![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm not sure that most people understand that distinction between "people will want to help" and "people won't help because of self-interest".
The idea that we know what's right but we still don't do it involves a thing called "cognitive dissonance". It's basically the dissonance between what we want to believe about ourselves and the truth of what we do that proves who we are. It's the difference between saying "well, I would never stand by while oppression happened" and then not stepping in to combat racism, sexism, bigotry, or the vilifying of any racial or religious group.
Most people haven't levelled the truth of their own dissonance within themselves, and so they will go to any lengths to prove that they are not cognitively dissonant with their beliefs. Exhibit A: Trump's followers. Exhibit B: white people who think that racism isn't a thing anymore (or that they can experience racism).
--
So: I don't believe that I will end my life with the same rights that I had when I entered into it. I'm racially Chinese, even if I'm born Australian, and between China's economic power and the present COVID-19 crisis, there's just No Way.
I'm thinking about this a lot lately, in part because of the COVID-19 'SafeApp' that the government is putting out, which traces contacts between people with the purpose of identifying who's been in contact with whom for how long.
The app traces through the exchange of coded 'tokens' through personal devices (phones) so that you know who you've been around and where. Those tokens are recorded against your device, which is recorded against your name in some database that's allegedly secure and not-available-to-just-anyone-only-the-Health-Department.
Technically? So far, so good.
However, I have misgivings about the application of the app and the procedures surrounding it.
1. Given the way the government believes its own propaganda on it's IT preparedness and the "it would be amusing if it wasn't my government and my data" faux pas that it's committed along the way, I'm not willing to trust their assurances that this will never be used against individuals outside of the matter of the pandemic. This is the government that brought us Robodebt and the 2016 Census catastrophe as examples of their handling of information and information processes, and which continued the fiasco of the NBN as an example of their understanding of technology and the way it works in society.
2. Given the way our government loves authoritarianism (with several departments having declared their jurisdiction absolute in matters like immigration and country security, not to mention the dismantling of things like the Freedom of Information, and the raids on journalist offices who disagreed with the ruling party), I do not believe that when the pandemic is over, the government will quietly retire the app. It's too useful to an authoritarian government with a paranoia about security and a racial bias.
3. I'm Australian born of Chinese ancestry. For the last three years, I've held the view that I will not leave this world with the same rights that I had when I entered into it. China is simply too powerful - economically and therefore politically - and when it makes no distinction of boundaries and borders (y helo thar Province Of Taiwan) then other countries take notice.
China has already said that it looks upon its diaspora (that is, the racially Chinese who have immigrated to other countries and then who've been born and bred in those other countries, many of them with minimal or no actual contact with China) as a kind of 'lost children' who will someday come 'home'. It won't grant any protections to them - such would live "as servants in their father's household" in the words of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son (who was restored to full sonhood, even if he no longer had any entitlement to his father's estate) - but it will use any and all means it has to fuel it's own power. This includes recruiting people who feel unwanted by the country they were born in, and estranged by the western culture that values whiteness above all else in deed and action, even if they assure us otherwise in words.
You think this won't happen? It's already happened with ISIS and their recruitment of Arab youngsters from the west. Start with a group of western-born young people who are already vilified and considered 'different', then tell them they have somewhere to belong, they just have to do these particular things.
It's a lie that the west has already sold to non-western immigrants: if you obey our laws, behave the way 'white westerners' do, then you will be acceptable to us and we will protect you. It's a lie in the west, because the problem between the law and people's hearts is that people's hearts don't obey the law: the first reaction of the heart is self-interest and selfishness.
That said, we are human and to be human is to hope. As such, there will be young people of Asian descent in the west who will grow up disillusioned with a culture that sneers at them and won't move to defend their more subtler rights - the right to walk without fear, the right to be presumed innocent, the right to be Australian without necessarily being white or 'western European'. And those young people will join the extremist groups out of China pushing for Chinese dominance. Because they will be promised acceptance by people who look like them where what they see is only rejection and questioning from western cultures.
As it has been, so shall it be. This I believe about human nature.
Most of you reading this are white. I actually have very few close Australian-born friends of Chinese descent anymore. Most of those are family or occasionally former church. They probably won't agree with my opinions above; that's their right and logic. They haven't seen the world as I have; they haven't heard the stories from the other side - from the LGBTQI and the disabled, the non-Christian and the grew-up-poor, the friends whose experience of non-whiteness is very negative, and many others - from the people that I have little commonality with, but whose stories I have been privileged and humbled to hear and witness.
I have seen a world manifestly beyond the people who've been brought up like me: urban middle-upper class Christian aspirationals - white and Chinese - with nothing more to worry about than that we might experience a little social rejection for our faith.
And for those people who Aren't Like Us, the world doesn't work the way it does for us. The rules that go well for us if we follow them break them in ways that we can't understand, and which many of us don't want to.
We like to believe in an infallible system, that the safety nets collect all the worthy who might otherwise fall through the cracks. It's how we sleep at night and live with ourselves by day. Injustice is brought upon the sufferer by their own actions. (The argument of Job's friends: your suffering is because of your sin. Repent of your sin and the suffering will end.) And the things that seem mere inconveniences to us are major roadblocks to others.
I know the system isn't infallible, but there are few alternatives that aren't 'whackjob' right now.
Ultimately, I think that while this app will be useful in dealing with COVID-19, but there are many reasons why it is inadvisable for someone like me to download the app on my phone.
One thing to be people who think we put more data on Facebook. You're right. We do. But having the more data is a safeguard, too. It means that what exchange passed between (say) myself and a CCP activist is easily seen and clearly known - even the deleted comments. An app that lists that I spend two hours in a space with a CCP activist, but doesn't have the faintest idea that that was a day the trains in Sydney got stuck because of a death in the system, and we were the only two people in the carriage while we waited for the train to move on? There's no record that we had a conversation, but we spent time with each other, didn't we?
There's a saying: "an innocent person has nothing to fear". I submit that "an innocent person has nothing to fear from an honest and open authority".
How many honest and open civil authorities do you know?
Ones that don't cover up their failings? Ones that admit they got it wrong and they're working to turn it around to what's right? Ones that not only pay lipservice to the right and the good in our society, but which actively pursue it?
Anyway, this has been long and most of you have long since washed your hands of me, Pilate-like. So here's the kicker.
In spite of the future threat that this app holds to me, personally, as an Australian of Chinese descent in a time when China is rapidly becoming the enemy and racial vilification of the Chinese is becoming a thing...
...I will probably download the app.
Because the tool is useful for defeating COVID-19 and saving lives.
It will be useful for taking away my freedoms and spying on my future actions, too. I firmly believe that. And yes, I do believe that I am opening myself up to that probability in the future. I love the potential of this country, but I have no faith in human nature. And it is human nature that is guiding this government more and more, rather than the belief
So why am I giving this power up to a government that will almost certainly use it against me and people like me within the next five years?
Two words that still might only make the vaguest of sense to my spiritual peers: Jesus Christ.
I can act against something that is not in my best interests for the interest of others. In the interests of others who will revile me for my race, in the interests of a country that would treat me second-calss, in the interests of friends who will not stir from their houses to protest the injustices that will someday be done to my rights.
That's not absolution for silence and inaction, by the way - no more than we absolve the German Christians who said to wait out Hitler because he couldn't be that bad, surely. (But, wowee, are you sure you're grateful enough for a grace that isn't reliant on your own good works?)
My instruction from Christ is not to do unto others as they would do unto me, but to do unto others as I would have them do unto me.
So, yes, I'm willing to give up what is increasingly likely to be my freedoms - not so everything can go back to 'normal' because I think the old 'normal' was broken - but because God told me to Love Him, and then to Love My Neighbour - and that the first would be shown in doing the second.
The idea that we know what's right but we still don't do it involves a thing called "cognitive dissonance". It's basically the dissonance between what we want to believe about ourselves and the truth of what we do that proves who we are. It's the difference between saying "well, I would never stand by while oppression happened" and then not stepping in to combat racism, sexism, bigotry, or the vilifying of any racial or religious group.
Most people haven't levelled the truth of their own dissonance within themselves, and so they will go to any lengths to prove that they are not cognitively dissonant with their beliefs. Exhibit A: Trump's followers. Exhibit B: white people who think that racism isn't a thing anymore (or that they can experience racism).
--
So: I don't believe that I will end my life with the same rights that I had when I entered into it. I'm racially Chinese, even if I'm born Australian, and between China's economic power and the present COVID-19 crisis, there's just No Way.
I'm thinking about this a lot lately, in part because of the COVID-19 'SafeApp' that the government is putting out, which traces contacts between people with the purpose of identifying who's been in contact with whom for how long.
The app traces through the exchange of coded 'tokens' through personal devices (phones) so that you know who you've been around and where. Those tokens are recorded against your device, which is recorded against your name in some database that's allegedly secure and not-available-to-just-anyone-only-the-Health-Department.
Technically? So far, so good.
However, I have misgivings about the application of the app and the procedures surrounding it.
1. Given the way the government believes its own propaganda on it's IT preparedness and the "it would be amusing if it wasn't my government and my data" faux pas that it's committed along the way, I'm not willing to trust their assurances that this will never be used against individuals outside of the matter of the pandemic. This is the government that brought us Robodebt and the 2016 Census catastrophe as examples of their handling of information and information processes, and which continued the fiasco of the NBN as an example of their understanding of technology and the way it works in society.
2. Given the way our government loves authoritarianism (with several departments having declared their jurisdiction absolute in matters like immigration and country security, not to mention the dismantling of things like the Freedom of Information, and the raids on journalist offices who disagreed with the ruling party), I do not believe that when the pandemic is over, the government will quietly retire the app. It's too useful to an authoritarian government with a paranoia about security and a racial bias.
3. I'm Australian born of Chinese ancestry. For the last three years, I've held the view that I will not leave this world with the same rights that I had when I entered into it. China is simply too powerful - economically and therefore politically - and when it makes no distinction of boundaries and borders (y helo thar Province Of Taiwan) then other countries take notice.
China has already said that it looks upon its diaspora (that is, the racially Chinese who have immigrated to other countries and then who've been born and bred in those other countries, many of them with minimal or no actual contact with China) as a kind of 'lost children' who will someday come 'home'. It won't grant any protections to them - such would live "as servants in their father's household" in the words of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son (who was restored to full sonhood, even if he no longer had any entitlement to his father's estate) - but it will use any and all means it has to fuel it's own power. This includes recruiting people who feel unwanted by the country they were born in, and estranged by the western culture that values whiteness above all else in deed and action, even if they assure us otherwise in words.
You think this won't happen? It's already happened with ISIS and their recruitment of Arab youngsters from the west. Start with a group of western-born young people who are already vilified and considered 'different', then tell them they have somewhere to belong, they just have to do these particular things.
It's a lie that the west has already sold to non-western immigrants: if you obey our laws, behave the way 'white westerners' do, then you will be acceptable to us and we will protect you. It's a lie in the west, because the problem between the law and people's hearts is that people's hearts don't obey the law: the first reaction of the heart is self-interest and selfishness.
That said, we are human and to be human is to hope. As such, there will be young people of Asian descent in the west who will grow up disillusioned with a culture that sneers at them and won't move to defend their more subtler rights - the right to walk without fear, the right to be presumed innocent, the right to be Australian without necessarily being white or 'western European'. And those young people will join the extremist groups out of China pushing for Chinese dominance. Because they will be promised acceptance by people who look like them where what they see is only rejection and questioning from western cultures.
As it has been, so shall it be. This I believe about human nature.
Most of you reading this are white. I actually have very few close Australian-born friends of Chinese descent anymore. Most of those are family or occasionally former church. They probably won't agree with my opinions above; that's their right and logic. They haven't seen the world as I have; they haven't heard the stories from the other side - from the LGBTQI and the disabled, the non-Christian and the grew-up-poor, the friends whose experience of non-whiteness is very negative, and many others - from the people that I have little commonality with, but whose stories I have been privileged and humbled to hear and witness.
I have seen a world manifestly beyond the people who've been brought up like me: urban middle-upper class Christian aspirationals - white and Chinese - with nothing more to worry about than that we might experience a little social rejection for our faith.
And for those people who Aren't Like Us, the world doesn't work the way it does for us. The rules that go well for us if we follow them break them in ways that we can't understand, and which many of us don't want to.
We like to believe in an infallible system, that the safety nets collect all the worthy who might otherwise fall through the cracks. It's how we sleep at night and live with ourselves by day. Injustice is brought upon the sufferer by their own actions. (The argument of Job's friends: your suffering is because of your sin. Repent of your sin and the suffering will end.) And the things that seem mere inconveniences to us are major roadblocks to others.
I know the system isn't infallible, but there are few alternatives that aren't 'whackjob' right now.
Ultimately, I think that while this app will be useful in dealing with COVID-19, but there are many reasons why it is inadvisable for someone like me to download the app on my phone.
One thing to be people who think we put more data on Facebook. You're right. We do. But having the more data is a safeguard, too. It means that what exchange passed between (say) myself and a CCP activist is easily seen and clearly known - even the deleted comments. An app that lists that I spend two hours in a space with a CCP activist, but doesn't have the faintest idea that that was a day the trains in Sydney got stuck because of a death in the system, and we were the only two people in the carriage while we waited for the train to move on? There's no record that we had a conversation, but we spent time with each other, didn't we?
There's a saying: "an innocent person has nothing to fear". I submit that "an innocent person has nothing to fear from an honest and open authority".
How many honest and open civil authorities do you know?
Ones that don't cover up their failings? Ones that admit they got it wrong and they're working to turn it around to what's right? Ones that not only pay lipservice to the right and the good in our society, but which actively pursue it?
Anyway, this has been long and most of you have long since washed your hands of me, Pilate-like. So here's the kicker.
In spite of the future threat that this app holds to me, personally, as an Australian of Chinese descent in a time when China is rapidly becoming the enemy and racial vilification of the Chinese is becoming a thing...
...I will probably download the app.
Because the tool is useful for defeating COVID-19 and saving lives.
It will be useful for taking away my freedoms and spying on my future actions, too. I firmly believe that. And yes, I do believe that I am opening myself up to that probability in the future. I love the potential of this country, but I have no faith in human nature. And it is human nature that is guiding this government more and more, rather than the belief
So why am I giving this power up to a government that will almost certainly use it against me and people like me within the next five years?
Two words that still might only make the vaguest of sense to my spiritual peers: Jesus Christ.
I can act against something that is not in my best interests for the interest of others. In the interests of others who will revile me for my race, in the interests of a country that would treat me second-calss, in the interests of friends who will not stir from their houses to protest the injustices that will someday be done to my rights.
That's not absolution for silence and inaction, by the way - no more than we absolve the German Christians who said to wait out Hitler because he couldn't be that bad, surely. (But, wowee, are you sure you're grateful enough for a grace that isn't reliant on your own good works?)
My instruction from Christ is not to do unto others as they would do unto me, but to do unto others as I would have them do unto me.
So, yes, I'm willing to give up what is increasingly likely to be my freedoms - not so everything can go back to 'normal' because I think the old 'normal' was broken - but because God told me to Love Him, and then to Love My Neighbour - and that the first would be shown in doing the second.
no subject
no subject
no subject
(I of course don't know what it's like to be racially Chinese in the world esp right now but thank you for sharing your thoughts & perspective!)
no subject
We have a similar app (two, in fact), and I had to get both because you couldn't go to work if you didn't have that. And I like being employed.
no subject
I kind of expect that to be the next step.