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Comment by zavertnik | Hacker News Reader

> It's tedious.

Worse, it's distracting.

Exactly. I think the more thoughtful responses are starting to bubble up to the top now, but when I first got here, essentially all the comments were of this form.

Sorry. It warrants investigation, as the overt and covert consensus from Washington is to smear China and drag us into a "Trade War" that might go into a hot war. We need to be critical at every step. Every instance of the consensus manufacturing machine needs to be called out.

If you start calling out things that are clearly not that then you start looking like a crazy person and lose credibility. We have a popular children's story about this called The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Maybe take a few minutes to actually read the piece and look at what else the author has written before jumping to the conclusion that they're just part of Trump's propaganda machine.

It's not the "Boy Who Cried Wolf." It's pointing out a systematic anti-Sino campaign carried out by American-backed NGOs and, in this case, academic mercenaries.

I'm not even saying that you're wrong that such a thing exists, just that you're wrong to implicate Jonathan Haidt in that plot. And by seeing it everywhere—even where it's not—you are losing credibility when you go to point it out in places where it's real.

You clearly have not read anything that Haidt has written and you just ignore all of the comments pointing out that you're mistaken, so you just end up looking like a conspiracy theorist who refuses to even look at the actual evidence because you already know it's all a conspiracy. Looking unreasonable and irrational hurts your cause.

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