There tends to be a lot of low-key (and some not-so-low-key) anti-Chinese xenophobia on HN, so that's likely a big part of it too.
Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.
That sounds like a good thing and it is. But it’s not a US story. In fact, other wealthy countries didn’t just already have a higher baseline life expectancy pre-COVID, they rebounded to it post-COVID sooner than the U.S. was able to its already lower level.
So what this actually is, is a story of “global modern medicine good”, and unfortunately, even within that, the U.S. is among the worst performing.
That being said, >95% of the world lives outside US and in recent times (culminating with orange man's second term but started way before) US has alienated literally every single other country, democratic or not. This is what happens when reins are firmly held by unstable people full of pettiness and mental issues, plus visibly corrupt too.
So division deepens as seen also here, and as much as 20th century was a century of US, 21st century is and will be one of China. Every move US makes now just pushes whole situation further into that direction. So folks cheer for their own camp, not some larger common group of aligned friends.
i have one good example: the rare earth probelm. i saw many artices on this topic in reddit/x, and many times, it comes with a pic of an old farmer/dude in a dirty environment doing it's work. so it implies this is just a dirty work, western countires dont want to do it is because it's dirty and they dont want to harm the environment. only china dont care about this,
exmaple link: 1. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-china-rare-earths-d... 2. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2026/07/16/...
but in reality, its not true. its only true long time before, assume china didn't have advanced tech on this is totally insane, consider china has joined this indsutry for decaseds and lead in the tech. but in most comments area, people still assume it's dirty so only china is doing it.
if you dont know your 'enermy', you will keep lose. This happens so many times.
HN has lots of hellbanned bots lately (I have showdead on [1]) but I never notice ones pushing a political slant. But I suppose nation states conducting a campaign on Hacker News would be much too cunning to make the bots obvious
[1] because many posts get wrongly flagged, apparently in part by trigger-happy users who will flag anything with incidental similarities to AI prose (everyone, PLEASE STOP DOING THAT), in part because HN's automoderation is severe for new users, and in part because plenty of people get hellbanned either unfairly or although they do still write plenty of worthwhile posts. I even rescued someone who it turned out had been hellbanned by a mod by accident.
I'm simply asking who are these people being genocided?
But last I checked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a few thousand years older than our sitting president.
Lets be frank, every single issue we have with the CCP is either also being done by the west or in the works.
chinese oppression of the uighurs is nothing compared to whats going on in Gaza.
china forces prisoners to peel garlic while american prisoners are paid pennies a day to fight wildfires while being prohibited from being paid for those very same skills as firefighters when rehabilitated.
america is quickly workin on legislation to to make criticism of certain foreign governments illegal with very real reprucussons (revoking passports).
At least china has a working power grid and high speed train network.
Making some kind of equivalence of the two in terms of the rights of the individual is so ridiculous that nobody is going to take anything you say after that seriously, you do your arguments a disservice by doing it.
Yet.