Here's something communism is good at: Making smartphones less annoying This week the kings of the Middle Kingdom issued directives to address some of the biggest annoyances associated with smartphones applications: copycat apps and bloatware. On Monday the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) launched a campaign it said would "rectify chaos" in smartphone apps by cracking down on several …
Was going to post the same observation: This is smoke and mirrors.
They >say< they're banning and cracking down so people feel safe and secure. Meanwhile they're inserting apps to monitor the population and control their social score to maintain control.
But they've declared they're against it! Look: Even the dodgy western media has said it is true! So it must be!
Will be interesting to see who they target first with these new laws...
That should be obvious - state required software is by definition a required app without which the phone cannot operate and therefore, by definition, is not bloatware. If you disagree we'll just need you to step on this bus, where you'll be taken to a reeducation camp for 6 weeks of drugs and beatings while forced to chant "the government is all, the government knows best, all power to the government."
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I'd say it's more like facism in many senses - there's a culture of exclusion of all others than Han Chinese, elevating them and their history beyond all others; they have a policy of expansion in areas not recognised internationally; but at the end of the day - people are allowed to own property and save money. Not everything is state owned, although it is very pervasive.
It’s human nature, and there is quite a lot of variance in that.
A system that has to use a big stick to make it work doesn’t fit so well with human nature compared to one that uses a nice big carrot. It’s unfortunate that the best system we’ve found so far is so flawed.
China hasn't been communist for a while, though they keep calling themselves that. But North Korea calls themselves a democratic people's republic, and it is none of those, so a name doesn't mean much.
China is basically a crony capitalist authoritarian state. No one can claim a state is communist when it can't even find work for its young people. China's unemployment rate for those under 25 is nearly 20%!
That expression comes from the last line of the text to the national anthem, "The land of the free and the home of the brave." The words were written by an amateur poet who was observing the bombardment of a US Fort by British warships in 1814. It was not true then either: 16% of the US population were slaves.
> China's unemployment rate for those under 25 is nearly 20%!
Harder to manipulate via NEATing as it is done here - scale is huge, still only just over half of youngsters are hitting university/HE - nonetheless there are currently 45 million chinese youngsters enrolled in degree and post grad level edu - more than the entire working age population of the UK. Personally I'm not tempted to move - but central investment there and lack thereof here, were I 20 years younger and looking 20 years ahead, I'd definitely be learning Mandarin (and living in the EU right now of course).
According to Xi and the CCP, it is "Communism with Chinese characteristics". This is likely so they can re-use nostalgic imagery and propaganda of nationalitic communism, and be seen as a continuation of the spirit of Mao, while the "Chinese characteristics" basically just means doing whatever the leadership wants at any time.
Yes, it's Communism because it is fully built on it. Communism ALWAYS becomes authoritarian and corrupt, you have seen in in CCCP, Eastern Europe, and South America. It can't become anything else.
Was CCCP communism? Yes. Was DDR communism? Yes. Was Ceasescu a communist? Yes. Was Castro a communist? Yes.
There is no different Communism that is a "workers' paradise" leading to a better society. It's no surprise that Orwell who knew it well described his authoritarian states built on the same version of Socialism communist Russia used.
Communism and Fascism are just two sides of the same coin. Mussolini himself was a prominent Socialist before founding Fascism. So it's no surprise they look so much alike.
There are differences between communism-themed dictatorships and other types of dictatorships, yes including fascism-themed ones. We've never seen a non-dictatorship communist state, and I think the evidence is clear that such a thing isn't possible, but there is still a difference between a state that intends to organize itself to look (or even to be) communist under the top echelons of the dictator and his supporters and those that don't. China used to look like the former, and it was really bad. They don't look much like that anymore, and it's still bad.
What difference? The only difference is that under people like Stalin or Mao it could become even more violent trying to use "orthodoxy" to eliminate any possible competitor and crush any possibility of rebellion, trying to establish a full control of the Party and the country for a long time - something Xi is attempting now in China even if not at the level of Mao - times are different and scaring too much those who bring in money and technology to China is not good - it is true that Xi might have understood that CCCP failed because it made people's lives too miserable, and today is not a good way to ensure one's rule. Even someone like Putin grown up in the KGB and thinking CCCP fall was bad, knows people today are not the same of a century ago - while a nationalist ideology sells better than one based on complex books written too many years ago and nobody reads.
The difference isn't in how bad things can be. Some of the worst dictatorships have been communist, and some have not. The difference is only in the appearance and structure, with some related effects on exactly how badly it is run. One major appearance difference is in the structure of the economy, as communist countries tend to talk a lot more about the ostensible strength of the worker than non-communist dictatorships, organizations tend to be legally depowered instead of just practically depowered by government action, and many organizations would be state-owned instead of private. This doesn't make them better or worse. It's like the difference between desktop environments on Linux; they look different and have different effects on the user's workflow, but they all basically do the same thing.
China under Mao spouted a lot of the classic communism points and set up some of its trademark social programs [complete fiascos]. The Soviet Union codified a lot of those things originally. Cuba and North Korea still sound like that today. Non-communist dictatorships often sound very different, if no less menacing. China today, though, is not structured like it once was and no longer uses the classic indicators of communism. It has adopted a less communist appearance, but is no less authoritarian than it was. They switched off "communist theme" on the UI, that's all.
You really still drink the communist kool-aid they are selling for over a century now. It is true communism dictatorship could quite sophisticated, but not everywhere. The same way, non communist dictatorships could be quite sophisticated as well, or just the one-man show of the average caudillo.
"as communist countries tend to talk a lot more about the ostensible strength of the worker" Really? That was just plain propaganda. The actual reality was very different. Up of being serfs - unable to move to look for better employment, because internal movements were forbidden, requiring special permissions.
Maybe the real difference is this - communism built a very strong propaganda (they were not alone - even fascist movements used it), and tried to paint their action under a "good light" (what Orwell described in "Animal Farm") while less sophisticated dictatorship aren't able to build such "reality distortion field" - which explains why after a century of bloody disasters some people still believe "communism is good".
Yet the Chinese Communist Party needs a different "narrative" today, workers' right are not good for its aims today. Nationalism works better.
> From what I read, they're not too big on the corruption side of things either, at least not at a national level.
Read where? Official CCP prouncements are mainly for projecting an image, and only tangentially related to the truth.
That said, the CCP is indeed big on cracking down on corruption - occasionally - but that's because, with no independent judiciary, corruption prosecutions are a universal tool to use against the political opponents of those in power. This is because the whole CCP is corrupt from top to bottom, and such corruption is encouraged because anyone who doesn't have their hands dirty in some way is a potential threat that those in power can't as easily remove.
> look at supported ports for LineageOS and SailfishOS
Any particular recommendations for anything <€$£250 that is rootable? (Xiaomi out of the question because of insistence on "rooting code"). Ta.
Ironically, Google's own phones seem to be the most hackable but their price point is way beyond what I'm willing to pay for a phone.
I like Sony but you tend to hit a limit on how far you can upgrade Android version. Google Pixel and predecessors are a safe bet but I would tend to look at Samsung S-something used/refurbished. That doesn't align completely with the original poster who wanted top of the line hardware. I haven't figured out how to get that cheaply yet.
Still simple, but OnePlus phones don't arrive laden to the gunwales with crud anyway. You get their launcher (de rigeur since Google decided they'd keep the vanilla one for their devices), their migration utility for setup and the usual utilities. That's about it.
"I want high end hardware but nothing preinstalled besides the basic phone and text apps."
Fairphone? Comes with vanilla Android, or, if you don't want Google, you can have it with /e/OS, or even easily install your own OS. Also the battery is easily replaceable (no tools needed).
Only drawback (which might affect you or not): Not sold outside the EU.
> Fairphone? Comes with vanilla Android, or, if you don't want Google, you can have it with /e/OS
Fair phone is expensive, clunky, and at the end of the day not all that open. eOS is not actually Google free.
It's a pretty wretched landscape at the moment, if you're looking for a decent, privacy respecting smartphone.
> Fair phone is expensive, clunky, and at the end of the day not all that open.
I recently got a Fairphone 4 for work. Now, granted, I'm not installing half the app store or playing games on it (and consequently get about a week of battery life), but it was apparently cheaper than the phones most employees choose. It was larger than I was expecting, if that's what you mean by "clunky", but the phone itself seems fairly zippy when I'm applying my finger grease to the screen and whatnot.
> eOS is not actually Google free.
Depends how "Google free" you want to be. I would say /e/OS is about as Google-free as you can get while still having access to the Google Play Store out of the box (which is pretty much required to function as a member of society in Norway, sadly). There are certainly some Google "services" that are required for some apps to function (accessed likely via microG), but my personal /e/OS phone doesn't know of any Google account, nor any "e" account, so I'm satisfied with that amount of disconnection for now.
> It's a pretty wretched landscape at the moment, if you're looking for a decent, privacy respecting smartphone.
I guess one would probably have to try one of the non-android Linux phones. What's that one with the hardware killswitches? Ah, the Librem 5 from Purism - if you can get one.
So far, no-one in the comments has been banging the drum for unrestrained capitalism. Isn't anyone going to say consumer choice is king, and people should have the opportunity to choose unremovable bloatware subsidised by the sale of tracking and personal data, with the other choice being no service at all because non-subsidised phones are so expensive there is not a large enough market to make them viable?
No-one? No-one?
Call yourself capitalist running dogs? Tchah!
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