No, I am not confusing sesame credit with social credit because sesame credit was explicitly implemented as a version of social credit with the support of Chinese government. Sesame Credit takes account of, among other things, social media connections and purchasing habits.

Ant Financial tells us so.

I'm not trying to pick an argument with you, but conversation here would be a lot more productive if we could say "yes, you're right, I was confusing it with sesame credit" instead of back pedaling and hand waving to now make sesame credit seem like the same thing because of arbitrary factors.

This is exactly why I feel any conversation here is pointless. You're so eager to prove you're right that even when pointed out you confused it with something else you try to bend facts.

What just happened was literally no different from you saying that Mercedes makes the Jetta and I write that I think you're confusing that with Volkswagen and then you respond lol both German and both cars so same thing.

So long as we converse like this it's just a dick measuring contest in the dark and not an actual conversation.

If you want to mince words and say Sesame Credit is not the Social Credit the Chinese government is running internally, sure. More power to you.

In fact and practice, Sesame Credit is a form of social credit. It was one of many developed at the behest of the Chinese government and modelled after a white paper from the Chinese government.

grizy, this isn't the first time you stated something grossly incorrect without any citation ITT, the first few times I gave you benefit of doubt but it's pretty clear you're just hand waving actual facts to fit narratives.

nobody in their right mind could possibly argue that sesame credit and social credit are the same thing

this is no different from arguing that in the US our credit scores are no different from our social security numbers

you're not even attempting to look at actual facts here but rather construct narratives even if it requires bending facts to do so

if you said "the social credit score is modeled off of Alibaba's sesame credit that people use to secure loans to buy their homes with and people use that for dating services" I would have no problem with that statement

that's not what you said at all, you outright lied

this should have been "they have been using sesame credit scores at dating websites for years"

grizy, seriously man, it's like when you posted that they are doing such and such coverage for the HK elections and i found that fascinating so i bothered to check it and found the complete opposite and you then again hand waved that off as "tv coverage only"\

i gave you the benefit of doubt then and earlier too but now I'm seeing a clear pattern

Good lord. Are you seriously making a distinction even the CCP/Ant Pay are not trying to make?

I am not the only one that refers to Sesame Score as a type of social credit score. And that's for good reason. The score is not a purely financial one like it is in the US and is modelled on recommendations from a government white paper that explicitly makes rating social credit an explicit goal.

I didn't hand wave anything about the TV coverage. I said CGTV shifted story to calling the elections illegitimate. And you said you don't see such thing. At the time I made the post, western media hasn't picked up on it yet. Now they are translating the official line as "skewed" by foreign influence, violence, and intimidation.

That's the official line that comes on CGTV in Flushing and shows up on posts in WeChat even now. If you want to say you don't see it, it's because even the CCP knows the line is too incredible and they have made the decision to de-emphasize. If you want to be REALLLY nuanced then the propaganda line is silence as default with "it was skewed by violence and foreign intervention" if asked. The official line is pure silence while screaming at top of their lungs: "sovereignty" "stop intervening" "we will fight."

You're engaging in doublespeak and playing semantics and I think RainierWolfcastle nailed why.

no, you're outright lying and now going into ad hominen attacks because i pointed it out

I think you may be right that he understates the actual threat that the Soviet Union posed, but I don't think he meant to say that there was no threat, only that there are negative consequences to fear-mongering. I think that's the point of the quote in the opening paragraph: “The only way you are going to get what you want,” he reportedly told the president, “is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.”

I think if there's a valid point in there, it's not supposed to be that there is no threat whatsoever (or no competition), but rather that there is a strategic element to deciding how to respond to it, and certain ways of framing the threat make it harder to see the value of the prior strategy, e.g.

Can we please lock this thread already since OP is clearly not interested in dealing with facts but chooses to operate on fabricated bs

https://www.wired.com/story/china-so...-score-system/

A TLR is that someone in the ACLU found a swedish blogger talking about it and included a mention of it as a something that could be a slippery slope. He didn't research it, didn't go to China, didn't pick up the phone or write any emails, just saw it mentioned on a Swedish website. From there Mike Pence mentioned it as part of evil China and it took on a life of it's own from there.

And grizy, here's your piece about Sesame credit...

Keep going on claiming I'm biased or viewing with rose colored glasses but you're literally suffering from a severe case of

I took a didi (Chinese Uber) to the train station January 2018.

We approach the station and the driver says something that I thought sounded like "black gate"* like he was saying he'd drop me off by a black gate. He then started speeding and I have no idea what's going on. He ends up at a red light a block away from the train station and two cop cars stop in front and behind. A bunch of cops get out and start yelling and one tries to open the driver side door. The driver backs out diagonally and drives away and drops me off a half mile away and calls me another car.

Turns out he didn't have a license to drop people off at the train station.

*In hindsight I think he was saying "policemen!" in English

RichardBread,

Your personal experience has created a bias in you. It's alright, it happens to literally everyone. You tried to call me out earlier in the thread about conversations I had with an actual Chinese citizen and looked kind of foolish, and instead of learning from that experience, you've tripled and quadrupled down.

Just my puzzlement: how does one reconcile the picture of the Chinese policeman as a "keystone cop" yet within the dynamic of torture in prisons and the excising of organs from healthy human beings who are imprisoned, having been brought to justice by policemen .

I am mainly speaking to the Chinese communist apologists.

rickyroll, in an attempt to prove I am a liar, literally cites an article that says Sesame Credit was "authorized" by the Chinese government to experiment with proposals in the aforementioned white paper on social credit, in essence supporting my position that Sesame Credit is a version of social credit.

And he even quotes it:
"For example, the government partnered with corporations on some early initiatives, including “credit scores” calculated by private tech companies, like Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit program. In 2015 the Chinese government authorized eight tech companies, including Ant Financial, an affiliate of the corporate giant Alibaba, to experiment with developing credit reporting systems for individuals. In addition to financial data, Sesame Credit does take into consideration things like social media connections and purchasing habits—a product feature that garnered a lot of attention in the West, including in a WIRED cover story."

I do not dispute social credit scores (government and private versions) are not quite all, sci-fi like, encompassing as some people seem to think they already are. I also do not dispute the Chinese government declined to use any of the private scores as the official one.

But here are two points you need to keep in mind:
1. the current versions are plenty scary with real-world impact
2. the national government is still working toward a sci-fi like version controlled directly by the CCP as policy. Last year PBoC started Baihang to consolidate data. Not successfully so far but lol if you think a word from Xi won't get the companies to just hand over data.

I wouldn't fret about it. He'll just repeat whatever tantrum he threw ad nauseum.

The capacities of big data surpassed sci-fi a long time ago, and sci-fi has yet to catch up. China has merely weaponized it for population control.

I think this speaks to the idea that a lot of people hold on to that there is some inherent efficiency to authoritarian governments because one guy can call the shots (eg "the trains ran on time under Mussolini).

The Chinese system is inherently corrupt. If you are a shot caller in the party who are you going to promote to the big leagues: a guy who's never touched a fly or a guy with hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets he has no legitimate reason to have? Who can you trust to toe the line and who can be more easily disposed of should he fail to do so?

grizy you did lie, you said social credit when you were talking about sesame credit, and if you keep reading that quote you posted you'll feel pretty foolish continuing to double down like this

i don't understand why you are still insisting this is the case, ffs man...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-and-the-world

Like I was saying before, the current generation of young Chinese grew up on the CCP koolaid and I think the fervent nationalism displayed by young Chinese people is taking a lot of journalists by surprise.

Do I think China and the Chinese people are a threat to the US now? No. Absolutely not. But I do think China is a ticking time bomb.

Some issues that will almost certainly play large parts of determining China's future within our life times:
1. As China runs out of low hanging economic fruits to pick (read technologies to steal if you will), economic growth will slow.
2. As China, partly due to conscious policy and partly due to internal politics, stratify social classes and regional economic differences, discontent will rise among increasingly large portions of the population.
3. As Xi ages, political uncertainty will rise.
4. As the story of victimhood (the state media still talks often about the "West's" history of colonizing and bullying China in the past) becomes increasingly entrenched, they'll increasingly see the rest of the world increasingly as adversaries.
5. Concentration camps and slave labor
6. Increasingly authoritarian control via use of propaganda, control of media, technology, and secret police.

That toxic mixture should sound terrifyingly familiar to you if you have any awareness of last 100 years of world history. Oh, by the way, China got nukes now.

Agreed, everyone here has biases.

I've been biased from living there and actually working as a journalist interviewing dissidents. People here have been talking about Liu Xiaobo, I interviewed him in person after charter 8 was published and worked for an organization that did illegal satellite and radio transmissions into China in Chinese language to skirt censorship. I'm even willing to provide credentials to a mod to verify I'm being 100% honest about this.

I'm literally the only person here who's been down in the trenches.

You guys are biased from not having been there.

Everything is biased.

I literally just shared an article written by Americans, interviewing other americans talking about how most of our knowledge about this stuff is fake and made up and yet you guys are still thinking I'm the one who is compromised here.

I'm very disappointed in you guys. We're on the same side but you'd rather ignore facts in exchange for more persuasive statements that are blatantly false like "social credit is used for dating services"

I'll just refer you to your own post describing Sesame Credit as an implementation of the social credit white paper, which makes Sesame Credit a social credit by any reasonable definition.

I never once claimed it is THE Social Credit with capital S and C officially adopted by the CCP to evaluate all citizens.*You imputed that onto my posts and were desperate to use it as a gotcha to call me a liar.

I get it. You like your life in China and want to think the best of it. That's only human.

PS: *A national "Social Credit" program officially adopted by the national CCP does not yet exist. The CCP is still working toward that version. Last year they founded Baihang, officially the only licensed credit agency, and ordered the 8 firms that tried to implement the white paper, including Sesame Credit, to own Baihang and share data with Baihang. So far all but 3 have declined to share data but lol if you think that's anything but political infighting over who should get to run THE Social Credit of CCP. Bigger lol if you think whoever ends up with the final version won't have all of Sesame Credit, Tencent Credit, and everyone else's data in addition to a big chunk of the hundreds of millions of cameras the CCP plans to train on Chinese citizens.

grizy, you lied, accept that and move on

there is absolutely no getting around that

We'll see if war is a probable outcome. Chinese history is often one of surprising pragmatism, and war is rarely profitable.

If the rift continues, we might very well see an alternate trading bloc grow. The Silk and Road initiative is often seen as a step in this direction. If that happens, we might see a world divided in a way that makes the iron curtain of the cold war look like open borders.

Of course, China might well at this point overtake us in technology and science. "The west" seems to have collectively decided that we don't like science, that intellectualism is a conspiracy and education an agenda to destroy all that is good. We especially see this now in green tech which due to partisan politics is a hot potato in the west, while China potentially sees the opening they need to establish themselves as the primary superpower of the world.

But also the technology race to strong AI is one that is often seen as a "winner takes it all"-scenario, the arms race of our times except there is no prize for catching up.

rickyroll seems incapable of reading the article he himself cited.

That article does say perception has outstripped reality but nevertheless, citing the same experts, consistently describe what are already implemented in pretty scary terms and describe Sesame Credit is an implementation of social credit that now functions like a loyalty program for Ant Financial (Alibaba essentially). The same article describes components of Sesame Credit that makes it sound awfully like a social credit score.

And he implied I was lying when I said Chinese media was calling the HK elections illegimate (to the extent they felt compelled to say anything about the elections at all).

I present to you this tweet from China Daily dated Nov 25th.
https://twitter.com/ChinaDaily/statu...96697172094977


Just c'mon.

You both have lots to contribute on this subject. ELE (despite this being politics).

US expat WeChat politics groups are full of Chinese-Americans (some of which are only posing as Americans I'm quite certain) obsessively promoting Andrew Yang. They come off as very nationalistic regarding China even within the confines of groups where discussing China is generally off-limits.

I completely understand a demographic being biased towards its first ever presidential candidate but I do find it rather striking.

In fairness, US expats across the board trend towards being the obsessive anti-"SJW" dipshits that for some reason Yang has traction with.