High Trust Society | Hacker News Reader

High Trust Society

geohot.github.io

6 pointsnoch4 comments

Open articleView on HN

> A government that kills squirrels that get too famous on social media, not as much

How fast do we forget...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/pet-cats-killed-chinese-...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/08/china/shanghai-corgi-deat...

https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/china-city-kill-house-pets-co...

It’s kinda funny watching the right desperately try to spin the squirrel story into an October Surprise.

They kind of peaked early with "Hillary is high priestess of a satanic pedophile coven who bathes in the blood of children like Elizabeth Bathory and maybe has a weird prion disease from eating babies and was replaced with a clone" and couldn't get traction with "and this next guy is also a pedophile, and really old, not old like our guy but old in a bad way because our guy fuuuuucks (and you should see what Biden's son has on his laptop)" so I guess they ran out of steam.

OK maybe "Obama is a crypto-muslim Al-Qaeda plant and literally the antichrist" was peak. It's all been downhill since, though.

If I were a high school teacher I think it would be very much worthwhile to have my students read this post and have a group discussion.

Q1. What does the author wish to convey by presenting plots, US vs China, of out-of-wedlock births? Electricity generation?

Q2. What might be the possible downsides of living in a society, such as China, that deals with violations of social and moral norms so much more efficiently and effectively than the United States does?

Q3. In the early 20th century, many American communists enamored of the Soviet Union travelled to the Soviet Union but returned home disillusioned. How likely do you think it is that the author would become similarly disillusioned if he were to go to China for an extended stay?

Q4. Do you think this post would be accepted for publication in the opinion pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? Why or why not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com