- We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard
- We're talking about others (Chinese) needing to rebel, blaming this on brainwashing, without adknowledging our own inability and unwillingness to act, without being willing to label this brainwashing
- We're building over the course of increasingly ignorant veiled-criticism posts of foreign cultures a dog-whistle for Chinese racism within our tech culture
- We're narrowly conceptualizing the issues fundamental to these technologies, spending our energy on exasperation that contributes to nationalistic sentiment, rather than addressing the global systemic abuse
- Our "blindspot" of admitting our own state the abuse of information fundamentally carves out, via the course of international law and sovereignty, the justification for other countries to do the exact same
In essence: fixing this kind of thing starts at home in the United States. Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.
> We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard
A cursory search on HN will give you countless counter-examples. Can you give me an example of the inconsistency?
Are you suggesting there should be no posts criticizing China? or every such a post should have a banner claiming "Be gentle. Don't criticize too much. Look into the mirror"? how about HN visitors not from the US?
> We're talking about others (Chinese) needing to rebel, blaming this on brainwashing, without adknowledging our own inability and unwillingness to act, without being willing to label this brainwashing
You know what is brainwashing? "China’s most popular app is a propaganda tool teaching Xi Jinping Thought" [0]
> Our "blindspot" of admitting our own state the abuse of information fundamentally carves out, via the course of international law and sovereignty, the justification for other countries to do the exact same
First off, the US is not the leader of surveillance. Other countries don't need US's approval to implement their own surveillance. What a smack of arrogance. Are you sure you don't believe in American supremacy?
Secondly, I'm not aware of any "international law" that justifies surveillance because "the US does it".
> In essence: fixing this kind of thing starts at home in the United States. Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.
This reminds me of the the argument against space exploration: "Fix issues on Earth first before thinking of Mars". You know how absurd it is.
> We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard
How do you even know? These complaints are never in direct response to a person who clearly espoused a hypocritical position, it's just general talking into the room, or in response to an assumption.
> rather than addressing the global systemic abuse
How is "but the NSA" achieving that? Or simply assuming someone else has this
> "blindspot" of admitting our own state
... what is "our", here? Americans? Humans? Carbon-based lifeforms? "The West"? If you have to make everything this diffuse and global and systemic to even tackle it, what's your proposed first step? What is a comment you like?
> Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.
I don't know what sunday morning HN comment anguish is supposed to be, but I know that not looking away, even when you could have easily looked away and people would prefer you to, is always good, even just for the person doing it.
1) The complaints are often either hypocritical or naive, mirroring whatever target the official US policy (and thus media) have at that year. People oblivious to 99% of the goings-on around the world merely parrot opinions they read in the media about 1-2 select places, in tandem with official national "interests" against those places. At the same time when you see tons of blog posts, and media stories and so on (and movies and TV series) against country/situation X, you don't see any about country Y which is similarly or much worse, but an ally (or indifferent). E.g. complaining about the treatment of gay/women in place X but always forgetting Saudi Arabia unless it happens to coincide with some beef their country has with it.
2) Opinions used to sell state action and interventions, with blatant disregard for nuance and for the people in the area they're supposed to help. E.g. whenever there was an intervention to "bring democracy" etc, it created worse power vacuums and civil war hellholes in the places it touched (e.g. Iraq, Libya, Syria, jut in the last 15 years) -- but of course it also sold trillions of war merchandise.
> People oblivious to 99% of the goings-on around the world merely parrot opinions they read in the media about 1-2 select places
If you had been about to respond to that commenter "You are oblivious to 99% of the going on's around the world [0] and merely parrot opinions you read in the media", that probably would have given you pause. Being more indirect isn't being more polite, in my books.
[0] that could be parsed as either "to 99% of the stuff of which I am aware of, so I am aware of 100 times more things than you", or as "to 99% of all the stuff that actually goes on the world, which would mean you are aware of 1% of everything going on right now, which would make you something between Q and God", both of which are silly.
> At the same time when you see tons of blog posts, and media stories and so on (and movies and TV series) against country/situation X, you don't see any about country Y which is similarly or much worse, but an ally (or indifferent).
Another way to look at it is that 99.999% (exactly) of the stories here are basically fluff that can disappear quicker than you say "whoops" if the serious stuff isn't dealt with. How come that the precious few cases when something serious, whether it's in the US or elsewhere, gets some attention, are played off against each other? What does this achieve? What does this create room for? It's not a zero-sum game, where making assumptions about a commenter who made a very short comment stating a simple fact, without a hint of any of the stuff you conjure up, somehow improves discussion taking place elsewhere or in the future.
>[0] that could be parsed as either "to 99% of the stuff of which I am aware of, so I am aware of 100 times more things than you", or as "to 99% of all the stuff that actually goes on the world, which would mean you are aware of 1% of everything going on right now, which would make you something between Q and God", both of which are silly.
Both of which are accurate (which is almost as good as polite). The average American can't pinpoint Belgium on the map, much less understand global inter-state politics.
The people who do (and who don't just have an opinion based on reading NYT or Economist or worse Time) are much less. We're not even talking about having a nuanced opinion here, with all the subtleties of the history of the countries involved, etc.
Being from a country that has actual involvement with 20th/21st century history (with other nations etc), not as something abstract that happens away, but in real time, also helps. As opposed to an isolated huge country where the main concerns are the local (state) affairs, and where the average person seldom if ever reads foreign literature, seldom if ever listens to foreign music, and almost never watches foreign movies. Heck, the average person don't even watch the other countries' athletes in Olympics, the media only give them an one-sided US athletes coverage.
Heck, the average German or Frenchman can tell a lot more about global affairs than the average American, and I've had such discussions in all of those countries and more.
Heck, most Americans can't tell who their own Vice President is.
The average American doesn't know what the Stasi is. Mostly because the average American doesn't know exist, contrary to the person you responded to.
> The people who do (and who don't just have an opinion based on reading NYT or Economist or worse Time) are much less.
But at what percentage of Americans on a website do you just get to assume a commenter's nationality, and at what percentage of obliviousness to what is going on in the world and under their noses can you just declare an American ignorant by association, simply ignore any and all they said, and scold them for their supposed ignorance and one-sidedness? Again, what does this achieve?
> We're not even talking about having a nuanced opinion here, with all the subtleties of the history of the countries involved, etc.
I hope this isn't aiming at some kind of understanding how Chinese totalitarianism isn't really totalitarianism, or that for a Chinese child it's just different when their parents get tortured because they happened to own land at the wrong time, etc. I mean, what nuance could one be missing about harvesting organs from political prisoners? "Yes, it's horrible, but", is that the new "I'm not racist, but"?
And hey, when a Chinese employee in China makes a honest mistake the US government doesn't like, do they get them fired, as that Mariott employee got fired? When a Chinese company quotes someone Angela Merkel doesn't like on Chinese social media, does that company end up apologizing profusely, three times, like Mercedes Benz did for quoting the Dalai Lama (without attribution even, just the quote) on Instagram? At what point are we allowed to also talk about Chinese totalitarianism?
As a German, for me it's precisely not to "point fingers", I simply don't want this shit to be repeated elsewhere, either. And I cannot sit idly by when it's belittled or rationalized in any way. Not even when someone else might say the same thing with a different motivation or a different view of the world. I also don't think the world being fucked up elsewhere is something that relieves one of responsibility. Just like when you're on a sinking ship, that other ships are also sinking doesn't make it better, but even worse. It's simply orthogonal: criticizing China doesn't take away energy that would have been used for criticizing the US, it's simply that all these whataboutism comments ruined a discussion that, on a website where such stuff doesn't get flagged every single time anyway (while people complain about the crazy anti-China bent everyone is on, just seething with hatred against China, nothing to do with compassion, intelligence, and wishing China well), could have been interesting.
In the US, you have all necessary freedoms on paper, and probably more than enough even in practice, if people only used them, to change things. In China, that doesn't even remotely apply, and we're now decades into dissidents being murdered. The people who managed to survive in that system so far and are formed by it are not the people I ask "permission" of. They can forfeit their own human rights if they want, not those of their fellow citizens. Not 50 years ago, not today, not ever. Just like the Holocaust wouldn't have been suddenly okay if only the Nazis had won; and that the extent of it could even be somewhat discovered was because they lost the war, not because they didn't want to erase that completely from the history books, just like they completely erased villages.
I've also had many discussions about these subjects, but all of them combined were not half as insightful as the books by Sebastian Haffner and Hannah Arendt I read. They're a good way to find out just how dumb we have become, and how quickly. And when issues get split into country X versus country Y, rather than talking about individuals and groups of individuals within them and their actual actions and variety of motivations, that's already part of the circus for me. Abstractions that take on a life on their own in that way aren't helpful at all.
> [..] even the desert of neighbourlessness and mutual suspicion disappears, so that it is as if everybody melted together into giant being of enormous proportions. This too does the for a totalitarian environment so well prepared vernacular express in its own way when it no longer speaks of "the" Russians or "the" French, but tells us what "the" Russian or "the" Frenchman wants.
Definitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications?
This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.
Well as somebody who is very anti US-monitoring, let me help you understand:
Your comments are so unproductive (i.e. emotional/irrelevant/us-vs-them) that they actually undermine the cause you say you're concerned about. You give the rest of us a bad name.
China could probably go much further. In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you). Much of that surveillance is automatic, and fed into police threat scores and FBI databases based off of online conversations (like this one) and other information (including financials, purchase history, social circle, etc).
Now, in the United States, if you want to disrupt some other kind of corruption (say, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists, and the FBI will infiltrate and seek the arrests of that behavior as well, enforcing the strict relationship that wealthy families have in the enforcement of American societal structure.
I'm so absolutely tired of people dismissing very real concerns and positions of people with the term "conspiracy theory"! First of all, gp isn't wrong, those things do happen in America and we have had plenty of proof leak over the years to back that up. Second, the entire history of the world is chock-full of conspiracy, so to dismiss points so blithely and naively as " conspiracy theory" indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Third, has everyone just forgotten that the term itself was pushed post JFK assassination as a psyop tool by the CIA to discredit anyone who questioned the Warren commission?
If it weren't for Snowden many of us who had been ranting about the NSA would still be getting dismissed with off-hand remarks of "conspiracy theorist" with a condescending undertone. Yet even as those of us warning about these issues move on to tell people about the next thing, we get the same thing. Even worse, after being proved right by Wikileaks or Snowden etc, those same people are still making excuses for their failure to heed those warnings. For example, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to start talking about NSA and to get "yeah we'll, we knew about echelon, it wasn't a surprise" type comments. Yes, those of us paying attention knew, but the problem is that we all got dismissed by smugly idiotic people with phrases like "crackpot conspiracy theorist"...
There is a huge difference between "that's not true, it's a conspiracy theory", and "oh sure it does happen, but at a different scale and with less bad consequences [not that I would want to suffer the worst consequences in either scenario]".
> "Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument.
To "that's a conspiracy theory" it actually is, and though I still agree that it's a red herring to talk about the US when China is brought up (and China or Russia or human nature when the US is brought up), it's not a "conspiracy theory" at all.
> It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.
> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
"False equivalence": Nope, not saying they are equivalent.
"Conspiracy theory": Nope, read the reporting on the Snowden documents, fusion centers, legal cases involving use of surveillance, statements by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It's all the same": I think what America is doing is both worse and of a different kind.
> In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you)
Have you tried? Did you know that the United States communist party has been in existence for a century? [0]
> (says, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists
I mean, I wouldn't trade my life for almost any other life - even a life of greater wealth and power.
But to take the point you've made and work through its conclusions: Hacker News skews heavily privileged male high-income engineer, and likely wouldn't trade their lives to live as an _American_ female, much less a Detroiter, Hispanic laborer, or American prison inmate.
Living in the world's sole superpower (most of HN) has, of course, its own advantages that we don't need to enumerate.
The cartoon at the top of this article (squinty eyes, fatty short figure) makes me uncomfortable, as it edges pretty close to old racist depictions of Asians and Blacks from half a century ago.
That said, the article itself takes a negative and biased approach to evaluating China's government. China's system seeks, and achieves, representation of its people through a variation of a social contract that has lasted - and been updated and modernized - through thousands of years.
China's current Communist Party is measured against specific outcomes, the livelihoods, outlooks, and possibilities of the people of China, which have never looked better (the next century has been dubbed by historians the "Chinese Century" based on the demographic, financial, cultural, and technological success of China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Century). That same party is measured against corruption, and recent efforts in the country to excise grift and nepotism have given its government new efficiency, purpose and effectivity.
Old Western power centers (Europe pre-WWII and America post-) may have some anxiety about the the relative loss of leadership that global scandals, lost legitimacy, financial crashes, and systemic corruption have wrought in recent years. Its with this anxiety that I find articles like this written: China is, and has been, doing something right, and the West needs to look at its own failings and correct them to succeed and keep pace with 21st century dynamism.
One of the key focal points of the DoD's research is the identification of the topology of social networks and the flow of trust, information, and rumors. The topology and the chokepoints across it which information is distributed are leverage point where ideas can be contended, disrupted, replaced, challenged or seeded. Doing this at scale requires minimal human operation - only enough to convince the targetted population and narrative centers that the propaganda content is legitimate social traffic - and also information systems to infer microculture so that the information programming can be fit inside the moral, judgemental, human, religious and social (e.g. politeness) parameters from large quantities of communication surveillance.
- We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard
- We're talking about others (Chinese) needing to rebel, blaming this on brainwashing, without adknowledging our own inability and unwillingness to act, without being willing to label this brainwashing
- We're building over the course of increasingly ignorant veiled-criticism posts of foreign cultures a dog-whistle for Chinese racism within our tech culture
- We're narrowly conceptualizing the issues fundamental to these technologies, spending our energy on exasperation that contributes to nationalistic sentiment, rather than addressing the global systemic abuse
- Our "blindspot" of admitting our own state the abuse of information fundamentally carves out, via the course of international law and sovereignty, the justification for other countries to do the exact same
In essence: fixing this kind of thing starts at home in the United States. Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.