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.
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.
The American criminal justice system has problems. Those problems are systemic and publicly discussed, but the rule of law exists, and the process is public, and you have the right to defend yourself against charges the state levies.
When is Jack Ma's public trial? Peng Shuai's?
Putting things into quotes doesn't make it "work".
A vanishingly small percentage of these defendants are innocent. Prison reform cannot proceed rationally unless everybody involved admits that nearly all the people who go to prison did indeed commit a serious crime.
Now that this is moving the goal posts. Lots of people go missing and die for unknown reasons, including non-violent ones.
The issue with "disappearing" is that it is done by coordinated groups (including the prison-industrial complex). It is not that we don't know precisely how the victims got hurt.
This comparison is risible. First of all, you actually do have to commit a crime to go to prison, in the vast majority of cases. Second, the details of your trial (and appeal) are public. The "mass incarceration" meme has been too successful for it's own good, so successful that people seem earnestly to believe that most prisoners are innocent or there for spurious reasons, but it's simply not the case. The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet.
This chart reveals a lot of problems with our system. Are too many people in jail for drugs? Sure, probably. (But it's nowhere near the largest category.) Do we have a big problem with getting people in local jails to speedy trials? Yes, absolutely. Are our sentences too long? Yes, in some cases.
But most people in prison committed a serious crime.
I don't have the data on the "long rap sheet" portion of my claim, though I would encourage you to look out for it every time there's a news story about a high-profile arrest. The list of previous crimes in most cases would be comical if it weren't so tragic.
Additionally, studies of released inmates show very high recidivism rates. One study showed that, "401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Yes, eye witness accounts. Thousands of families whose children never came home. Widely available photos online. The smoking gun that you aren’t allowed to talk about it.
I have talked to people who saw it. Similar to how we can still talk to holocaust survivors. Maybe they are all lying. But the motive seems unclear and the testimonies are corroborated by others.
That's also against the site guidelines, and actually worse than the GP provocation I replied to, because two piling on is already the seed of a mob. We don't want that dynamic on HN at all. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Any criticism of Xi at all will suffice. And there is mountains of evidence about the thousands of innocent protesters that died that day, despite the attempts of an authoritarian government to prevent the truth from being known.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Vs
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Now the problem is I'm not a lawyer or expert in reading laws or understanding how they would be interpreted. The bill aims to prevent the following kind of theories being taught, ones that say:
(A) any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race;
(B) the United States is a fundamentally racist country;
(C) the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States is a fundamentally racist document;
(D) an individual's moral worth is determined by the race of the individual;
(E) an individual, by virtue of the race of the individual, is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; or
(F) an individual, because of the race of the individual, bears responsibility for the actions committed by members of the race of the individual.
This sounds pretty good to me. B and C could be controversial in that those things were true in the past, but they seem to refer to the present tense. So the letter of the law is okay and the rest of the points are banning racist theories which is good, so the spirit of the law seems reasonable too. I don't see how this would be interpreted as banning the teaching of past racism like slavery or segregation or that massacre. But as I said I'm not an expert so I would be interested to know whether that's a real concern.
You realize that B and C would ban any discussion of the Dred Scott decision if read literally? Think about Stephen Douglas’ arguments in his debates —- we couldn’t discuss those either?
As I explicitly wrote, I don't realize that because from a lay person's reading, they are written in the present tense so it would not seem to ban any discussion or theory that the US was racist. Pretty hard to claim that it wasn't, surely.
So do you have a legal opinion or more informed reasoning that says the law would actually be interpreted differently, and would also ban discussion of past issues?
How is disallowing in public schools the use of a particular instructional approach (not discussion of the topic as such) equivalent to "discussion of the Tulsa race massacre"?
It does, for example, the provision regarding
>(B) the United States is a fundamentally racist country;
Could be interpreted as preventing proper discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre
Ok, so you just proved the point. These bills do not prevent teaching about Tulsa. That claim has always been a lie.
As for what you call “proper” discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre. Nothing in the bill prevents people talking about how the massacre was caused by racism. Nothing in the bill even prevents discussion of the idea that the US is fundamentally racist, or why people might believe that to be true.
The only thing the bill prevents is teaching that the US is fundamentally racist as if it were an absolute truth or fact, rather than an idea that some people hold.
So no. You are simply wrong about what the bill means.
My claim (upthread) was "honest and uncensored discussion." You can talk in censored ways about it, yes.
If you think it's okay to censor particular views because they're obviously wrong or misguided... you're totally free to hols that view, but that's still censorship.
Your claim I was responding to is this: “Could be interpreted as preventing proper discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre”
> If you think it's okay to censor particular views because they're obviously wrong or misguided... you're totally free to hols that view, but that's still censorship.
It’s a false claim to say that these bills ‘censor’ particular views. That is the lie.
They seek to prevent certain views being taught as fact that can’t be debated.
I.e. the bills do the opposite of what you assert.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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 don't see good enough evidence to show the zoological origin yet. I don't see good enough evidence of a lab leak origin yet either. I do see good enough evidence for a Chinese coverup. I can say for 100% certainly the Chinese are not being upfront with their data. What scenario would hiding data benefit? Cui bono?
They might just want to protect other secrets about the lab and keep everyone at arms length.
My bet is that even in China (which is not monolithic) different stakeholders are not so sure and there's major CYA between the scientists, the local managers, the Beijing-based leadership, senior leadership at all levels. Nothing good can come for any of these people if they allow the investigation to proceed smoothly. What if it's discovered that some totally unrelated incident happened years ago or that somebody was embezzling or did shady land deals with Wuhan lab accounts? The truth only helps people who are not involved. Everybody involved is best served by keeping their mouth shut and blocking any investigation.
Sorry but China is about as monolithic as you can get. The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country. It doesn’t allow anything except for a monolithic view.
That’s not how China works. Source, my Wife is Chinese and her father is a retired CCP member.
Local officials are highly corrupt and also are terrified something they are responsible for will come to the attention of the central leadership in a bad way. Thus they will bodge things for personal gain against the policies of the central leadership, and will try to ensure the central leadership don’t hear about things they very much want to hear about.
This is a terribly high risk strategy, but it’s the only one that actually works. That’s the problem with corrupt bureaucracies.
Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened. This is now happening in Hong Kong.
> The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country.
And your comment below really disagree with one another?
> Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened.
I'm totally ignorant on this matter but to my reading there seems to be more in common between your two viewpoints than not.
The point is there are different stakeholders with mutually incompatible interests in China. It’s not monolithic and no one centre of power knows and directs everything all the time. That’s why when the central authorities come across local officials doing stuff that hurts it embarrasses them, they impose such harsh penalties, including death. You don’t have to punish behaviour that doesn’t happen.
This is just classic American black-and-white national morality thinking. You see the same thing applied all the time to the citizenry of North Korea - "they're all brainwashed and totally absolutely follow the leader" - the unstated subtext being "so when the US military invades and kills a whole lot of them, really we had no choice and this was the right and just thing to do for our defense".
Which doesn't really square up with the extensive border smuggling operations into and out of China, the defusion of illegal portable media players and thumbdrives carrying outside news, or the methamphetamine epidemic they're suffering.
> It doesn’t allow anything except for a monolithic view.
And yet somehow even the most ill-informed Americans hear all about things the CCP doesn't want anyone to hear about. Doesn't sound like very tight control.
This suggests a Bayesian approach. If there is a lab leak, we'd expect a Chinese cover-up to be a more likely than a Chinese cover-up to a zoological origin. So if your priors are that the zoological and lab-leak origins are equally likely, the evidence of Chinese cover-up weighs in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
That's only true if you assume China has perfect knowledge of the source of the leak from the very start in both scenarios.
In the zoological scenario, they wouldn't have any idea where it came from and might suspect it could be a lab leek simply based on the origin. It's very likely they would engage in cover-up behaviour anyway, just out of caution.
And then there are other reasons why they might decide to cover things up.
Ironically, a Chinese cover-up is absolutely useless evidence towards a lab leak hypothesis.
Occam's Razor. We know viruses jump species because it's happened before and we understand the mechanism. The lab leak theory requires a lot of unlikely things to happen. Don't spread misinformation.
Occam's Razor by far leans in the other direction. Species jumps are incredibly rare and lab leaks while not common have also happened before. Add in the fact that it happens to start in a city with a lab researching the same kind of virus.....
In the wake of COVID-19, one of the interesting bits of research was the use of a much broader COVID-19 type test to try and find new novel viruses.
And pretty much the moment it was developed, a new coronavirus in the midst of jumping species was found in hospitalized patients with pnuemonia-like symptoms [1].
Basically once they went looking, in 2% of the sample group they found people who were infected with a canine coronavirus, but who did not seem to be able to infect other people with it.
The likely scenario is that viruses are jumping species all the time, but rarely succeed in causing illness we don't simply write off as "a bout of pneuomonia from a seasonal something" due to lack of severity or lack of ability to spread human to human.
Species jumps are definitely not rare. This virus already jumped to literally a dozen species in a year.
It's estimated that dozens of viruses jump to humans every year, it's just unlikely that they survive long enough to mutate to adapt to the human body.
Coronavirus species jumps have happened at least twice (three times if you include Covid-19) in my adult memory. Perhaps they’re just not as “incredibly rare” as they once were?
Oh wow. The coverup, the first cases being right next to WIV the only BSL4 and studying coronaviruses, WIV having multiple recent virus leaks…
Occam’s razor definitely applies but not the way you’re alluding to.
If it happened anywhere in the world, then yes.... It happening in a city where there is a lab, working with those types of viruses, makes it a very "interesting coincidence".
Among others. Corrupt government officials in all countries, car insurance agencies, certainly Chinese billionaires and billionaires of almost all countries, the US Democratic Party, even.
No, that's precisely my point, there is no conspiracy and qui bono is not sufficient. I was being unclear perhaps, but I was trying to suscitate your incredulity. Just because someone benefits doesn't mean they intended it.
Agreed, seems like it’s harder to tell everyday what is considered a serious conspiracy theory and what is beyond the pale. In fact I am not sure any conspiracy theory is now considered beyond the pale, seems like anything one comes up with will eventually generate a set of believers / adherents.
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
Please don't copy-paste comments. It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio, and it contradicts the principle that HN threads are supposed to be conversations. People don't repeat long pre-written statements in conversation.
If you want to refer to something you said in a previous context, that's fine and is what links are for.
> China's global reputation is going to take a hit.
If having openly racist culture and running concentration camps has done nothing to their reputation, I don't think anything will.
> I don't think they did this intentionally.
Regardless if this was intentional or not, they should take responsibility. Imagine if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on Europe by mistake. This is the same calibre of "oops my bad.".
It's not a secret that these viruses were researched as a potential bio-weapon. In that sense whether it was intentional or not, it has done immense damage to worldwide economy, which is exactly the goal of such bio-weapon.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Nationalistic flamewar is particularly not welcome here.
If we're to have a thoughtful, substantive conversation about a topic as sensitive as the OP, not jumping straight into the flames of hell is...rather a precondition.
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
I thought you misrepresented the linked paper - as it was clearly about checking some cross-immunity and not recombining genes - but then I found out deeper in the abstract:
"""
Since SHC014 could not be success fully isolated, a recombinant virus (rWIV1-SHC014S) was constructed based on the WIV1 backbone with the replacement of SHC014S gene, as described previously (Zengetal.,2016). The S sequence of SHC014 was amplified with primer pair (F-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-AGTGGTCTCAACGAA-CATGAAATTGTTAGTTTTAGTTTTTGCTAC-3′ and R-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-TCAGGTCTCAGTTCGTTTATGTG-TAATGTAATTTGACACCCTTG-3′), digested with BsaI, and inserted into an artificial bacterial chromosome along with the other viral cDNA fragments."""
Recombination virus is commonly made everywhere, including US or China. Researchers made it mostly for getting genes for later use, antibody/antigen analysis in this case. Using virus/BAC is a very common lab technique and is very different from "intentionally making virus as a weapon to kill human". You can reconfirm with any of your wet-lab biotech majored friends. Please run an sequence analysis between rWIV1-SHC014S and the current COVID-19 virus before drawing misleading conclusion.
One analogy for developers: Bad persons are using git to develop ransomware, and company X is also using git, therefore company X is developing ransomware.
SARS1 appeared in China, 2 provinces over, so quite far. And I was not talking necessarily about the Hubei region, but about the proximity of the first case to the lab: half a mile. City of Wuhan has a population of 11 million. The Hubei province has a population of 58 million.
Out of all the wet markets that serve that much population, the coronavirus just happened to appear at the market nearest to the lab studying coronaviruses. To have such a coincidence is like winning the lottery.
It's not evidence, sure, it's correlation at best. But this alone should make you investigate that lab much much better, it should be the first possible cause you research.
I am not saying this to "make China pay". After all, the US itself was sponsoring coronavirus research at that lab. But we should establish a worldwide safety standard in dealing with such research, and establish periodical inspections. Just like we do with Nuclear power plants, only better.
Circumstantial evidence is a better term. Judging the article the number of such pointing to the lab are piling up and should be hard to ignore, while those pointing in other directions are still very few.
Neither scenario for how Sars-Cov-2 came to infect humans looks good for China, it's interesting that they are pushing one over the other.
On the one hand we have unsanitary food markets and the questionable production and sale of exotic animals for human consumption.
On the other extreme we have the potential escape of a genetically modified virus from a research lab.
Honestly I find the second scenario more reassuring, if it did escape from a lab then the Chinese and the international community can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.
If the virus made the jump from a wild animal somewhere in China's exotic animal industry then what is the recourse? Can the Chinese Government clamp down on that industry enough to prevent it from happening again? Will the Chinese culturally be willing to give up consuming animals like bats and pangolins that are frequent reservoirs for coronaviruses?
I think the world should demand more openness from China on the matter and demand a plan to prevent another outbreak like this from happening again. The latest estimate is 7 million people dead world wide and trillions of dollars lost. Surely that should justify some hard lines drawn and the threat of economic sanctions if the world can't be given some kind of re-assurance that this won't happen again.
If I were the PR guy for China and I could choose what the origin was, I'd go for wet market without a doubt. The "ancient food culture" argument is much more complex, easier to defend and easier to empathize with.
Lab negligence is just a pure fuck up. Very hard to spin that and not take responsibility.
They are responsible for enforcing safety standards, or having safety standards in the first place. Financiers have no authority on building standards or procedures, particularly in a place like China.
It’s not far fetched to say if a lab escape did occur, it would be in the government’s best interest to keep that secret (it could easily affect reputation/blame from others).
An analogous example would be a hit and run by a drive. The driver may have driven recklessly but not have meant to do damage to others, after damage is done the driver doesn’t want to be discovered. Similarly if this was a lab escape, the government doesn’t want their recklessness to be known.
I've been looking into the research that was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is an NIH grant that was doing interesting research around bat coronavirus. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... . I would encourage you to read into their research methods. This one is pretty scary in retrospect https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114.... Research methods included synthesizing new Coronavirus variants with specific genes. It's not a smoking gun but it's definitely a loaded gun.
We are declining because we are becoming more like China. More censorship, larger control of central government, currency manipulation. I actually see this as inevitable as you get a larger and larger population freedoms need to get reduced to maintain a stable society.
Disagree. The first part, becoming more like china due to censorhip, etc is true.
The 2nd part has no basis in reality. The issue is the concentration of power in the hands of the technocrats who now make decisions for everyone on censorship, currency manipulation, etc.
It isn't inevitable, its the result of the concentration of power and the failure of the US government to regulate massive monopolies especially in the tech space that have crushed or bought out newcomers, concentrating power further and ruining progress via buyouts and copying.
