations in the past).
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1. delecti ◴[30 Aug 22 00:37 UTC] No.32645352[source]▶
There's definitely a tendency to oversimplify authoritarians by criticizing them for other aspects. American right-wing authoritarians are bad because they're authoritarian, but get criticized for the Evangelical tone through which they enforce it. Likewise with Chinese authoritarians getting criticized for being communist while they do authoritarianism, rather than for the authoritarianism itself.
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2. kelnos ◴[30 Aug 22 00:49 UTC] No.32645424[source]▶
That's a fantastic point that I think many people miss. And others are well aware of it, but try to deflect attention from the authoritarian bits by focusing on the other bits.
3. somenameforme ◴[30 Aug 22 05:58 UTC] No.32647082[source]▶
There's a very specific reason for this that can be illustrated quite easily:

The current Wiki page on authoritarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

The same page, but from 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...

The Wiki 'definition' of authoritarianism has shifted quite radically in recent years. There's a line in the older page, completely scrubbed at some point, that's quite relevant: "Democracies rarely exhibit much authoritarian behavior except in transition to or from authoritarian states. Many (if not most) citizens of authoritarian states do not perceive their state as authoritarian until late in its development."

Recent history (that extends beyond just the past 2 years) has emphasized that the vast majority of people are perfectly fine, if not enthusiastic, about authoritarianism when they share the values of said authority. This makes it near impossible to criticize authoritarianism, in and of itself, because it trends towards immediate hypocrisy. So instead people criticize a system of values they disagree with, while using authoritarianism as a convenient slur to make the critique sound more noble and meaningful than a simple value disagreement would.

The same thing has happened to the Wiki page. The older page emphasizes quite clearly that the West has long since entered into the world of authoritarianism, but we don't want to imagine this could ever happen. So instead we've redefined the word in an effort to focus largely on the differences between the United States and "the bad guys."