yourbandsucks

If a streamer had said something, for example, anti-LGBT, Blizzard would have shut them down the same way and everyone would be applauding.

Depending on your personal politics, any given corporate action is either 'brave, standing up for principles' or 'obviously a sellout to the corrupt bad guys'.

1) Get sympathetic media to print a claim

2) Plaster claim over grainy black-and-white photo, with attribution. Run TV/internet campaign with it.

If you're having a lawyerly debate about the technicalities of the accusation, you've already lost.

Lots of great people in both places.

4x longer than the British did, in any case. The CCP hasn't even proposed rolling back HK's limited democracy (so far, 22 years). And they've, so far, killed far fewer protestors than the British did.

As far as the first part.. you know this is living memory, right?

Believe it or not, the average Chinese has a better grasp of their recent history than the average HN reader.

How come nobody cared about 'universal human rights' for HK residents until it was a way to kneecap China? Again, check the record: 95 years of colonialism with less rights than they have now. They got their limited democracy in the last few years of British rule. Thatcher and Reagan never gave a shit.

Watch their hands, not their mouths, that goes for all politicians.

Xi has a lot of problems in general on the rights front, he's moving things in the wrong direction, but we have no leg to stand on regarding HK.

But you and they are calling maoism and dengism "basically the same thing". That's about half a degree from calling communism and capitalism the same thing. With Chinese characteristics for both, of course.

Anybody who knew China would know exactly why I picked 40 years. It's 2 very different governments.

So I get that you'd consider them "the enemy" in both cases but could this be a teachable moment?

How has America typically done when we wade into shit we don't understand, perfectly convinced that we're the good guys?

How has it typically worked out for the 'liberated'?

Everyone panicked about the Japanese buying up American assets, too.

It's all about 'rising tides lifting all boats' until there's a chance of someone else's boat being almost as high as ours. Then all of a sudden it's about the foreign threat, ulterior motives..

I'm a 2x Obama voter, but Obama totally greenlit and supported Saudi Arabia in Yemen from the beginning. Things were getting hot there in like 2010, this spanned almost his entire tenure. That's another area where as soon as things change hands, everyone has a different opinion depending on if it's the red guys or the blue guys.

As far as hooking Russia/Turkey up, Syria would be a better example IMO. We ceded Syria, the Saudis are still 100% ours. In either case, part of being non-interventionist means ceding things to regional powers.

What power does Crowder have over you? He's a joke.

Consider: his viewpoint is a firing offense at FAANG while your viewpoint is constantly validated and endorsed.

Who's got the power there? Of course Crowder is a terrible example to speak up for, but he definitely is not empowered.

I appreciate the engagement.

I'm not Chinese and either way I wouldn't speak for 1.6B people. I'll just note that there have been way more revolutions in China than in America over any timeframe, and they were all terrible. Things are going great for average Chinese people right now, and they have living memory of revolution, bloodshed, starvation, etc. Why fuck with it? Lock in the economic gains, and slow-march towards democracy.

Xi is trying to move things in the wrong direction on the freedom front, and that's bad. The solution here is alliance with Chinese intellectuals, not opposition to 'China' that forces them onto their people's side.

I totally agree, I think we're talking about orthogonal things.

You're saying that a good idea should absolutely be taken, whichever culture it came from, which I totally agree with -- I was saying that Western powers (all powers) tend to go after their interests first, and any talk of 'promoting our values abroad' should be greeted with skepticism, given the record. Not that I disagree with the values.

You have me at a disadvantage here because I'm not sure which sentences you're trying to emphasize or how they relate to the debate.

It sounds like you're saying that you're so right, self-doubt would be an unnecessary encumbrance.

How many words of Chinese do you know? How much Chinese history? Have you ever seen a subsistence farmer?

But you only got that constitution because the British had to retreat, literally centuries after Locke wrote. Entrenched power had no intentions of giving your people rights before that.

Related, the British ran Hong Kong for over a hundred years. Why wasn't it already democratic, prior to handover, if their values are so great? The limited democracy they have was introduced in the 1990s as the clock was running out.

Re: brainless sheeple asians

Consider how easy it was to get you to believe cartoonish generalities about a billion people you've never met.

Who's the sheep?

I wouldn't say that Chinese should hold strong opinions on how we run our country, either.

But for what it's worth, the average educated Chinese knows far more about America than vice-versa. These threads are great evidence.

I love that line of argument.

1) China has done >0 bad things

2) Comparison is whataboutism

3) Therefore China is literally Nazi Germany (actual topic of this subthread, not a strawman).

Is it within the realm of possibility that the vast majority of Americans are in fact uneducated and misinformed about what daily life in China is like? Or even the broad strokes of history there?

What % of Americans could even tell you the names of the last 3 dynasties?

Context matters. When the only relevant sins are those of our chief geopolitical rival.. at a certain point that says more about us than them.

And a few years prior, Yeats had written that "The center cannot hold", and that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".

Worth remembering, IMO. Lots of passionate people calling for a conflict, and it's not clear that they've thought about ramifications very deeply.

"Give the game away" is too strong, you're right. I don't mean to imply that Kuhn didn't mean what he carefully wrote, he seems like a standup guy doing Free Software.

Absolutely possible and I don't have a hard time believing they'd reached that point with RMS.

I hadn't seen RMS's politics link before -- he puts out like 10 bullet-point hot takes a day, lots of them with a viewpoint way outside the mainstream. He's got weirdo semanticist takes about basically everything, including, as infamously linked, sex laws.

I normally want to defend the right to have unorthodox takes on general principle, but I can see where they're coming from here as far as leadership.

But then Kuhn gives the game away within a couple paragraphs, calling RMS's views 'problematic' and expressing disagreement with several of them.

If you're gonna go with that line, stay on-message.

This is 2019. We want to cast out anybody different, in the name of empathy and inclusiveness.

If it were the case that these things were never mentioned, and anytime they were brought up, people were silenced, I'd totally agree with your point here.

But we're getting wall-to-wall coverage of basically those exact issues, all the time, with only one point of view endorsed. It's uninclusive to anybody who thinks differently in terms of methods or priorities.

A wise company with secret sauce wouldn't give it away.

If our corporate culture is pathologically short-term-obsessed, that's on us. It's not on the 'bad guys' who lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.

If a Chinese family goes from a 3rd-world life to a modern one, is that a relative loss for America? In sports, it would be.

Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.

Maybe sports teams are a horrible way to think about it.

Not only that, you definitely guessed wrong about what the market wanted and now all your effort meticulously reviewing every line of code is voided. Not to mention the over engineering which has become an actual liability.

The Chinese have rebelled against their government waaaaay more times than Americans over basically any timeframe.

Mao managed to do it twice, including launching a revolution while actually in the government but sidelined.

Another fun fact, the US army has more recent experience helping put down a Chinese rebellion (boxer rebellion, 1900) than an American one.

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