Joe Rogan Experience #1427 - Melissa Chen
- uploaded by PowerfulJRE on 14 February 2020



Melissa Chen is the NY editor for Spectator USA and the managing director of Ideas Beyond Borders.

www.ideasbeyondborders.org

twitter.com/MsMelChen


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At around 20:00 UK time on Monday 17 August, I'll quote this post and add one or more questions or instructions. The first member to answer correctly, wins.

ANSWERS:

1) A) Ideas Beyond Borders simply translates books to Arabic and uploads to their site for access. It promotes pluralistic ideas of thinking and allowing to give ideas to parts of the world who censor the citizens from the world outside of their country.

B) Author: Steven Pinker
Title: Enlightenment Now

2) Example 1.China invests into american films and sell them in China. Although they change little continuity like in Top Gun changes the jacket patches from Taiwanese patch to a Chinese patch. Also in the marvel movie, “Dr.Strange,” changing the Tibetan monk to a Celtic monk to make the Chinese government content.

Example 2. Luxor brands have constantly have had to change clothes or state apologies to China. She stated that “Versace or Dolce or Gabbana listed like countries that were in, and it was like Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan .” That made china mad because it was all China. They demanded for them to change it because they know everyone wants access to the Chinese market. They apologized and changed the website.

P.S. I researched this more after listening to this. It was actually Versace shirt stating that Hong Kong & Macao as independent countries which upset China very much. This happens with tons of the companies and you can see a lot with one google search.

3)

He clearly states he supports freedom of speech but he doesn’t support any kind of supremacy. His whole plan is to more or less infiltrate these groups as becoming close to them. Honestly the best way to portray love and not war.



Thank you for letting me enter this contest! I hope these are correct. Either way, I’m happy I learned a lot from this and plan to start listening to all of his podcasts. More people need to enter this as they will have great opportunities for art but also an chance for education!

Thank you for this, @afreefilms .

Based on your existing (undeleted) post count at the time of responding, it looks like you lacked the minimum number of 91 to be an eligible participant*. [This corresponds to at least four tabs being visible (up to 30 posts per tab) when your profile is accessed and someone clicks 'View this member's recent posts.'] From my count, you only had 87 undeleted posts when answering the questions.

Given your clear efforts, however, that requirement will be waived on this occasion. I appreciate there could easily have been good-faith confusion between (a) the number of posts a member has published on the forum (which appears beneath their username), and (b) the number of posts by that member which have not been deleted.

Congratulations on winning the competition.



REFERENCE ANSWERS


1.

1.1  The Ideas Beyond Borders* motto is "Making the Inaccessible, Accessible."

Melissa Chen describes the nonprofit as an organisation that tries to promote pluralistic thinking and exports ideas to part of the world that is often censored. It acquires the rights to books that are not available in the Middle East, translates them into Arabic, and makes them available online to be downloaded free of charge. The organisation also translates Wikipedia pages into Arabic. According to Chen, only 10% of English-language Wikipedia pages exist in Arabic.

In the podcast, Chen says there's a statistic that more books are translated from English to Spanish in one year than have been translated from English to Arabic in a thousand years.

She rhetorically asks whether people would even know what "Orwellian" means if they have never had access to or heard of George Orwell. And how can we expect them to break out of a status-quo mindset when certain words cannot be looked up (like "feminism" or "secularism") because they don't exist in Arabic? When not exposed to different ideas, when living in a monoculture where heavy censorship exists both from your authoritarian government and your religion, "the habits of a free mind are not really cultivated."

Chen: We're not saying, like, this is a top-down thing: “You have to read this.” I just want to live in a world where being ignorant is a choice.


1.2  Title and author: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.

Chen: [Abridged and edited.] That was the first book we chose to translate into Arabic. Recently, there were a lot of protests in the Middle East, and we started distributing that book. The person who was coordinating some of the protests was telling us, "We want to get this book out to the people, because a lot of these youths are really jaded, by theocrats in the region, by authoritarianism. And, you know what our religion has never gone through? Not the Reformation, we don't want the Reformation, we want the Enlightenment."

Because the Enlightenment is what constrained Christianity in a way — this idea of the social contract, of eroding absolute monarchy, separating church and state... all of these wonderful innovations came out of the Enlightenment. It promoted this idea that maybe people should be free to have their own conscience and think differently. And that is something that really is needed in the Middle East.



2.  Examples of China using its financial muscle to change the behaviour of Americans or American corporations from afar:


(i)  Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets of the NBA, tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protests in 2019. This was followed by backpedaling from both Morey and the NBA after the outcry and heavy-handed responses from China. Further fallout ensued. Wikipedia* offers a fair summary of the drama.


(ii)  In 2019, Versace prostrated itself (along with Coach and Givenchy) in an apology over a t-shirt design that was claimed to undermine Beijing's "One China" policy.* With the Versace design, Hong Kong and Macau had been added to a world-tour-style list of locations, but without mentioning their connection to China. Likewise with Taiwan for the apparel design(s) by one or both of the other brands.


(iii)  Marriott issued its own apology to China in 2018:

China’s Cyberspace Administration, the internet watchdog, said the hotelier had “seriously violated national laws and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” after a customer survey listed Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as separate countries. The regulator ordered Marriott’s website and booking applications to close for a week.

The company, which operates more than 100 hotels in China, quickly responded with a profuse apology distancing itself from charges of supporting separatist movements.

“Marriott International respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. We don’t support separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China,” the company said in a statement. “We sincerely apologise for any actions that may have suggested otherwise.”*


(iv)  For the Marvel film, Doctor Strange (2016), one of the original characters was changed, apparently to appease the Chinese government — from a male Tibetan monk to the female Celtic monk played by Tilda Swinton.


(v)  In Top Gun (1986), Tom Cruise's character had a leather jacket with multiple patches stitched on it, including the flags of Taiwan and Japan. But in the sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2021), which is partly produced by a Chinese film distributor and production company, those flag patches have mysteriously disappeared.





The following articles and posts may be of interest to those who wish to read more on the subject of censorship / self-censorship and kowtowing to China:

- BBC (6 August 2020): Hollywood censors films to appease China, report* suggests*

- The New York Times (16 July 2020): Barr Urges U.S. Companies to Resist Serving as ‘Pawns’ for China*

- The Washington Post (11 October 2019): How China gets American companies to parrot its propaganda*

- The Federalist (10 October 2019): 14 Times American Companies Self-Censored Or Apologized To Appease Communist China*

- Reddit (circa October 2019): List of companies under China's censorship orders (so far)*



As an art-related side note, the post below by KAWS, regarding his Krusty the Clown / Mao piece, is worth a read. To my mind, it was both a smart business move and evidence of moral cowardice.





3.  New Jersey Antifa calling Daryl Davis a neo-Nazi was cretinous in itself, but also demonstrates the dangers of black-and-white thinking.

That accusation was an extreme, single-direction version of the (already reckless) presumption of guilt by association. It exemplified the "political one-drop rule" that Melissa Chen spoke about: Even if you associate and speak with a whole range of people, i.e. a normal distribution that includes individuals whose opinions you disagree with, you will still be tainted by the most right-wing person of that group.

The TEDx talk below offers a good summary of Davis's mindset and process, and what he has actually achieved by speaking with and listening to those who hold views different to his own.


Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies. | Daryl Davis | TEDxNaperville [18:52]
- uploaded by TEDx Talks on 8 December 2017



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@afreefilms — Although your cookies are secured, a bonus task is available as well.

If you choose to complete it, and do so by 20:00 UK time on Sunday, 23 August (plenty of time), you'll win extra prizes: a vintage, collectible art postcard and one of my favourite books.


In the short clip below, Melissa Chen mentions the encroaching tyranny of China, especially digital tyranny in all forms: mass surveillance, the collecting of facial scans, and other uses of AI (in addition to the selling of that technology to other authoritarian states).

She also refers to UN joint statements condemning China's human rights violations and abuses in its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang*. Paradoxically, the signatories were nations often accused of being Islamophobic (the USA, many European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) — whereas the likes of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Algeria actually chose to side with China on the issue.


Should We Be Worried About a Hot War with China? [4:57]
- uploaded by JRE Clips on 14 February 2020




With a quick YouTube search, one finds plenty of news reports regarding China's surveillance society and digital dictatorship. These come from multiple sources such as Australia's ABC-TV (Foreign Correspondent), The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and VICE News.

Among the selection available, find a video you consider balanced and informative, which covers both China's surveillance technology generally and the extreme use of that technology in Xinjiang. Then post your chosen video for others to watch in this thread.

Moby - go
PopTone - go

The link:
Is it that Moby - Go samples Tones on Tails - go, whilst PopTone is made up of some of the members of Tones on Tails (Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins).

I would say that Poptone and Chemical Brothers songs are connected thematically and one could read them as complementing each other. They are both about breaking boundaries, comforting your fears and standing up for yourself.

(I m not eligible to participate in this lottery -I am new here-- so please Mr Met evaluate this answer after other members have given theirs)