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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives. This displays the virtues of our imperfect system better than anything else, imo.

Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.

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I am less worried about our democratic governments then I am about private entities, especially in sports and entertainment bending over to various totalitarian governments for a handful of bucks. Because that is making it easier for our governments to do the same, simply because people are used to it.

China as a strong lobby in DC [0]. And, while admitting you're wrong should show strength and courage, for some reason, probably due to media pressure among other things, the political discourse in the US doesn't allow people to admit they were wrong and course correct or just come to a new position when new information is found. Remember the huge campaign calling John Kerry a "flip-flopper" [1]? I suspect the lobbyist money is more of the driving factor here though. If you can somehow eliminate that, our elected leaders wouldn't have the motivation for lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry in the first place.

0 - https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-us-officials-who-now-...

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(politics)

> Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.

But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.

>one of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives

I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.

This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.

If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.

It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency

I largely agree. My point about not tolerating it extends to how we behave towards each other. Perhaps even primarily so.

> One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives

Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.

The best way for us to combat this is to strengthen our diplomatic relations and develop our economy, which is exactly want China is doing itself.

I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.

This is just wishful thinking. Doesn’t help other countries. We just think way too much of ourselves in the US and our influence in the world, specifically how our way of life influences other countries. It probably stems from the collapse of the USSR, which was mostly because of internal system rot but we attributed it to American freedom and democracy. Every foreign policy decision since then is taken with those lens and we ended up failing miserably in all of them.

I mean I think that is a very simplistic, limited and isolated point of view to address a population, but also very optimistic about the democratic West population capability to logically read situations.

I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.

What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of

what kind of example can the west be to the world

Well, because despite those failures, things can always be worse. This game is not zero-sum.

I suspect the two of you are agreeing more that in initially seems - IMHO the proper response of the west to the current time of troubles is to double down on the values of freedom over safety that made us the dominant cultural force. Stupidity exists in dictatorships also, it's when we're not willing to be distracted by propaganda against our rivals and look at our own mistakes that a democratic system lets much of that stupidity cancel itself out.

> I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out

Who is this?

> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp

https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.

>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia

If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...

Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.

"Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'. ", This bugs me so much. The biden administration literally complained to MSM about the bad news they were getting. In a few days CNN came out with "Gas prices are coming down ", being still not as low as the Trump era. Reminds me of 1984 when Winston makes up an article about chocolate rations

I'm confused by your complaint. Gas prices heave generally been heading down recently as best as I can tell. Gasbuddy.com/charts

From your source, gas was an average of ~2.40 on jan 20th. Rite after biden gets in gas spikes, peaking around 3.40 end of october. Now it's around 3.20. Still up by 80c nationally. But CNN is saying "gas is going down" trying to give biden a favorable image, instead of saying "Gas is still way up because of the ESG policies of the biden administration"

The headline from CNN I found is: "Finally some relief: Gasoline and natural gas prices are falling". Does that sound particularly positive? Not really, it actually emphasizes how bad it had been and how it's something that even needs relief. You'd rather they inject politics into their statement of fact headlines like your example? Is that even true? It's also been high recently in Europe so I'm skeptical.

This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.

Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.

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