Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

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> The U.S. has allowed the wealth gap to grow to levels that are pretty scary.

China has scary levels of wealth gap too. I think it is probably has more.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/04/06/income-inequali...

> The U.S. has continued to elect inept and crony politicians who wish to look backward instead of bring the nation forward

China is perceived to much more corrupt than the US. It is not even a competition. This index is not perfect but this is the closest we have to measuring corruption uniformly across different systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

If the US is declining and China is ascending, why do we so many Chinese PhDs students (many of them my friends and hate going back) who want to stay back in the US with many years of wait time?

https://www.boundless.com/blog/visa-bulletin/

Let us please stick to facts and data.

(All the falsifiable statements in this parent comment are false but for some reason it is on top.)

It’s amazing that someone who has a deep nuanced view of American politics and critiques the minutia of American current events from the inside, then blindly believes vague propaganda from China (“China united and strong! Great and competent leader!”). Super common perspective from upper-middle class Americans who argue on HN and Reddit.

If you don’t live in China, don’t speak Chinese, didn’t grow up in China, have no Chinese family, then you simply have to idea what the fuck is really going on there.

Seconding this opinion.

China may need no help from US to jeopardise its ascendancy.

So far, China's progress came at a greatest expense of its political establishment.

For long, people have expected that at some point the people in power will decide that they need to put a leash on the country that gets too far ahead of its political leadership, and prevent it from getting "too successful" for them to manage.

They way Xi's administration not simply acting on that, but like tripling and quadrupling down on it in the last few years is the biggest proof that they have passed that point.

Yeah, this is a pretty common affliction among well-to-do Americans, and I just do not understand it. Remember when Sam Altman said it's easier to discuss controversial ideas in Beijing than San Francisco?

That is just plain scary. Reminds of this old Soviet joke.

Q: Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the USA?

A: Yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan”, and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan",and you will not be punished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You have a good point here, and this way of making it just makes everything worse.

We've had to ask you this kind of thing many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781294

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543721

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343386

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19010638

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17822100

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20805021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667959

... and that's just for starters. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on? I appreciate the good comments you make here and don't want to ban you, and at the same time, there is a problem.

Was the problem the class component? I thought it was relevant because there is a monoculture on HN and Reddit, and most of the readers likely identified with that.

Only insofar as it's part of a putdown package. Really it's the combination of pejorative language (especially when personal), outright insults ("blindly believes vague propaganda"), putdowns ("super common perspective from [etc.]"), aggressive argumentativeness (your last sentence). The whole deal.

I'd be careful about perceptions like "there is a monoculture on HN and Reddit". Trying to pin down anything concrete about that is really slippery. Such perceptions are notoriously in the eye of the beholder, meaning we tend to create them without realizing it's we who are creating them, and it leads us to do battle with our own demons. Large statistical clouds like HN (let alone Reddit) furnish tons of material to craft demons with, far more than we need. That makes the pictures extremely convincing—with enough degrees of freedom you can fit any curve to any picture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980339

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098687

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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