https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2128124/marr...

> The employee, Roy Jones, 49, who was let go by the hotel giant, has revealed to the Wall Street Journal handled social media accounts from his desk at a customer engagement center in Omaha, Nebraska.

> According to WSJ, Jones says he had no idea that he would lose his $14 per hour job after "liking a tweet".

> > Friends of Tibet congratulate global hotel chain #Marriott International for listing #Tibet as a country along with #HongKong and #Taiwan. pic.twitter.com/SXKWb20v3e— Friends of Tibet (@friendsoftibet) January 9, 2018

> Jones told the WSJ he wasn’t aware of any instructions on dealing with China. He also said he didn’t fully understand what the issue was about.

> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”

It's not the Iraq war, but it's also not something you would want to happen to you. Currently Marriott employees are on strike... because of wages, nobody gives a shit about that guy. He's just gone, maybe he has another job now, maybe not, who cares.

And for what, again? For liking a tweet, which China doesn't like because they're occupying Tibet so brutally for so long now and think that gives them the right.

Though that employee had no clue what it was about, it boils down to that they want to force you to look the other way. Oh, you can know that other people are being tortured and killed, but you can't speak out, at all. So either you stay ignorant of what you can't help, or you have this on your mind.

But this not just another thing in life, like being disallowed entry into one country of hundreds. A person who is denied the right to speak out against the brutalization of others, is being brutalized themselves every second of their life from here on out. The fact it's in a way we don't recognize and internalize instead, make part of ourselves, makes it so much worse to me. I can't accept that others accept it, their acceptance is futile. They can have the world, they cannot have me.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/07/technology/mercedes-benz-ti...

> Mercedes, which is owned by Daimler, (DDAIF) ran afoul of China's stance when it paired a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama with a photo of one of its luxury sedans on Instagram -- a social media platform that is banned in China.

> "Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.

> The ad was posted on Monday and garnered nearly 90,000 likes before Mercedes deleted it the following day, according to a screenshot posted by Chinese state media.

> The Global Times, a state-run newspaper that often strikes a nationalistic tone, criticized Mercedes, saying the company was quick to respond to the incident but shouldn't make such mistakes in the first place.

> Mercedes issued a statement in Chinese about the incident on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter (TWTR), offering a "sincere apology" three separate times.

They posted a "quote commonly attributed to the Daila Llama", without mentioning the name Dalai Llama, on their instagram, which isn't even accessible in China. And then they apologized three times after deleting it.

Don't just ask what X or Y are currently doing, ask what X and Y are. These two examples aren't the only ones, and I bet you, everything else staying as it is, they won't be the last. If you give totalitarianism the little finger, it cannot help but want the hand, just like a scorpion must sting.

> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.

-- Hannah Arendt

That's why the Iraq war "predicted Snowden and killbots", if you just squint right.

I think the opposite is also true, if you want to control your people completely, you need to control more than "your" people. That both elements in China and elements in the US (and countries in the EU and many others, let's say all countries for the sake of simplicity) want that is of no help to, uhh, decent folk anywhere. They don't benefit from being used as cannon fodder against this other battleship that uses "its" people as cannon fodder. All oppressive regimes can make an agreement before you can say "oh shit", and then focus on subduing their own populations with the means they built while having other nations as an excuse.

So the fact that "we" or "others" are "doing it too" should make the alarm bells louder, not more quiet.

> Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

-- George Orwell, letter to Noel Willmett (1944)