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Notes -
Thanks. That’s interesting.
I guess I should be more careful with my phrasing. I shouldn’t have conveyed that ideology matters less than private business in the eyes of Sauron of the East. The reason we have such pervasive censorship is obviously downstream of their ideology. What I was trying to say is that the actual contours of the Chinese censorship machine are hard to gauge, and you probably can’t capture them with a simple low-dimensional model. Plus the fact that censorship used to be handled manually by low-wage, barely educated workers (it’s a running joke on Chinese internet that they hire people who barely finished 9 year mandatory education to read and censor your posts) makes it unpredictable and inconsistent. So you can’t easily infer state ideology just by looking at what they censor and what they don’t.
I don’t think that is entirely what they intended, and intention seems more relevant here than actual outcomes. If they had (have, since were in year 2026) panopticon-like tools, I’m sure they’d be happy to use them. Maybe then it would be easier to infer the state-promoted ideology by looking at which kinds of wackos they allow to speak.
As a side note, I’m always fascinated by the obvious difference in preferences between Western and Eastern men when it comes to women. Wu is barely attractive to me, and I’d guess general Chinese netizens would rate her 5/10 tops. Not because she’s “fat” as my anorexic countrymen thinks, it’s about facial features. I have a friend I’d rate maybe 3/10, but she ended up with a blue-eyed German boyfriend who, to me, looks like the kind of guy you’d see in Nazi propaganda posters. And obviously in porn featuring EA women, the preference for EA men vs Western men also seems very different. It’s pretty fun to observe, and I’m curious whether anyone has studied it.
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