TimothyOilpants

And ANYTHING to do with natural resource harvesting and processing.

The Alberta separatism thing has influenced my opinion on the Xinjiang Uyghur situation. Providing a decent standard of living for >1,400,000,000 is a big undertaking, no one in human history has come even close. Absolute individual liberty sounds good on the surface, but at what cost?

If you have a small, but very disruptive minority of your population who have made it clear that they would rather tear your country apart than integrate into your established social fabric and norms, what do you do? Isolation and re-education seems like a reasonable, and humane option. Extermination or expulsion would be much easier solutions; investing the time and resources to improve material conditions while also giving people the opportunity to be rehabilitated seems like a preferable alternative.

I see a lot of people very critical of China’s Sinicization campaign; but at the same time I also see growing instability in most other culturally diverse nations. Ideological extremism is on the rise, anti-immigration sentiment plagues many other developed nations, and I have yet to see systems or proposed solutions which I think can scale to the extent required for a population of 50,000,000… Let alone billions.

It still seems like letting people off the hook for media literacy is a knee jerk reaction. Since the dawn of Google, the VAST majority of people who use it have just treated the first result as gospel. I don’t know if scraping that same content and putting it in the same place with the word “Summary” above it is materially that different.

The core problem here is still individuals not taking accountability for their own education. I would actually argue that holding Google to the standard of somehow being “arbiters of truth” is even more dangerous. No one should trust any information presented to them by an entity that has vested financial interests in influencing consumer behavior.

The Dream and Magic were the beginning of an era!

It’s just about increasing the friction. No door lock will stop a motivated thief, but it will discourage 75% of people from trying. The laziest/stupidest kids (read: the most at risk for grooming and indoctrination) will be the ones least likely to overcome this friction, so it’s still a good harm reduction strategy.

To be fair, kids clever and motivated enough to get around this type of gating generally aren’t the ones at the greatest risk. I think this is more about creating a reasonable barrier to protect our most vulnerable.