Ex-Canadian Diplomat Michael Kovrig Detained in China | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Canadian Diplomat Michael Kovrig Detained in China

cbc.ca

71 pointscolinprince19 comments

And so it begins. I guess this is what they meant when they said that Canada would "pay a heavy price" [0].

[0]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-will-p...

This is a small price, just a warning shot. Think of Canadian NGOs, businesses in China, multi-billion $$ contracts etc etc.

Huawei is China's line in the sand and we are living in interesting times. (This is just business, USA would also send the equivalent of aircraft carriers for AAPL, Intel etc.)

> The exact reason for the detention was not immediately clear

Without that information, this story is meaningless. He could have done something very bad that justifies his detention. If China refused to explain why he is detained, that's another story.

I think that China doesn't really deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore. They'll probably make up some bullshit excuse and why they detained the man, but it'll be clear to everyone it's retaliation for the Huawei thing.

Ah yes, once you dislike someone enough, it's okay to suspend due process. Got it.

More like once someone has proven to be untrustworthy and evil a million times, not to mention threatened to retaliate, then it's okay to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt, especially when the timing is so suspecious to say the least.

Is the timing really suspecious? Or do those things happen all the time and we just never pay attention to them until we have a reason?

The timing is suspicious in that it comes shortly after a statement that "Canada will pay a heavy price."

It's not like the US or other Western countries arrested someone and then found a reason to make it stick. Nations are very much alike here. I think the core problem that was tried to address is the mentality of "China did it, so it must be with bad intent".

> China did it, so it must be with bad intent

Yes, this is called 'pattern recognition'.

And inference by pattern recognition is fallacious, as any Poisson distribution will demonstrate.

Good pattern recognition doesn't work that well when it's trained with biased datasets.

Well... Chinese officials refused to explain the detention, so it is another story as you said.

Trade war is taking prisoners now.

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