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Comment by yourbandsucks | Hacker News Reader

1) I definitely think the hate is organic rather than 'manipulated'. It's an angry mob.

2) Most if not all of the china-haters display an astounding lack of context or cultural/historical awareness when talking about China. At their absolute best, they're presenting the xinjiang thing with no context and attempting to define the entire country with it (my wikipedia snark). Or reciting their 5th grade lessons about Russian communism as if that's relevant. At their worst.. it gets really ugly.

Here's what I think is going on: They're against dragonfly 'on principle', but then they hear the case about increased access for Chinese people being a net good. This causes dissonance. How to resolve it? Make the Chinese the bad guys. No more dissonance.

Those of us who know recent Chinese history are very suspicious of such ideological righteousness.

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The only dissonance is your own. Nobody is making the Chinese the bad guys. They are criticizing the Chinese government, which is certainly not representative of the Chinese in any way given that it is not elected and it crushes critics.

Google search might be convenient for citizens, but claiming that convenience outweighs the moral forfeiture of Google rubber stamping political censorship is a huge jump.

If you don't care about censorship, then it might be obvious to you that Google should move into China. It's not to people who care.

How sure are you that calling people "China-haters" is not a means to resolve your own cognitive dissonance?

> then they hear the case about increased access for Chinese people being a net good. This causes dissonance.

Not for me, since it's not about "what's good for Chinese non-dissidents", it's about what people who aren't already complicit with totalitarianism must not make themselves complicit with. You can do what you want, but I'll withdraw my support. If someone is a friend with someone who normalizes totalitarianism, I won't be their friend. Nothing more, nothing less, and from where I'm sitting, not my loss at all. What you think turns it all around to a "net good" doesn't even register for me, it's like a few grams on one end of the scale, hundreds of tons on the other.

I'm the kind of humorless German who thinks Germans who "don't want to be bothered about history" should not be allowed to vote (well not literally, but I have no respect for what they are "comfortable" with, I respect history and the demands it places on us, on anyone who would call themselves intellectual doubly so). Compared to that, China and Google and the US have nothing to move me with. There isn't even anything there to hate, for me. They are noobs in a very real sense, never achieved basic mastery in anything I would consider crucial and the minimum, and now innoculate themselves against said mastery. I'm pretty sure that's the distinction between "noob" and "newbie". Oh, and everybody looking down on them is a "hater", can't possibly be someone who knows something they don't. It's always virtue-signalling, never virtue. What must not be can't be.

I can't speak for anyone else. But if you implicitly lump me together with someone I may utterly disagree with on a thousand things, then I'll talk back.

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