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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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The Chinese have managed it fine, in practice. Things the CCP don’t want to work don’t work, and neither do most VPNs. I’m sure it’s possible to bypass the firewall but I think it would be very difficult to do in an untraceable way.

Yet it happens routinely. There's a lot of Chinese on twitter. When I was playing certain games that were 'banned' in China, a third of the players were Chinese. They were all using VPNs.

'Untraceable way'

Are they gulaging peopel for unauthorized internet access? No. The maximum penalty is $2000 and confiscation of profits obtained through avoiding the firewall. https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.36RG72E

That’s what I mean, yes. Reasonably savvy Chinese are allowed to play in the supervised play area. They are not permitted to leave it and do their own thing in secret.

I'm confused.

I'm partly confused why no_one necroed a two-month-dead threat for a response that clearly misunderstood the point they were trying to rebut. But I'm even more confused how you knew/noticed/responded within the hour for a post that didn't reference you.

Not offended / upset or anything. Just confused.

Why not?

I was searching and found this absolute whopper of the kind that doesn't allow me to do anything but respond.

I sometimes read from the new comments tab, since reading from the roundup page means I miss interesting comments nested a few posts down. For the same reason, I didn’t realise it was a necro.

For better or worse I’ve got bored of most of my old time-wasting pages but it does mean that I tend to refresh the Motte when I get that ‘tab-out’ itch. If you can suggest alternatives I’m open :)

...not a 'constant update' thing, but if you ever want to do a deep dive / generally-untapped government policy resource, have you ever looked up stuff from legislative research services?

Some (generally larger/richer) countries keep a dedicated organization to do basic policy research for the legislative body. In Britain, this is the House of Commons Library, while in the US it is the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service.

These sort of organizations are surprisingly good / useful when trying to read up on a policy issue. They are relatively non-partisan for the level they work at- they are working for both/all parties in general- and they tend to excel at characterizing existing laws / regulations of governments. This is because they have to take a lot of legal dynamics and convey it into forms that the target audience- legislators with minimal expertise- may understand.

Sometimes it can be interesting to take the current culture war issue of the day, and just look up what was last written about it months or years ago, before it became [current thing in culture war / propaganda].

Obviously you are limited to your language, but it can be interesting to see how parliamentary research services from around the world approach common policy issues.