Hacker News Reader

Comment by ticmasta | Hacker News Reader

Well, we saw with the USSR that decades of Cold War couldn't be defused politically but Levis and Coca Cola went a long way towards bridging the divide.

Now we have China which is basketball-mad but the problem is we can't use the carrot of the NBA to entice them towards us as long as the NBA is willing to trade their product under China's terms for a big enough paycheque. The NBA's attempt to paint themselves as a non-participant is totally unacceptable. You either stand for something or you stand for nothing; you don't get to quietly profit from the situation while declaring you have no position. That's the "good people on both sides" argument we rightly called out as total BS.

View on HN

The NBA is about basketball, not about something that is quickly turning into McCarthyism. Demanding that they should 'stand for something' is behaving exactly how China and Chinese companies are accused of behaving.

The concept of "enticing China towards the US" is also naive at best. China is not a small country that the US can turn into a satellite. It is a superpower with its own views and interests and however its political regime will evolve it will not be either aligned with or under the leadership of the US. The US government knows that and that is the problem they have with China.

Please see comments in this thread or Google about their standing for gender issues in the United States. They’ve positioned themselves as social conscious.

Ok, fair. But how about them being free to not interfere with what their players and managers support?

Is that like how IBM was about business machines when they sold equipment to help Nazis with the Final Solution? Are living Uighur prisoners not being chopped up for their body parts, today?

It is true that the CCP loves capitalism without conscience. The owners of the NBA (and MLB/NFL) seem to like that idea too, but the league has posititioned itself differently, as having a social conscience. Which, BTW, is different to McCarthyism. (It's a real tell that you use that playbook BTW.)

Culturally, China is not an exporter. It imports culture massively, but it isn't IP it can easily copy.

Authoritarian regimes are usually pretty bad at creating cultural products, except the ones like gruesome museums. Though I'm looking forward to HK producing its own Ai Weiwei or Guo Jian.

This is a common self-aggrandizing misconception in the West, but Levis and Coca Cola didn't do shit to bring the USSR down. Neither did a half-senile actor from California banging his shoe on a desk, and yelling about tearing down a wall.

Glasnost, Perestroika, Afghanistan, economic stagnation, and the growing squeamishness of the country's leadership to use mass violence for political repression did.

If the economy of the USSR were growing 7% year over year, the Berlin wall would be six hundred feet tall by now, and communists would still be in charge of half of Europe.

Change in superpowers comes from within, not from foreign grandstanding.

Khrushchev’s shoe incident happened 20 years before Reagan was president.

To explain, and ruin the joke:

I am purposefully, and quite absurdly, conflating Khrushchev's rather embarrassing shoe debacle with the rather embarrassing overstatement of Reagan's oratorical prowess and influence, in the affair of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many people hold to the mistaken belief that he can take any credit for it. [1]

[1] Occasionally, they trot out 'Star Wars bankrupts the Soviet Union' as his greatest triumph. No, it wasn't eight years of Star Wars that starved the Soviet Economy, it was eight decades of military spending taking up >40% of GDP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com