441–450 of 481 posts
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Do you buckle your seatbelt before you start driving or when you're 68% of the way to your destination?
A closer car analogy: antique vehicles without seatbelts were not banned from public roads when seatbelts became mandatory.
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Ah, that's a good point. I'm sorry not to have a better solution at the moment. One thing I think we'll do is add links to comments to jump to next subthread (and jump to parent), which would at least enable you to skip the noise easily.
html5's summary/detail works without javascript, can be controlled via attributes and remains interactive with JS disabled. Maybe with some creative CSS it could be somehow wrangled into the [-]?
Source is here: https://gitlab.com/smichel17/smichel17.gitlab.io/-/blob/mast...
Note: accessibility is still WIP, because the toggle is not selectable with the keyboard. Should be solve-able though by hiding the checkbox via different means than `display: hidden` (ie, so the checkbox is visually hidden but still keyboard-selectable).
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I know that it’s difficult for you to discuss anti-astroturfing methods without disclosing information that could make circumvention easier, but can you give us an idea of how much effort is put in to detecting this kind of activity on HN? You seem very confident that this doesn’t happen here; is that because you’re doing something to prevent it? We are, after all, talking about an entity that is known to use these t…
Thanks for asking the question and putting so much care into stating it. I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. Most of the time, I find an extensive amount of fairly well considered comments on a variety of topics. That leads me to the conclusion that the account is 'genuine'. To state it a bit more naively: if…
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I think the simplistic sort of thinking that capitalism and human rights are 'inseparable' from each other and can be 'exported' like Coca Cola or Blue Jeans is just a leftover from the Cold War. The reality is much more complicated unfortunately, together with the slowly growing realisation that the USA has quickly lost it's 'role model' status as the leader of the 'Free World' after the Cold War has ended. The West…
Considering the actions of these capitalist nations during Cold War it's pretty clear in retrospective that promoting human rights and democracy wasn't very high priority. Propping up dictators and terrorist don't seem very much in those lines.
It's perhaps easy to forget now, but during the 30s, 40s, and 50s the face and "leader" of communism was Stalin – not exactly a friendly chap – and things like China's Great Leap Forward left over 20 million dead (mostly due to incompetence, not malice), and let's not forget Cambodia.
Details differ per care of course, but in quite a few cases all of this was done in the name of "freedom and democracy", which was perhaps not entirely unreasonable too. I'm not saying that it was the right thing to do (many other issues like national sovereignty etc. which come in to play), but I do think it's a bit more complex than your comment. I'm not sure if idly sitting by and doing nothing would have been that great of an option either.
There's a reason that communist symbolism and the like is considered taboo in many formerly communist Eastern European countries, somewhat akin to Nazi symbolism.
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A resolution is difficult. China is a totalitarian country and totalitarianism needs to be fought, but I doubt that a democratic China would be any different when it comes to their claims to the world. They'd want to expand just as they want to expand now. Just look at the various western colonial empires of history. Many of them were democracies in some form or fashion. Any long term resolution to the conflict has t…
> A resolution is difficult. China is a totalitarian country and totalitarianism needs to be fought, but I doubt that a democratic China would be any different when it comes to their claims to the world. I wonder about this. Why does totalitarianism in a sovereign nation need to be fought? For those of us considering a democratic China...why do we think the country would fare better as a democracy? The Chinese civili…
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It's not sinophobia. I've got _zero_ issue with Chinese Americans as long as their English is good enough that their primary news sources still don't still sit in China (for example second generation or greater Chinese Americans). It's the legitimate concern about China pushing remote spying into its software and hardware that is sold overseas as well as the manipulation of people through companies like TikTok aka By…
Chinese Americans are cool because they can read English, which is real news. I won't bother reading anything in Chinese or learn Chinese values, but I can judge them according to my beliefs because the English one is far superior. Sounds kinda sinophobia to me.
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It's not sinophobia. I've got _zero_ issue with Chinese Americans as long as their English is good enough that their primary news sources still don't still sit in China (for example second generation or greater Chinese Americans). It's the legitimate concern about China pushing remote spying into its software and hardware that is sold overseas as well as the manipulation of people through companies like TikTok aka By…
There’s no way defend against your accusations. It essentially boils down to “you’ve been brainwashed.” You’ve already decided your viewpoint is right and anything against it has read too much Chinese language news (whether true or not). The “manipulation” you speak of is more hypothetical. If anything Facebook has done more manipulative harm thus far. One way to think about this is what exactly would TikTok have to…
Set up a subsidiary that's subject to US law and rather than Chinese law and also has majority ownership in America. It's what the China enforces on foreign companies, so fair is fair.
> So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people?
I have no problem with Chinese companies participating in global economics as long as they're not based on stolen technology. Also it's not "potential", this has already happened extensively. China rose to prominence by extensive state funded industrial espionage and US companies were too blinded by greed to counter it. The US needs more laws in place to prevent this type of behavior and more retaliatory action when it's committed.
So many Chinese people I see online seem to think that the US is scared of China becoming more powerful economical or some other nonsense. The US created current Chinese economic prosperity through extensive work by Nixon and others in that era. That was all a massive mistake based on the mistaken idea that if China became more economically powerful they would become more democratic and more freedom oriented. That has failed to be the case and it's time to rethink how the US has handled China historically.
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A resolution is difficult. China is a totalitarian country and totalitarianism needs to be fought, but I doubt that a democratic China would be any different when it comes to their claims to the world. They'd want to expand just as they want to expand now. Just look at the various western colonial empires of history. Many of them were democracies in some form or fashion. Any long term resolution to the conflict has t…
What is the solution for totalitarianism? Destruction of the country, plunging millions into poverty, for it to be replaced by a sham democracy where all the levers of power are behind US interests? How did that work out in Iraq? If you want China to stop being totalitarian, then you should wait until most Chinese citizens decide that they don't approve of the ruling party, and then let them decide what to replace it…
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That seems very similar to what a certain US citizen that now lives in Russia almost had happen to them.
The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too. However: - Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish. - Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed. I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in compar…
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1...
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
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What is the solution for totalitarianism? Destruction of the country, plunging millions into poverty, for it to be replaced by a sham democracy where all the levers of power are behind US interests? How did that work out in Iraq? If you want China to stop being totalitarian, then you should wait until most Chinese citizens decide that they don't approve of the ruling party, and then let them decide what to replace it…
Yeah, I'm sure the CCP is going to let the citizens decide...
In any case, you can rest assured that if the Chinese have to choose between Yeltsin and the CCP, they will choose the latter 100% of the times. Democracy cannot be forced.