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Comment by anon_d | Hacker News Reader

Yes, exactly.

It's not like the US media hasn't been successfully spreading it's own global propaganda for ages.

An end to the US's media/academic monopoly on truth-setting is a very welcome change. We need real competition here.

I agree that competition of some kind could be welcome, but welcoming the state sponsored propaganda of autocratic, corrupt and repressive states just because their own hegemonic desires conflict with those of the US strikes me as being the most politically facile stance imaginable.

I suspect that any competition would always be portrayed as autocratic, corrupt and repressive, as we are influenced by the other side of the propaganda. Not that this is a lie. I really think that you will find some degree of repression, autocratism and corruption in any state seeking to attain or trying to keep some degree of global power and facing some opposition.

Maybe hypothetically. But in this case we know that we're talking about China so there's no need to speculate about relative autocracy, corruption and repression.

The degree and ends do matter. Chinese autocratic actions are not equivalent to the shaping of American discourse by for-profit institutions.

I will trust the one that has codified free speech - however flawed.

I don't think whataboutism is automatically wrong. But in the context of hn threads on China, I feel it often adds an unhelpful layer of abstraction.

It's never clear if people doing the whatabouting actually dispute the negative characterization of China, or whether they agree with it but also want to change the subject to a broader topic in way the unfocuses the lense of the conversation.

The moral condemnation of what China is doing is not information I want to be lost from the conversation, and that seems to always be an effect of the whatabouting.

The problem here is that the media of democratic and not so repressive states failed us miserably. It's not that almost all of them joined in unison when Afghanistan was attacked, and in a similar way during the invasion on Iraq that ultimately gave birth to ISIS. Even discussions on current copyright and patent laws are avoided. (As a thought experiment, imagine the Gates Foundation supporting generic equivalents of expensive drugs and going to a war with the Big Pharma; that's unthinkable, even though many more lives could be saved in this way - see the case of Sofosbuvir.) You need to be in line with the American values and ways of thinking or else you face trouble. This happens on so many levels people even stopped paying attention, let alone questioning it.

Not true. I think you're conflating content with the traditional (for-profit) distribution mediums.

For-profit channels distribute profitable ideas. Profitsble ideas have mass appeal. Unsurprising.

However, there are no social pressure to write for the mainstream (beyond the practical constraints of our capitalist society). Social media has empowered counter-culture narratives toward both good and bad ends.

Go criticize the state in China and compare your experience with the US - guess which state will "fail"

I get your point, but in the West they'll smear you and try to strangle you economically, if you're one of these small, independent outlets. Also, platforms like YouTube is where the audience is, but you'd get ads pulled as soon as you mention something like Iran etc.

Honestly, the way flagship american news corporations publish fawning hagiographies of people like McCain and Bush and Obama and Bill Gates, justify and promote wars, etc. it's really not meaningfully distinct from "statist" equivalents.

Americans criticize countries singing anthems and making military parades and all that stuff, while seemingly completely unaware of Mt. Rushmore, anthems and jets in sports games, etc.

When you already have a bunch of fires burning setting more fires makes them compete for oxygen, but that doesn't help living things.

I would say the proper reaction to bullshit is critical thinking. Take someone like James Randi, and imagine instead of disproving deceptions he had just pretended to receive a message from spirits that this or that person was faking something. That's "competition" alright, but it's not helping, and it just helps normalizes something that has greater potential for abuse than use.

James Randi has been caught outright lying and is not to be relied on:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/...

http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/04/randis-involvem...

Thanks, I had no idea, but that was really just an example I made up on the spot. In some cases, you can fight wildfires with fire, but that's also besides the point, which isn't about James Randi or fire but propaganda and deception, and how best to counter it.

Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals.

The result of this system is not truth.

The result of this system is propaganda successful disguised as objectivity...

which is exactly what you need in order to effectively manipulate a democracy.

> Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals.

Yes, and it makes it all the more damning, because it kinda shows we know how logic works, what standards or principles are, but for "social reasons" we can suspend that.

> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. [..] Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

-- George Orwell

This now split up into more echo chambers, little "orthodoxies", but the sum of that is not truth either.

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