You've been using HN for nothing but political arguments for a long time now. That's an abuse of this site, and we ban accounts that do it. It's time this stopped, so please stop.
Other users have been abusive, and I'm scolding them too. But HN isn't a primarily political site, so please ply this stuff elsewhere, not here.
More and more, social media platforms have been telling me - or using their algorithms to tell me - that my opinions, as educated and well argued as they are, are not welcome on their sites.
I did not expect to see this from Hacker News. Indeed, after the experiment banning political conversation, I had thought that the opposite decision had been made.
And finally, to be clear, I use HN for far more than political chatter. I read the technical content, and use it as a general news feed (one of my many). I comment where I am inspired to. I did not realize how often that ends up being of a political nature. I care deeply about individual freedoms and the technology that enables and disables these.
Can we find a mechanism whereby my nationality is confirmed? I would like to do this for the sake of my own vindication, as well as clarity to those who were/are suspicious.
Is there a term I should be using instead when I'm talking about international media coming from Western countries? I use the term Russian media and Chinese media, though I don't talk about them as much (I don't read them as often, though I try).
Thank you, it's interesting to hear what my account history looks like.
Please also check xnull, xnull3guest, xnull4guest, etc.
I have another account jwtadvice.
These are all on different computers. I was lazy and created different credentials for all of them.
If you have questions, whatever, let me know.
I understand why people are afraid that other commentators may be intelligence agents. I too suffer from this thought. The truth of the matter is that governments around the world participate in social media propaganda (US, Russia, and China included, don't kid yourself).
Regarding "pro-China" accusations. I'm pro-American. I love American values. And that's why I will criticize America when it does not live up to them.
I am one person. I am an advocate for decentralized systems, including in Russia and in China.
I've given advice to people on HN in these various accounts about where I get information. If you feel that I am well educated, I recommend finding one of those comments and looking into those sources. They include all open source information channels - and many of them are US official outlets (such as State Department press briefings).
I'm an American. I grew up in the New England area and I now live on the West Coast. I'm in Computer Security.
I do not know how to address a challenge like this?
How can I - without providing something absurd like my driver's license - prove that I am an American and of American decent?
Note that I was talking the other day about the situation in Cyprus, where I used the terminology 'aggressive' to describe Turkish behavior. I was accused of being a Greek.
Anyway, I fully reject the accusation that I am 50 Cent Party member or paid by any government, including my home country the United States.
Don't appeal to us. The problem is not whether we have or have not evidence of who you are. The problem is that the Chinese government has actively destroyed its long term credibility on these issues by (a) using wumao and schills to attempt to DDOS public debate on these issues, (b) locking up and disempowering any voices of dissent that might allow a nuanced, authentic discussion of China-related issues in or outside of China, c) taking zero tolerance, blinkered and extreme views on many national/territorial issues that are very difficult for anyone else not Chinese to accept.
E.g. I would totally support the idea of One China eventually, but why does the mainland government insist on denying that Taiwan is, de facto, a separate country right now? It's insane. Few would begrudge a future, managed and gradual reunion of these historically linked countries. But why on earth won't China (and pro-China commenters like yourself) drop the charade that Taiwan doesn't have its own constitution, currency, diplomatic service, politics, borders etc.? That's why your opinions can't be trusted - because they 100% mirror the insane opinions of the CCP and the wumao they employ.
You might be a totally cool guy who just happens to believe that China is peace loving and coincidentally has done loads of detailed research into UNCLOS and the state of civil society and dissent in China.
I see. It appears you've decided your opinion long ago.
Please don't appeal to me as the rest of this comment is not to you.
I'd like to address the HN community. Note the above authoritative assurance this commentor is giving, with one sided accusation of the Chinese and a complete pass on US aggression and social media propaganda. This is exactly the kind of playbook used by those operating out of the US military propaganda center Fort Bragg.
He might be just a HN commentor who is nationalistic and affected by the propaganda of his media bubble who coincidentally is charging people who dissent from those opinions as being foreign propagandists. He could.
Again, totally cool, but straight out of the wumao playbook. Post of last resort is call everyone and everything into question, accuse the other commenter of his own national bias and bubble (whilst refusing to accept yours), throw your hands up and play the victim.
Is there a summary of "wumao" playbook? I think all these you mentioned are standard propaganda or public communication tricks.
> call everyone and everything into question
Sorry, I did not see evidences that the poster accused "everyone and everything". I doubt HN tolerates such behavior at all.
How about references the parent comment about the specific statements that reflect your statement?
> accuse the other commented of his own national bias and bubble (whilst refusing to accept yours)
I think you should emphasize the the part "whilst refusing to accept yours". This is definitely many so-called "wumao" have to do to do their jobs.
I surely see HN members have far less exhibition of this trait.
> throw your hands up and play the victim.
I did not see the poster "play the victim". Even the accusation on China is a lie, that does not victimize any members here. The whole idea of someone "play the victim" should be seen as a way of thinking that does not fit here.
Some comments can hurts someone's feeling, but it should be clear that we discuss topic, not accusing people. We back our statements with facts, and dispute others with facts too.
You're the one providing "authoritative assurance" and it's very transparent (obvious) to me. Especially in a thread about the very thing you're mimicking.
The article presents many opinions as though they are facts.
One of the crucial aspects to understanding the South China Sea situation is the dispute of the sovereignty of the waters. The New York Times doesn't provide context on the sovereignty disputes, or provide the Chinese argument. Instead misleads its readership by quoting "international waters in the South China Sea."
This is an editorial error of enormous magnitude affecting the quality of the publication. An non politicized publication would write "disputed waters in the South China Sea."
Indeed, you can read back only a couple of years where US media reporting did exactly this. The recent propaganda push inside US media has been to use the term "international waters" in association with the geography to affect public opinion.
I notice that this incident was less than 50 miles from the Philipines (main Luzon/Manila Island) and Subic Bay, and outside of the "Nine Dash Line" of territorial waters claimed by China so if this article wanted to be inflammatory, it certainly could be.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Scarborough+Shoal/@13.7576...
Do I need to read more than 10 sentences before getting to this part of the article?
The overseas edition of The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, said on its social media account Saturday night that the Chinese capture of the drone was legal because rules about drone activities had not been clearly written. “This is the gray area,” the newspaper said. “If the U.S. military can send the drone, surely China can seize it.”
In its statement, the Defense Ministry scolded the United States over what it called its longstanding practice of conducting “close-in reconnaissance and military surveys” in waters claimed by China.
It's true that quote is in the last half of the article, but it seems to provide the context that you say is missing, or do you think the article should be several times longer?
The NYT has extensively covered the South China Sea sovereignty dispute. You can write the Public Editor if you think this is an actual error, but you'll probably get a chuckle.
Agree. Every article doesn't need to recap the context. The average Times reader is no doubt familiar with China's and the UNCLOS's conflicting definitions of territorial waters around the South China Sea.
The problem is that the Times takes a side rather than reporting independently.
It's a glaring editorial error to present a dispute as being concluded with your own opinion. That's what the Times has done. Whether its readership is aware of it or not.
I furthermore disagree with the assertion that the average Times reader is no doubt familiar with the context.
I find it troubling you present the context improperly yourself (China v. UNCLOS) in writing your opinion here.
> I find it troubling you present the context improperly yourself (China v. UNCLOS)
Disputes are fractal. Any summary will be incomplete to some observer.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a party (but the United States is not) [1], ruled with the Philippines on the South China Sea's territoriality being drawn by UNCLOS rules. Others in the region disputing China's claims take similar positions [2]. The UUV was seized closer to the Philippine shore than to mainland China.
Disclaimer: I am not an international lawyer. Please consult one before annexing others' claimed territories.
Article 298 limitedly exempts Section 2. This makes sense because the purpose of UNCLOS is to settle maritime territoriality disputes.
See §§ 397 - 412 of the ruling [1] for the Tribunal's reasons Article 298 does not apply to many salient pieces of the Philippines' case, including those pertaining to "Scarborough Shoal" (§ 400), "Mischief Reef, Second Thomas Shoal, or Subi Reef" (§ 401) and others.
"Bogus" is a strong term. China seems to be breaching UNCLOS, which it agreed to. That said, it wants extraordinary rights similar to those exercised by the United States (which is not a UNCLOS signatory).
Ultimately, international law is a convenient fiction. South China Sea territoriality will be decided by the United States weighing the benefits of freedom of navigation against the cost of enforcing UNCLOS boundaries with force. Sending drones and forcing them to be returned is less risky (and less effective) than piloting manned ships through the area.
Do China's claims really extend to where the drone was seized? According to reports, it was about 50nm northwest of the Phillipines. As best as I can determine, it happened outside the nine-dash line, which is what the dispute is over.
If their claims go that far, that seems almost absurd.
Is "in association with the geography" a tacit admission that the Chinese claim[0] appears ludicrous when you look at it? I could jot down lines on a map[1] too, and it wouldn't make it any more sane.
The point I was making is that across US broadcasting, there has been an attempt to associate the geography "South China Sea" with the term "International Waters."
My understanding is that despite a lot of hilariously vague statements, the Chinese have never made a formal claim to this area, and what limited claims they have made have been rejected by tribunal in the Hague.
That's the understanding one would get reading exclusively American media coverage.
The long and short? The Qing Dynasty had territory over these islands before WWII. It was never a powerful naval power. The Japanese took them and more during WWII. The US (San Fran Conference, Cairo Conference, Potsdam Conference) demanded the Japanese remove themselves from these islands (including Spratlys, Paracels), and give islands back to China (including, notably, Taiwan). China, during the Cold War, traded some ownership back and forth with Vietnam of Pacific islands in SCS in order to avoid their being involved in Cold War disputes.
Now China is seeking, for National Security purposes, to build infrastructure (including civilian, rescue, emergency response, shipping and military) on these islands. The United States sees this as area access/area denial - it could be denied the ability to project naval power into this area. The Chinese want to be able to protect naval trade, and protect themselves from their historical vulnerability (embargo).
US has tried multiple ways to prevent or slow this project. A recent effort to get the Philippines to contest the waters failed when the Philippines backed off of their claim.
Western reporting likes to present the South China Sea as a consensus, but it's not. It's been very difficult for the United States to get Asian Countries - those involved in the area - to side with the United States about the waters and their future.
UNCLOS ruled in favour of the Philippines. The Philippines are not willing to enforce their claim against an emerging regional hegemony. That's different from backing off.
> The Chinese want to be able to protect naval trade, and protect themselves from their historical vulnerability (embargo)
This is a fair thing to want, but it conflicts with neighbouring states' claimed rights to freedom of navigation. It is in the United States' and China's neighbors' interests to prevent China from achieving regional naval hegemony. Presenting this morally just serves to confuse the issue.
> It's been very difficult for the United States to get Asian Countries - those involved in the area - to side with the United States
India and Indonesia, amongst others, have supported the ruling [1].
See my answer here [1]. You are mis-interpreting Article 298. Its potential effect on the Tribunal's jurisdiction was argued by China and struck down by the Tribunal [2].
We're back to pretending opinions are facts, are we?
> There's also an attempt by China to associate the geography "Taiwan" with "China", when it's obviously a separate country.
Interestingly here, Taiwan's constitution and official policy does not claim there are two Chinese states. The United States and world consensus also recognizes the People's Republic of China as a government, but not Taiwan.
Do you explicitly disagree with ROC, PRC and the US about the status of Taiwan as a separate country?
Does anyone else here remember the Iraqi Information Minister giving a "there are no Americans in Baghdad" speech while US tanks literally rolled past in the background?
It was Iraqi opinion that they were winning the war. It was US opinion that the US was winning the war. One of those was a fact and the other wasn't.
The official status of Taiwan is playing politics. Nations stopped recognizing Taiwan as a result of PRC's ascendancy. But the PRC does not govern there.
Technically Crimea belongs to Ukraine and most of the world acknowledges this.
But in all practical realty--de facto--Crimea is now Russian territory. It's not foolish to acknowledge this.
It's also Canadian propaganda, and German propaganda, and who knows how many other media sources publish similar information.
Personally, I find it very understandable when two countries or cultures have differing viewpoints about what's right or not. However, I think it's imperative for their integrity to accept rules and international courts if you sign up for it. Many countries have been culpable of such incidents, and they're always in the wrong for unilaterally breaking such agreements. This time, it's China doing so. Don't sign up for common rules if you don't intend on following them.
Sure there are propaganda and opinions everywhere, but the question of integrity and ethics is clear in this example.
This is a great article for a role reversal. Imagine a Chinese military "research" ship off California gathering data on "water salinity". There would be calls for nukes.
> "We respect the freedom of all nations, as reflected in international law, to operate military vessels beyond the territorial seas of other nations."
Here are reports of Russian plans and ships patrolling the Californian coast in 2014:
I think you're missing the point. The US policy is symmetric. Here's the agreement signed with the USSR to try to reduce the possibility of collisions etc with the "trawlers" that the USSR had parked in international waters outside US naval bases:
The location is more than 200 miles away from the nearest thing that China claims is an island. But that's just for economic stuff; 12 miles is the limit for sovereignty.
I believe sighting of Russian fish trawlers (actually sig intelligence vessel) off Florida coast during earlier launches of space shuttles was pretty common. That didn't lead to nuclear wars.
Do you mean brought out information about Clinton and her promoters trying to hack the election by getting questions to debates beforehand, rigging the election against Sanders, and when the head of the DNC was found to be only working on Clinton's behalf having to resign then given a juicy job in Clinton's foundation? Well certainly!
I believe sighting of Russian fish trawlers (actually sig intelligence vessel) off Florida coast during earlier launches of space shuttles was pretty common. That didn't lead to nuclear wars.
The United States already includes social media into police threat scoring algorithms, which are used to track and prioritize police surveillance and citizen 'nudging'.
Algorithms across the US attempt to constrain the conversation to maintain confidence in public institutions. Facebook censored me from posting the Snowden documents. It stopped Mayday protestors from organizing. Amazon took down Wikileaks (for a short while).
This article is just an instance of hate-them-not-us propaganda. The problem is that I don't hate the Chinese, they are a peaceful country (read: are in and have not been in wars, are leaders of the UN peacekeeping forces, and do not militarily interfere in other countries' affairs). Plus they have done nothing to me and I love all the Chinese people I have met.
I absolutely agree this is propaganda, but I think there is a meaningful distinction about the degree this is done in China vs here. America cannot completely censor something internally, because we have no great firewall, despite being able to practically do it for millions relying on facebook. And that is a meaningful difference, the difference between some and almost none. We cannot make a political dissidents life as hard as it is in china, with originizations like the ACLU, and that too is a meaningful difference of degree.
The goals of the organizations doing these things are not always aligned either, since many of them do have to maintain consumer trust they aren't always on the same page as the government, and that's a meaningful friction that doesn't exist AFAICT in China.
I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.
The article overplayed the contrast and underplayed the comparison. China has civil rights organizations parallel to the ACLU, and in America civil rights activists and journalists are routinely finding themselves charged with crimes, in prison or harassed. I myself have been harassed (followed, gaslit, personally surveilled, and threatened) by state police in America, for sharing Snowden documents and their contents. My mail between my relatives and I were opened. All subtle hints and threats: stop being outspoken.
Following the state of the law with regard to providers and services in the United States, I think you've overemphasized the capability for companies to fight back, as the pressure from the state is incredible and at every front. Primarily, PR is used to emphasize that businesses are really on consumers' sides: that they'd like to not provide data and access. But in actuality, being a successful company at the scale you need to survive means working hand in hand with the US government. We saw how large ("trusted") brands worked hand-in-hand with government by the Snowden documents and we've watched it slip further since.
> I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.
We have the same rights worth fighting for that the Chinese have.
Government does not give us rights. The rights are independent of government. Americans and Chinese have the same rights. Both governments are impeding on them. Washington DOES NOT give Americans more rights than the Chinese. Rights have never been something Washington can give.
What you are seeing is Washington taking rights, and pointing fingers at the Chinese, telling you that they're taking more.
You want to fight for rights? You can't fight the Chinese for your rights.
> China has civil rights organizations parallel to the ACLU
No, it doesn't, because the ACLU has a degree of power and legitimacy in the US which the Chinese government would not allow to any equivalent organization. The ACLU has actually won cases in court which effected a change in law and/or behavior.
> I myself have been harassed (followed, gaslit, personally surveilled, and threatened) by state police in America, for sharing Snowden documents and their contents. My mail between my relatives and I were opened. All subtle hints and threats: stop being outspoken.
Without minimizing the wrongness, illegality, or harm those things have done to you, I have to imagine that in China, a) Snowden documents would never have seen the light of day, and, b) If you had attempted to share something like that you would have been imprisoned without trial.
As the parent poster said, the difference between some and none is significant.
I do agree with the ultimate statement of you post, about fighting for rights.
> No, it doesn't, because the ACLU has a degree of power and legitimacy in the US which the Chinese government would not allow to any equivalent organization. The ACLU has actually won cases in court which effected a change in law and/or behavior.
a) Had Washington had its way the documents never would have seen the light of day. They broke international law to ground planes in search of Snowden. They blocked as much of the documents as they could from being shared. They spread rumors about malware on Wikileaks. They worked with the media industry to not cover the contents and to work on the messaging to the American people: "This is bulk collection, not mass surveillance." Their official and public statements on the contents and scope of the programs were repeatedly shown to be false. They passed a law legalizing and expanding authorities and passed this off to the public as their stopping the programs, while the media ran 24/7 news about Caitlyn Jenning. The UK infiltrated the Guardian at gunpoint and destroyed the documents.
b) The laws are in place for exactly this. Snowden, had he been caught, would have been in military prison. His lawyers are arguing today the terms of a trial for him to come home, with senior members of our government calling for his execution. The US government under the Obama Justice Department has compromised on a secret jury-less trial in the Virginia legal subsystem (notable for prosecuting National Security cases, and siding with National Security over individual rights). Remember Chelsea Manning's court case? I don't.
The very link you posted refers to the problems that human rights lawyers face in China. They are estimated to number only a few dozen, in a country of 1.3 billion citizens. (This info is right there in your link!)
It's absurd to compare this environment to the ACLU.
In 1986, Gorbachev released Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. I guess you would have been saying: "That's it, the West can stop harping about human rights in the Soviet Union, it's all equal now"...?
And besides their small number, they are also often jailed and abused for taking on cases (mentioned in the article itself). There was a high profile case involving Chen Guancheng, who escaped house arrest and sought refuge in the US embassy. He was granted asylum and now lives in the US.
To my knowledge, there has not been a case of an ACLU lawyer being jailed or harassed simply for taking on a case.
You read the first Wikipedia article looking for reasons to dismiss it.
There's plenty of Civil Rights activity in China. It's a myopic American view that there is none and "no true Scotsman" all the civil rights law firms, attorneys and court cases should be dismissed out of hand for consideration.
In China, most disputes are resolved without institutional involvement whatsoever. Off the bat it's difficult to point to institutions and institutional processes and claim China doesn't have equivalence.
You are right. China is different. But it's not some wasteland dystopia from a fantasy novel. It has a wide and active civil society. That civil society is uniquely Chinese, and frankly, it's exciting to see it blossom as it has been since the 80s.
The most shocking thing is that the United States thinks China and Chinese society is a country to compare itself to. The ignorance of these comparisons is nearly as shocking.
Again, I can't believe you're bringing out these links as evidence of a healthy civil society in China. All the events described indicate active long-term persecution by the government. (Why do you think China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group is based in Hong Kong?)
Your argument could have been made about the Soviet Union in the late '80s. I grew up in Finland, and I remember people actually saying that: defending the Soviet human rights record, saying Russia is different, and pretending that a sprinkling of perestroika has fixed everything. It was complete bullshit then, and it's the same today in China.
I was actually asked to leave. My comments and opinions have been deleted, hidden, shadowbanned and obscured elsewhere.
Indeed, it's hard to find a place on American social media where dissenting opinions can be argued. There's either an administrative agreement to shut the ideas down, or places (such as HN) don't like the idea of having opinions on their site for whatever reason (harmful to the community) so they shut it down.
I'm certainly not getting thrown in jail. But you won't hear any dissenting opinions.
For what it's worth I've been upvoting you for giving me great perspective. It's not often I get to hear about China outside the American media lense, and so I tend to think of it as a real-life IngSoc state. And we both agree America won't get better by saying "china has it way worse guys"
I think that both countries are on equally slippery slopes. I want to appeal to an American sense that this is something in our fiber, and civil liberties are as important to being American as baseball and apple pie.
They are on equally slippery slopes, but China is farther down the slope.
The US has far more legal protections and better rule of law than China has ever had. And, crucially, America is a democracy with constitutionally protected free speech. American citizens have much greater ability to challenge the actions of their government than Chinese citizens do.
I think it does a disservice to those defending civil liberties in the US to not recognize that the two countries' situations are vastly different.
Right. You've been harassed by police, but here you are, still commenting on the open internet about what happened to you, and not locked in your house with your internet severed and having not seen a lawyer or your family members for 9 months. Thats the difference.
> I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.
That's a really good point--those of us in America are lucky to be here. Do you think people are fighting enough, though? Amy Goodman was nearly thrown in jail just for covering the Dakota Pipeline Protests--what punishment will be handed out in response to that egregious attempt at violating civil rights in America. Right now it looks like: none.
Another example: At least one Journalist has been physically detained, searched and had equipment seized for travelling to cover the Dakota Pipeline Protests.^1
What about the fact that the Iraqi government was desperately trying to prove they did not have chemical weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush administration hid this from the public?^2 Even though that is a proven, factually-substantiated conspiracy, and it is not technically censored, how many Americans would you guess are aware that happened? In my experience, most aren't.
What about whistle blower protections? Human rights abuses? Guantanamo? Police brutality? Legalized propaganda? Our actions in Syria? Government harassment of Greenwald, Poitras, and others for covering the Snowden leaks? The list goes on and on.
If we lost just a few of our best 'freedom fighters:' the ACLU, the EFF, and people like Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald, my best guess is that the world would start to turn into a different place. I'm not sure if we are fighting enough.
Well, when I saw creeping authoritarianism in action, I started giving a monthly $72 donation to the ACLU. If we all do similarly, they'll have more strength to fight back for our rights. I also just gave part of my holiday bonus to the ADL.
That makes me feel good, reading that you do that. I wish I had more financial freedom to support those two and other organizations which fight for liberty, particularly the EFF.
Why would not reading anything other than English matter? There are a large number of English language news sources based outside the US. Even inside the US, there is a wide range of news sources with varying ideologies.
In contrast anyone Chinese that are active online effectively has to be capable of understanding both english and Chinese.
I find that hard to believe. I know it's not true for Portuguese native speakers, and China seems to be even more keen on providing native alternatives to foreign sites.
> they are a peaceful country (read: are in and have not been in wars, are leaders of the UN peacekeeping forces, and do not militarily interfere in other countries' affairs). Plus they have done nothing to me and I love all the Chinese people I have met.
This is alarmingly disturbing nonsense; it doesn't even make any sense. What does "are in and have not been in wars" mean? The Chinese engage in lots of wars, they're just not that loud about it in recent history.
When has China actually been aggressive with Japan, Korean, and India, other then minor border conflicts and skirmishes?
The South China sea stuff is indeed China throwing its weight around, sure, but need I remind you that China's foreign interventions has been far more restrained than, say, the US (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama) or Russia's (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria) even in the last three decades.
Going back slightly further, Japan invaded and occupied half of China and killed millions of Chinese people over the course of a decade, while it was the US that invaded, nuked, and then occupied Japan, even though the US never suffered civilian casualties from Japanese attack. Yet you don't see the Chinese government crying out for bloody revenge, do you?
One the one hand, we have China asserting claims to sea resources and sea lanes there are right in its back yard, where it has a legitimate strategic and national interest. On the other, we have the outright invasion, occupation, and overthrow of sovereign governments. Which country is objectively more peaceful?
In a history class, I heard or read that traditionally China never sought to become an empire in the Roman or the post-Columbus Western European sense due to their culture. I'm paraphrasing, but the Forbidden City was thought to have been the place where Heaven met Earth. Accordingly, it didn't make sense to spread so far from this Nexus, for the farther flung the empire was, the farther away it was from Heaven. Instead, it preferred to make all roads lead to heaven. In essence, by being the economic, cultural, and military center of the world, everyone would have to come to them.
As a Chinese, I can see where you are coming from. It is true that Chinese people have this kind of "sentiments" as you described, as part of our culture. We don't go very far and establish colonies, we prefer stay close to our root.
If you read more history of China, you will also notice that the Han ethnicity prefers letting others adopt Hans customs and cultures instead of actively adopting or adapting to foreign cultures. That's another striking characteristics in my opinion.
The proximate reason for China getting involved in Korea was self-defense. It has been rather convincingly argued that if it weren't Truman and Douglas MacArthur's insistence on going all the way to the Yalu River (the border between North Korea and China), China would never have intervened militarily [1]. This is despite repeated warnings from China that they would intervene if US troops continued driving north, warnings which were completely ignored by Truman and his war cabinet [2].
The US had repeatedly sworn to not cross the 38th parallel in the past. Once the US decided to invade North Korea proper, Truman's promises to stop at the Yalu River no longer seemed credible to China's government. Note that Beijing is very close to Manchuria, and both the Manchus and Japanese invaded China along this route in the past.
The US has certainly threatened war against any foreign powers that interfered anywhere in the entire Western hemisphere [3] -- not sure how anyone can then turn around and fault China for reacting to American troops driving right up to its Manchurian border. Remember this was in 1951, the Cold War was getting warmed up, and the US had nuked Japan only a few years earlier. No responsible Chinese government could have ignored the very real and credible threat of another invasion.
The Vietnamese invasion has an interesting history -- the PLA invaded, failed to achieve its main objectives, then marched right back less than a month later. Certainly not a full-scale invasion nor an occupation, considering the proximate cause was to 'punish' Vietnam for invading Cambodia.
China invaded into Tibet in 1951, so China is not a peaceful country (it's binary thing, without gradation), but China is less aggressive than many other countries.
"""
Qing dynasty rule in Tibet began with their 1720 expedition to the country when they expelled the invading Dzungars.
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For several decades, peace reigned in Tibet, but in 1792 the Qing Qianlong Emperor sent a large Chinese army into Tibet to push the invading Nepalese out.
"""
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As the Qing dynasty weakened, its authority over Tibet also gradually declined, and by the mid-19th century its influence was minuscule. Qing authority over Tibet had become more symbolic than real by the late 19th century,[35][36][37][38] although in the 1860s the Tibetans still chose for reasons of their own to emphasize the empire's symbolic authority and make it seem substantial.[39]
"""
I can't tell if you are bringing this up because you are criticizing the Americans for refusing to join and be bound by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or if you are accusing the Chinese of violating their treaty commitments.
If it's the former, I don't think the US will be joining it any time soon. US military grand strategy depends on its ability to deploy marines with its navy anywhere swiftly in the world. That's why the Panama Canal was built: to allow the US Navy to swiftly move between Oceans to reallocate force posture. This is why the United States rejected the UNCLOS court juristiction over its boobytrapping the coastal regions around Nicaragua - the US refuses to be bound by this international law (the other major one, I would suggest, is the International Criminal Court/Rome Statues).
If you mean the second, the Chinese have argued that this is a territory dispute, in which case UNCLOS itself (article 299, IIRC) agrees it has no authority.
Certainly UNCLOS is a major aspect to understanding the South China Sea situation, and should be linked.
[sidenote, most people agree that the figure is 3-7 countries - depending on your definition of "currently" - not 8.]
I think the US bombing various places is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first sight. For example, our military action in Libya - which is entirely contained to one coastal town - is with the support of the Libyan government, the vast majority of the Libyan people, and the United Nations. It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I personally don't support our airstrikes in Pakistan, but they have definitely been effective (although at a devastating price to civilian lives that I find unacceptable.)
In some cases, the US government is an unimaginable force for evil; we've dropped chemical weapons on a civilian population as recently as 2004, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah - one of the worse battles of modern times. In others, it's an unimaginable case for good.
For example, during the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments around the world donated billions of dollars. America promised unimaginable quantities of food, fresh water, and support. Within days, American aid began arriving - in the form of two aircraft carriers, basically floating cities. During the crisis period, American forces delivered the daily food requirements for 100,000 people every 24 hours.
In the end of March 2005 - remember, the tsunami was in December 2004 - the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments reported that they had received precisely none of the money promised by foreign governments. They did report receiving some food; the Thai government in particular received many donations of rice from the governments of Israel and China. To demonstrate how pants-on-head stupid that was, Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice, and that year they had their largest crop of rice in all history.
So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.
> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.
> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.
Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.
The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.
That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.
The United States faces a choice:
A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.
OR
B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.
Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.
The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.
I don't have the best knowledge of Libyan politics. But I do know that the GNA (Sarraj loyalists) and GNC (Ghawil loyalists) are both in support of the airstrikes, and those two groups combined pretty much make up whatever you might call the "Libyan government" right now, so that's why I made the simplification.
Of course, given the current state of Libya, there aren't exactly pollsters walking around asking peoples' opinions on the Sirte strikes. But given the bipartisan support, it's pretty clear that they have good support in Libya itself. The fact that the UN supports the strikes - especially given that the UN can't even say "water is wet" without someone vetoing - says something about their international support.
I agree that America has been blocking countries from doing some pretty basic stuff. I recently traveled to Iran, and the American sanctions have shaken the country to the core.
But even things that seem obviously good are in fact horrible ideas. Every tiniest change in our laws affects the outside world in a massive way. In 1993, Tom Harkin, the junior Sentator from Iowa, introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which prohibited the importation of products that have been produced by child labor. Sounds simple, right? Who on earth is in favor of child labor? There were concerns about the effectiveness of the bill. Well, as it turns out, the bill was devastatingly effective. In 1993, Bangladeshi employers, in fear of losing lucrative American contracts, dismissed over 75% of child laborers in the textile industry. In 1997, UNICEF investigated what happened to these children after being laid off. They found that most children found themselves in much worse situations: crushing stones (leading to horrible particle inhalation illnesses), scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.
Things aren't always as simple as they seem, especially when you're as big as America. Smaller countries, like the Netherlands, can take grand actions like banning child labor imports, or banning arms exports to Saudi Arabia, or establishing relations with countries the US is at war at (e.x. North Korea.) But the tiniest little movement by the US can completely shake the world. Think about that the next time America seems to face a clear choice between good and evil.
So you are saying we should not condemn the Chinese government for the actions described in the article because the US government is doing the same things.
I strongly disagree. I think all human beings have the same basic rights, and so we should condemn actions that undermine them no matter where they happen in the world.
Furthermore, governmental violations are complicated and so for each government we need separate articles describing what it is doing wrong. And that is what we indeed get in many media articles linked to here at HN, including lots at The Economist.
That being the case, why is it that you condemn describing what the Chinese government is doing wrong, but think it is good to do so for the US? I don't know, but one possibility is that you are a troll paid by the Chinese government to promote its propaganda.
I read it more as 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'.
The line of 'their restrictions on human rights are worse than ours' seems like at best a race to the bottom. I feel western democracy should be setting a standard so far above what this article describes that there are no comparisons to draw. In which case the OP has a good point
> why is it that you condemn describing what the Chinese government is doing wrong, but think it is good to do so for the US?
I condemn the Chinese for all of their civil rights infractions, watch: China has a serious problem with gross human and civil rights violations.
Anyway. People tend to react to accusation that the United States government commits serious human rights attrocities with a knee jerk - accusing the other person of being employed by other governments, etc.
This is not the case.
Let me put this out there, because I think it's important to understand.
China has been drastically improving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is UP.
America has been drastically devolving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is DOWN.
Is that concerning? Why do Americans feel that China is even a metric for comparison?
No government gives their people rights. Rights are inalienable.
The United States government has been taking away their people's rights.
Articles such as the above make China seem like the problem, or the most important problem.
If you are an American and you are concerned with human and civil rights, you won't win them by fighting the Chinese. You will win them by fighting your own government.
I take the allegation that I am a paid Chinese propagandist seriously. I reject this accusation fully.
> Facebook censored me from posting the Snowden documents.
Can you be more specific? You tried to post the actual Snowden documents (whatever that means...Are you Glenn Greenwald, or Snowden himself?)? Or you posted a story about the Snowden documents? AFAIK, there's no public repository of the Snowden documents, something that Wikileaks has been keen to snark about: http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-and-wikileaks-...
It actually doesn't mention that police surveillance of your social media posts calculates a threat score for you, which is used to make law enforcement decisions.
In fact, the article I think does a poor job overall doing compare-and-contrast. It has a paragraph (two?) on the United States, and dovetails into an opinion (without covering America much at all) about why China is worse.
Americans need to understand that they can't fight the Chinese for their rights. They have to fight Washington for their rights.
So you are saying the civil rights situations in China and the US are equally bad? That is certainly not what the various organizations that study rights in different countries around the world say.
Something similar is happening with "Russia got Trump elected" (simply by exposing some truths about Clinton) propaganda that you see in the media today.
I am referring to the well known and well regarded Chinese policy of non-interference and non-intervention, and the Chinese leadership of UN Peacekeeping missions, as well as their lack of having been in a war with any external country for a very long time (and then their being the defenders in those wars).
That's like saying your neighbour is peaceful and serene because he hasn't got in trouble with anyone in your neighbourhood, yet he beats his wife, is an alcoholic, etc..
Well you could at least recognize his point. Tibet alone doesn't justify the joke of "We have proof that Saddam Hussein has WMD" at the UN. Let's count the number of deaths in Irak and Tibet, and if it's not enough let's measure the long-term effects of invading Tibet vs the jeopardization of the middle-east.
Hi there, Chinese here. Perhaps you would be interested in learning about East Turkestan, or as we like to call it "XinJiang", or perhaps South Mongolia, or "Inner Mongolia".
Calling us out on Tibet is nice and all, but it does get so very boring.
If you are a CCP employee, please contact me to give me my 5角, cheers!
What about the attempts to alter political discourse in Hong Kong, such as the Umbrella Revolution. How about their reaction to 零八宪章 (Charter 08)? Are those things we can criticize China on?
I guess China's folks would be a hell of a control group for Stockholm syndrome. I can't really think of any reason in the rational realm why would somebody in their sane minds would support a government that doesn't even let you Google... [..]
> why would somebody in their sane minds would support a government that doesn't even let you Google
As a matter of fact, people who can see your comment certainly would not support a government that do not let them use Google. But this group of Chinese people are tiny.
I guess at least 90% of Chinese citizens do not know Google.
So the problem is not that Chinese citizens like totalitarianism, the problem is that they do not see it as totalitarianism, or even think it's truly democratic. Like many people here believe that Trump is for the people and will be serving them faithfully (I am not saying that Trump will not do that, I am saying that it should not be taken as a thing that will happen for sure), which has to be the case if people can put Trump in check and hold him accountable.
But I don't know how to educate 1.3 billion people...
I can buy your comment for Chinese < 30 years old because they don't know anything better. But what about middle-aged Chinese? Don't they know the difference?
I don't know China history, but have they never lived in a democratic fashion at least in the last 50-60 years?
Canadian. They attacked India twice, and they have been sending soldiers in to shift the borders over the recent few years. They have built artificial islands and calling international waters theirs and disputing over islands with their neighbors. Have you been following the news at all?
You may be an american citizen, but what are you ethnically? My guess was you were Chinese.
I'm worried about the freedom of dissenting opinion in civil society from surveillance, not the privacy of my messages. Privacy is something I would easily give up for such freedom.
Signal seems to me to one tool in a large profile to maintain freedom of information dissemination and information gathering activity.
It seems to me that speaking to a large number of people anonymously is not possible with any of the existing tools, Signal included, and it seems that this set of tools is the next set that is needed.
Candidates for this include implementations of "Dining Cryptographer Nets," though there exist scalability and DoSability concerns.
An incomplete sketch of a browser plugin/feature that would allow posts to be signed from an anonymous source. (hiding your IP isn't addressed; use something like Tor)
* Blocks of text that start and end with magic numbers are signed in-band in the style of "gpg --clearsign".
* The pubkey pair is automagically created on first use.
For legacy support with existing infrastructure (such as HN):
* When you submit a form with a <textarea>, the plugin provides a UI to sign the contents before submitting the form.
* When browsing a page that contains magic number wrapped text, the text is automagically verified and the key pinned.
* The structure of the signed text should allow the plugin to hide the magic numbers, signature, etc, so the text looks normal.
However, newer software would have other options:
* Define a mapping between the in-band data and a tag structure that holds the same data. This needs to be strictly defined, so it is possible to remove the tag structure and verify the original signed text. This gives full presentation control back to the website, while allowing individual posts on the page to be verified.
The big problem - as usual - is key distribution. In the latter case where it is easy to hide metadata with CSS, the public key can simply be included with the post. Unfortunately, in the legacy case I don't think there's a good way to include two pages of public key in each "--clearsign"d post.
I have considered, and even worked on, a Chrome extension for this exact purpose. Some hurdles I discovered:
* Websites do weird things with textareas. If it's a plain-ol HTML form, it's pretty easy to intercept and do what you want. It seems most websites intercept button clicks then pass your text around to twenty different JS functions and libraries before doing something useful with it. You wind up writing code to handle edge-cases more than anything else.
* To address your final comment, embedding the pubkey inside the text would defeat the entire purpose. A malicious actor (see recent Reddit controversy) can just create their own pubkey, sign the modified comment with it, and noone would be the wiser.
Some things I discovered, and found worked well:
* Keybase has a fantastic library for generating PGP keypairs in-browser. It really added that extra bit of "magic" to the extension.
* Chrome extensions can get CORS exemptions on a per-website basis, and uploading to a standard SKS keyserver is just a POST request that can be done by Javascript.
* Expanding on the last bullet point, verifying other user's comments was tricky. During development, I just downloaded all keys on the keyserver that were uploaded by my extension on a scheduled interval and stored them in localstorage. Unfortunately, I don't think this would scale.
If anyone is interested in picking up where I left off, I could upload the source to Github.
Could you commit to github? Im working on something similar and would like to check out what you got/maybe pick it up. Feel free to send me an email (in my HN profile)
> It seems to me that speaking to a large number of people anonymously is not possible with
> any of the existing tools, Signal included
While it's still at the testnet stage, I have very high hopes for Maidsafe's SAFEnet. This will allow a completely anonymous internet, providing both users and publishers complete anonymity. Upon release of the actual network, it will live in the wild, just like bitcoin, with no company in control of it. Maidsafe's business model is to be one of many developers that will consult to companies who want to migrate their data storage onto the network. The network itself will be controlled by nobody.
It's peer to peer, but there are intermediate nodes which isolate content storage from those who view it, so neither IP addresses of storage nodes nor IP addresses of content consumers can be determined. Since there is no centralization, there's nobody for state actors to attack, legally or by force. All traffic is encrypted and even the ports are randomized, to avoid state firewalls from determining what the traffic is and blocking it.
I think it's our best hope to distribute large amounts of data to the world and avoid the censorship that many countries already have and that even those of us in the west see looming upon us.
In a democracy, dissemination of information to the voters can theoretically affect political change.
In countries that are not democracies, I'm uncertain what to do with your complaint. Would you dismiss giving oppressed people access to literature, news, entertainment, or technical and scientific information, on the premise that the information is unlikely to allow them to affect political change? I don't believe that premise is true, but even if it were, their lives are still made better, which means it's far from meaningless.
Recent events have disproven the cypherpunk-era belief that freely available, secure communications will lead to a better (read: more rational) world. I don't dismiss the desire to give access. I think its utility has been naively overstated; these same tools can be, and have been, used by old guard oligarchs to maintain and extend their political and economic power.
I agree that bad actors and state actors will also use this technology. Every time I read a podesta email I am reminded that such hacker induced government transparency will be gone, when they all move to the platform.
But governments do a pretty good job of keeping their secrets now, so in the end, I think this will balance the scales towards private citizens.
> I'm worried about the freedom of dissenting opinion in civil society from surveillance, not the privacy of my messages. Privacy is something I would easily give up for such freedom.
I see these two subjects as being inseparable. Before I feel comfortable asserting a dissenting opinion in a public forum, I would much rather discuss the subject among my peers where I don't feel I will be immediately eviscerated for a poorly constructed thought. If I don't feel that I have any privacy, I'm more likely to be subject to chilling effects.
> Before I feel comfortable asserting a dissenting opinion in a public forum, I would much rather discuss the subject among my peers where I don't feel I will be immediately eviscerated for a poorly constructed thought.
While I certainly emphasize with the anxiety of publicly expressing an unpopular opinion, I believe it is, especially in times like these, your moral duty to endure in spite of the repercussions and speak your mind.
Even though I went to Stanford and had direct access to Milgrom's famous prison experiment, the lesson from it didnt hit home until many years later I read this article: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-desire-to-fit-in-is-the-root-of-al...
Now, the phrase "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent" resonates with me.
This phrase does not mean "All good men should continually natter on". It is also your moral duty to present a cogent argument, lest we drown in a sea of mostly inane babbling and constant infighting, completely burying the points that need to be made.
Speaking out matters. So does when, where, and how you speak out. And that is something best discussed privately.
It's not a moral duty, it's a Robb Report level luxury. One does not need to be particularly articulate or present a rational argument, especially when dealing with matters of morality. Sadly, rhetoric and appeals to emotion, empathy, and common sense are more effective if your goal is to sway others.
> This phrase does not mean "All good men should continually natter on". It is also your moral duty to present a cogent argument
What I was trying to say is there will be times where you are not as prepared as you like. It's not about presenting an airtight, cogent argument, it's about having the courage to say something like, "Officer, stop beating the shit out of this guy in a wheelchair. He's clearly isn't resisting and you're being a dick."
Would it not be trivial to algorithmically obfuscate this identifying information? As I write this, Im thinking of Ender's siblings finding their voice under the pseudonyms Desmothenes and Locke
It was, back when WikiLeaks seemed to be politically independent. Now it's hard to tell whether I'd be supporting worthy efforts to promote free dissent, or whether I'd be supporting one man's (or a small group of people's) interest in influencing U.S. politics in ways I find objectionable.
I'm also not sure I see the connection between 'dissent' and the dissemination of stolen private emails.
So you're a media dsitribution contractor in Washington, DC and you don't see how covert editing of social media posts is upsetting, overreach, abuse, or illegitimate? And you're making fun of expectations of the integrity of social media posts?
I think editing critical Reddit comments as part of a prank or maybe as a jokey form of retribution is an extremely ill-advised and boneheaded move. I don't know if it was abusive and it was hardly covert, but it was definitely not cool. I doubt Spez will make that mistake again.
But did it tell us anything new? Are we surprised that Reddit admins have the technical ability to edit records in their own database? (As do the admins of other social media sites...)
It seems Reddit admins don't have that ability, if I read the thread correctly. Rather, Spez helped build the system and just knew how to manage the prank. It wasn't even really a backdoor thing, he just had the know-how to do it (like being able to log into the database and update a row).
That's the confusing bit about the outrage to me: I think people expected it to be secure and tight, and ... well... I'm not sure what led to that conclusion. I can easily imaging that until Spez pulled that stunt, they just figured it was too hard to screw with and that the databases were sufficiently secure. After all, the techs have full access to the machines*. It's like being surprised that your ActiveDirectory admin can change your password at will.
But you can bet your booties they'll try to lock it down a bit better now. Wouldn't expect it to be the TarSnap of forums, though. Reddit's not exactly a bastion of authenticity :P
EDIT: What I mean here is that someone has physical access to the machines, right? Or at least some amount of root? Or can log in? I guess to me it's like being outraged that the guy who targets the Hubble telescope abuses his position and points it at Earth or something as a joke; huge amount of time and money on the line and it would be a dumb thing, but it's also pretty harmless. Might still get fired for it, though.
It would be nice to have a clearer understanding of how the algorithm works, and how it purports to stop vote manipulation from state actors, like the capabilities of the GCHQ and NSA from the Snowden documents or the astroturfing contractor centers for the DoD (Earnest Voice, etc).
I'm thinking maybe the algorithm changes slightly alter some brigading from communities, but probably can't handle state-sponsored manipulation.
There's a downvote brigade on my posts right now and anything I want to contribute gets detailed into accusations of my being some kind of agent.