Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 190 posts

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#181

Post by yencabulator »

irdc wrote: post #163
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd. China proper starts about 1000 BC, so China is quite a bit younger than Europe. (Whatever "Europe" is.)

If you define Europe as Sumer or Egypt, then yes. If you define Europe as Rome, then no. The earliest deciphered Greek writing dates from 1450 BC (Linear B) but that civilisation fell in the Bronze Age collapse and there is no (written) continuity with Europe as it stands today. As far as I'm concerned we're all equally ancient descendants from LUCA.

It all comes down to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder... but most racists don't want to think of their African origins.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#182

Post by readthenotes1 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #52
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #29

There are primary sources. There are archeological sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sourc…

Every ancient empire did this with their primordial beginnings, from Romulus and Remus to Izanagi and Izanami.

The Tang Dynasty is hardly primordial though.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#183

Post by Apocryphon »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #182
Apocryphon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every ancient empire did this with their primordial beginnings, from Romulus and Remus to Izanagi and Izanami.

The Tang Dynasty is hardly primordial though.

I was referring to the Xia, the mythical precursor/founding dynasty.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#184

Post by readthenotes1 »

YackerLose wrote: post #85
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #29

There are primary sources. There are archeological sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sourc…

>So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously. There are people who believe that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Holocaust is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of an idea they didn't use reason to arrive at.

Many of the people I know that believe odd things do use reason, but they only accept certain things as facts and discard other things as dysfactual.

Sometimes the things they accept is facts are merely delusions, of course, but that doesn't mean they don't reason. It just means that their reason is based on delusions.

Otoh, I also have met a number of people that when you ask "because why" freeze up as they simply have no basis at all and don't understand themselves why they came to hold a position.

And we can't forget that wood and witches are the only things that float because Science.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#185

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

drabbiticus wrote: post #157
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd. China proper starts about 1000 BC, so China is quite a bit younger than Europe. (Whatever "Europe" is.)

> quite a bit younger than You have introduced a comparison, which thus begs the following questions: 1. What is the event that defines "China proper"? 2. What is the event that defines "Europe [proper]" to you?

1. Whatever was happening in Zhou. (Not sure it was really a "dynasty" pe se.)

2. Proto-Indo-European and Ancient Egyptian cultural norms and patterns are still very much alive in "Europe" today, so probably the invention of the wheel in the early Bronze Age is a good start.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#186

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

jmclnx wrote: post #171
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd. China proper starts about 1000 BC, so China is quite a bit younger than Europe. (Whatever "Europe" is.)

We need to define "older". All areas are old, but it is history that can make one area seem old. Of course I am ignoring Africa, the oldest of all in Human History. I think this thread is referring to record keeping. In Europe and especially in the mid-east, when an area was conquered, seems the trend was to destroy written records. I think when that happened in China, a lot written records survived, so it has the ap…

Egyptian and Sumerian writing predates oracle bone script by about 2000 years.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#187

Post by mrguyorama »

Apocryphon wrote: post #49
culi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more

Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism? https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...

My step sister came out of no where at a family gathering to swear Helen Keller was a fraud.

I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud"

Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up!

In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt.

But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person.

All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with.

I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#188

Post by kelipso »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #180
kelipso wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Talking points” for one man is simply the truth for another man. When you look at everything through a conspiracy lens, eventually the truth can become “talking points” and you end up in an island of delusion (I hope everyone still remembers the “vibecession” we had…, the inflation is not real actually, etc etc). We seriously need to evaluate this “talking points” accusation lol. Propaganda accusations in general, t…

No I mean literally a specific set of iirc 5 points, that none of them had ever used before, that they all did with very little variation, at the same time, one morning. They didn't all just independently end up with the same subjects they needed to talk about at the same time. It made lots of people who had previously believed in their bullshit wake up and take notice.

Ok…so they read the same article or watched the same video that went viral. And people repeat what’s in the article or video because it makes sense. It’s a very very common phenomenon in the internet. People do it all the time. Does not imply conspiracy.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#189

Post by bulbar »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #29

There are primary sources. There are archeological sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sourc…

> “Certainly under Xi, the CCP now honors the longer trajectory of Chinese history. This means that all history needs to point in a direction that suggests unified (rather than split) identity, historical and cultural continuity, and an idea of ‘China’ as a long-standing entity that has been continuous through history,” he said.

That's a weird phrasing for describing that China itself does basically the same thing: Redefining history aka lying about it. That's certainly not 'honoring' the history.

So he seems to have incentives to be aligned with Chinese dictates which makes him being an unreliable source.

Re: One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

#190

Post by UltraSane »

ecshafer wrote: post #86
NotThatFast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he reading Neal Adams? I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk! I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong. Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard. Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they jus…

Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I…

Modern inertial navigation fiber optic gyroscopes can be used to measure latitude because they can measure the earth's rotation.

The routes planes take make absolutely no sense if the earth was flat. They actually use great circle routes which are the shortest distance on a globe and these routes look curved on a flat projection.

Post reply on HN