> The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden
Kinda daft not to assume this has been the case for a long time already
The opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics included a celebration of the National Health Service, which got mysteriously cut from the broadcast in the US, at a time when there was a bunch of fuss over Obamacare that had come into effect a year or two before.
Was hard not to imagine that was a deliberate choice.
Look again at the insurmountable hill that is the US's potential transition to a fully public healthcare system, and consider that celebrating having done that elsewhere might be valid.
You can check it out - the first couple of minutes here of people in nurse costumes standing by beds and moving around a bit. Not really must see stuff. https://youtu.be/ReJjvlipXpM
Well the "no censorship!"-crowd in rhe US has been strangly focused on the censorship of racists, bigots and nazis. I don't think they consider censorship that benefits the Neo-feudalist lords as censorship.
The naive part of me these past years was thinking that calling out contradictions would bring shame and reflection to these people.
It's still important to call them out for all the onlookers, but he goal in suc discussions should not be to try and convince the other party in these cases. They at best don't care and are going all on vibes, and at worst knowingly contradict because their goal is also onlookers.
Even if a large conspiracy isn't involved, I believe that biases in worldview can contribute to these effects. However, I still think it's important to inform people of things they might be missing and hold media accountable for their choices, regardless of whether those choices are random or unknowingly biasedWe need to be careful not to fall into the allure of "fake media" in our outrage, as this could ultimately benefit populists in the long run.
The NHS is genuinely loved by most British people, for all it's faults. Not celebrating it would have been very weird. So not really propaganda, just showing the world the things we are proud of.
Feel free to censor it on your end if you find the very idea dangerous.
How is the NHS very different from the military. Americans love their military and often have propaganda-style bits like fly-overs during football games. American's don't get the option to 'opt-out' of paying for its gigantic costs. Why not have military spending depend on voluntary donations?
They actually should be able to, for the most part.
The original idea of state exists to ensure 3 things:
- Protection of the territory of the state
- Protection of the integrity of the individual citizen
- Protection of the private property of the citizen
This is why people started organizing in societies and allowing the existence of a ruler class. These 3 things.
You will always need some amount of military to be part of the state. But what most countries waste today (the USA for instance), is pornographic. The state should only be allowed (by taxation) enough military to defend their territory, not to exert control over the all planet like the USA wants to do.
EDIT: Yeah, I should have guessed the part of the "integrity of the individual citizen" would, of course, be twisted. No, it's not protection of the individual from disease of from his own stupidity or lack of ability. It just means the role of the state is to ensure the citizen is protected from deliberate harm from another individual.
I would say that in the list 'Protection of the integrity of the individual citizen' is something that a NHS would serve. Individually, people want to know that if they get injured or sick they can be taken care when they can't for themselves. Everyone is at risk of these things. Society as an organism also benefits from having resources dedicated to repair of its components in the same as it does in defense of external threats. 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.
> 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.
Let's be honest here. You know the NHS (and various equivalents across the world) go way, way beyond this.
And I'm not even against the existence of a public funded health service within limits. But this is just phonographic. In my country (and from what I've read in the NHS it's relatively similar), in the past 10 years we added more than 90% medical doctors and nurses to the national NHS. The budget for the local NHS increased by 72% in that same period.
And the service has become absolutely terrible and now people (the ones that only benefit from it but don't pay the costs) are asking to raise taxes even more to put even more money into the problem.
Naa, enough is enough. I don't want to support this crap.
Fair enough to complain about the execution, but glad to see you see the logic of its existence. Back to the military comparison, the waste (fraud, corruption, kickbacks, etc, etc) in that part of the public expenditure is pretty massive. Yet there don't seem to be the same outrage or call for reforms in that area. Even when multi-billion dollar programs stagger about for years then produce nothing useful (except for the profits extracted by the defense firms and their investors). Lots of hate for NHS waste, but military spending waste seems to get a free pass. Why is this?
Basically, because the military got a massive budget in WWII and Americans just got used to it because slaughtering the Nazis was the only thing that can convince Americans to buy into that level of welfare.
Now it's mostly a jobs program for poor people plus pork for politicians to throw at their favored contractors/companies. Can't really be eliminated without political suicide because too many mouths are fed off of it and will make it their mission every waking moment to damn anyone who tries to do it.
Since prevention is a lot cheaper than cure we're trying to avoid the same mistake with other things rather than commit political supuku on things that already exist.
The idea behind taxation is to enable collective spending power for things that ideally benefit society. The NHS is likely to be useful for the vast majority of people at some point or another though individuals may well not get value for money if they're healthy or die young etc. However, providing free/cheap healthcare enables people to get check-ups and hopefully catch problems earlier which can make a huge difference to the outcomes. Of course, increasing the health of the workforce is going to benefit the economy as well, if you're looking for a purely monetary benefit.
There's option to opt out of social security if you are of the right religion that existed before, I want to say, by the 1960s was the nominal date in the statute -- and registered as such by some gatekeepers in the religion. The Amish won't let those who didn't grow up in the community register although some Mennonites might. Or are working as a preacher.
It should probably be challenged because it's a clear religious discrimination. I looked seriously at renouncing my right to social security but eventually I found out they've gamed the system in favor of a few insular religions.
What a weird worldview, celebrating censorship that aligns with corporate interests in healthcare, a basic necessity, while using the tired diatribe "but muh tax money!" to pathetically drum support for it, lol.
Aren't you tired of being so angry at the wrong stuff? Such an exhausting way to live.
Nope, I came commenting on your comment which given the pattern of your other comments getting flagged all the time shows to be an exhausting way to live: being mad at small things.
I wish I could live in your bubble, where disliking the state forcibly taking away 50% of my salary (more actually) to redistribute to people that don't contribute to society and to waste in severely mismanaged public services is "being mad at small things".
You live in the bubble where taxation is only to redistribute to wasteful means. In that bubble you get blinded by black-and-white thinking that can never achieve any kind of nuance to actually address issues, only seeing issues in it all is not conducive to creating concrete criticism which is the first step to change. You can only be cynical, and contrarian.
So yeah, seems exhausting, being mad at it all because you can't think in specifics, just a general sense of madness and outrage at a black hole of frustration.
Unfortunately you live in that bubble.
Sorry you live in a broken society, maybe do something to change it.
The NHS is a bit like the NRA in the US. Politicians and rich folk would ideally do away with it, but they cannot, so they have to play lip service to gain favour with the public.
So its not propaganda in the way you are thinking of.
I honestly think the way they mix their audio is so the stadium noise gets turned down whenever the announcer talks and the American announcers just never shut the fuck up no matter how inane they might be.
You make it sound like NBC is some sort of obscure specialist service, but it turns out that they're actually a mainstream national broadcaster, available not just over the air but also on just about every satellite, cable, and streaming provider in the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC
Not only that, but they're the official Olympic broadcaster in the USA! Around 22m watched it on their broadcast services, and a further 3m on streaming.
In reality, an overwhelming majority of Americans watching the opening ceremony were doing so via NBC.
NBC alone had over 20 million opening ceremony viewers this year (TV + Peacock streams)[0]. TV is a huge huge part of US culture. See also the Super Bowl, which just happened today.
This is making a remarkable assumption about a vast population. I know everybody in my family watched the opening ceremony on TV. Are you just making guesses?
I'll have to ask my brother but that might be NBC's audio engineer decision, or even his default settings (depending on the broadcaster voice).
I'm as critical as the US as they come, in fact I just cancelled my summer trip to the Appalachia, but seeing this as censorship is reading a bit too far, simpler explanations exist (crowd noises are dimmed by audio filters)
Both? It is very likely the 'booh' were cut by the broadcaster filters. Each broadcaster (at least in my country) has a 'sound identity' (it's a literal translation, sorry) and use filters during live shows. It originally come from AM radio where your sound is _very_ compressed, to FM radio where you still have to compress it, but with more range. My state radio would have captured and diffused the 'booh' while on the music radio I used to listen to as a kid, they definitely would have been dampened (most of them would have been caught by the 'passe-haut/coupe-bas').
I listened to the US broadcast, definitely dampened, I'm not sure if it's a default filter or one that triggers with the broadcaster, it is extremely likely it isn't intentional. My Bayesian ass is 95% sure.
my question is more technical: how did the blot out the booing? and: how live was it in the US? from the Academy Awards we know that they have a 5s delay (following the Michael Moore incident), but what is it with olympics broadcast?
The audio engineers are monitoring multiple mics (for an event of this magnitude probably dozens) and increasing or decreasing volume on them in real time for the mix that goes on the air. Standard for any sports broadcast.
While they do show it live, it's in the middle of the workday, so almost everyone in the USA will have watched it delayed by many hours at "prime time", aka around 8pm local time in each zone.
That being said, I'm in the US and I heard boos on the delayed broadcast.
"The USTA’s decision to comply with the White House’s wishes and shield Trump’s self-presentation from noise is hardly understandable. The British Guardian called it in tennis jargon an “unforced error” – a fault without necessity. The US Open are actually the Grand Slam tournament that cares least about etiquette."
People from the US are totally unaware that their leaders are unpopular abroad!
If only traditional media didn't have such a stranglehold on the US population The people would know they would...
I fail to see the point of pushing this narrative. Has braindrain taken all of Europe good writers? Meanwhile China and America still take all the medals. All France can do is pick the games so Marchand gets the most golds, so much for collectivism.
Oh and Marchand swims for UT Austin BTW. An American school, training under an American coach with American infrastructure.
So North Korea, China, America, Russia and basically all other countries have propaganda, and Europe doesn’t? I live in Europe and think we do. Not everything that is in the news is true.
"So other heads are also flamable. Do you think your head isn't?"
Something potentially happening elsewhere doesn't invalidate it being pointed out. In fact if Von der Leyen got booed in China and a Geeman broadcaster muted it, I would also like to know what was ommited.
Europe doesn’t bill itself as “the land of the free” and doesn’t proudly tout itself as having free speech above all else no matter the cost. So famously fascist symbols - like the swastika/hakenkreuz among other things - are banned a few places, it may be controversial but it’s not a dirty little secret or anything like that
Your argument is no clearer. Someone's claiming US is beginning to resemble China in that they hide criticism of the ruling parties - they have not mentioned Europe once and you're saying ... something about censorship in Europe?
This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.
> This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.
Well I think there is definitely WAY too much drugs here. Definitely not as bad as California, but I've lived in Eindhoven for a while and people could just put their car window open a bit and text a certain number and get it delivered to their car! Also I've met plenty of students who took XTC during parties and thought it was all fine. When I said something about it they called me a "moral knight". Guess I'm old fashion.
I have showdead set to yes, and while so some articles get a gray color and an occasional [flagged] tag, everything is still searchable[0]. The only form of censorship is the ordering in the news list, but I could pick any other list[1] if I wanted to.
And how many people do you think use these 3 lnks compared to the base URL? That's the clever little ways to censor. You don't need everyone to be unaware, just as many as possible.
That's why I tend to search top in the last day and week. Specifically to catch flagged articles like this, since at least the votes don't get undone.
Please, the topic in question is whether HN "is one of the biggest culprits" in "adopting Chinese censorship methods". Granted, I'm far from being knowledgeable in Chinese censorship methods, but I doubt they can be circumvented by just using different URIs.
I don't agree with that because HN is a relatively small site. But the methods used here aren't dissimilar to what is happening in this story nor in China. Burying stories is a big part of censorship while minimizing dissent.
...so what? "Most stories about politics" are considered Off-Topic, as per the guidelines[0], and some members favor the flag- over the hide-button more than I'd like. It's still on place 19 on the active list[1], and a far cry from any practiced censorship like on Reddit, where stuff just gets [deleted] out of existence.
Yes. When it is complaint about some leftist student protesting and thus interfering with far right speaker free speech rigth to never be opposed, regualarly discussed. Rarely flagged.
But, when there is something making current admin or far right lool bad, flagged quickly
Weird, I remember Western media ran full transcripts of his speech after the Ukraine invasion and every other time he crawled out of his bunker in the Urals. Would you like to enlighten us which important viewpoints of Putin get censored in the West?
Citation needed.. really sorry to say it because there are plenty of things to say about the current US administration.
It feels like people inventing this story, farming for followers on socials by manufacturing outrage. And a close read of the article will uncover that it was denied by the networks.
This needs a deeper dig before opinions be formed - especially given the vehement denials of manipulation by the broadcasters.
People in the US heard the boos, as evidenced by the comments and others posting about it. All politicians get booed. But how many? And who controls the mics? The editing? The news press?
More anti-American propaganda on HN. Why does this keep happening? This is not news, nor is it relevant for HN.
Hackers care about the truth. I don't think many here would consider the censorship of a US head of state being inherently pro-US (or the criticism of said censorship to be anti-US).
But feel free to elaborate why you feel wanting the US population to be able to see how their political leadership is perceived elsewhere is "anti-US" — cause I would describe it as the exact opposite.
Americans - and citizens of all big countries - know their leadership isn't popular everywhere, especially when other governments disagree with them on increasingly more issues (UK and French censorship of speech being one of them, ironically).
Seeing the 100th "U.S. government bad - please believe us this time" story from yet another activist-masquerading-as-journalist post from The Guardian (UK) ending up on the same website where technologists discuss innovations in tech and science is the real travesty here.
Kinda daft not to assume this has been the case for a long time already
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