4 ms·

why are there so many (and seemingly exclusively) negative posts about china on hacker news?

by nikofeyn 8y ago

loeg 8y ago
It's an economic superpower, and it does plenty of things worth criticizing.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  This isn’t even that kind of negative article, more like names are done differently there.
alephnil 8y ago
You could easily have written an equally negative article about Americans, which for the longest time created systems that only worked with ASCII. Even a small deviation from that, like Europeans that had name with accented letters could cause trouble. One example is payment systems that refused the transaction if you name had an accented letter. I experienced that as recently as 5-6 years ago. These problems are rarer these days, but Americans have had 50 years to get it right, the Chinese started much more recently. The cause of the problems are the same in both cases. The system designers are oblivious to or ignore cultures outside their own.
franzwong 8y ago
It's called Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
posting2fast 8y ago
Negative? I'd rather say it's part of the stuff that's normalizing totalitarianism by being too polite about it. > Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead / Points to insensitivity. / He who laughs / Has not yet received / The terrible news. > What times are these, in which / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing! / And he who walks quietly across the street, / Passes out of the reach of his friends / Who are in danger? -- Berthold Brecht, ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’ > Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. -- George Orwell, "Why I Write" Why would you on the other hand not pay attention? Because you or nobody you love has been put in a camp, for example? Because you're with those who ignore the millions of people who did resist totalitarianism and were murdered, as if those never existed, while giving the time of the day to those who build on their corpses and call it culture or the nature of the people? Imagine an alternate universe where the Nazis hadn't "won the war", but never started one, and had "just" done what they did "internally", while militarizing without attacking. Few would have even raised a brow, nobody would have done anything, and after 20-30 years of that, nobody even capable of forming an opinion would be left alive in Germany. And then people would just say "awww, that's just how they are, that's how they like to treat each other". In that alternative universe, there would also be people for whom that would not be enough, who wouldn't stop with acceptance of totalitarianism, who don't want uglyness to not be called uglyness anymore, they want to see it considered beauty. In short, you're being among the worst in a reality where hardly anyone is good.

why are there so many (and seemingly exclusively) negative posts about china on hacker news?

loeg 8y ago

It's an economic superpower, and it does plenty of things worth criticizing.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
This isn’t even that kind of negative article, more like names are done differently there.

alephnil 8y ago

You could easily have written an equally negative article about Americans, which for the longest time created systems that only worked with ASCII. Even a small deviation from that, like Europeans that had name with accented letters could cause trouble. One example is payment systems that refused the transaction if you name had an accented letter. I experienced that as recently as 5-6 years ago. These problems are rarer these days, but Americans have had 50 years to get it right, the Chinese started much more recently. The cause of the problems are the same in both cases. The system designers are oblivious to or ignore cultures outside their own.

franzwong 8y ago

It's called Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

posting2fast 8y ago

Negative? I'd rather say it's part of the stuff that's normalizing totalitarianism by being too polite about it. > Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead / Points to insensitivity. / He who laughs / Has not yet received / The terrible news. > What times are these, in which / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing! / And he who walks quietly across the street, / Passes out of the reach of his friends / Who are in danger? -- Berthold Brecht, ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’ > Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. -- George Orwell, "Why I Write" Why would you on the other hand not pay attention? Because you or nobody you love has been put in a camp, for example? Because you're with those who ignore the millions of people who did resist totalitarianism and were murdered, as if those never existed, while giving the time of the day to those who build on their corpses and call it culture or the nature of the people? Imagine an alternate universe where the Nazis hadn't "won the war", but never started one, and had "just" done what they did "internally", while militarizing without attacking. Few would have even raised a brow, nobody would have done anything, and after 20-30 years of that, nobody even capable of forming an opinion would be left alive in Germany. And then people would just say "awww, that's just how they are, that's how they like to treat each other". In that alternative universe, there would also be people for whom that would not be enough, who wouldn't stop with acceptance of totalitarianism, who don't want uglyness to not be called uglyness anymore, they want to see it considered beauty. In short, you're being among the worst in a reality where hardly anyone is good.