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Comment by Bayesian_bro | Hacker News Reader

This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything else. China is very consequentialist, they care about prosperity and success over everything else. I'm a pretty red blooded American (I drive a black smoke diesel truck and have enough firearms and ammo to make it pretty far in the apocalypse). I wonder what ethical system will be more successful in the future. We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The Chinese know that Tiananmen Square was a bad thing, but they want to forget about it and move on (consequentialism). In America our Tiananmen Square is probably slavery and we apparently don't want to forget about it even if it rips our county apart (deontological). What system will succeed in the next 100 years? The pandemic really showed me some of the issues of Western deontological ethics.

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Whitewashing history to save the economy is certainly an interesting take.

Let's be clear: the reason the Chinese government wants to forget and move on from Tiananmen Square is because it threatens their power. The scariest thing for an autocrat is the people realizing that people hold the real power, and that all systems of government only exist because of the consent of the governed (implied in China's case, explicit in a democracies).

Yet the freedom of speech in the US hasn't prevented a gerontocracy of multimillionaires (both in government and outside of it) to preside over a servant class. We have mass incarceration in for-profit prisons whose inhabitants protect California mansions from wildfires, "gig economy workers" without health insurance, and laborers who are effectively indentured servants who cannot leave their jobs without losing health care. In every city on the west coast, the tent cities grow larger by the day.

"At least we can talk about it..." Yes, talk, and talk, and talk. This has come about over decades. How many decades of "freedom" will it take to actually bring change? Could it be that endless debate on Twitter is our modern bread and circuses that will amount to nothing?

Completely disagree with your portrayal of consequentialism. Freedom absolutely provides utility, and allowing the government to disappear people who disagree with it is in no way a path to maximizing utility.

I don't think you're down in the weeds enough. China does have freedom to a degree. Obviously there's lots of ways where they have zero freedom also. But it certainly looks like the CCP is attempting to maximize freedom where it provides utility and minimize it where it hurts their goals or prosperity.

I vehemently disagree with that stance, but I do want acknowledge the CCP's actual stance.

Disappearing people who accuse the government/government officials of wrongdoing will never maximize utility.

I think you will disappear if you offend anyone too powerful, even in first worlds/democratic countries.

I think that is a weak argument and difficult or impossible to prove.

The better argument is against utilitarianism itself. Humans deserve some rights even if it means less utility.

I liked your take on this situation and the tradeoffs, but please note I'm a red blooded American that just ordered a tesla, doesn't own guns, and couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year.

> who won the Super Bowl last year

Tom Brady is usually a good guess.

Yeah, I'd push back a bit on the "red blooded American" = "rural truck driver/gun owner" idea, at least if "red blooded American" is supposed to mean "typical American" or "indisputably American" or "American who wishes their country to flourish".

My backstory is that I used to live in SF for 10 years before this pandemic. We moved to a rural western area because of the pandemic. I need the diesel truck to tow trailers.

I think this is overly reductive, even if it’s largely pointed in the right direction.

For example, I think the best way to interpret the pandemic isn’t through ethical systems, it’s through state capacity and competence. America didn’t fumble the pandemic because of deontological ethics, it fumbled because the federal government was just straight up incompetent. Without the federal government coordinating the crisis, every state was left to try its own strategy, which really does not work during a pandemic.

Furthermore china might have eventually taken a “utilitarian” approach, but only after their first strategy of denial and repression failed. Like many authoritarian regimes China’s first interest is in their own stability, not prosperity per se. In cases where the prosperity of the citizens and the pride of the party are in conflict, China will clearly favor the latter over the former.

A very similar thing happens with “democracy.” In America it’s basically just anything that calls itself democracy and vaguely follows some notion of Western democracy is just accepted as the obvious best way to organize society.

You’ll get a lot of head scratching if you ask questions like “What if it turns out that the correlation between government policies and the policy preferences of the population is stronger in some supposedly ‘undemocratic’ countries than in major Western democracies?” After the head-scratching you’ll usually get some kind of argument that strips the former population of agency, like “oh well they’re just brainwashed.” Kinda ironic for supposed proponents of democracy to strip people of their agency.

If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government.

However, understanding the pro's and con's of any type of government, including autocracies, is a worthy pursuit. We can learn something from anyone.

> If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government.

But you would need to show that they are actually being stripped of their agency. You can't just say "I declare that their government doesn't represent their preferences, and when they say that the government actually does represent their preferences, that's because they can't think for themselves." Having different preferences than you is not sufficient evidence of brainwashing. That's pretty circular, and you could just as easily say "Western democracy is bad, and anyone who lives in a Western democracy who says they like it is just brainwashed."

If a government severely punishes debate about its behavior or views it wants accepted and unchallenged, or has a system in place to eliminate information in the public sphere that it does not want you to encounter, through technology and overwhelming pressure on organizations and individuals, ...

... that's all you need to know. That is a situation designed precisely to stay in power despite not responding to a freely informed public's preferences.

If an autocratic leader actually asked its citizens for their preferences on whether the autocrat should stay in power, and abided by the result - it would not be an autocracy.

We’re talking about the form of government though, not specific acts of censorship about specific government actions. Those are definitely bad! But I don’t think there are secrets about the form of government of, say, China, and how it is similar and different than, say, the United States.

Not everything is measured by economic success. Liberal democracy is a value in of itself not just for financial gain. Could be that the Chinese system is better economically, who knows. But to me it sounds very alien to live there - I wouldn't want to. They don't align with most of my values. Now, present America which is fast becoming eaten by radicals may also become not aligned with my values at some point (at that point Europe will be the last standing), but for now it's better for people who appreciate liberal democracy.

It's hard to know if the information we get out of China is reasonably accurate, for a given value of 'reasonably accurate'.

It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.

For sure. The lack of transparency is a given in an authoritarian regime and I'm sure there are consequences. Isn't Covid a good example? Chinese scientists who tried to ring the alarm where harassed or worse when the whole outbreak was beginning. Kinda reminds me of what happened in Chernobyl.

You also have to be aware of the language barrier/lack of voices from within China who can give you context of what is happening. News that you hear about China are mostly written by western media who has little to no clue about what actually happened (remember the Bloomberg report on the spy chip?). I would exercise caution when reading anything online, especially at this very low SNR climate.

Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.

> lack of voices from within China

Whose fault is that? China only has one voice as a policy. I'll take Western media's reporting over what the Chinese party is saying more often than not. The media has its own problems but still.

letting the government have total control over your life works great until someone gets in charge that does bad things.

Then you get 60-80 million killed by their own government in the great leap forward.

Historically categorizing America like this might have made sense but ever since 9/11 it’s been less and less true. How else do you explain the economic response around the 2008 recession, the patriot act and everything in the Snowden leaks, our insane wars that are ostensibly not about oil futures, or the insane amount of money printing and spending in the wake of covid? I’m not even sure I’d be willing to buy the argument that China is more consequentialist than we are.

I don’t think that Tiananmen Square is their slavery. When I was in high school we had a guy visit from China and I dragged him to the school library and showed him the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen Square. He’d never heard of it. Same experience when I discussed it with Chinese friends in college. It’s not because Chinese society wants to get over it — China does not have such a thing as public opinion. Don’t look at China with rose colored glasses in the context of their 2021 economy, you have to remember how backwards and broke they were just 20 years ago. It was a totalitarian regime and it’s still a totalitarian regime, just a more wealthy one.

In summary, I agree that it seems like “consequentialism” has won, but it’s not the case that the two are battling it out to see which is better. Both countries independently chose consequentialism, and maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

Chinas pandemic outcome remains to be seen. Their zero Covid approach may prove increasingly challenging as new variants become more contagious and the rest of the world takes a maintenance approach.

I think a centrally controlled society’s IQ is the sum if it’s leaders. A free society’s IQ is the sum of its people. That makes me optimistic about the prospects for the US.

What is the bandwidth of political leaders in US occupied by? If you can have an abortion or not, who can vote and in what conditions, if vaccines are a good thing or a bad thing. Basically issues which were settled 100 years ago in other places.

Meanwhile China built thousands of miles of high-speed train in the last 10 years (while US built basically none), is about to have more navy ships than the US and so on.

https://twitter.com/SpiritofHo/status/1470145473315016704

The US leaves far more to people outside the government. We get stuff like Space X.

China has profited greatly by allowing its people more economic autonomy, but even the most successful are subject to State control of whatever the State wants to control, whenever the State wants to control it. See Jack Ma.

We will never know China's pandemic outcome because the data their govt releases is not trustworthy. Perhaps you meant only their economic outcome?

I'm a French immigrant in China.

I think you're building a fake dichotomy: as a politician in France once said, borders are the only hope we have to escape if we dont like what we have. It's fine to have many models and important we can move in between them. I agree China cares about the result now but it's probably temporary: once the middle class is proportionally more important, priorities will shift, they already have somewhat. Xi Jinping announcing in glorious pomp a new stock exchange in Beijing is, for all the flaws of the communists, sort of different from what Mao would have done.

Tiananmen is not something the Chinese want to forget, but that the communists want to hide, it's a bit different. But, since there's always balance in everything, rather than throw themselves wave after wave on their bullets, they make the most of what they can get now and bide their time. If that can give you some sense of relief, I never met a pro communist Chinese, never one, who would defend the party: they only ever say stuff like "bah, we had an emperor before, it's the same with another name", hardly a support of the ideology you'll agree lol.

In America your Tiananmen are the civilian deaths and war crimes in Afghanistan, and see, you forgot about them and prefered to talk about someth you reformed already, like a Chinese would say of nobility and servitude under the empire. Face your demons, if you dare :)

Summing up this response as

> you accuse people of this while you do that

Assuming this is right (and even if it's not), do not confuse the values and actions of a government with the values of its people. The CCP has gone out of its way to remove Tiananmen from history. Many bureaucrats in the US government wish they had the power to erase points in history as what the CCP wields.

To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear.

In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.

I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing.

> just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China

Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.

There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard.

The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controve...

What is this substantial evidence? A one of the protestors moving to the US isn’t terribly convincing.

They machine gunned and steam rolled their own people by the thousands. Used road equipment to make them into a giant “meat pie” (British ambassador’s description) soaked the sea of mangled corpses in gas and lit it on fire. Then they drove over it repeatedly and washes the body parts and ashes down the drain.

This is not a two sides issue. It doesn’t matter if the students were radicalized etc. the Chinese Govt murdered thousands of people who questioned it. Completely barbaric system of govt but in line with their current use of slave labor and concentration camps.

Tiananmen Square: foreign interference is unclear.

9/11: Clear foreign involvement.

You’re comparing these two things because they both have foreign involvement?

Why would you describe black smoke diesel as American?

I believe they are referring to "rolling coal". Its the practice of modifying a diesel truck to run dirty for the purposes of directing the black cloud at someone.

They are contrasting their viewpoint by identifying some of their other traits in terms of "hard right" characterizations in a somewhat poetic manner, e.g. those that would stereotypically come from someone who would blanket condemn Chinese policy based purely on it not being America + Freedom. i.e. "If even _I_, as someone typically far away from X, think Y, then...". It would be like saying "I own five Tesla's but am a bit skeptical of this whole electric car thing because...""

Americans obviously don't love freedom above all, at least not uniformly across the country. Many seem to be surprisingly willing to give it up in return for a sense of safety.

I would qualify your comment about "prosperity and success" to say that the CCP (which is not the same as "China") cares about average prosperity and the further entrenchment of the ruling elite. Chinese people are too numerous, varied, and under-studied (since no honest political surveys are done there) for me to comment on their overall culture.

There's a lot Id like to discuss about the logic in this comment, but one thing really struck me 'the Chinese know tienamen square was a bad thing'...

I have a number of Chinese friends from college and they universally view this event as a CIA fraud with no actual basis in historical reality. I really would like to know what your basing your logic here on.

I think that deontological vs consequentialist ethics is a spectrum. If Covid were as painful and dangerous as Ebola, people would be much more likely to accept stricter quarantines and mandates.

I think the problem with Western deontology is that it is no longer rooted in consequences and has become a parody of itself. Take US foreign affairs, for example. We used to care about limiting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The most efficient way to do so was to support anti-communist dictators that could be bought out. However, this was sold to the people as "spreading democracy". A generation later, those in power genuinely believed that America is supposed to spread democracy, which is why we spent trillions of dollars trying to do so in the Middle East to little effect.

Wow. not "forgetting about slavery" is tearing the country apart? You are so far down the racist q-anon rabbit hole, I doubt you can see your way out. The US is today, and always has been deeply racist. That didn't end when slavery ended. The main forces tearing this country apart today are white nationalists who were so freaked out that cops started being held accountable for modern day lynchings that they are trying to overthrow the government.

I definitely voted for Biden.

A lot of Chinas current decision making doesn’t seem too consequentialist. Cracking down on tech companies? Is that supposed to make China a stronger country?

China wants to be a “great power,” but that’s more deontological than consequentialist.

For example, is China’s current naval expansion creating good consequences? An increased GDP? Higher life expectancy? Higher literacy rates?

Not really.

How about the Belt and Road project? Is it increasing GDP?

We have to also consider the ethical framing of “success.” Perhaps success is ripping the country apart rather than forgetting the moral blight of slavery.

Truthfully, I don’t have a good answer here myself beyond, “uh, something in between willful forgetting and never ending cross-group animus.”

As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as I am, and no more.

>>> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics.

The free world developed the vaccine, and virtually the entire R&D and manufacturing infrastructure that made vaccine development possible.

Also, response to the pandemic has been highly regional, suggesting that we don't have a single unifying "ethical system." There are also two polarized camps related to the presentation of information to the public, such as the effects of carbon dioxide, the results of elections, and so forth.

I wonder if there's a better example than the pandemic for supporting your hypothesis.

I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?

The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.

> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?

This is a legitimate comparison between the CCP and the government of Oklahoma. It is a bad comparison in terms of responses. China fears and represses discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience.

There are a large number of bills in US state legislatures aimed at suppressing honest and uncensored discussion of the Tulsa race massacre.

In America, we should discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experiences. And we do, a lot of the time. But not always.

> There are a large number of bills in US state legislatures aimed at suppressing honest and uncensored discussion of the Tulsa race massacre.

Bullshit. There is not one.

Name a single one

https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/oklahoma-lawmaker-propo...

This doesn't ban discussion of the sort we're having here.

Controlling how classroom time is managed is not suppression of speech. The teacher can't spend the whole day preaching the gospel, either, and that doesn't amount to suppression of religion.

It may not be the best example of the U.S. remembering its failures, but it's nowhere close to what China does to force people to forget.

Did you want to make sure it's the same one, that your preferred media outlets are talking about?

It's more than one. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=legislature+bill+crt&t=h_&ia=web

? Banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools is not the same thing as banning any discussion of the Tulsa race massacre.

I didn't claim it bans "any discussion." I claimed it bans "honest and uncensored discussion."

> There are a large number of bills in US state legislatures aimed at suppressing honest and uncensored discussion of the Tulsa race massacre.

Which bills are those?

Is it somehow better that the government of the United States doesn’t even need to try to suppress the information?

I'm not even sure it doesn't try. Didn't some politicians made actions in the recent past regarding the so called critical race theory?

> Is it somehow better that the government of the United States doesn’t even need to try to suppress the information?

Is the claim the United States is not having a discussion, in public and politics, reckoning with its racial past?

No, the claim is just that most Americans have never heard of it, even now after it was featured in some critically-acclaimed (although probably not massively watched) TV shows, and certainly not for the century before those TV shows.

> In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience.

Well, some do. The anti-CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that. Do you suppose they'll be teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma high schools in the near future?

ETA I think people were taking me the wrong way. I added "anti-" above. The brouhaha is all the people trying to prevent their kids from hearing anything in history class that makes them feel bad. To the extent that they're putting the force of law behind suppressing the discussion of ugly events in US history, I would say this is pretty analogous to the policy of the CCP.

On a higher level the issue is not one sided and focusing solely on one side is what the CRT brouhaha is all about. It’s an ideology not an attempt at portraying reality.

There is no human group in history that holds the moral high ground. Trying to convey anything else is tribalism.

CRT has nothing to do with teaching history.

The parent commenter was referring to "the CRT brouhaha" (how the broader issue is playing out in the real world, not just what the academic term "critical race theory" does or doesn't refer to). The brouhaha is affecting how history is taught in at least some places.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/us/texas-critical-race-theory...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-sta...

https://time.com/6075193/critical-race-theory-debate/

Also, CRT has probably never been taught in an American K-12 public school. It's an academic subject you would only encounter at a university in a very specific field of study.

> Well, some do. The CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that.

Yes, because "learning from our experience" is yet another form of oppression according to CRT pushers. And "discuss and debate" are routinely dismissed as "White" values.

> Yes, because "learning from our experience" is yet another form of oppression according to CRT pushers.

I don't understand. Are you saying people who discuss critical race theory are opposed to learning from our experience? Could you characterize what these people are doing? I'm genuinely curious. I don't mean to be aggressive, I just don't understand your point.

> CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that

I'm not claiming that some people in America would like to live under a totalitarian regime. I'm saying that's not what we have, and that most Americans don't want that.

We can look at China, get scared, and note the similar systems in our own. But we shouldn't be lazy and conclude that, because bees and birds both have eyes they are fundamentally the same thing.

Omitting something from a curriculum is one thing.

Attempting to scrub it from the internet and all of human consciousness is a whole new level of tyranny.

If I google "Tulsa Race Massacre" I immediately get results and information. Try searching for "Tiananmen square massacre" in China and see what kind of results you get.

One is subjectively more egregious than the other. There isn't even a real comparison here.

Sure. I was just responding to "In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience."

It's clear that some Americans would prefer to hide and forget inconvenient parts of US history in the same way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square.

Personally I'm strongly on the side of remembering history so we can learn from it and not be doomed to repeat it.

In the same way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square?

You are free in America to talk about the Tulsa race massacre as much as you like. You can look it up on the web, you can buy books about it. The government won't threaten you for doing so. It is taught in some schools and universities. In Oklahoma, it is required by law to be taught in schools. Every year at the end of May there are articles published about how no one knows about the Tulsa race massacre.

That is not equivalent to the way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square. Those two things are not the same at all. America is not China. Freedom is not slavery.

That is all true. That doesn't change the fact that there are people in the US who would prefer that these events are not taught in school. It's good and important that they are, but there are people who would prefer to see only nationalistic feel-good history be taught. There are also schools that ban certain books, important, literary books.

These are things to be wary of, and not be complacent about.

I don't know about Oklahoma, but I did learn about the Tulsa Massacre in high school. I was also taught that it's my responsibility as a citizen to question my government and hold them to account, to never blindly trust them, and to reject nationalism. This is a pretty clear difference...

The Tulsa race massacre which has been featured in pop culture and all over the press in the last few years because a lot of Americans didn’t know about it.

The Tiananmen Square massacre which is censored to even mention digitally in China, and state agents intimidate citizens outside China just for mentioning it.

Also note that Tulsa was 100 years ago. Around the time of the birth of the CCP, which has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since that time. Tiananmen was in 1989.

Any attempt to equivocate these two is utterly intellectually dishonest.

Okay so a more apt comparison would be 30 years after the Tulsa race massacre in America to see if was easier to talk about it

Or 100 years after the Tianamen Square massacre in China to see if its easier to talk about it then

great. very productive.

It’s a delusional if you think that in the 50s, there were American agents intimidating their citizens abroad for talking about the Tulsa race massacre.

The idea that it is OK for it to take another 50 years before the Chinese can talk about Tiananmen without fear of state reprisal, seems to be an apology for totalitarian oppression.

“Agree with me or its an apology for totalitarian oppression“

Alternatively its just not an apt comparison.

Sure but you knew it wasn’t an apt comparison when you made it, which is what makes it apologist.

I was talking about yours. The thing i initially replied to.

sschueller made the original comparison; it sounds like both you and zepto agree it was a bad comparison.

Good observation

In the 50s there was US agent repression and intimidation of beliefs around communism (see McCarthyism). The KKK was also still rampant and had members that were police or other "state officials". So ... maybe US isn't so different after all?

The KKK wasn’t a part of the state.

And yes, there was state sponsored anti-communism in the 50s, but it is not even close to comparable. Nobody was being intimidated for mentioning communism, or even advocating for it.

People were targeted for group membership. This is still wrong, but please stop trying to make it seem equivalent to what is happening today in China. The fact that you have to go back 50 years to find an example shows how different the two countries are today.

You seriously need to read your history.

The KKK was a defacto paramilitary arm of several states and municipalities during that time. Many sheriffs, and more than a few high level state government officials were members. Folks got killed and programs of terror were instituted against ‘uppity’ populations using the KKK as the instrument.

There was widespread state supported suppression (as in literal FBI members harassing and destroying peoples lives) for anyone who even SEEMED to POTENTIALLY support communism, even if they literally had no idea what the FBI was talking about.

If you dared publicly support communism, many folks got deported, disappeared, or worse.

The KKK was not a paramilitary arm of the state.

To claim it was is a lie.

The KKK was a terrorist organization bent on violently oppressing Black Americans. It was never part of the state.

as I said, it was a defacto paramilitary arm - [https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/exhibits/show/rebelgoverno...] (one of many, many examples)

Or do you think the gov’t of Alamance and Caswell counties just somehow lost the paperwork?

Why do you think the Federal government sent in federal Marshalls (and more) so James Meredith could attend Ole’ Miss? Could it have something to do with the Governor himself taking over as registrar to block it, and numerous threats of violence, including from the KKK? [https://aas.olemiss.edu/documenting-the-african-american-exp...]

If you want to talk First, Second, or Third Klan, then sure. But if you want to spin the Klan in the south as a bunch of radicals running around in the woods? That’s just false.

It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’ - and were aided, abetted, and in many cases actively led by members of various state and local governments. When Lincoln was assassinated, reconciliation or follow through post civil war mostly stopped, and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm. And it was very effective. Ask any black man or woman living in the Deep South.

Now they’re mostly a bunch of loser types (Third Klan or post Third Klan depending on where you draw the line), but they’re still somewhat dangerous. And to not remember the history is even more dangerous.

> it was a defacto paramilitary arm

Which means it wasn’t ever a paramilitary arm of the state. You just want to pretend it was because that way you can act as if the KKK and the state were part of the same thing, which they never were.

> It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’

Yes, because there were a bunch of racists who were operating a secret paramilitary organization…

> and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm

As you admit here.

Nobody is denying how bad the KKK was. It simply not true to say that it was ever part of the state.

Try this quote from Wikipedia:

“Organized in the Southern United States, it was suppressed through federal intervention in the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secret as to membership and plans. Its numerous chapters across the South were suppressed around 1871, through federal law enforcement.”

It was a terrorist organization which attempted to overthrow state governments and which the state suppressed.

That is about as far away from being an arm of the state as you can get, ‘defacto’ or not.

Well, they were busier intimidating and harassing American citizens abroad for daring to say anything in support of Communism. I doubt Tulsa made the radar.

In the US in the 50s if you talked about race in the wrong manner you were prevented from going abroad in the first place. (See: Paul Robeson)

You can talk about the Tulsa race massacre. You can make TV shows depicting it. Forces may have conspired to keep it from the forefront of the American consciousness, but nobody was going around burning the books or throwing people in jail for bringing it up.

> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?

Since HBO's Watchmen, I've heard and read about the Tulsa race massacre quite a bit. It's frequently mentioned in the media now.

I was shocked that this was almost totally unknown and unspoken about prior to the show, but I guarantee you that it won't remain that way.

That's the difference with Tiananmen.

> Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.

Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.

But for what it’s worth, laws regarding public alcohol consumption are a local thing. There are plenty of places in the United States where public alcohol consumption isn’t a crime. And of course, you’re free to drink privately.

But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.

> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.

I would say it's a much more relevant metric than the ability to own a shitload of guns, or to drive a black smoke diesel truck, the latter of which is honestly bafflingly antisocial behavior. The definition of "freedom" should begin with the freedom from others pushing their negative externalities onto you.

> The definition of "freedom" should begin with the freedom from others pushing their negative externalities onto you.

While I (European) generally agree with you, this could also be a point against public consumption of alcohol ;)

I think the attitude might be that we should prohibit and punish the behaviors, not the source. If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor. And if someone is drinking alcohol without being disruptive, is there cause to punish or prohibit their behavior?

Except it should be, because alcoholism is in fact a lethal disease all on its own and frequently overlies serious mental health issues, including things like domestic abuse, drunk driving, etc. Where there’s smoke, look for fire.

But this was about public vs private drinking. Many, if not most, problem drinkers drink in private. Cherry-picking some visible issue X, that may be related to a more complex underlying problem Y, just because it's visible, is called window-dressing and is in general a very ineffective way to try to solve Y (and honestly, solving Y is often not even the goal, marketing speeches notwithstanding).

I think we have a disagreement about the number of problems. I agree with you at to the 0th iteration but in the particular example of alcohol, the externalities are so large, the perturbation is important and we should make sure the model is “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

So your statement “If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor”

Please find a different example, or, if you believe in the goal of improving human society, please revise that statement. Belligerence and other disruptiveness involving alcohol should be tracked, because it can reveal the deeper problem that is present in some (honestly, many) cases of public belligerence and disruptiveness once a trend is established. Saving lives is important all on it’s own.

> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.

How so? It seems to me that the people's ability to use and enjoy public spaces as they fit (of course unless they intrude on other people's freedom) is at the very heart of what I consider freedom.

> And of course, you’re free to drink privately.

And of course you're free to express your opinion privately, at home, when no one's listening. See the problem with that kind of 'freedom'?

The reason many municipalities ban public drunkenness is because it intrudes upon other people's freedom. Very many people tend to behave badly while drunk!

Many other places deal with that by making behaving badly the thing you're not allowed to do, rather than the activities that sometimes lead people (who partake in them irresponsibly) to behave badly.

Ah, a preemptive punishment for all! The very heart of what I would call freedom! Wonderful!

> But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.

Anarchism is based on freely agreed rules and organization. It denies rulers, not rules. I find this to be a necessary condition for freedom. So yes, one can find something to complain about pretty much every country if arguing from freedom. The status quo is not a good excuse for lack of freedom, that's just circular reasoning.

I urge everyone not to fall into the trap of the "Us vs Them" rhetoric that almost always leads to more oppression and violence. Trying to quantify freedom is moot. The enemy of freedom is corruption, fear and hate.

This struck me as I was visiting Munich, momentarily agog at the guy in front of me walking down the street drinking beer like it was no thing. Meanwhile Americans were protesting that mask mandates were an infringement on their freedom (Germans too).

Many, many things are an infringement on our individual freedom, but it's revealing what people actually choose to rally around, and when. It points to how certain issues have become politicized and have organized, well-funded opposition.

To all the people up in arms about masks -- why now? Why this easy thing? Why weren't you protesting restrictions on voting age, driving age, drinking age, restrictions on gay marriage rights? Those are all very consequential restrictions, as opposed to wearing a bit of fabric on your face. Something that snow-sports enthusiasts routinely do without complaint or consequence.

I got comments from neighbors for going into the street with a cup of coffee in the Netherlands. My Dutch wasn't that great but I picked up they were busting my balls in a friendly way - guess it looked funny to some. I also sometimes would get uncomfortable stares whenever I came down to throw something in the garbage room - the old guy looking was making sure I'm not gonna put garbage A in a B dumpster. Now every society has some kind of norms police citizens, but I feel it's quite worse in places like Germany/NL/Switzerland etc.

Not really much substance to my argument, just sharing. Also I'm not criticizing these countries, their culture is just different than what I was brought up with. Where I live if you start correcting everyone around you you will be the one corrected eventually. That's why where I live looks much worse than Germany I guess.

>I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre.

The issue with that comparison is Americans can easily search about Tulsa and find a bunch of information about it. People in China are restricted from getting information about Tienanmen Square.

While a lot of people in China know bad stuff happened in Tienanmen Square, they can't so easily confirm their suspicions. They can't hear people's take on it and fully understand what happened.

>How many Americans don't know about it?

Just because Americans don't know about a topic doesn't really matter. Americans don't know about a lot of historical events, especially ones that happened 100 years ago.

I would guess a lot of Americans don't know Harding was President during Tulsa. Does that mean Harding is like Tienanmen Square?

I would go as far as saying people don't even know about Tulsa shows people aren't really moving on, but just forgot about it. On the other hand, everybody knows slavery occurred.

There are number of places in the US where it is legal to walk around outside with a drink. New Orleans is the place I'm most familiar with but there are others. Some people forget that the US is not a monoculture.

Let's compare them:

The Tiananmen Square massacre killed off the Chinese democracy movement which challenged the CCP for national power. It set a new course for Chinese government, that it is still more or less on.

The Tulsa massacre was a local race riot, with little impact outside Oklahoma.

The area involved was also fairly affluent. There’s a possibility that Black Americans could seen that become a larger enclave, not unlike Atlanta’s Black community. It’s impossible to know which butterfly’s wings might have changed the course of history.

Maybe alcohol is not the best metric, but Assange is, or endless wars.

not comparable. I know of it (and have for 20 years; hey, I went to a public school run by hippies so we talked about this kind of stuff) AND ALSO I can post about it right here, right now, without worrying about the state coming after me (as, obviously I have, just now, and has everyone else in this thread) AND ALSO I can go to a FOREIGN COUNTRY and post about it without worrying that the us will go after my mom living in the US.

Prime whataboutism. But anyways, just as one example, the Tulsa race massacre was the subject of a major recent TV series (The Watchmen). Mere mentions of Tiananmen square massacre, observing quiet vigils, etc. could get you jailed in China. On freedom of speech, there is no possible comparison. Even the existence of this very conversation would be immediately censored on the Chinese domestic internet.

> you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested

Just switch to injecting heroin in public spaces. The police will leave you alone and you might even become a celebrated person.

I want to help the parent poster out here: I think he was refering to how easy it is to get thrown in jail in America. Jail as a concept does not really exist in many European countries. You can swap drinking in public with speeding or some other minor offense.

"The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. "

Having grown up in Germany and now living in the US I think in the US you can have more freedom if you are willing to live outside the boundaries of the life the average citizen has. If you are willing to live off the grid you can be pretty free. Some people think freedom also means the right to not have health insurance.

But if you live the life of the average citizen with a regular job I feel the US citizen is less free. You constantly have to worry about the cost of health care and education. I also feel people are less willing to voice their opinion in order to not offend others. You have way less rights as an employee. Police is less predictable and may do weird stuff. I also feel less free when I get into a confrontation with somebody and have to worry about getting shot.

Interesting perspective, though I'd like some detail around the 'worry about getting shot' comment.

I'm in my 50s and have lived in the US all but 2 of my years, and have never been concerned about getting shot (in the US or abroad.) In what kind of situations have you found yourself that you've actively had this worry?

I had a situation where almost every morning a guy with big work truck would pass us extremely closely at full speed while we were walking our dog. The road didn’t have sidewalks so usually cars would slow down or change sides but this guy didn’t. We tried to wave to him to slow down which only resulted in him swerving towards us so we had to jump off the road. One day I stood in the middle of the road and made him stop. I explained the situation to him and he was extremely aggressive and threatened to beat me up. I told him he can try but should think about the consequences first. After a while he backed off. I called his employer and never saw him again.

When i told this story to some people they told me that I would have had a real problem if he had had a gun. That’s probably true.

In Germany you usually can assume that even bad guys don’t have a gun but in the US you have to assume that every idiot has a gun. This brings confrontations quickly to a dangerous level.

I think what I mean by “freedom” is that “citizens” are a branch of government. Freedom is that we’ve decided the citizens are the ruling class.

To oversimplify quite a bite: As a citizen of the United States, and Arizona, I’m allowed to get together with a group of citizens, draft law, and bring it to vote during the next election.

As long as it’s constitutionally valid, and we get a majority vote, it becomes law.

Several cities have changed their ballot box from First Past The Post to Ranked Choice Voting through citizen lead initiatives. Ending the full prohibition on Marijuana in my state was a citizen initiative.

I’m sure they exist - but I don’t know of other countries that have this kind of freedom.

We’ve gotten it wrong in places (gerrymandering is a big one) - but we’ve been one piece of citizen lead legislation away from improving it for a long time. And that gives me hope.

This is what-about-ism. I am surprised you didn't mention that we are less free to smoke in public places!

Here's the thing: Laws about where you can smoke and drink vary from place to place in the US but in every part of them you are free to complain about them. The laws were passed by elected officials. You can start a petition to change them. You can run for mayor on the platform of changing the rules about where you can smoke or drink.

I agree that it is a sad commentary that many Americans don't know about the Tulsa race riot. Yet here we are discussing it. A popular TV show in the US (The Watchmen) depicted it quite graphically. Could those things happen with Tiananmen Square in China?

I personally feel that the term "what-about-ism" is excessively used to down play the wrongs of a other party. Especially when that other party is pretending to be at a higher moral ground than the one they are critical about. One should not make things OK because someone else does it but one should point out the wrongs another party is engaged in especially if it is hypocritical.

In this case however I didn't say what about, I did suggest an alternative to Ops comment which in itself may have been what about ism.

In the US (and most western countries), I can put up a website detailing what happened in the Tulsa race massacre with no fear of government censorship or retaliation. In China, I could not do the same with details of Tiananmen Square.

In the U.S. there's a hierarchy of freedoms. Fundamental rights, like speech and the right to a fair trial, are necessary to secure other "lower" freedoms if you want.

You can drink outside in some places, like Las Vegas. The fact that you can't drink outside most places just illustrates that the overwhelming majority don't even want to do that.

Drugs and booze are cheap freedoms that don't do anything to avoid repression.

> more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom

My experience of the US is similar to yours.

Note that the USA is rather special in how it encodes freedom. There is, after all, literally a big list of guaranteed freedoms. In practice, if something's not on there, then every government and quasi-governmental entity assumes you are not free to do it, or at least, they believe they can decide to stop you.

This is the inverse of almost every construction of freedom that went before it, and your experience arises from that difference. The notoriously vast & byzantine scale of the US Code is another emergent property, it being essentially a salami attack on its own fundamentals.

I don't think you made the comparison between these two events with any ulterior motives, but the subthreads below your comment are interesting and telling in part because a significant number of the comments are parroting each other from users with little history on HN. It feels like this thread may have attracted the attention of the Fifty Cent Army[1].

There are a remarkable number of comments that fall into the same vein, and at least one is a username I recognize from previous threads about China shilling very hard in a pro-CCP way. I wonder if @dang or HN have any processes by which to identify bot / shill accounts and limit them, because it's obvious there's a far larger contingent of these accounts on the site than I originally expected. I guess HN is no longer an unnoticed corner of the Internet where folks can just have normal conversations like it used to be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?

I'd never heard of it until I watched Watchmen. So, I'd lived nearly half my life before hearing of it.

I spent my entire childhood in states bordering Oklahoma, and, for a while, in Oklahoma itself (though not in/near Tulsa).

I'll take not being able to drink on the street in some parts of the US if it means I can criticize the government without being harassed (or worse) by government officials.

> Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested.

This shows a common misunderstanding of the US legal system - the federal gov't couldn't make public consumption legal or illegal even if it wanted to. I go to local festivals in my town multiple time s a year with thousands of people milling about drinking freely - because my city and county don't prohibit it.

You come to the US with the assumption that the federal government has authority over these things, but they don't - constitutionally they are largely forbidden from creating laws like that - it's up to the state, county, and city to do so.

> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre

If that were a valid comparison, your comment wouldn't still be on this site.

If you compare how China treats discussion and remembrance of Tiananmen to the how the US treats the Tulsa Race Massacre you will find there is no comparison.

It's true that many in the US don't know about it but many in the US cannot find China on a map so ignorance of the thing might be explainable by something rather more benign than the oppressive and punitive way China handles things.

In recent years information and documentaries on the Tulsa race massacre have been popping up with regularity. The information is easy to find, there are multiple documentaries you have easy access to, the government (in the form of the Tulsa Historical Society) has a very through website exploring what happened, etc. More importantly no one is punished for exploring and discussing this topic. Quite the opposite lately, it is of growing interest to many in the US. Now compare that to China and the Tiananmen Square massacre. As I said at the top, no comparison at all.

I'm not a rah rah "Murican", either. I am very critical of my own country (as I think we all should be.. you can't improve if you don't learn from the bad) and the US has many problems that should be addressed but to compare China and the US on these points is not even a little reasonable, in my opinion. It shows a lack of knowledge of both China (someplace I have lived for years) and the US (where I grew up and currently live). Also, your example of drinking in public is just a generalization and of all the things you could have picked that would be valid arguments, is not a good one. In my community in Ohio you can drink anywhere in the downtown public area, for example and it is several square miles in area.

Not talking about the Tulsa race massacre, is an example of society at large choosing, through inattention or other social forces, to not care about something they should probably choose to care more about.

Not being allowed to talk about Tiananmen Square massacre is society being told what to find worthy of attention.

While the ends may on occasion align, I think it’s an important distinction.

But it is also worth considering “practical” freedoms.

It varies a lot by where you live and how much premium you personally care about following the letter of the law.

I think HN tends to assume nobody has any freedom because most of HN lives in "nice" suburbs or "nice" parts of cities where law enforcement is being used in a backhand manner to enforce conformity and also comes from a life where obeying basically all the laws basically all the time is considered default behavior. The lower classes are far, far free-er on a day to day basis than HN is. Nobody cares if you smoke weed on your porch in any neighborhood where a Ford E350 is a more common driveway adornment than a Mercedes E350. I walk my dog beer in hand two days a week. Kids ride dirt bikes on the street. The section 8 people play loud music in languages I don't speak. Nobody gets hassled by the powers that be, as far as I can tell. And this isn't some rural area in a small government red state, it's working class neighborhood in a blue state.

As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't necessarily reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as the rest of us, and no more.

> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics

We’ll see. Due to it’s Zero COVID strategy and ineffectual vaccines China has a highly immunonaive population just as the virus gets so infectious that other Zero COVID countries have abandoned that strategy. However, New Zealand, Singapore etc have the much better mRNA vaccines. I hope the terrible cost of losing their basic human rights was worth it for them, but I suspect the worst days of COVID are ahead for China.

Different ethics? You are very open minded. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Totalitarian governments busy themselves with editing history and skewing the narrative. I've been there, growing in a communist country liberated because the USSR went bankrupt. So, thank you USA. Now we can hold views critical of the government without being arrested, tortured and sent to forced labour camps.

Different but also not always so different.

American alarmism over communism has, at times, led them down a similar pathway.

This is some asinine cultural analysis, as if entire cultures can be reduced to the embrace of moral philosophies. You could just have easily described China as harboring a deontological commitment to social harmony and deference to authority, or America as being consequentialist in its embrace of freedom as the approach most conducive to happiness and opposed to tyranny. Both are caricatures, of course.

A problem I’ve noticed with philosophy nerds is that they have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of their niche interest by hallucinating the influence of philosophical reasoning in human affairs and historical events. Most people in most times don’t think about this stuff at all. It’s completely irrelevant.

This logic works on the average. There are plenty of nuances between the two countries. This is my reduced experience from spending lots of time in China from the early 2000's.

Indeed, all of philosophy has devolved from praxis to theory unmooring itself from the seed by which it began: that of living informed by wisdom. It is damning that one of its elevated patrons is a man who wrote in spirals.

The philosophers of thousands of years ago instructed by which they lived: drinking to excess in bathtubs if you were a hedonist or meditating in the woods surviving only on the food which others gave you if you were a Buddhist.

> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics

Can we? I have no idea how many people in China have died from covid, and neither do you. All we have to go on is what the state-run media says.

Are you genuinely comparing Tianamen Square to centuries of slavery?

The Chinese also don't talk about a lot of the bad things that happened in the great leap forward, which could have a case made that it was worse than slavery.

Is like to see what that case is? Because nothing about the Great Leap I’ve read compares to chattel slavery or the 40% losses of life in the transatlantic slave trade.

In absolute number of dead, it's certainly worse, if only because of the scale of China. According to Henry Louis Gates 12.7 million Africans were abducted by the slave trade. Estimates for the Great Leap Forward are 15 to 55M dead from famine and several million more from violence.

https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-take...

The Great Leap famine that killed between 11.6 - 55 million over fours years, compared to the Atlantic slave trade with estimated deaths from 2 - 60 million (over 200 hundred years).[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...

Go read stories about neighbors eating each others children to survive. It is pointless to compare tragedies as to which is worse, but it is worthwhile to recognize the magnitude of the (unimaginable) suffering caused by bad policy. The point is you wouldn't want to experience either -- neither is a better choice, they were both disasters worthy of keeping in memory.

No, they are comparing the atrocities of the Chinese government that inspired Tianamen Square to slavery, without saying that the two are equivalent

Ostensibly consequentialist, but that is just a symptom of maintaining authority and order. Arguably many choices from the Chinese State reported in the last decade have been at the expense of prosperity and success, such as Xi consolidating power and cracking down on business leaders. Hyper centralization of power rarely works out well, and when it has, those personalities as in SK and Singapore favored Capitalism.

Look at you, getting all fancy with your "deontological" and "consequentialist." Does it feel erudite to use 5 dollar words when a 10 cent word like "freedom" would do?

No, actually we cannot see that "having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics." But then, we don't have police welding people's doors shut, either.

I think you need to look up what "deontological" means. It's putting a means before an end. America does this with spreading freedom. Colonial Spain did this with spreading christianity. Russia did this with spreading communism.

I know how to look up words, thanks. You do need to de-obfuscate, though.

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