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In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

nytimes.com

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Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#471

Post by dang »

pphysch wrote: post #463
dang wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691 .

I think it is a reasonable thing to not leave misinformation unchallenged, especially when that misinformation is correlated with a rise in (lethal) hate crimes against Asian Americans.

It's reasonable when you do it in a thoughtful, substantive way that leaves a lot of room for other side. It's not reasonable when you do it with snarky flamebait, or with low-information/high-indignation swipes. In other words, the issue isn't the content of your views, but the quality of your posts. We're trying to avoid internet default here, if possible.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#472

Post by kragen »

pphysch wrote: post #432
kragen wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.

Sure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated. Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.

Yes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee.

Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal.

The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#473

Post by random314 »

varjag wrote: post #348
kragen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You posted that response literally three minutes after my comment. That's barely enough time to read the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution . I suggest you spend more than three minutes learning about a thing before complaining that things are not obvious to you about it. Three hours would be reasonable. You could spend the first hour or two just reading that article, or start w…

That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary, so you may well heed your own advice and read it for once. My point was that any parallels between that and events in the USA are nothing but disingenuous exaggeration. Consider just how vague your allusions are: without knowing your political views I would be at loss figuring if you allude to the rise of proto-fascist American right or lament the assault…

> That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary,

I couldn't find the quoted passage in the Cultural Revolution WP as you mentioned.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#474

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

DenisM wrote: post #445
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s also an appropriate use of the idiom.

How about preemptively jailing all men in case some are murderers. Also a noble cause?

Yes, that’s another good example.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#475

Post by kragen »

random314 wrote: post #473
varjag wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary, so you may well heed your own advice and read it for once. My point was that any parallels between that and events in the USA are nothing but disingenuous exaggeration. Consider just how vague your allusions are: without knowing your political views I would be at loss figuring if you allude to the rise of proto-fascist American right or lament the assault…

> That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary, I couldn't find the quoted passage in the Cultural Revolution WP as you mentioned.

It's in the infobox in the right margin of the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. Why they thought it was relevant to the conversation is anybody's guess, but I guess people who don't know anything about a thing are likely to have a lot of random opinions about it.

In my view, though, accusing others of dishonesty and hypocrisy because they disagree with one's random unfounded opinions is unacceptable. Last time I said that I got downvoted to -2 and flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#476

Post by kragen »

platinumrad wrote: post #343
mlindner wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting zero mistakes is unreasonable. The system worked correctly. The person who was not guilty was found not guilty.

Yeah the system worked correctly. He only lost a year of his life. Whoopsies!

And all his grad students and the chair of a university department, based on accusations that turned out to be entirely false.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#477

Post by kragen »

refurb wrote: post #213
otrahuevada wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article the State discovered, way late, that the kind of ties he had with China were not of the kind they assumed guilt of and heavily publicized when they went to destroy his professional life, but instead of the kind people have when they are born elsewhere. When they did find out about this, they instead tried to make him admit to some other non criminal kind of ties to justify their ruining of hi…

What people don’t realize is that a prosecutor is like any other job - pressure from the boss to deliver, long hours, “sunk cost fallacy” and all the other crap you see in big corporates. Not to excuse the behavior, but more highlighting what contributes to it. Once a prosecutor thinks he has a case against you, you’re pretty fucked to be honest because it rare for them to ever admit fault or back down.

It's just like any other job, except that the job is to destroy people's lives.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#478

Post by kragen »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #448
feoren wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias, perhaps? That is, all the stories you hear about like this are the kind that turn into stories you hear about -- you don't hear about anyone whose life is just quietly ruined, so it seems like they all work out fine. And of course nothing "works itself out" -- it's people who work them out. It doesn't have to be you -- it's OK to just read the article and move on with your own life -- but whenever…

The whole story is basically “how the USA gave China its space and ICBM program.” I assume “worked out” meant for the Chinese, because it really did.

For all of humanity. When I worked at Satellogic in Argentina, China's space program was how we got our satellites into space. If we'd been dependent on the US and Russia, we'd've been in bad shape.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#479

Post by n4r9 »

the_only_law wrote: post #192
n4r9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc McCarthyism is the suppression of socialist ideas full stop, regardless of sympathy to Soviets or China.

You recall incorrectly > McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to communism and socialism.[1] The term originally referred to the controversial practices and policies of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), and has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. https://en…

Doesn't seem too far off what I said. A widespread persecution of people with left-wing politics. Some other groups such as homosexuals also suffered. There was a tenuous and absurd justification of "un-American"ness or of communist sympathies.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#480

Post by jcranberry »

luke0016 wrote: post #146
jcranberry wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its somewhat important that this principal only applies to criminal court.

Why?

presumption of innocence is a legal principle that only applies to criminal court.

so i assume when youre equating the fundamental right to what governments believe, youre talking about specifically presumption of innocence before convicted criminally, and being jailed or executed.

the government does not fundamentally believe in presumption of innocence in civil law. for example, you could sue a bank for losing some of your records it's required to keep. the onus is on the bank (the defendant) to prove they did not lose those records, rather than on the plaintiff to prove that they don't have the records.

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